The lieutenant paused. "Ever been thirsty, Graham?"

"Not that kind," said the Ethnologist.

"H'm. We had the whole of that day, the night, and the next day of it,
and only a trifle of dew we wrung out of our clothes and the tent.
And below us was the river going giggle, giggle, round a rock in mid
stream. I never knew such a barrenness of incident, or such a quantity
of sensation. The sun might have had Joshua's command still upon it
for all the motion one could see; and it blazed like a near furnace.
Towards the evening of the first day one of the Derbyshire men said
something--nobody heard what--and went off round the bend of the
cliff. We heard shots, and when Hooker looked round the corner he was
gone. And in the morning the Sepoy whose leg was shot was in delirium,
and jumped or fell over the cliff. Then we took the mule and shot
it, and that must needs go over the cliff too in its last struggles,
leaving eight of us.

"We could see the body of the Sepoy down below, with the head in the
water. He was lying face downwards, and so far as I could make out was
scarcely smashed at all. Badly as the Chins might covet his head, they
had the sense to leave it alone until the darkness came.

"At first we talked of all the chances there were of the main body
hearing the firing, and reckoned whether they would begin to miss us,
and all that kind of thing, but we dried up as the evening came on.
The Sepoys played games with bits of stone among themselves, and
afterwards told stories. The night was rather chilly. The second day
nobody spoke. Our lips were black and our throats afire, and we lay