"You will not"--he had dropped the Sir completely after his
opening sentence--"make any escape that way. But you can try.
I have tried. Once only."

The sensation of nameless terror and abject fear which I had in
vain attempted to strive against overmastered me completely. My
long fast--it was now close upon ten o'clock, and I had eaten
nothing since tiffin on the previous day--combined with the violent
and unnatural agitation of the ride had exhausted me, and I verily
believe that, for a few minutes, I acted as one mad. I hurled myself
against the pitiless sand-slope I ran round the base of the crater,
blaspheming and praying by turns. I crawled out among the
sedges of the river-front, only to be driven back each time in an
agony of nervous dread by the rifle-bullets which cut up the sand
round me--for I dared not face the death of a mad dog among that
hideous crowd--and finally fell, spent and raving, at the curb of the
well. No one had taken the slightest notion of an exhibition which
makes me blush hotly even when I think of it now.

Two or three men trod on my panting body as they drew water, but
they were evidently used to this sort of thing, and had no time to
waste upon me. The situation was humiliating. Gunga Dass,
indeed, when he had banked the embers of his fire with sand, was
at some pains to throw half a cupful of fetid water over my head,
an attention for which I could have fallen on my knees and
thanked him, but he was laughing all the while in the same
mirthless, wheezy key that greeted me on my first attempt to force
the shoals. And so, in a semi-comatose condition, I lay till noon.
Then, being only a man after all, I felt hungry, and intimated as
much to Gunga Dass, whom I had begun to regard as my natural