ame go forward--stroke after
stroke. I tried to believe that I could not hear voices; but that attempt
was a failure.

Do you know what fear is? Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death,
but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see--fear that
dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat--fear that makes you
sweat on the palms of the hands, and gulp in order to keep the uvula at
work? This is a fine Fear--a great cowardice, and must be felt to be
appreciated. The very improbability of billiards in a dak-bungalow proved
the reality of the thing. No man--drunk or sober--could imagine a game at
billiards, or invent the spitting crack of a "screw-cannon."

A severe course of dak-bungalows has this disadvantage--it breeds infinite
credulity. If a man said to a confirmed dak-bungalow-haunter:--"There is a
corpse in the next room, and there's a mad girl in the next but one, and
the woman and man on that camel have just eloped from a place sixty miles
away," the hearer would not disbelieve because he would know that nothing
is too wild, grotesque, or horrible to happen in a dak-bungalow.

This credulity, unfortunately, extends to ghosts. A rational person fresh
from his own house would have turned on his side and slept. I did not. So
surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores of things in the
bed because the bulk of my blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear
every stroke of a long game at billiards played in the echoing room behind
the iron-barred door. My dominant fear was that the players might want a
marker. It was an absurd fear; because creatures who could play in the
dark would be above such superfluities. I only know that that was my
terror; and it was real.

After a long, long while the game stopped, and the door banged. I slept
because I was dead tired. Otherwise I should have preferred to have kept
awake. Not for everything in Asia would I have dropped the door-bar and
peered into the dark of the next room.

When the morning came, I considered that I had done well and wisely, and
inquired for the means of departure.

"By the way, _khansamah_," I said, "what were those three doolies doing in
my compound in the night?"

"There were no doolies," said the _khansamah_.

I went into the next room and the daylight streamed through the open door.
I was immensely brave. I would, at that hour, have played Black Pool with
the owner of the big Black Pool down below.

"Has this