After the sports some of us played tennis on the courts made in the clearing. As the sun set, after a parting drink and hearty invitations to visit their estates, our friends bade us good-bye and rode off. On our next day's march our faces were set homewards. We passed several tea gardens until we reached Hathipota, where the hospitable Tyson welcomed us, and placed the resources of his estate at our men's disposal and entertained the British officers in his bungalow. Parties of our non-commissioned officers and men were taken over the factories and withering sheds, and were as deeply interested as we were in the ponderous machinery and clever contrivances. We left Hathipota next day. Later on, we were to see it again under more tragic auspices, when we were conveying a murderer to his doom. Thence to the end of the ten days' march we worked through the forest back towards home. We passed almost dryshod over a wide river at Jainti, which during the Rains can only be crossed by a cradle running on an iron cable from bank to bank. At Jainti ends the little railway by which we had arrived. The next station to it was Buxa Road. From Santrabari we climbed our hills again, sorry to have finished our pleasant and instructive march. The men had learned much of jungle conditions; and I had acquired a knowledge of the district which was to stand me in good stead in days to come. CHAPTER X THROUGH FIRE AND WATER India in the hot weather--A land of torment--The drought--Forest fires--The cholera huts burned--Fighting the flames--Death of a sepoy--The bond between British officers and their men--The sepoy's funeral--A fortnight's vigil--Saving the Station--The hills ablaze--A sublime spectacle--The devastated forest--Fallen leaves on fire--Our elephants' peril--Saving the zareba--A beat for game in the jungle--Trying to catch a wild elephant--A moonlight ramble--We meet a bear--The burst of the Monsoons--A dull existence--Three hundred inches of rain--The monotony of thunderstorms--A changed world--Leeches--Monster hailstones--Surveyors caught in a storm--A break in the Rains--The revived jungle--Useless lightning-conductors--The Monsoon again--The loneliness of Buxa. Through the long months of the Indian summer the cool Hills look down in pity on the Plains steeped in the brooding heat, where the sun is an offence and a torture, where the hot wind, like a blast of fiery air from an opened furnace door, mocks with the thought of pleasant breezes in a temperate land, where night brings only the breathless hours of darkness when the parched earth gives out the heat it has stored by day, and only dawn affords a momentary relief.