in front of them, and they could feel the hand
of Jimmy Hawkins from far off. They waited in extemporised sidings while
processions of empty trucks returned to the north, and were coupled on
to slow, crawling trains, and dropped at midnight, Heaven knew where;
but it was furiously hot, and they walked to and fro among sacks, and
dogs howled. Then they came to an India more strange to them than to the
untravelled Englishman--the flat, red India of palm-tree, palmyra-palm,
and rice--the India of the picture-books, of "Little Harry and His
Bearer"--all dead and dry in the baking heat. They had left the
incessant passenger-traffic of the north and west far and far behind
them. Here the people crawled to the side of the train, holding their
little ones in their arms; and a loaded truck would be left behind, the
men and women clustering round it like ants by spilled honey. Once in
the twilight they saw on a dusty plain a regiment of little brown men,
each bearing a body over his shoulder; and when the train stopped
to leave yet another truck, they perceived that the burdens were not
corpses, but only foodless folk picked up beside dead oxen by a corps of
Irregular troops. Now they met more white men, here one and there two,
whose tents stood close to the line, and who came armed with written
authorities and angry words to cut off a truck. They were too busy to do
more than nod at Scott and Martyn, and stare curiously at William, who
could do nothing except make tea, and watch how her men staved off the
rush of wailing, walking skeletons, putting them down three at a time
in heaps, with their own hands uncoupling the marked trucks, or taking
receipts from the hollow-eyed, weary white men, who spoke another argot
than theirs. They ran out of ice, out of soda-water, and out of tea; for
they were six days and seven nights on the road, and it seemed to them
like seven times seven years.

At last, in a dry, hot dawn, in a land of death, lit by long red fires
of railway-sleepers, where they were burning the dead, they came to
their destination, and were met by Jim Hawkins, the Head of the Famine,
unshaven, unwashed, but cheery, and entirely in command of affairs.

Martyn, he decreed then and there, was to live on trains till further
orders; was to go back with empty trucks, filling them with starving
people as he found them, and dropping them at a famine-camp on the edge
of the Eight Districts. He would pick up supplies and return,