Neither of them spoke. At the station Hyde lost his temper openly,
and King left him abusing an unhappy native servant.

The station was crammed to suffocation by a crowd that roared and
writhed and smelt to high heaven. At one end of the platform, in
the midst of a human eddy, a frenzied horse resisted with his teeth
and all four feet at once the efforts of six natives and a British
sergeant to force him into a loose-box. At the back of the same
platform the little dark-brown mules of a mountain battery twitched
their flanks in line, jingling chains and stamping when the flies
bit home.

Flies buzzed everywhere. Fat native merchants vied with lean and
timid ones in noisy effort to secure accommodation on a train already
crowded to the limit. Twenty British officers hunted up and down
for the places supposed to have been reserved for them, and sweating
servants hurried after them with arms full of heterogeneous baggage,
swearing at the crowd that swore back ungrudgingly. But the general
himself had telephoned for King's reservation, so he took his time.

There were din and stink and dust beneath a savage sun, shaken into
reverberations by the scream of an engine's safety valve. It was
India in essence and awake!--India arising out of lethargy!--India
as she is more often nowadays--and it made King, for the time being
of the Khyber Rifles, happier than some other men can be in ballrooms.

Any one who watched him--and there was at least one man who did--
must have noticed his strange ability, almost like that of water,
to reach the point he aimed for, through, and not around, the crowd.