man in the mess who could not be spared more easily than he.

For he was indomitable, unfailing, always fulfilling his duties with
machine-like regularity, stern, impenetrable, hard as granite.

As to what lay behind that hardness, no one ever troubled to inquire.
They took him for granted, much as if he had been a well-oiled engine
guaranteed to surmount all obstacles. How he did it was nobody's
business but his own. If he suffered in that appalling heat as other men
suffered, no one knew of it. If he grew a little grimmer and a little
gaunter, no one noticed. Everyone knew that whatever happened to others,
he at least would hold on. Everyone described him as "hard as nails."

Each day seemed more intolerable than the last, each night a perceptible
narrowing of the fiery circle in which they lived. They seemed to be
drawing towards a culminating horror that grew hourly more palpable,
more monstrously menacing--a horror that drained their strength even
from afar.

"It's going to kill us this time," declared little Robey, the youngest
subaltern, to whom the nights were a torment unspeakable. He had been
within an ace of heat apoplexy more than once, and his nerves were
stretched almost to breaking-point.

But Merryon went doggedly on, hewing his unswerving way through all. The
monsoon was drawing near, and the whole tortured earth seemed to be
waiting in dumb expectation.

Night after night a glassy moon came up, shining, immense and awful,
through a thick haze of heat. Night after night Merryon lay on his