Those two degrees of heat bring a thousand other changes. Even at Hodinuggur, arid as it always was, they intensified the drought till a drop of water seemed as visionary a consolation to the parched horizon as it must have been to poor Dives in the fires of hell. The very canal denied its nature as it slipped past yellow and thick with silt from the clayey defiles of the lower hills, each little swirl and eddy looking as if streaked and pitted in mud. Yet the chill of its snowy birth came with the flood, so that in the red-hot evenings George's factotum used to call through the yellow-dust haze to the groom who sat on the edge of the canal, apparently moored to his place by a soda-water bottle tied to a string, and then Ganesha would haul in the strange buoy and scramble up the bank with it rapidly, so as to give the master's dinner-drink a chance of being cool.
All this amused George Keene hugely at first. He drew caricatures of it for the rectory, and sent a very impressionist sketch of his world to Mrs. Boynton. It consisted of a dust-storm, a caper-bush, and a rat-hole. She put it on the mantelpiece of the pretty drawing-room in the little house among scented pine-woods, where she was just beginning to appreciate the soothing effect of having a decent balance at your banker's. Her lady-visitors laughed and said it was very clever, but some of the men looked queer and muttered 'poor devil' under their breath. Not that George looked on himself in that light. On the contrary, Hodinuggur amused him. Its dreary antiquity was all new to him, and as he went through the cool, dark passages of the old palace on his way to play chess with the Diwân, he learnt to admire some things about it; notably the thickness of its walls, through which the sun never filtered, though it soaked piteously into his red-brick bungalow. Upon the roof Zubr-ul-Zamân shrivelled under the heat almost as much as a certain figure which still lay huddled up on the landing of the secret stair in the thickness of the tower beneath him as he sat at chess. Below that again Khush-hâl Beg lay stark naked, like a huge baby, in a swinging cradle, which was pulled to and fro by a drowsy coolie, while a bheestic supplied the fat carcass alternately outside and inside with tepid water from his skin bag, and as the latter shrank, Khush-hâl swelled visibly--horribly.