Ch. 21: At the end of the Passage

The sky is lead and our faces are red,
And the gates of Hell are opened and riven,
And the winds of Hell are loosened and driven,
And the dust flies up in the face of Heaven,
And the clouds come down in a fiery sheet,
Heavy to raise and hard to be borne.
And the soul of man is turned from his meat,
Turned from the trifles for which he has striven
Sick in his body, and heavy hearted,
And his soul flies up like the dust in the sheet
Breaks from his flesh and is gone and departed,
As the blasts they blow on the cholera-horn.
HIMALAYAN.

Four men, each entitled to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness,' sat at a table playing whist. The thermometer marked--for
them--one hundred and one degrees of heat. The room was darkened till it
was only just possible to distinguish the pips of the cards and the very
white faces of the players. A tattered, rotten punkah of whitewashed
calico was puddling the hot air and whining dolefully at each stroke.
Outside lay gloom of a November day in London. There was neither sky,
sun, nor horizon,--nothing but a brown purple haze of heat. It was as
though the earth were dying of apoplexy.

From time to time clouds of tawny dust rose from the ground without wind
or warning, flung themselves tablecloth-wise among the tops of the
parched trees, and came down again. Then a whirling dust-devil would
scutter across the plain for a couple of miles, break, and fall outward,
though there was nothing to check its flight save a long low line of
piled railway-sleepers white with the dust, a cluster of huts made of
mud, condemned rails, and canvas, and the one squat four-roomed bungalow
that belonged to the assistant engineer in charge of a section of the
Gaudhari State line then under construction.

The four, stripped to the thinnest of sleeping-suits, played whist
crossly, with wranglings as to leads and returns. It was not the best
kind of whist, but they had taken some trouble to arrive at it. Mottram
of the Indian Survey had ridden thirty and railed one hundred miles from
his lonely post in the desert since the night before; Lowndes of the
Civil Service, on special duty in the political department, had come as
far to escape for an instant the miserable intrigues of an impoverished
native State whose king alternately fawned and blustered for more money
from the pitiful revenues contributed by hard-wrung peasants and
despairing camel-breeders; Spurstow, the doctor of the line, had left a
cholera-stricken camp of coolies to look after itself for forty-eight
hours while he associated with white men once more. Hummil, the
assistant engineer, was the host. He stood fast and received his friends
thus every Sunday if they could come in. When one of them