At last, our arrangements complete, we left forty men behind at Buxa to guard the Station; and one morning in February saw us, a hundred and sixty strong, marching through the jungle in the direction of Rajabhatkawa. We moved with fixed bayonets and all the proper precautions of a column passing through an enemy's country. Advanced, rear and flank guards protected us on all sides. These detachments, instead of being thrown out a mile or more from the main body, as they would have been in open country, were not a hundred yards from it. And even that was often too much in the dense jungle. Every man carried at his belt a _kukri_, the Gurkha's heavy, curved knife, and used it to hack his way through the tangle of creepers and undergrowth. The progress was necessarily very slow, and we hardly advanced a mile an hour. We marched by compass, no easy task in thick forest. [Illustration: "MY SEPOYS DRILLING."] [Illustration: BUGLERS AND NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICERS OF MY DETACHMENT.] At the first fire line, as there was an open space, I halted and closed the detachment to give them their first object-lesson in the jungle. To my men, inhabitants of the sandy deserts of Rajputana or the cultivated plains of the North-West Provinces, forest lore was unknown. And as all the warfare the Assam Brigade, to which we belonged, would be called upon to wage would be fought against savages in thick jungle, I lost no chance of teaching our men all conditions of the bush. I now asked them where, when the rivers were dry, would they look for water in the forest. They mostly replied: "We would dig for it, Sahib." I told them that Nature had been too generous to call for such exertion and had kindly provided water in the trees. They looked at me in surprise and evidently thought that I meant to be facetious. I pointed to a thick creeper swinging between the trees in front of me and introduced them to the mysterious _pani bel_. A piece was cut off; and the water flowed from it. That astonished them. "_Wah! wah!_ but that is _jadu_ (magic)," they said to each other. "Marvellous is the Sahib's knowledge. Like us he is new to the forest. Then how could he know of such a wonderful thing?" The water creeper grew freely all round. Permission given, they broke ranks and rushed into the jungle, each resolved to handle the marvel for himself. In a few minutes I was surrounded by scores of sepoys leaning on their rifles with heads well thrown back to catch in their mouths the water dropping from the cut pieces of creeper. The _pani bel_ was a great success. They filled their haversacks with it, and all that day, at every halt, pulled it out to taste and marvel at the magic plant.