The depolarized and bewildered Damocles found himself in a strange and
truly foreign land, a queer, cold, dismal country inhabited by vast
quantities of "second-class sahibs," as he termed the British lower
middle-class and poor, a country of a strange greenness and
orderedness, where there were white servants, strangely conjoined rows
of houses in the villages, dangerous-looking fires inside the houses,
a kind of tomb-stones on all house-tops, strange horse-drawn vehicles,
butlerless and _ghari_[9]-less sahibs, and an utter absence of
"natives," sepoys, _byle-gharies_,[10] camels, monkeys, kites,
squirrels, bulbuls, _minahs_,[11] mongooses, palm-trees, and temples.
Cattle appeared to have no humps, crows to have black heads, and trees
to have no fruit. The very monsoon seemed inextricably mixed with the
cold season. Fancy the rains coming in the cold weather! Perhaps there
was no hot weather and nobody went to the hills in this strange
country of strange people, strange food, strange customs. Nobody
seemed to have any tents when they left the station for the districts,
nor to take any bedding when they went on tour or up-country. A queer,
foreign land.

But Monksmead was a most magnificent "bungalow" standing in a truly
beautiful "compound"--wherein the very _bhistis_[12] and _mallis_ were
European and appeared to be second-class sahibs.

Marvellous was the interior of the bungalow with its countless rooms
and mountainous stair-cases (on the wall of one of which hung _the
Sword_ which he had never seen but instantly recognized) and its army
of white servants headed by the white butler (so like the Chaplain of
Bimariabad in grave respectability and solemn pompousness) and its
extraordinary white "ayahs" or maids, and silver-haired Mrs. Pont,