The Elephant God | Page 5

confidentially with
this office.
"I have the honour to be, Sir,
"Your most obedient servant."
Here followed the signature of one of the highest military authorities in
India.
Dermot stared at the letter.
"So that's it!" he thought. "It's a bigger thing than I imagined."
He had known when he consented to being transferred from a staff
appointment in Simla to the command of a small detachment of a
Military Police Battalion garrisoning an unimportant frontier fort on the

face of the Himalayas that he was being sent there for a special purpose.
He had consented gladly; for to him the great attraction of his new post
was that he would find himself once more in the great Terai Jungle. To
him it was Paradise. Before going to Simla he had been stationed with a
Double Company of the Indian Infantry Regiment to which he
belonged in a similar outpost in the mountains not many miles away.
This outpost had now been abolished. But while in it he used to spend
all his spare time in the marvellous jungle that extended to his very
door.
The great Terai Forest stretches for hundreds of miles along the foot of
the Himalayas, from Assam through Bengal to Garwhal and up into
Nepal. It is a sportsman's heaven; for it shelters in its recesses wild
elephants, rhinoceros, bison, bears, tigers, panthers, and many of the
deer tribes. Dermot loved it. He was a mighty hunter, but a
discriminating one. He did not kill for sheer lust of slaughter, and
preferred to study the ways of the harmless animals rather than shoot
them. Only against dangerous beasts did he wage relentless war.
Dermot knew that he could very well leave the routine work of the little
post to his Second in Command. The fort was practically a block of
fortified stone barracks, easily defensible against attacks of badly
armed hillmen and accommodating a couple of hundred sepoys. It was
to hold the duar or pass of Ranga through the Himalayas against raiders
from Bhutan that the little post had been built.
For centuries past the wild dwellers beyond the mountains were used to
swooping down from the hills on the less warlike plainsmen in search
of loot, women, and slaves. But the war with Bhutan in 1864-5 brought
the borderland under the English flag, and the Pax Britannica settled on
it. Yet even now temptation was sometimes too strong for lawless men.
Occasionally swift-footed parties of fierce swordsmen swept down
through the unguarded passes and raided the tea-gardens that are
springing up in the foothills and the forests below them. For hundreds
of coolies work on these big estates, and large consignments of silver
coin come to the gardens for their payment.
But there was bigger game afoot than these badly-armed raiders. The

task set Dermot showed it; and his soldier's heart warmed at the thought
of helping to stage a fierce little frontier war in which he might come
early on the scene.
Carefully sealing up again and locking away the cipher code and
keyword, he went out on the back verandah and shouted for his orderly.
The dwellings of Europeans upcountry in India are not luxurious--far
from it. Away from the big cities like Bombay, Calcutta, or Karachi,
the amenities of civilisation are sadly lacking. The bungalows are lit
only by oil-lamps, their floors are generally of pounded earth covered
with poor matting harbouring fleas and other insect pests, their roofs
are of thatch or tiles, and such luxuries as bells, electric or otherwise,
are unknown. So the servants, who reside outside the bungalows in the
compounds, or enclosures, are summoned by the simple expedient of
shouting "Boy".
Presently the orderly appeared.
"Shaikh Ismail," said the Major, "go to the Mess, give my salaams to
Parker Sahib, and ask him to come here."
The sepoy, a smart young Punjabi Mussulman, clad in the white
undress of the Indian Army, saluted and strode off up the hill to the
pretty mess-bungalow of the British officers of the detachment. In it the
subaltern occupied one room.
When he received Dermot's message, this officer, a tall, good-looking
man of about twenty-eight years of age, accompanied the orderly to his
senior's quarters.
"Come in and have a smoke, Parker," said the Major cheerily.
The subaltern entered and helped himself to a cigarette from an open
box on the table before looking for a chair in the scantily-furnished
room.
As he struck a match he said,

"Ismail Khan tells me you've just had trouble with that surly beast,
Chand Khan".
Dermot told him what had occurred.
"What a soor! (swine!)" exclaimed Parker indignantly. "I always knew
he was a cruel devil; but I didn't think he was quite such a brute. And to
poor old Badshah too. It's a damned