These things done, we scuttled and slid down to the mess tent, and breakfasted as best we might; and the best was surprisingly good, considering the difficulties the wretched servants must have had in cooking anything in their wet lair, where the miserable fire of damp sticks produced apparently little but acrid smoke.

We passed a dismal day, as, wrapped in our warmest clothes, we sat upon our beds watching the rain turn to snow, then to hail and sleet, and finally back to rain again; while the ever-changing wisps of grey mist gathered thick in the glens, or “put forth an arm and crept from pine to pine.”

Towards evening the clouds broke a little, and the forest-clad steeps appeared through them, powdered thickly with new snow.  Walter and I sallied forth from our sodden tents and held a council of war in the mud.  It was decided to quit our somewhat unsatisfactory and precarious position early to-morrow, if fine, as the weather looked so nasty, and a squall of wind might have awkward consequences.

Friday, April 14.—­A very fairly fine morning enabled us to strike camp yesterday, and get the baggage off in good time.  The Smithsons decided to make for the jheels near the river, in order to give the duck a final worry round before the season closes on the 15th.

My shikari having reported a good bara singh in a small nullah off the Erin, I arranged to go in search of him.  The march down to Bandipur was a short and easy one, and we got comfortably settled on board our boats early in the afternoon.  About sunset the clouds gathered thick over the hills which we had left, and a thunderstorm broke, its preliminary squall throwing the crews of our fleet into a fearful fuss, and sending them on to the bank with extra ropes and holdfasts to make all secure.  An elderly lady, with a dirty red cap and very untidy ringlets, superintended the business with much clamour.  We take her to be the wife or grandmother (not sure which) of the skipper.

It was with an undoubted sense of solid comfort that we lay in our cosy beds under a wooden roof, whereon the fat rain-drops sputtered, while the thunder still crackled and banged in the distance!

We shifted before dawn to a small village a couple of miles to the east, and at 6.30 Jane and I set out to attack the bara singh, of which the shikari held out high hope.  My wife, mounted on a rough pony, was able to accomplish with great comfort the two miles of flat country which we had to traverse before turning off sharp to the right along a track which led steeply upwards through the scrub that clothed the lower part of the nullah.

There is something unusually charming in the dawn here—­the crisp, buoyant air, the silent hills, their lower slopes and corries still a purple mystery; on high, the silver peaks—­looking ridiculously close—­change swiftly from their cold pallor into rosy life at the first touch of the risen sun.