Ch. 10: Bubbling Well Road

Look out on a large scale map the place where the Chenab river falls
into the Indus fifteen miles or so above the hamlet of Chachuran. Five
miles west of Chachuran lies Bubbling Well Road, and the house of the
gosain or priest of Arti-goth. It was the priest who showed me the road,
but it is no thanks to him that I am able to tell this story.

Five miles west of Chachuran is a patch of the plumed jungle-grass, that
turns over in silver when the wind blows, from ten to twenty feet high
and from three to four miles square. In the heart of the patch hides the
gosain of Bubbling Well Road. The villagers stone him when he peers into
the daylight, although he is a priest, and he runs back again as a
strayed wolf turns into tall crops. He is a one-eyed man and carries,
burnt between his brows, the impress of two copper coins. Some say that
he was tortured by a native prince in the old days; for he is so old
that he must have been capable of mischief in the days of Runjit Singh.
His most pressing need at present is a halter, and the care of the
British Government.

These things happened when the jungle-grass was tall; and the villagers
of Chachuran told me that a sounder of pig had gone into the Arti-goth
patch. To enter jungle-grass is always an unwise proceeding, but I went,
partly because I knew nothing of pig-hunting, and partly because the
villagers said that the big boar of the sounder owned foot long tushes.
Therefore I wished to shoot him, in order to produce the tushes in after
years, and say that I had ridden him down in fair chase. I took a gun
and went into the hot, close patch, believing that it would be an easy
thing to unearth one pig in ten square miles of jungle. Mr. Wardle, the
terrier, went with me because he believed that I was incapable of
existing for an hour without his advice and countenance. He managed to
slip in and out between the grass clumps, but I had to force my way, and
in twenty minutes was as completely lost as though I had been in the
heart of Central Africa. I did not notice this at first till I had grown
wearied of stumbling and pushing through the grass, and Mr. Wardle was
beginning to sit down very often and hang out his tongue very far. There
was nothing but grass everywhere, and it was impossible to see two yards
in any direction. The grass-stems held the heat exactly as boiler-tubes
do.

In half-an-hour, when I was devoutly wishing that I had left the big
boar alone, I came to a narrow path which seemed to be a compromise
between a native foot-path and a pig-run. It was barely six inches wide,
but I could sidle along it in comfort. The grass was extremely thick
here, and where the path was ill defined it was necessary to crush into
the tussocks either with both