Then he enlarged on his beasts. Nothing ever hurts a mule short of a bullet or shell. Physical impact, heat or cold, or drought, or damp, it is all the same. They are a little fastidious about drink, but they deserve one indulgence, and a wise Staff officer will give them a place up-stream for watering above the cavalry. For hardiness nothing can touch them. They are as fit in Tibet as in the Sudan, as composed in a blizzard on the Nathu-la as in a sandstorm at Wadi Haifa. And I knew that every word he said was true. I had sat a transport-cart through the torrents of Jammu, and had lost a mule over a precipice in a mountain pass beyond the Himalayas. It lay half buried in the snow all night with the thermometer below zero. In the morning it was dragged up by ropes and began complacently grazing. "And look at them now in this slush!" They certainly showed no sign of distress or even of depression. "And the Drabis? Do they grouse?" "Not a bit. They are splendid. They have no nerves, no more nerves than the mules. You ought to have seen Muhammad Alim come back from Neuve Chapelle. When hell began the order had gone round 'All into your dug-outs,' and the bombardier of his cart had buried himself obediently in the nearest funkhole. He stuck it out there all day. The next morning he rolled up at the Brigade Column and reported his cart was lost. Nothing could have lived in that fire, so it was struck off." But Drabi Muhammad Alim had not heard the order. He sat through the whole of the bombardment in his cart. After two days, not having found his destination, he returned. "Sahib," he said, "I have lost the way." When asked what the fire was like he said that there had been a wind when the boom-golies passed, which reminded him of the monsoon when the tufân catches the pine trees in Dagshai. It occurred to me that the Asiatic driver assimilated the peculiar virtues of his beast. The man with a camel or bullock or mule is less excitable, more of a fatalist, than the man who goes on foot alone. The mule and the Drabi would rattle along under shell-fire as imperturbably as they run the gauntlet of falling rocks on the Kashmir road in the monsoon. I have seen the Drabi calmly charioteering his pontoons to the Tigris bank, perched on a thwart like a bird, when the bullets were flying and the sappers preparing the bridge for the crossing. And I have seen him carry on when dead to the world, a mere automaton like Ali Hussein, who reported himself hit in the shoulder two days after the battle at Umm-el-Hannah. "Yes, Sahib," he admitted to the doctor a little guiltily when cross-examined, "it was in the battle two days ago that I came by this wound." Then he added shamefacedly fearing reproof, "Sahib, I could not come before. There was no time. There were too many journeys. And the wounded were too many."