Did I know that Sahib? He gave me the
name of a well-known man who has been buried for more than a
quarter of a century, and showed me an ancient daguerreotype of
that man in his prehistoric youth. I had seen a steel engraving of
him at the head of a double volume of Memoirs a month before,
and I felt ancient beyond telling.
The day shut in and the _khansamah_ went to get me food. He did
not go through the pretense of calling it "_khana_"--man's victuals.
He said "_ratub_," and that means, among other things, "grub"--dog's
rations. There was no insult in his choice of the term. He had
forgotten the other word, I suppose.
While he was cutting up the dead bodies of animals, I settled
myself down, after exploring the d?k-bungalow. There were three
rooms, beside my own, which was a corner kennel, each giving
into the other through dingy white doors fastened with long iron
bars. The bungalow was a very solid one, but the partition walls of
the rooms were almost jerry-built in their flimsiness. Every step or
bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three, and
every footfall came back tremulously from the far walls.
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