though there may be ten words for rice between the time when it goes into the ground and the day it comes to table, yet they cannot express a non-concrete idea even by a circumlocution. Arithmetic reaches a dozen, and thereafter vagueness of many, much, or little. Why a dozen? The jungli is a secretive bird, even in his family circle. You and I count openly, in tens, on our fingertips. The jungli, with halfclosed left hand, calculates with his thumb-tip against the four sets of three inner phalanges of his fingers, where the eye may not follow. Withal, he is a mean fellow, with a hole-and-corner mentality. He never looks you in the face when he speaks; he has seven different underhand ways of slaying game; and his untrustworthiness gives rise to the saying that in all his statements the jungli sticks so closely to the truth that it is impossible to get it from him. And Their war system is no system, in that it is the antithesis of any organisation. though any one village might at any moment, and for reason good or bad, rise with a whoop like a flock of starlings and go bald-headed at the enemy of the moment, yet (and it was our great asset) inter-village liaison or cohesion was impossible in warfare conducted on the principles of hysteria. All the same, they were dangerous, damned dangerous. Theirs was the instability of nitro-glycerine or of fulminate of mercury. If you put your hat down carelessly on either, you'd go through the roof. This communal system-to get it within the four corners of a definition-seems, on the whole, to be less a Democracy than a negation of any form of discipline, since discipline is not the fact of putting men up in a row and shouting at them, but is, by definition, Organised Self-control. With them there is no public opinion to limit wrongfulness of action, and active misbehaviour is only kept in check by fears of retaliation. Their only virtues are their splendid physique and their undeniable personal courage; while the only limitation on an openly vicious life seems to be either immaturity or anno domini. There is, however, in all this a praiseworthy consistency, in that it is the most complete and final expression of individualism and self-determination, and the working out of the principles of a pandemic democracy to a logical conclusion. The interest of the individual is paramount, to the eventual exclusion of the good of the community. They are impenitent and, hitherto, uncorrected. Their isolation both physical, on account of their jungle setting, and moral, due to the reluctance of other tribes to have dealings with a people as explosive and untrustworthy as a badly made firework-has so far prevented their indisciplined and non moral attitude to life from being of us with them-were a coiled their undoing. To such a people came the linguo historico- ethnological brainstorm - merchant, Major Alexander Grant (sometime of Inverness, but now recovering from a bad go of quartan ague in Labêk stockade). He proposed to put them neatly into a volume of records, with a foundation of Tibeto-Burman lore and collateral excursions into totemism, Buddhism, animism, and a dozen other learned by products and definitions. Summarised, in simple language the question seemed to be, "What are their Manners and Customs? " The answer, to us who knew them, was too easy. They had neither. They seemed, indeed, to have replaced this almost universal duality by Habits and by Impulses, from the examination of which, in the end, neither profit nor edification resulted. Grant, full of enthusiasm and energy, was cheerfully ignorant of all this. Nor were we, with our definite orders to give him all the rope he wanted, the people to enlighten him. The Doomworm, who only groused at the smaller worries of life, set his loyal old headpiece to the carrying out of PardonHowe's orders, and at the same time kept a wary eye on the possibilities of tribal explosions. Macmillan, inscrutable and silent, surveyed the problem with steely grey eyes through sandy eyelashes. The two of them together-aye, and every man our spring; and the mechanism which held it tight-coiled was utter and unswerving loyalty to the great bald head of Pardon-Howe, whom, as you may by now have gathered, we worshipped. Grant got to work. We gave him, as orderly, our most intelligent Gurkha, one Ranbir Gurung, one of our few who had a smattering of tongues; the Madrassi bearer, helpless and inefficient in these new and virile surroundings, retired into the background. We trotted out the kotoki, or local interpreter, and sat him on the verandah while Macmillan expounded to his reluctant ear the whole duty of intercommunication between Grant and jungledom. We made all as smooth as we could, but the Doomworm exacted only one rigid condition: there must be no visiting of villages in the hunt for information, all people to be interviewed must come to the stockade. Nor was Grant, unversed in pathless jungles, to go anywhere without an adequate and intelligent escort of our providing. For the rest, he had a free hand; and after he had discovered that we, perfectly politely, were unable to enlighten him on any question of ethnology, history, language, or any alleged manner or custom, we gave him a rough list of meal-hours, and turned again to our daily tasks. IV. There was much coming and going. There were interviews. Grant, the kotoki, and the leading local gam held interminable tête-à-têtes in a hut outside the main gate. Grant scribbled voluminous notes, while Ranbir squatted in silence in the background. There were hours on hours when Grant wrote furiously on the mess table, sheet after sheet of loose foolscap, and as furiously tore them up again. The wind blew them about. The Doomworm, painfully faddy about the cleanliness of his stockade, would presently call the Madrassi and make him clear up the mess before meal-times. The Madrassi objected. He was, I think, the laziest and sulkiest rotter who ever emerged from the Benighted Presidency. He had a name as long as a goods train-Anantaswami Venkatachellam Mudalliar, to be exact, -but at the end of a week Macmillan christened him The Erg, and the name stuck (an erg apparently being a unit of horse-power in the movements of molecules, and therefore the smallest known force in Nature). And he was dirty-dirty in a land where, to white man or brown, neglect of cleanliness was the shortest of steps to the hospital. The interviews went on. But now definite hitches commenced to show up. One morning the gam was not forthcoming, and a message, through Ranbir, to the village, elicited the unconvincing fact that he had gone on a journey, for many days, and that his return was problematical. But Ranbir, resourceful chap, brought back the female oldest inhabitant, white-haired, skinny and astonishingly dirty, and dumped her down in the hut. "There, sahib; try her with a few questions!" Grant, joyful at this new departure, did so. What he asked her in the interests of science must have astonished a dame who, for the past thirty years, had probably ceased to think of such things. Anyhow, so Ranbir told us, the effect was remarkable. The old puss reached out a skinny and begrimed paw and deliberately stroked Grant's face, straight down from his hair, over his nose, and down his chin, what time she murmured "ka-linga," or, as one might say, "tootsy-wootsy!" Grant fled. That night the kotoki got suddenly and most surprisingly drunk, was bunged into the Quarter Guard, and woke with a muzzy explanation of mental confusion produced by his new duties and the necessity for some such relief. One way and another there was a hitch, and Grant took a breathing-space-from interviews, at any rate. He never ceased scribbling, however, though what he found to write which the careful formation of about passed our understanding. We always and invariably, deliberately and purposely refused to butt in. Our duties began and ended with giving the principal characters a fair field and no favour, thereafter confining ourselves to holding the ring and keeping a watchful eye lifting for trouble. Though we refused to discuss ethnology, in one way a discussion arose which I, for one, will not forget. Grant and Macmillan, compatriots, were of an equal keenness and enthusiasm on Highland lore. One evening Macmillan, coming in from an unusually exhausting trek to a distant village, got out the rarely used whisky bottle. I left them at 9 P.M. But at 11, the sleep of the stockade being valuable and unnecessary noise from the Mess discouraged, I got out of bed to see what it was all about. The doorway was blocked by the huge form of Asghar Ali, the veteran messkhitmatgar. He stood staring into the room, and muttering into his white beard something about burra sharm ki bàt," or a mild disapproval of unseemly conduct. Over his shoulder I caught a glimpse of Macmillan and Grant. They were clothed in their shirts only; they were down on their hands and knees; Grant had a tartan travelling-rug spread on the floor, also a trunk strap. In a staccato monotone in 66 each word seemed a matter of concern to him, he was explaining to Macmillan exactly how he viewed the problem of folding a plaid into the proper pleating of the feile mhor, Macmillan disagreeing the while. The demonstration came to an end when Grant, having arranged plaid and strap to his liking, attempted to roll over backwards on to it and buckle it round his waist, Macmillan being apparently unwilling, or possibly unable, to help him straighten matters. . . . Desipere in loco! Let be. It probably did them both a world of good. Grant, whose male sources of information seemed to have taken on a persistent absenteeism, and the female sources not again to be lightly attempted, turned to Ranbir. The Gurkha had a working knowledge of the local tongue, and had somehow acquired an enthusiasm for this weird highbrow whose ways were so incomprehensible. He took to going off on his own. We let him, knowing he would avoid trouble. And, whether bred of keenness, or due to a vivid imagination, each evening would see him spinning long yarns to Grant. At one time he spent many days running about with a twigful of leaves; the junglis had a way of snipping bits out of their dogs' ears to mark village ownership, the permutations and combinations being many. Grant was writing a thing was beginning to be infutile chapter on the subject, with illustrations; it was Ranbir's duty to take leaves to each village and to snip them in accordance with the dogs' He began by investigating the dogs, but had to fall back on the owners after incidents involving bandages and iodine. ears. Ranbir worked hard and keenly, but even he could not satisfy Grant's thirst for exact statistics. Energy, not accuracy, was his line. Grant, quite unfairly, would flare out at him, abuse him as no rifleman ought to be abused, and send him flying to his quarters on the wings of a stream of adjectives. Then he would stride into the office and demand to be " "relieved of the co-operation of a man who, if he wanted to count above ten, would have had to take his boots off." Poor Ranbir! He worked like a Trojan all through. How many white men would have stuck the half of what he got? The inevitable intervals when facts, mostly irrelevant, were being collected, Grant spent spasmodically in buttonholing junglis-if the word may be used of people innocent of anything to button-and in bribing them with sticks of tobacco to stand still while he fingered their skulls and took photographs at all angles; but this again came to a stop when word went round that evil lurked in the little black box. tractable, and we several times sgee-e-e-e!" The slow draw of the dah, the poise and lightning stroke, when the Enemy of Man fell into two contorted halves, and was flicked into the bush. Grant was seized with a desire for a really big cobra, something to hang superlatives on in his report. He sent Ranbir round announcing a rupee reward for any really good specimen of One way and another the a cobra, produced alive at the |