"And what said the German officer, Shiva Lal?"

"Nay, sahib, he said nothing." We also say nothing. For Shiva Lal needs
but little encouragement to talk from sunset to cock-crow. Perhaps the
unfortunate German officer divined as much. But the spell of Shiva Lal's
eloquence is rudely broken by Major D----, who takes me by the arm to go
elsewhere. And the little group squatting on their haunches at their
mid-day meal cease listening and dip their _chupattis_ in the aromatic
_dhal_, in that slow, ruminant, ritualistic way in which the Indian
always eats his food.

"_Ram, Ram! Tumhi kothun allé?_" said my friend Smith, turning aside to
a lonely figure on my right. A cry of joy escapes a dark-featured
Mahratta who has been looking mournfully on from his bed of pain,
comprehending nothing of these dialogues. We have, indeed, been talking
in every language except Mahrathi. And he, poor soul, has lost both
feet--they were frostbitten--and will never answer the music of the
charge again. But at the sound of his own tongue he raises his body by
the pulley hanging at the head of his cot, and gravely salutes the
sahib. Like Ruth amid the alien corn, his heart is sad with thoughts of
home, and he has been dreaming between these iron walls of the wide,
sunlit spaces of the Deccan. As his feverish brain counts and re-counts
the rivets on the ship-plates, ever and anon they part before his
wistful eyes, and he sees again the little village with its grove of
mangoes and its sacred banyan on the inviolable _otla_; he hears once
again the animated chatter of the wayfarers in the _chowdi_.

"Where is thy home?"