“Pundit Ram Lal sends your highness his peace, and bids you ride without sparing.  The dak is laid to the fire-carriages.”

The saddles were changed in a moment, Kiramat Ali and I assisting in the operation.  It was clear that Ram Lal’s messengers were swift, for even if he had met Isaacs when the latter reached the railroad, no ordinary horse could have returned with the message at the time I had received it.  Still less would any ordinary Hindus be capable of laying a dak, or post route of relays, over a hundred miles long in twelve hours.  Once prepared, it was a mere matter of physical endurance in the rider to cover the ground, for the relays were stationed every five or six miles.  It was well known that Lord Steepleton Kildare had lately ridden from Simla to Umballa one night and back the next day, ninety-two miles each way, with constant change of cattle.  What puzzled me was the rapidity with which the necessary dispositions had been made.  On the whole, I was reassured.  If Ram Lal had been able to prepare my way at such short notice here, with two more days at his disposal he would doubtless succeed in laying me a dak most of the way from Julinder to Keitung.  I will not dwell upon the details of the journey.  I reached the railroad and prepared for forty-eight hours of jolting and jostling and broken sleep.  It is true that railway travelling is nowhere so luxurious as in India, where a carriage has but two compartments, each holding as a rule only two persons, though four can be accommodated by means of hanging berths.  Each compartment has a spacious bathroom attached, where you may bathe as often as you please, and there are various contrivances for ventilating and cooling the air.  Nevertheless the heat is sometimes unbearable, and a journey from Bombay to Calcutta direct during the warm months is a severe trial to the strongest constitution.  On this occasion I had about forty-eight hours to travel, and I was resolved to get all the rest in that time that the jolting made possible; for I knew that once in the saddle again it might be days before I got a night’s sleep.  And so we rumbled along, through the vast fields of sugar-cane, now mostly tied in huge sheaves upright, through boundless stretches of richly-cultivated soil, intersected with the regularity of a chess-board by the rivulets and channels of a laborious irrigation.  Here and there stood the high frames made by planting four bamboos in a square and wickering the top, whereon the ryots sit when the crops are ripening, to watch against thieves and cattle, and to drive away the birds of the air.  On we spun, past Meerut and Mozuffernugger, past Umballa and Loodhiana, till we reached our station of Julinder at dawn.  Descending from the train, I was about to begin making inquiries about my next move, when I was accosted by a tall and well-dressed Mussulman, in a plain cloth caftan and a white turban, but exquisitely clean and fresh looking, as it seemed to me, for my eyes were smarting with dust and wearied with the perpetual shaking of the train.