I wondered whether he were inwardly comparing the two countries. Here, everything drenched and colourless; there, brightness and colour and clean shadows. Here, the little stone church of a similar drabness to its envelope of mist; there, the reflection of the Golden Temple sleeping in the tank all day. The minarets of his mosque and the crenellated city walls would be etched now against a blue sky. I looked at his mules. They did not seem at all _dépaysés_. "How do they stand the damp?" I asked. "Much sickness?" "No, Sahib. Only one has been sick. None have died except those destroyed by the bo-ombs." I wondered what the carts were doing at ----. They were of the first line; the first line transport carries the food into the very mouth of the Army. Being the last link in the line of communications, it is naturally the most vulnerable. Other links are out of range of the enemy's guns and immune, in this phase of the operations at least, from attack except by aircraft. The Drabi explained that they had been detailed for forage work. As he lifted the curricle bar from the yoke one of the mules stepped on his foot, and he called it a name that reflected equally on his own morals and those of the animal's near relations. He did not address the beast in the tone an Englishman would use, but spoke to it with brotherly reproach. Just then an officer of the Indian Army Supply and Transport Corps rode up, and I got him to talk, as I knew I could if I praised his mules and carts enough. He enlarged on the virtues of the most adaptable, adjustable, and indestructible vehicles that had ever been used in a campaign, and of the most hardy, ascetic, and providentially accommodating beast that had ever drawn or carried the munitions of war. These light transport-carts are wonderful. They cut through the mud like a harrow over thin soil. The centre of the road is left to the lorries. "They would be bogged where we go," the S. and T. man said proudly. "They are built for swamps and boulder-strewn mountain streams. If the whole show turns over, you can right it at once. If you get stuck in a shell-hole, you can cut the mules loose, use them as pack transport, and man-handle the carts. Then we have got component parts. We can stick on a wheel in a minute, and we don't get left like that menagerie of drays, furnishing vans, brewers' carts, and farmers' tumbrils, which collapse in the fairway and seem to have no extra parts at all--unadaptable things, some of them, like a lot of rotten curios. And, of course, you know you can take our carts to pieces and pack them; you can get"--I think he said fourteen--"of them into a truck. And if you----"