or two until awakened by Raymond's voice bidding him join him at tea.
Strolling in pyjamas and slippers into the sitting-room which they
shared the subaltern found his comrade lying lazily in a long chair and
attired in the same cool costume. The outer doors and windows of the
bungalow were still closed against the brooding heat outside. Inside the
house the temperature was little cooler despite the _punkah_ which
droned monotonously overhead.

Over their tea the two young soldiers discussed the day's sport,
recalling every incident of each run and kill, until the servants came
in to throw open the doors and windows in hope of a faint breath of
evening coolness. The _punkah_ stopped, and the coolie who pulled it
shuffled away.

After tea Raymond took his companion to inspect the cantonment, which
Wargrave had not yet seen, for he had not reached it until after dusk
the previous day. It consisted only of the Mess, the Regimental Office,
and about ten bungalows for the officers, single-storied brick or
rubble-walled buildings, thatched or tiled. Some of them were unoccupied
and were tumbling in ruins. There was nothing else--not even the
"general shop" usual in most small cantonments. Not a spool of thread,
not a tin of sardines, could be purchased within a three days' journey.
Most of the food supplies and almost everything else had to be brought
from Bombay. Around the bungalow the compounds were simply patches of
the universal sands surrounded by mud walls. No flowers, no trees, not
even a blade of grass, relieved the dull monotony. Altogether the
cantonment of Rohar was an unlovely and uninteresting place. Yet it is
but an example of many such stations in India, lonely and
soul-deadening, some of which have not even its saving grace of sport to
enliven existence in them.