The Thakur put his head out of the tonga and spoke shrilly in Mewari. The Englishman replied in English-Urdu. The Thakur withdrew his head, and from certain grunts that followed seemed to be wakening his retainers. Then two men fell sleepily out of the tonga and walked into the night. “Come in,” said the Thakur, “you and your baggage. My _banduq_ is in that corner; be careful.” The Englishman, taking a mail-bag in one hand for safety’s sake--the wilderness inspires an Anglo-Indian Cockney with unreasoning fear--climbed into the tonga, which was then loaded far beyond Plimsoll mark, and the procession resumed its journey. Every one in the vehicle,--it seemed as full as the railway carriage that held Alice. Through the Looking Glass--was _Sahib_ and _Hazur_. Except the Englishman. He was simple _tum_, and a revolver, Army pattern, was printing every diamond in the chequer-work of its handle, into his right hip. When men desired him to move, they prodded him with the handles of _tulwars_ till they had coiled him into an uneasy lump. Then they slept upon him, or cannoned against him as the tonga bumped. It was an _aram_ tonga or tonga for ease. That was the bitterest thought of all. In due season the harness began to break once every five minutes, and the driver vowed that the wheels would give way also. After eight hours in one position, it is excessively difficult to walk, still more difficult to climb up an unknown road into a dak-bungalow; but he who has sought sleep on an arsenal and under the bodies of burly Rajputs, can do it. The grey dawn brought Udaipur and a Trench bedstead. As the tonga jingled away, the Englishman heard the familiar crack of broken harness. So he was not the Jonah he had been taught to consider himself all through that night of penance! A jackal sat in the verandah and howled him to sleep, wherein he dreamed that he had caught a Viceroy under the walls of Chitor and beaten him with a _tulwar_ till he turned into a dak-pony whose near foreleg, was perpetually coming off, and who would say nothing but _um_ when he was asked why he had not built a railway from Chitor to Udaipur. VII. _Touching the Children of the Sun and their City, and the Hat-marked Caste and their Merits, and a Good Man’s Works in the Wilderness._