Whether a too copious lunch had rendered my men torpid, or whether the
attractions of their happy homes drew them, I know not, but after the
loads (and these not heavy) had been, after much wrangling, bound upon
their backs, and they had limped along for a few hundred yards or so, one
fell sick, or said he was sick, and, peacefully squatting on a convenient
stone, refused to budge.
We were still close to some of the scattered huts of Pahlgam, so an
authority, in the shape of a lumbadhar or chowkidar, or some such, came to
our help, and promptly collected for us an elderly gentleman who was
tending his flocks and herds in the vicinity. Doubtless it was provoking,
when he was looking forward to a comfortable afternoon tea in the bosom of
his family, after a hard day's work of doing nothing, to be called upon to
carry a nasty angular yakdan for seven miles along a distinctly uneven
road; but was he therefore justified in blubbering like a baby, and
behaving like an ape being led to execution?
The first half-mile was dreadful. At every couple of hundred yards the
coolies would sit down in a bunch, groaning and crying, and nothing less
than a push or a thump would induce them to move. We felt like
slave-drivers, and indeed Sabz Ali and the shikari behaved as such,
although their prods and objurgations were not so hurtful as they appeared,
being somewhat after the fashion of the tale told by an idiot,
"Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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