A Day in Nepal

I

THE elephants had gone down to the river, early in the morning, to get ready for the day’s work. They lay, some fifteen or so, like black rocks in the slowmoving, muddy stream. Behind them, on the north bank, the forest rose, a wall of greenery, topping the precipitous earth bank that glowed a rich yellow in the level sunlight. It was a very hot day in June, with the rains already a week overdue; the heat, even at that early hour, was stifling. Not a leaf quivered.

The mahouts, with much shouting and many vociferous commands, attended to the toilette of their charges. Radha Piyari — Radha the Beloved — lay on her side close inshore, right in front of me as I lazed on the river bank watching the scene. Her trunk was curled up out of harm’s way, like a gigantic ammonite; her crafty little pig’s eye was tightly screwed up; over what one could see of her great face there was an expression of complete beatitude. The water lapped gently against her sides, and the mahout rubbed her down with a brick, stopping now and then to throw water over her with his cupped hands, or to examine her huge ear for parasites. He stood on the foreleg which the water hid, and talked pleasantly to her, all the time, ‘of cabbages and kings.’ Then, stepping back into the river bed, he ordered: ‘Tiriya, beti.' (‘Turn over, my daughter.’)

Not a muscle moved. ‘Art thou deaf? Did not I say turn over?’ Radha Piyari’s only response was to snuggle down luxuriously yet a little farther into the soft sand. She was having the time of her life: cool water lapped her; soft sand moulded itself to her every sinuosity; and then there was the blissful joy of being scrubbed by a brick, while the sunlight, not yet too powerful for her taste, soaked steadily into the great black hide.

Muhammad Ali threw out his arms in expostulation. ‘Shameless one! Evil liver! Low-caste person! Dost thou not attend to my orders? Have I not said, twice, that thou must turn?’ His voice rose to a frenzied yell. Radha Piyari gave a heave of contented enjoyment, and a little wriggle which sought yet more of that blissful contact with the cool, soft sand beneath her; but the tight-shut eye did not open, and the trunk remained tightly coiled.

Muhammad Ali stepped back a pace, and shrieked: ‘Child of shame! Spawn of a nameless outcaste! Thou dost not obey me — thou, whose mother’s virtue could not resist the village watchman; thou, whose sister . . .’ And so on through the untranslatable intricacies of what has come to be a stereotyped formula of abuse. Radha Piyari cautiously opened her cunning little eye. This, though ‘ but the beginning of love talk in her country,’ promised to get more serious, all the same. Perhaps she had better do something about it, after all; there was still one whole side to scrub! So the huge bulk rolled to a vertical position, then heaved up slowly on the forelegs and subsided, — without the trace of a splash, so controlled was the whole movement, — exposing the other side. The little eye shut again; blissful content spread like a slow smile over the great face; and she settled down, with nicely adjusted wriggles, to another half hour or so of perfect happiness.

II

An hour later we were off. We crossed the river, which forms the boundary between British India and Nepal, and threaded our way, in single file, through the forest, drifting along silently — for an elephant on a forest track makes little more sound than a falling leaf. The great sal trees stood up on each side of us, sixty feet high or more, their summits a feathery mass of silver gray, fresh and cool-looking in their new foliage, and the air was heavy with the perfume from their flowering tops. Every now and then, as we moved into a clearing, the sun burned our faces and hands; and the elephants slipped their trunks inside their great mouths to draw out some small store of liquid, which they squirted along their overheated flanks.

We twisted through the tortuous paths of a Tharu village, the overhanging thatch of the houses brushing the sides of the elephants as they passed. One or two of them made tentative movements to steal, as they drifted along, the gourds or pumpkins that lay, fat, juicy, and inviting, on the sun-bleached roofs — tentatives which were corrected by resounding thumps on the head from the heavy ankus that each mahout balanced on his right thigh. Little children, naked as worms except for the amulets round their necks, poured in from a side path, perilously near the ponderous feet. One could feel the great beasts ‘collecting’ themselves and going cautiously, lest they should harm any of these little ones. But the children trotted along sturdily, unheeding, pluffing up the thick dust with their feet, and shouting in their shrill voices: —

(‘O elephant! O elephant! Give me a hair. Give me a hair of gold.’)

Their mothers had told them that if an elephant plucked one of its sparse hairs and handed it to them it would turn into gold in the palm of their hand. And one’s mind went back to a very small English boy of long ago, dainty in white piqué skirt, pursuing unweariedly the thrushes on a velvet green lawn, with a handful of salt tightly clutched in one chubby fist. For his mother had told him that the only sure and certain way of catching birds was to put salt on their tails.

Bahadur Singh — ‘short and stout and round about, and tubby as could be’ — hopped excitedly in his howdah, and pointed to a blue jay that fluttered off, pale blue and dark blue, gorgeous in the sunlight.

‘A katnas on the right! By God, we shall have at least one or half a tiger.’

And Abdul Muhammad, tall, fat, and heavily bearded, came in with the deepvoiced refrain: ‘If it please God, we shall at least have one or half a tiger.’

Later we passed a tiny little girl, perhaps six years old, who stood at the corner of a jungle path with a ghara of water poised on her head and her arm curved up to steady it. An exact replica of a grown woman, in her reddishbrown skirt that hung in multitudinous folds, in her sari and her pitiful little ornaments.

‘A virgin on the left, with a full water pot! By God, we shall have at least three tigers!’ — and Bahadur Singh jumped up and down in his excitement. And from behind me the deep refrain boomed out: ‘If God wills, we shall have at least three tigers.’

We wound on and on, along jungle paths or through trackless forest. There were omens all the way, and all were favorable. Our probable bag rose steadily. The rifles got too hot to hold in our bare hands, and we had to slip on the leather guards. Knowing what such temperatures can do with cordite, I kept my cartridges in my pocket.

The elephants were bored, for it was dull work; they squirted more and more frequently along their burning sides; they played with clumps of coarse grass that they had dragged out in passing, knocking off the earth and polishing the roots to glittering whiteness by dexterous whisking against their toes as each foot advanced in turn. The sun bit strongly at our faces and hands, and our eyes got dazzled with the terrific glare. We began to shift uneasily in our narrow seats, to stand, to sit, to doze off every now and then. It was clearly time for a halt.

From behind me Abdul Muhammad boomed, ‘It is necessary to halt. It is the hour of the midday prayer. The sun stands at its highest in the sky.’

Without a word spoken, we turned to the nearest shade. Abdul Muhammad slipped down the hind leg of his elephant; changed his turban for a skullcap; spread his praying mat on the yellow burnt-up grass, pointing it toward Mecca; washed his hands ceremoniously in the sand drift close by; and was at once absorbed in the stately ritual of his religion. The rest of us clustered together and talked in low tones. After some time Bahadur Singh got restless; the kneelings, the bowings, the standing up and the folding of the hands, went on interminably. ‘He is a five-times man,’ he said. ‘But he forgets that, though God will wait, — and often has to, — the tigers won’t! Hai, Abdul Muhammad!’ The automaton went on, undisturbed. ‘Hai, Abdul Muhammad — there is need of speed!’ Abdul Muhammad beat his forehead on the earth.

Bahadur Singh plucked from a bel tree, beside which his elephant stood, a dozen or so of the round, dark green, aromatic fruit it bore; and then, from a distance of perhaps twenty yards, lobbed them slowly, one after the other, at the praying figure. Each, about the size of an orange, fell with a thud, and rolled gently to somewhere very near the edge of the praying mat; none quite touched it. It was wonderfully accurate work, but it had not the slightest effect on Abdul Muhammad. When the full ritual had been performed, he gathered the mat, shinned up the hind leg of his elephant to his howdah, stuffed a quid of pan into his mouth, and chewed contentedly.

‘Now thy work is done till the sun goes down; ours is yet to do. March,’ said Bahadur Singh.

They were friends of very long standing, and they knew the exact limits to which each could go with the other; but one marveled, all the same. For a Hindu to molest a Muhammadan at his prayers is no light matter; blood has been shed, many a time, for less than Bahadur Singh had done.

III

Almost at once we found ourselves in quite different country. The trees were taller; underneath, the ground was as bare and as hard as a city pavement; nowhere — not even in the sparse watercourses — was a blade of grass to be seen; the signs of fairly recent fire were all around us. For perhaps thirty feet up, there was not a green leaf; everywhere lay blackened patches that had formerly been clumps of grass and undergrowth. Most striking of all, many of the trees were smouldering as they stood; the air was full of tenuous, filmy, blue-gray smoke; and here and there great asaina trees lay prone, burning slowly, with the smoke rising in delicate spirals. The asaina is peculiar in that it burns very gradually, like touchwood; the ash is pure white; and even the heavy seasonal rains seem unable to put out the fire. And so with astonishing frequence one saw, on the fire-blackened ground, the ghosts of great trees that lay in an outline of soft, powdery ash, complete to the last little twig. As far as the eye could reach through the thin haze of smoke, there was nothing but fire-blackened ground, seared trunks, and these huge white ghostly relics of what had once been the giants of a primeval forest. Not a bird sang in that desolating wilderness; no animals lived there; there was no water; the silence of death encompassed it. It was like a nightmare vision of the Inferno.

We pushed slowly on, for the elephant on a long march is not a fast walker, sometimes emerging into open areas where herds of cattle seemed to find a living on the seared plain, bare as the palm of one’s hand, sometimes plunging again into the sal forest, every now and then passing mango and lime trees that marked the former sites of abandoned settlements. It is a country without roads or rivers; the torrent beds that the seasonal rains cut, like great gashes across the face of the land, are all unbridged; there are very few villages, and in none of these did we see a single house of brick, or even of sundried mud. There is very little cultivation, and that of t the semi-nomadic type.

We are accustomed to talk, perhaps rather glibly, of man’s constant strife with nature; in India one sees that strife in its elemental form. Every day one has before one’s eyes some massive temple, constructed for eternity, where the fig tree has sent its searching roots into the great blocks of masonry and overturned them; shrines lie dismantled in the green depths of the forest, dissolved by the trees and grasses and creepers that have eaten them away; my elephant has stumbled, in the very heart of a great forest, over the almost imperceptible remains of a broad wall that was the sole remaining vestige, aboveground, of what had once been a great and populous city. I have shot tiger in ‘God’s Fort,’ as it is called locally — a wilderness of Cyclopean masonry, of wide temple steps and ruined fanes, of partially blocked-up crypts where leopards laired. For acre after acre one moved from massive stone to massive stone, pushing one’s way between the tree trunks, dodging the hanging lianes, scrambling through the thorn bushes and the creepers — chrome yellow splashed with blood-red spots — that bound the tangle together. ‘God’s Fort’ stands in the centre of the forest, with no habitations, not even the meanest, within many miles.

IV

Tiger shooting is not unlike the wellknown definition of war — weeks of acute boredom, punctuated by minutes of intense excitement. We had plodded along twenty-odd miles, perhaps, to beat a patch of thick cane jungle that was not much larger than a football field.

The details of a tiger beat are of no particular interest except to the participants; it will suffice to say that the omen derived from the ‘virgin on the left, with a full water pot,’ was the correct one. We got our three tigers, all big beasts. There was much joy in the Tharu village close by, — for these tigers lived on the villagers’ cattle, — and we swung off on the long trek home with their cheery shouts of thanks and farewell to hearten us on the way. The return journey, when there are three heavy tigers lolling ponderously on the pads, is always pleasant enough; we went over, untiredly, every little incident of the beat, the repeated charges, and the final kills, talking excitedly among ourselves and with the thronging mahouts. The picture which remains most vividly in my mind is of a great tawny beast, with deep black stripes, flashing over the green palmlike leaves of the canebrake, the drawnback lips showing the glittering teeth, the paws stretched out to their full extent, six feet above the ground, and coming straight at me with the most heart-shaking roar. What did one think of? I am quite clear as to that. One thought of the imperative necessity of protecting one’s elephant, which stood four-square, without a tremor, but very, very watchful.

Almost immediately after recrossing the river, we picked up, in the rapidly waning light, the track of an elephant. It will seem extraordinary to anyone not accustomed to these vast but sparsely inhabited areas, and to the life of the forest, that my mahout — I happened to be leading — should have turned to me at once with the casual remark: ‘That is the jungle-wala sahib. He must have come in from Bellarpore.’ He had; and we found him later at our camp, where his tents were already pitched. Thompson was a canny Scot, who knew his job and attended to it admirably. He slouched over to meet us as we came in, and admitted that our three tigers were ‘quite nice little beasties.’

‘I let one off myself, yesterday,’ he added.

‘ Missed it, you mean?‘

‘No. What I say — let him off.’

We lolled in long chairs, on a clearing overlooking the sluggish river, which gleamed leaden-dull in the faint light. Ice tinkled gratefully in the long glasses, and the owls hooted mournfully. Bit by bit, slowly, and as it seemed unwillingly, we got the story.

V

Thompson, returning about three o’clock to his camp after a long tour of inspection, had picked up the fresh track of a tiger.

‘You know the bit of outlying forest, all roni trees, at the bend of the river, three miles this side of Bellarpore?’

We nodded.

‘Well, it was there, on the path by the side of the river. A new tiger — evidently just in from Nepal. A big male. Shortly after, I noticed vultures in a cotton tree half a mile farther on. I went there straight, cutting across another bend. And there was the kill — a young buffalo, with very little eaten. Almost in the open, too. Damned fool of a tiger — he had walked along, in broad daylight, without attempting to take cover; and he had left his kill in the open. It seemed good enough, — though it was a hell of a hot day, as you know, — so I went on to the camp to fetch my machan, have some tea, — my first meal that day, — and get my rifle. I sent a pad back to fix up the machan in the cotton tree. I suppose I got there about five; I had left my watch behind. It was in the full sun, and infernally hot. There was a hanging rope, of course, to help me; but the trunk was very wide, and very slippery. I had to swarm up, and there was about thirty feet of it; it felt like three thousand. When I tumbled into the machan, I was cooked, absolutely done, lost to the world. I lay there gasping, soaked through with sweat; half a dozen times I thought I was going to be sick. Never felt so completely done in all my life. It was ten minutes or more before I could rouse myself to tell my mahout to tie the rifle to the rope. I hauled it up, loaded, and settled down to wait for the tiger. The elephant I sent back through the jungle, so as not to disturb the river path. I told the mahout to come back for me a quarter of an hour after the sun set; I was not going to sit there in the dark for any tiger.

‘Well, I don’t suppose the elephant had been gone half an hour when I heard the tiger, somewhere near the river bank. He came crashing along as if the place belonged to him. Then I heard a thump — evidently he had jumped down on to the river bed. I could see the north bank from where I sat, for nearly a quarter of a mile; but the near bank was hidden by the trees, except a hundred yards or so of it. I had a perfectly clear field of fire toward the river and the kill — which lay almost under me, just in front. In a few minutes, I picked up my tiger — a whacking big male, with a splendid ruff — slouching along, bang in the open, parallel to the river and not seventy yards from me. He did n’t care two hoots for anything or anybody, clearly — never looked this way or that, but shambled along, as if he were in carpet slippers, weaving his big head slightly from side to side. I was fascinated watching him, I did n’t want to shoot — though I could have picked out any single hair on him and put my bullet through it. Suddenly he turned straight for the river, and picked his way delicately through the odd puddles to the bank at the edge of the big pool.

’I watched him bend down to drink; and then things happened with such suddenness that my eye was not quick enough to see it all. There was a swirl in the water; and the next thing I knew was that Alphonse — the big “croc” that I have seen so often sunning himself on the bank opposite — had his jaws tight clamped over the tiger’s head. I could see the tiger’s hind legs come under him, and stiffen; but Alphonse was pulling him into the water all right. It stood like that for a second or two; and then, very, very slowly, the tiger backed away from the edge. Alphonse’s big wicked head appeared, then his shoulders, the tiger heaving away steadily. End of that movement! Slowly, against all that the tiger could do, he was drawn in jerks back to the water’s edge again. End of that movement! I tumbled to it after a bit. When fully afloat, the croc lost the advantage of his weight; when he was partially resting on the ledge of the pool, the tiger could n’t move him. And so it went, backward and forward.

‘But that tiger was having an intensive education in British India. The next time, when he had Alphonse well out, he gave his head a quick jerk up, and tried for the throat with one paw. I don’t know whether he got him or not, for Alphonse had his head down in a split second. But every time after that, when the tiger got far enough back from the water’s edge to risk it, he had another determined try for Alphonse’s throat. I don’t know how long it lasted — my best guess was something like a quarter of an hour. Again all of a sudden, so quick that I could not follow it, there was another swirl in the pool, and Alphonse had disappeared. The tiger almost fell back, recovered himself, and whisked round. Then he staggered, stumbling at every step, away from the river, and threw himself down right in front of me on some soft sand.

‘His head was torn to ribbons; his ruff was in points of clotted blood; his big sides heaved, and he took his breath in great gasps. Done to the world — just as I had been three quarters of an hour before when I tumbled into my machan. I could smell the reek of him as he lay laboring there in front of me; and I never felt sorrier for anybody. I promised myself that Alphonse was in for it, as soon as I could find time to lay for him — it ought to be pretty easy. I gave the tiger about twenty minutes to get his wind again, and cool off a bit; then I searched in my pocket for a spent cartridge, and tossed it on his flank as he lay. He looked up at me once, gave one woof, and was off.’