Publisher's Synopsis
Understand! Of course you don't. I don't, though I've been here two years. And what's more, I don't want to," retorted a rather undersized Englishman, whose white drill suit made him look like a stem to the huge mushroom of a pith hat which he wore. Despite this protection his face was brown exceedingly, and faintly wrinkled through sheer exposure to sun-bright, sun-dried air. The fact enhanced the monkey type of his features, and made his clear, light-blue eyes--so set that they were shadowless below and cavernous above--look quite aggressively cool, inquisitive, intelligent. "So long as we don't understand them," he went on, "and they don't understand us, we jog along the same path amicably, like--well! like the pilgrims to the 'Cradle of the Gods, ' and the telegraph-posts to the Adjutant General's office up the road yonder--and I'll trouble you to cram more space than that between two earthly poles! No! It is when we begin to have glimmerings that the deuce and all comes in--" He paused in the molten gold of sunlight, which made the yellow sand, the corn-coloured tussocks of tiger-grass still yellower and still more corn-coloured, to glance round, as if measuring the distance between the long, low line of mud enclosure they had left but a few hundred yards behind--yet which, already, was losing itself in an illimitable sand stretch beyond--and a bigger tuft in the sand stretch ahead; a tuft of spear-points and horses, bayonets and men, waiting beside the first faint semblance of a reed-paved road. Then he took out his watch. Apparently he found leisure at his disposal, for he walked on. "There's a nursery rhyme they taught me," he continued, "when my moral nature was at the mercy of any fool who chose to take an interest in it--'But if poor Pussy understood, she'd be, indeed, a naughty creature!' It didn't run so consecutively, of course; in fact 'creature' rhymed to 'teach her'--but I learnt it that way. Children do that sort of thing a sight deal oftener than their elders think."
