having a humbler aspect, had been sent to Bombay and cost as a world
of worry and expense to recover!



CHAPTER III

KARACHI TO ABBOTABAD

This morning we awoke to find ourselves rattling and shaking our way
through the Sind Desert--an interminable waste of sand, barren and
thirsty-looking, covered with a patchy scrub of yellowish and grey-purple
bushes.

I can well imagine how hatefully hot it can be here, but to-day it has
been merely pleasantly warm.

Jane and I were deeply interested in the novel scenes we passed through,
which, while new and strange to us, were yet made familiar by what we had
read and heard. The quiet-eyed cattle, with their queer humps, were just
what we expected to see in the dusty landscape. The chattering crowds in
the wayside stations, their bright-coloured garments flaunting in the
white sunlight--the fruit-sellers, the water-carriers, were all as though
they had stepped out of the pages of _Kim_--that most excellent of Indian
stories.

And so all day we rattled and shook through the Sind Desert in the hot
sunlight till the dust lay thick upon us, and our eyes grew tired of
watching the flying landscape.