He sponged and dried the little one, wrapped him in a cloth, and fed him again--just a few drops. The son of Madan Das choked and gurgled furthermore over a half-spoonful of water. “Oh, you’re not nearly so far gone as your mother, my son. She was already starving before your inestimable fountains dried.... And so they took away your sister’s little brass bowl--and the soup made of bark and flower-pods and wild berries. The poor _tahsildar_ must have been very tired and hot that day.... And so your worthy uncle who was a leper sold the clothing of Madan Das, who borrowed a loin-cloth from a neighbor, and did not need that very long.... Curl up and sleep on a man’s arm, my wee Rajput.” Between the two, Routledge passed the forenoon. At last, miles away across the dusty sun-shot plain eastward, a bullock-cart appeared, and long afterward behind it, faint as its shadow, another--and others. Almost imperceptibly, they moved forward on the twisting, burning road, like crippled insects; and the poles of the native-drivers raised from time to time like tortured antennæ. There was a murmur now within the huts of stricken Rydamphur. Routledge had sent his baggage west to the railroad and settled his account at the Rest House. He would leave with the coming of the famine relief. The child was better, but the woman could not rally. The nourishment lay dead within her. The bullock-carts merely moved in the retina of his eye. He was thinking deep, unbridled things in the stillness of high noon. The great law of cause and effect had brought the answer to his whimsical question of a few hours before. Why did karma inflict starvation upon the child before the tablets had formed within him on which the lesson might be graven for his life’s direction? The son of Madan Das was but an instrument of punishment for the mother.... What wrong she must have done, according to Hindu doctrine, to him in one of the dim other lives--when she was forced to bring him into the world, the famine-world of India, forced to love him, to watch him waste with hunger, and to crawl with him in the night. Incomparable maternal tragedy. The sins of how many lives had she not expiated up yonder in the withered fields! The woman’s arm flung itself out from her body, and lay in a checkered patch of sunlight. It made Routledge think of a dried and shrunken earth-worm which the morning heat had overtaken upon a wide pavement. Her eyelids were stretched apart now.