from that dâk-bungalow. I listened, and with each listen the game grew
clearer. There was whir on whir and click on click. Sometimes there was a
double click and a whir and another click. Beyond any sort of doubt,
people were playing billiards in the next room. And the next room was not
big enough to hold a billiard table!

Between the pauses of the wind I heard the game go forward--stroke after
stroke. I tried to believe that I could not hear voices; but that attempt
was a failure.

Do you know what fear is? Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death,
but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see--fear that
dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat--fear that makes you
sweat on the palms of the hands, and gulp in order to keep the uvula at
work? This is a fine Fear--a great cowardice, and must be felt to be
appreciated. The very improbability of billiards in a dâk-bungalow proved
the reality of the thing. No man--drunk or sober--could imagine a game at
billiards, or invent the spitting crack of a "screw-cannon."

A severe course of dâk-bungalows has this disadvantage--it breeds infinite
credulity. If a man said to a confirmed dâk-bungalow-haunter:--"There is a
corpse in the next room, and there's a mad girl in the next but one, and
the woman and man on that camel have just eloped from a place sixty miles
away," the hearer would not disbelieve because he would know that nothing
is too wild, grotesque, or horrible to happen in a dâk-bungalow.

This credulity, unfortunately, extends to ghosts. A rational person fresh
from his own house would have turned on his side and slept. I did not. So
surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores of things in the
bed because the bulk of my blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear