Narayan and the colonel, happily for our party,
did not experience anything worse than a slight vertigo. As to
the Babu, no carbonic acid gas could inconvenience his wonderful
Bengali nature. He said he was safe and comfortable enough, but
awfully hungry.
At last the outpour of entangled exclamations and unintelligible
explanations stopped, and I collected my thoughts and tried to
understand what had happened to me in the cave. Narayan was the
first to notice that I had fainted, and hastened to drag me back
to the passage. And this very moment they all heard the voice of
Gulab-Sing coming from the upper cell: "Tum-hare iha aneka kya
kam tha?" "What on earth brought you here?" Even before they
recovered from their astonishment he ran quickly past them, and
descending to the cell beneath called to them to "pass him down
the bai" (sister). This "passing down" of such a solid object
as my body, and the picture of the proceeding, vividly imagined,
made me laugh heartily, and I felt sorry I had not been able to
witness it. Handing him over their half-dead load, they hastened
to join the Takur; but he contrived to do without their help,
though how he did it they were at a loss to understand. By the
time they succeeded in getting through one passage Gulab-Sing
was already at the next one, in spite of the heavy burden he
carried; and they never were in time to be of any assistance to
him. The colonel, whose main feature is the tendency to go into
the details of everything, could not conceive by what proceedings
the Takur had managed to pass my almost lifeless body so rapidly
through all these narrow holes.
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