The darkness which holds the dawn was, as a rule, silent as the grave in the sand-stretches beyond the river, where the wide cut of the canal, the huge mud-heap of the gaol, with its scattered workshops and houses, showed as mere spots and lines on the illimitable plain. But on the night after the band had played "God save the Queen," while the first drops of sacred water trickled over the chink of the sluice into the dry bed of the canal below, its silence was broken by unfamiliar sounds. First of all, by the now ceaseless splash of the thin, glassy curve of water on its way to find out this new road to the sea. It had a sort of dreamy whisper in it, as if it were telling its first impressions, its hopes, its fears, to the river it was leaving behind. And on this background of ceaseless sound came two others intermittently. The first--a muffled hammering from the darkness which hid the Viceroy's camp--told of departure, letting the night know that another white-winged tent was flitting, and that the dawn must be prepared to find its place empty, the dream-city in ruins, the Hosts of the Lord-_sahib_ gone. The second told of arrival. It was a strange cry, soft, almost musical:-- "_Hârâ--Hârî--Hârâ--Hârî!_" Then every now and again in a sort of chant: "_Râm--Râm--Sita--Râm!_" It was the pilgrims' cry, their call on the Creator, the Destroyer, their appeal to the godhead in man and woman; for the forerunners of the great host to come were already nearing Eshwara on their road to the "Cradle of the Gods." But there was a fourth sound, inaudible--by reason of that ceaseless noise of water through the chink of the sluice--except to those close by it, like George Dillon, as he stood on the hand-bridge above the closed gates looking down idly into the darkness which prevented him from seeing the cause of the sound. He had been up all night. On his return,--later than he had intended, owing to his determination not to be defied by any woman,--he had found that in his absence cholera had been hard at its work. So he had buckled to his, expecting one of those awful nights which live, even in a doctor's memory, as a horror, as a warning to those best fitted to stem the stream of death, that they are but straws on its surface. But he had been mistaken. True, for an hour or so, cases had come in quicker than they could be attended to; then, suddenly, they ceased to come in at all. That had been eight hours ago. Too short a respite for certainty, but Dr. Dillon, being no novice in such work, had his hopes; the more so because the disease, from the very outset, had become steadily less and less virulent. Even so, seven dead bodies lay awaiting the first glint of dawn; therefore, as ill-luck would have it, there would be seven columns of smoke on the river's edge for all to see!