"You think other caravans will leave Surat first, and fall prey to the rebels," Surendranath translated.
"I believe that any caravan headed to Delhi will have to face the Maratha army at some point," Jack said. "The first such caravan to drive the Marathas from the field shall be the first to reach its destination."
"I cannot hire an army," Surendranath said.
"I did not say you need to hire an army. I said you need to drive the Marathas from the field."
"You speak like a fakir," Surendranath said darkly.
THE MAIDAN OF THIS KATHIAWAR river-town sported a more or less typical assortment of fakirs both Hindoo and Mahometan. Several were content with the old arms-crossed-behind-the-head trick. A Hindoo one was swallowing fire, a red-skirted Dervish was whirling around, another Hindoo was standing on his head covered with red dust. And yet most of them had empty begging-bowls and were going ignored by the townspeople. A score of idlers, barefoot boys, passersby, strolling pedlars and river-traders had gathered around one spectacle at the end of the maidan.
They were crowded so closely together that if Jack had not been mounted he wouldn't have been able to see the object of their attention: a gray-haired European man dressed up in clothes that had been out-moded, in England, before Jack had been born. He wore a black frock coat and a broad-brimmed black Pilgrim-hat and a frayed shirt that made him look like a wandering Puritan bible-pounder. And indeed there was an old worm-eaten Bible in view, resting on a low table—actually a plank, just barely spanning the gap between a couple of improvised sawbucks, with a stained and torn cloth thrown over it. Next to the Bible was another tome that Jack recognized as a hymn-book, and next to the hymnal, a little place setting: a china plate flanked by a rusty knife and fork.
Jack seemed to have arrived during a lull, which soon came to an end as an excited young Hindoo came running in from the market nearby, a dripping object held in his cupped hands. The crowd parted for him. He scampered up and deposited it in the center of the fakir's plate: a metal-gray giblet leaking blood and clear juice. Then he jumped back as if his hands had been burned, and ran over to wipe his hands on a nearby patch of grass.
The fakir sat for a few moments regarding the kidney with extreme solemnity, waiting for the buzz of the crowd to die away. Only when complete silence had fallen over the maidan did he reach for the knife and fork. He gripped one in each hand and held them poised over the organ for a few agonizing moments. The crowd underwent a sort of convulsion as every onlooker shifted to a better viewing angle.
The fakir appeared to lose his nerve, and set the utensils down. A sigh of mixed relief and disappointment ran through the onlookers. Someone darted up and tossed a paisa onto the table. The fakir put his hands together in a prayerful attitude and muttered indistinctly for a while, then reached for his Bible, opened it up, and read a paragraph or two, faltering as he came to bits that had been elided by book-worms. But this was something from the Old Testament with many "begats" and so it scarcely mattered.
Again he took up the knife and fork and struggled with himself for a while, and again lost his nerve and set them down. Mounting excitement in the crowd, now. More and larger coins rang on the plank. The fakir took up the hymnal, rose to his feet, and bellowed out a few verses of that old Puritan favorite:
If God thou send'st me straight to Hell
When I have breath'd my Last,
Just like a Stone flung in a Well
I'll go down meek and Fast…
For even though I've done my Best
T'obey thy Law Divine,
Who am I, thee to contest?
The Fault must all be Mine!
…and so on in that vein until the fire-eater and the Dervish were screaming at him to shut up.
Pretending to ignore their protests, the Christian fakir closed up the hymnal, took up knife and fork for the third time, and—having finally mustered the spiritual power to proceed—pierced the kidney. A jet of urine lunged out and nearly spattered an audacious boy, who jumped back screaming. The fakir took a good long time sawing off a piece of the organ. The crowd crept inwards again, not because anyone really wanted to get any closer, but because people kept blocking one another's view. The fakir impaled the morsel on the tines of the fork and raised it on high so that even the groundlings in the back row could get a clear view. Then in one quick movement he popped it into his mouth and began to chew it up.
Several fled wailing. Coins began to zero in on the fakir from diverse points of the compass. But after his Adam's apple moved up and down, and he opened his mouth wide to show it empty, and curled his tongue back to show he wasn't hiding anything, a barrage of paisas and even rupees came down on him.
"A stirring performance, Mr. Foot," said Jack, half an hour later, as they were all riding out of town together. "Lo these many months I have been worried sick about you, wondering how you were getting along—unfoundedly, as it turns out."
"Very considerate of you, then, to show up unasked-for to share your poverty with me," said Mr. Foot waspishly. Jack had extracted him from the maidan suddenly and none too gently, even to the point of leaving half the kidney sitting on the plate uneaten.
"I regret I missed the show," said Padraig.
"Nothing you haven't seen before in a thousand pubs," Jack answered mildly.
"E'en so," said Padraig," it had to've been better than what I've been doing the last hour: sneaking round peering at idolaters' piss-pots."
"What learned you?"
"Same as in the last village—they do it in pots. Untouchables come round once a day to empty them," Padraig answered.
"Are the piss and shit always mixed together or—"
"Oh, for Christ's sake!"
"First kidney-eating and now chamber-pots!" exclaimed Surendranath from his palanquin. "Why this keen curiosity concerning all matters related to urine?"
"Maybe we will have better luck in Diu," Jack said enigmatically.
THAT RIVER-CROSSING MARKED THE BEGINNING of a long, slow climb up into some dark hills to the south. Surendranath assured them that it was possible to circumvent the Gir Hills simply by following the coastal roads, but Jack insisted that they go right through the middle. At one point he led them off into a dense stand of trees, and spent a while tromping around in the undergrowth hefting various branches and snapping them over his knee to judge their dryness. This was the only part of the trip when they were in anything like danger, for (a) Jack surprised a cobra and (b) half a dozen bandits came out brandishing crude, but adequate, weapons. The Hindoo whom Surendranath had hired finally did something usefuclass="underline" viz. pulled a small dagger, hardly more than a paring-knife really, from his cummerbund and held it up to his own neck and then stood there adamantly threatening to cut his own throat.
The effect on the bandits was as if this fellow had summoned forth a whole artillery-regiment and surrounded them with loaded cannons. They dropped their armaments and held forth their hands beseechingly and pleaded with him in Gujarati for a while. After lengthy negotiations, fraught with unexpected twists and alarming setbacks, the Charan finally consented not to hurt himself, the bandits fled, and the party moved on.
Within the hour they had passed over the final crest of the Hills of Gir and come to a height-of-land whence they could look straight down a south-flowing river valley to the coast: the end of the Kathiawar Peninsula. At the point where the river emptied into the sea was a white speck; beyond it, the Arabian Sea stretched away forever.
As they traveled down that valley over the next day, the white speck gradually took on definition and resolved itself into a town with a European fort in the middle. Several East Indiamen, and smaller ships, sheltered beneath the fort's guns in a little harbor. The road became broader as they neared Diu. They were jostled together with caravans bringing bolts of cloth and bundles of spices towards the waiting ships, and began to meet Portuguese traders journeying up-country to trade.