The leading man chanted a dimeter line, generally with an iambus in the first foot; but when the road was difficult or the ascent toilsome, the metre became trochaic, in accordance with the best traditions of classical poetry. The hind-men responded with a sing-song trochaic dimeter which sounded like a long-drawn-out monosyllable. They never initiated anything. It was not custom; it had never been done. The laws of Nature are not so immutable as the ritual of a Hindu guild.
We sped on smoothly for eight miles, and when I asked the _kahars_ if they were tired, they said they would not rest, as relays were waiting on the road. All the way they chanted their hymn of the obvious:--
'Mountains are steep; _Chorus_: Yes, they are. The road is narrow; Yes, it is. The sahib is wounded; That is so. With many wounds; They are many. The road goes down; Yes, it does. Now we are hurrying; Yes, we are.'
Here they ran swiftly till the next rise in the hill.
Waiting in the shade for relays, I heard two Englishmen meet on the road. One had evidently been attached, and was going down to join his regiment; the other was coming up on special service. I caught fragments of our crisp expressive argot.
_Officer going down_ (_apparently disillusioned_): 'Oh, it's the same old bald-headed maidan we usually muddle into.'
_Officer coming up_: '... Up above Phari ideal country for native cavalry, isn't it?... A few men with lances prodding those fellows in the back would soon put the fear of God into them. Why don't they send up the --th Light Cavalry?'
_Officer going down_: 'They've Walers, and you can't feed 'em, and the --th are all Jats. They're no good; can't do without a devil of a lot of milk. They want bucketsful of it. Well, bye-bye; you'll soon get fed up with it.'
The doolie was hitched up, and the _kahars_ resumed their chant:
'A sahib goes up; Yes, he does. A sahib goes down; That is so.'
The heat and the monotonous cadence induced drowsiness, and one fell to thinking of this odd motley of men, all of one genus, descended from the anthropoid ape, and exhibiting various phases of evolution--the primitive Lepcha, advanced little further than his domestic dog; the Tibetan _kahar_ caught in the wheel of civilization, and forming part of the mechanism used to bring his own people into line; the Lucknow doolie-bearer and the Jemadar Sahib, products of a hoary civilization that have escaped complexity and nerves; and lord of all these, by virtue of his race, the most evolved, the English subaltern. All these folk are brought together because the people on the other side of the hills will insist on being obsolete anachronisms, who have been asleep for hundreds of years while we have been developing the sense of our duty towards our neighbour. They must come into line; it is the will of the most evolved.