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By Root 5890 0

and now it no longer existed. But while it was being chopped down the Collector and his men had emptied their guns into the hacking sepoys, and the door had become tightly jammed with the dead, many of whom still had bayonets wedged in their lifeless hands. Behind them their live comrades were shoving to force the pile of bodies through into the drawing-room to free the doorway; meanwhile the Collector and the Sikhs were shoving with all their might to hold the bodies in place, although their efforts were hindered by the protruding bayonets. The Collector and Hookum Singh had their backs to this wall of flesh, with bayonets sprouting from between their legs and under their armpits; they were shoving and shoving, and they in turn were being shoved by the other Sikhs, who were struggling to keep them in place. But inch by inch they were being driven back. The Collector found he could hardly breathe in the middle of this appalling sandwich; a few inches from his nose the face of a dead sepoy grinned at him with sparkling teeth; the Collector had the odd sensation that the man’s eyes were watching his efforts with amusement. He turned his own eyes away and tried not to think about it. But he was still so close that he could smell the perfume of patchouli on the corpse’s mustache.

Slowly but surely the mass of bodies was yielding...soon it would be forced out into the drawing-room like the cork out of a bottle of champagne. When they could hold it no longer the Collector shouted the order to retire to the next door: that which led from the drawing-room to the hall and where, several weeks earlier, the Collector had been lurking as he tried to make up his mind to attend the meeting of the Krishnapur Poetry Society. Behind that door would be yet another stack of loaded firearms ready to deal with the next assault. All this time Mr Rayne on one side of the staircase and Mr Worseley on the other, each with half a dozen men, should have been fighting their way back to converge with his own party in the hall. For a few moments, to give Hookum Singh time to get to the hall and ring the bell for the last time, the Collector held the toppling pile of bodies by himself, then he sped across the drawing-room after the Sikhs, his boots crunching broken glass from the cases of stuffed animals; the Sikhs had bare feet, however, and did not crunch it so loudly. Together they barely had time to take up a position at the far door, seize a loaded gun, drop to one knee, and aim as, with a final heave, the bulging mass of bodies exploded into the room, followed by the living.

“Fire!” shouted the Collector, and another morbid volley took effect. “Front rank, bayonets. Second rank, change guns, prepare to fire!”

Again there was a sharp skirmish at the door. Soon the bodies began to pile up here, too, and yet again the Collector and his men had to put their shoulders to the carnal barricade to prevent it from being ejected into the hall; and yet again, as if in a dream, the Collector found his face an inch from that of an amused sepoy and thought: “It surely can’t be the same man!” for from this corpse’s mustache there was also a scent of patchouli. But the Collector had no time to worry about the locomotion of corpses; this doorway had to be held until the defenders on the other side of the staircase had made good their retreat. A barricade of flagstones prised up from the floor had been erected for a final stand and the Collector, snatching a moment to look back towards it, was dismayed to see that the other party was already behind it, thus leaving himself and his men exposed on the flank. He bellowed at the Sikhs to retreat and as they stumbled back under a cross-fire from the other side of the hall, two of them fell dead and another mortally wounded. Once again there was a flurry of bodies from the doorway they had been defending and another charge. It was now time for the Collector to play his last card.

All this time he had been keeping a reserve force waiting in the library. This “veteran assault force” (as he called it) was composed of