If a man said to a confirmed dak-bungalow- haunter:--"There is a
corpse in the next room, and there's a mad girl in the next but one, and the
woman and man on that camel have just eloped from a place sixty miles away,"
the hearer would not disbelieve because he would know that nothing is too
wild, grotesque, or horrible to happen in a dak-bungalow.
This credulity, unfortunately, extends to ghosts. A rational person fresh from
his own house would have turned on his side and slept. I did not. So surely as
I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores of things in the bed because the
bulk of my blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear every stroke of a long
game at billiards played in the echoing room behind the iron-barred door. My
dominant fear was that the players might want a marker. It was an absurd fear;
because creatures who could play in the dark would be above such
superfluities. I only know that that was my terror; and it was real.
After a long, long while the game stopped, and the door banged. I slept
because I was dead tired. Otherwise I should have preferred to have kept
awake. Not for everything in Asia would I have dropped the door-bar and peered
into the dark of the next room.
When the morning came, I considered that I had done well and wisely, and
inquired for the means of departure.
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