Hardly had we gone twenty miles before the first rain-clouds of the season raced across the sky. The velocity of the wind was so great that it ripped off one of the sails of our boat. Seeing that there was no time to be lost, I opened the cage and released the three pigeons. As they struck the wind they vaulted right over and flew very low, almost falling into the water. They flew thus close to the surface of the river for a quarter of an hour, making very little headway against the hard wind. But they persisted and another ten minutes saw them safely tacking and flying landward. Just about the time they had reached the string of villages on our left, the sky grew pitch black, a torrential cloudburst blotted everything out, and we saw nothing but inky sheets of water through which the lightning zig-zagged and danced the dance of death. I gave up all hope of finding my pigeons again. We were almost ship-wrecked ourselves, but fortunately our boat was beached on the shore of a village. Next morning when I came home by train I found two wet pigeons instead of three. Gay-Neck's father had perished in the storm. No doubt it was all my fault, and for the few days that followed our house was given up to mourning. The two pigeons and I used to go up on the roof whenever the rain left off a bit in order to scan the sky for a glimpse of the father. Alas, he never returned. CHAPTER IV GAY-NECK IN THE HIMALAYAS Since the rain and the heat in the plains proved excessive, my family decided to take us to the Himalayas. If you take a map of India you will find that in its northeast corner is a town called Darjeeling, standing almost face to face with Mount Everest, the highest peak in the world. After travelling, not too fast, by caravan, several days from Darjeeling, my family, myself and my two pigeons reached the little village of Dentam. There we were ten thousand feet above sea level. At such a height an American mountain or the Alps would have at least some snow, but in India, which is in the tropics, and on the Himalayas, hardly thirty degrees north of the equator, the snow line does not commence under ten thousand feet, and the jungle of the foot hills abounding with animals is so cold after September that all its denizens migrate southward.