and angles
all in one tone like a pencil drawing.

There was no feeling in it, no expression. It had a temporary air in
that light, like trampled snow, and even the big Secretariat buildings
that raised themselves here and there out of the huddling bazaar looked
trivial, childish enterprises in the simple revelation of the morning.
A cold silence was abroad, which a crow now and then vainly tried to
disturb with a note of tentative enterprise, forced, premature. It
announced that the sun would probably rise, but nothing more. In the
little dark shops of the wood-carvers an occasional indefinite figure
moved, groping among last night's tools, or an old woman in a red sari
washed a brass dish over the shallow open drain that ran past her door.
At the tonga terminus, below the Mall, a couple of coughing syces,
muffled in their blankets, pulled one of these vehicles out of the
shed. They pushed it about sleepily, with clumsy futility; nothing else
stirred or spoke at all in Simla. Nothing disturbed Miss Anderson asleep
in her hotel.

A brown figure in a loin-cloth, with a burden, appeared where the road
turned down from the Mall, and then another, and several following. They
were coolies, and they carried luggage.

The first to arrive beside the tonga bent and loosed the trunk he
brought, which slipped from his back to the ground. The syces looked at
him, saying nothing, and he straightened himself against the wall of the
hillside, also in silence. It was too early for conversation. Thus did
all the others.

When the last portmanteau had been deposited, a khaki-coloured heap on
the shed floor rose up as a broad-shouldered Punjabi driver, and walked
round the luggage, looking at it.

'And you, owls' brethren,' he said, with sarcasm, addressing the first
coolie, 'you have undertaken to carry these matter fifty-eight kos to
Kalka, have you?'

'Na,' replied the coolie, stolidly, and spat.

'How else, then, is it to be taken?' the driver cried, with anger in
his argument. 'Behold the memsahib has ordered but one tonga, and a
fool-thing of an ekka. Here is work for six tongas! What reason is there
in this?'

The coolie folded his naked arms, and dug in the dust with an
unconcerned toe.

'I, what can I do?' he said, 'It is the order of the memsahib.'

Ram Singh grunted and said no more. A rickshaw was coming down from the
Mall, and the memsahib was in it.

Ten minutes later the ponies stood in their traces under th