Then the voice of the driver requested the Heaven-borne to return to their seats: and they were off again, full clatter, half a dozen pariahs speeding their progress. Honor, by her own choice, shared the back seat with her husband in comparative comfort. His enclosing arm shielded her, as far as might be, from the incessant jolting; and from time to time, in utter weariness, her head sank upon his shoulder, and she slept, while the two men smoked and talked fitfully in undertones. Such primitive journeyings are fast becoming obsolete in the India of to-day, where the railway stretches its antennae in all directions, and the horn of the motor has been heard beyond Chaman. Yet, for all their obvious discomforts, they possessed their own peculiar flavour of interest and charm. Dawn showed them the Indus at last: a sheet of tarnished silver, five miles wide, sprawling over the colourless country, its normal banks submerged by the rush of water from the hills: and behind them day sprang out of the east, 'a tyrant with a flaming sword.' Through eight blazing hours that sword hung bared above them. For their ferry-boat was a native barge, persuaded rather than propelled in any given direction by oars as long as punt poles; and set with one unwieldy sail that could neither be tacked nor furled; but which provided them, for a time, with a patch of burning shadow, by no means to be despised. In it they smoked and picnicked, and made merry with cards and dogs, to the best of their ability; while erratic currents bore them from sandbank to sandbank; each collision involving an interlude of shouting, shoving, coaxing, and upbraiding on the part of four assiduous boatmen; and when, by the mercy of God and the river, they managed to run aground on the farther side, it was nearing four o'clock in the afternoon. Here were more tongas awaiting their prey: and this time the travellers hailed them gratefully: for the swollen river had almost invaded the gardens of outlying bungalows; and a short gallop brought them at last into the straggling station, whose name literally signifies the Tents of Ishmael. But the day of tents had long since given place to the day of spacious, square-shouldered bungalows, with pillared verandahs, set in the midst of rambling compounds, where the ferasch and banana flourished in dusty luxuriance, while orange, pomegranate, hybiscus, and poinsettia,--to say nothing of marigolds and roses,--blazed regally in the blossoming season with scarlet, and crimson gold. A bird's-eye view of the station itself might have suggested to the imaginative eye a game of noughts and crosses scratched on a Titanic slate:--a network of wide white roads, unrelieved by curve or undulation; their rigidity emphasised by equidistant lines of trees, and whitewashed gate-posts, innocent of gates. Into one of these openings three out of the five tongas finally clattered and stood still; and a familiar brogue gave them greeting from the verandah.