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As I came through the Desert thus it was - As I came through the Desert. The City of Dreadful Night.

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Short story

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	23 octobre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819902089
Langue	English

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Rudyard Kipling - My Own True Ghost Story
As I came through the Desert thus it was – As I camethrough the Desert. The City of Dreadful Night.
Somewhere in the Other World, where there are booksand pictures and plays and shop windows to look at, and thousandsof men who spend their lives in building up all four, lives agentleman who writes real stories about the real insides of people;and his name is Mr. Walter Besant. But he will insist upon treatinghis ghosts – he has published half a workshopful of them – withlevity. He makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in somecases, flirt outrageously, with the phantoms. You may treatanything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; butyou must behave reverently toward a ghost, and particularly anIndian one.
There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form offat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside tilla traveler passes. Then they drop upon his neck and remain. Thereare also terrible ghosts of women who have died in child-bed. Thesewander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near avillage, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death inthis world and the next. Their feet are turned backward that allsober men may recognize them. There are ghosts of little childrenwho have been thrown into wells. These haunt well curbs and thefringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by thewrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the corpseghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attackSahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to havefrightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared thelife out of both white and black.
Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There aresaid to be two at Simla, not counting the woman who blows thebellows at Syree dâk-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has ahouse haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed todo night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that oneof her houses "repeats" on autumn evenings all the incidents of ahorrible horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost,and, now that she has been swept by cholera, will have room for asorrowful one; there are Officers' Quarters in Mian Mir whose doorsopen without reason, and whose furniture is guaranteed to creak,not with the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles whocome to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur possesses houses that nonewill willingly rent; and there is something – not fever – wrongwith a big bungalow in Allahabad. The older Provinces simplybristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies along theirmain thoroughfares.
Some of the dâk-bungalows on the Grand Trunk Roadhave handy little cemeteries in their compound – witnesses to the"changes and chances of this mortal life" in the days when mendrove from Calcutta to the Northwest. These bungalows areobjectionable places to put up in. They are generally very old,always dirty, while the khansamah is as ancient as thebungalow. He either chatters senilely, or falls into the longtrances of age. In both moods he is useless. If you get angry withhim, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these thirty years,and says that when he was in that Sahib's service not a khansamah in the Province could touch him. Then he jabbersand mows and trembles and fidgets among the dishes, and you repentof your irritation.
In these dâk-bungalows, ghosts are most likely to befound, and when found, they should be made a note of. Not long agoit was my business to live in dâk-bungalows. I never inhabited thesame house for three nights running, and grew to be learned in thebreed. I lived in Government-built ones with red brick walls andrail ceilings, an inventory of the furniture posted in every room,and an excited snake at the threshold to give welcome. I lived in"converted" ones – old houses officiating as dâk-bungalows – wherenothing was in its proper place and there wasn't even a fowl fordinner. I lived in second-hand palaces where the wind blew throughopen-work marble tracery just as uncomfortably as through a brokenpane. I lived in dâk-bungalows where the last entry in thevisitors' book was fifteen months old, and where they slashed offthe curry-kid's head with a sword. It was my good luck to meet allsorts of men, from sober traveling missionaries and desertersflying from British Regiments, to drunken loafers who threw whiskybottles at all who passed; and my still greater good fortune justto escape a maternity case. Seeing that a fair proportion of thetragedy of our lives out here acted itself in dâk-bungalows, Iwondered that I had met no ghosts. A ghost that would voluntarilyhang about a dâk-bungalow would be mad of course; but so many menhave died mad in dâk-bungalows that there must be a fair percentageof lunatic ghosts.
In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, forthere were two of them. Up till that hour I had sympathized withMr. Besant's method of handling them, as shown in "The Strange Caseof Mr. Lucraft and Other Stories." I am now in the Opposition.
We will call the bungalow Katmal dâk-bungalow. But that was the smallest part of the horror. A man with asensitive hide has no right to sleep in dâk-bungalows. He shouldmarry. Katmal dâk-bungalow was old and rotten and unrepaired. Thefloor was of worn brick, the walls were filthy, and the windowswere nearly black with grime. It stood on a bypath largely used bynative Sub-Deputy Assistants of all kinds, from Finance to Forests;but real Sahibs were rare. The khansamah , who was nearlybent double with old age, said so.
When I arrived, there was a fitful, undecided rainon the face of the land, accompanied by a restless wind, and everygust made a noise like the rattling of dry bones in the stiff toddypalms outside. The khansamah completely lost his head on myarrival. He had served a Sahib once. Did I know that Sahib? He gaveme the name of a well-known man who has been buried for more than aquarter of a century, and showed me an ancient daguerreotype ofthat man in his prehistoric youth. I had seen a steel engraving ofhim at the head of a double volume of Memoirs a month before, and Ifelt ancient beyond telling.
The day shut in and the khansamah went to getme food. He did not go through the, pretense of calling it" khana " – man's victuals. He said " ratub ," and thatmeans, among other things, "grub" – dog's rations. There was noinsult 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 dâk-bungalow. There werethree rooms, beside my own, which was a corner kennel, each givinginto the other through dingy white doors fastened with long ironbars. The bungalow was a very solid one, but the partition walls ofthe rooms were almost jerry-built in their flimsiness. Every stepor bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three, andevery footfall came back tremulously from the far walls. For thisreason I shut the door. There were no lamps – only candles in longglass shades. An oil wick was set in the bathroom.
For bleak, unadulterated misery that dâk-bungalowwas the worst of the many that I had ever set foot in. There was nofireplace, and the windows would not open; so a brazier of charcoalwould have been useless. The rain and the wind splashed and gurgledand moaned round the house, and the toddy palms rattled and roared.Half a dozen jackals went through the compound singing, and a hyenastood afar off and mocked them. A hyena would convince a Sadduceeof the Resurrection of the Dead – the worst sort of Dead. Then camethe ratub – a curious meal, half native and half English incomposition – with the old khansamah babbling behind mychair about dead and gone English people, and the wind-blowncandles playing shadow-bo-peep with the bed and themosquito-curtains. It was just the sort of dinner and evening tomake a man think of every single one of his past sins, and of allthe others that he intended to commit if he lived.
Sleep, for several hundred reasons, was not easy.The lamp in the bathroom threw the most absurd shadows into theroom, and the wind was beginning to talk nonsense.
Just when the reasons were drowsy with blood-suckingI heard the regular – "Let-us-take-and-heave-him-over" grunt ofdoolie-bearers in the compound. First one doolie came in, then asecond, and then a third. I heard the doolies dumped on the ground,and the shutter in front of my door shook. "That's some one tryingto come in," I said. But no one spoke, and I persuaded myself thatit was the gusty wind. The shutter of the room next to mine wasattacked, flung back, and the inner door opened. "That's someSub-Deputy Assistant," I said, "and he has brought his friends withhim. Now they'll talk and spit and smoke for an hour."
But there were no voices and no footsteps. No onewas putting his luggage into the next room. The door shut, and Ithanked Providence that I was to be left in peace. But I wascurious to know where the doolies had gone. I got out of bed andlooked into the darkness. There was never a sign of a doolie. Justas I was getting into bed again, I heard, in the next room, thesound that no man in his senses can possibly mistake – the whir ofa billiard ball down the length of the slates when the striker isstringing for break. No other sound is like it. A minute afterwardsthere was another whir, and I got into bed. I was not frightened –indeed I was not. I was very curious to know what had become of thedoolies. I jumped into bed for that reason.
Next minute I heard the double click of a cannon andmy hair sat up. It is a mistake to say that hair stands up. Theskin of the head tightens and you can feel a faint, prickly,bristling all over the scalp. That is the hair sitting up.
There was a whir and a click, and both sounds couldonly have been made by one thing – a billiard ball. I argued thematter out at great length with myse