“Famine,” they told him--he thought he saw famine in the eyes of the English--“yes, there is famine northward, but the government has taken it in hand. You see, when a famine is officially declared it doesn’t last long....” Mr. Jasper hurried northward, lest it be over before he reached there. He wanted to see the conditions which would cause the Anglo-Indians officially to recognize famine. Finally, it was borne upon him that he must leave the railway to discover the reality, and he made his way eastward, for a long day’s journey, by bullock-cart and sedan-chair, across a burning, forsaken land to the town of Rydamphur--too little and too far for the English yet to have heard its cry. Least of villages, Rydamphur, a still, sterile, Christless place, sprawled upon a saffron desert. He paid his coolies at the edge of the village, and they pointed out the Rest House among the huts. The place was dead as a dream creation. There was something febrile, unnatural in the late afternoon sunlight. The houses looked withered and ready to fall in that dead-gold light. He passed a darkened doorway and was stabbed by the spur of horrid understanding--a blast of unutterable fetor.... He ran for a step or two, horrified as if he had trodden upon the dead in the dark. His brain was filled with muttering: “This is famine! This is famine!”... Mr. Jasper turned shortly, and saw emerging from the darkened hut--a white man in native dress. It was a face incapable of tan, and fixed with a sorrow too deep for tears--a wild, tragic sorrow, vivid in the fever-wide eyes.... It was all nightmarish and inchoate. Thus he entered the oven of bricks called the Rest House, and bathed, changed, and gasped, while the snoring punkahs whipped him with hot, sterilizing breaths.... Dinner that evening at eight. Mr. Jasper sat down to a table with a gaunt, embrowned stranger in white linen--a wasted giant, with a head and figure of singular command; eyes that were weary and restless, but very wise and very kind. So sun-darkened was the face that Mr. Jasper thought at first his companion must be a native of high caste; especially since he ate no meat and sparingly of the rest. The dinner was meagre, but a feast compared to what was expected in the nucleus of a famine district. “I didn’t suppose such a variety of food could be procured here,” Mr. Jasper observed. “There has been plenty of food to be had for money, until the last day or two,” the stranger replied. “And the natives have no money?” Mr. Jasper realized that the question was inane, but his eagerness was great to draw the man before him into conversation. There was a distinguished look in the man’s face which promised much. He proved by no means disinclined to talk; indeed, seemed urged by a strange zeal for conversation that night, as one who has been in prison, or somewhere long and far from his kind. “I came here, not out of vulgar curiosity, but striving to understand,” Mr. Jasper said.