ants who will go days and
days without any at all, and without a word of complaint or sign of
collapse, are retainers not easily found and not to be despised.
Certainly, one seldom obtains such qualities in European servants. After
doing fifty or sixty miles on the saddle we would get off, and I rested
awhile, writing up my notes or, if at night, changing plates in my
cameras, but Sadek never had any rest at all. No sooner had we jumped off
our horses than he had to undo the saddles and unpack the baggage and
kill fowls and cook my meals, which all took him some little time; then
he had to wash or clean up everything and repack, and run about the
villages to purchase provisions, and all this kept him well employed
until the hour of departure; so that, even when I could put in a couple
of hours' sleep of a night, he never had time to sleep at all. Sleeping
on the saddle, of course, was usual when we travelled by caravan, but was
impossible when chapparing. So that he had to go several days at a time
without a moment's wink.

The remarkable facility with which, under these trying circumstances, he
got most excellent meals ready at all hours of the day or night and in
the most outlandish places, and the magic way in which he could produce
fuel and make a fire out of the most unlikely materials, was really
extraordinary. True, he took himself and his work most seriously and his
pride lay principally in having no reproach about the cooking.

He had a smattering of English that was very quaint. Everything above
ground he called "upstairs"; anything on the ground or below was
"downstairs." Thus, to mount and dismount a horse was laconically
expressed "horse upstairs," "horse downstairs." Similarly, to lie down
was "downstairs," to get up "upstairs." Anything involving violent motion
was "shoot," by which single word to fall, to kick, to bite, to drop, to
jump, to throw away, were defined. He possessed a good vocabulary of
swear words--which he had learnt from sailors at Bushire--and these
served him well when anything went wrong; but I forbade him to use them
in my presence as I wished to have the monopoly myself, and thus his
English vocabulary was very much curtailed. The remainder of his English
conversation applied entirely to cooking chickens.

Shortly after midnight we moved out of the Chappar khana, and, barring
some slight cultivation in the immediate neighbourhood of the village, we
soon entered again upon the flat,