The Waiting Land Read Free

pound eight shillings and fourpence all the way to Nepal) covered reservation of a slatted wooden shelf, on which I slept quite well last night, but by morning a gale-force wind was whipping a dust-storm across the endless, arid, grey-yellow plain, and this diabolical torture by Nature continued until dusk. Visibility was down to about a hundred yards, the hot sky was sullen with dust, and dust and sweat formed a mask of mud on my face. All morning I sat in a semi-coma, reflecting that at last I was experiencing real hardship; compared with such a journey cycling to India is just too easy.
    However, the worst was yet to come. At Lucknow I changed trains and found myself sharing an eight-seater compartment with seventeen Gurkha soldiers going home on leave. Each was carrying a vast amount of kit and initially it seemed a sheer physical impossibility for all ofthem to enter the compartment; yet it’s not for nothing that the Gurkhas have won so many VCs and enter it they did, bravely disregarding the possibility that we would all suffocate to death long before the journey ended. At first they had appeared to be slightly nonplussed by the sight of a dishevelled Memsahib in one corner, but they rapidly decided that I was best ignored and within seconds I found myself nine-tenths buried beneath a pile of bed-rolls, haversacks , wicker baskets and tin trunks. This pyramid was then scaled by two nimble little Gurungs, who expertly inserted themselves into the crevice between the top-most trunk and the roof and immediately began to dice and smoke, dropping unquenched cigarette ends onto my head at regular intervals. I don’t doubt that the Gurkhas are a wonderful people, but somehow today I never really managed to appreciate them.
    Then, soon after dusk, my luck changed. When we stopped at a junction I strenuously effected an earthquake in the carriage, bringing Gurungs and trunks mildly to grief as I fought my way out through the window. No one had told me where to change trains and as it was now essential to find out I went hobbling anxiously down the platform, every muscle knotted with cramp, in search of some knowledgeable-looking individual. Having questioned three officials, who each indicated that they couldn’t care less whether I ended up in Calcutta or Kathmandu, I was enormously relieved to come upon an Englishwoman strolling along the platform beside the first-class carriages. She at once assured me that I did not have to change until Muzaffarpur – and then we began to discuss our respective destinations. When the Englishwoman mentioned that she was returning to Dharan I said, ‘Then you must know Brigadier Pulley?’ (to whom I had a letter of introduction) and she exclaimed, ‘But I’m his wife!’ A moment later the Brigadier himself appeared and, when everyone had made the appropriate remarks about the dimensions of the earth, the Pulleys very kindly invited me to continue my journey in their air-conditioned coach. By then my addiction to ‘travelling rough’ had been so thoroughly – if temporarily – cured that it was difficult for me to refrain from hugging my benefactors.
    It is now only 1.45 a.m. and the daily train for Rexaul, on the Nepalese frontier, does not leave until 6 a.m.; but I’m afraid to sleep lest I should fail to wake in time.
30 APRIL – REXAUL RAILWAY STATION RETIRING-ROOM – 9 P.M.
    This pedantically-named apartment – no doubt a verbal relic of the era when trains were introduced into India – is equipped with two charpoys, a lukewarm shower and a defunct electric fan; but despite this wealth of refinements I now feel irremediably allergic to everything even remotely associated with railways.
    Today’s hundred-mile journey on a narrow-gauge track took eight blistering hours. The elderly engine was falling asunder and at each village it stopped, lengthily, to pull itself together before moving at walking speed to the next village. Also it killed a young man; but no one took much