The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [145]
Zarin had learnt to respect the old man's judgement, and Wally's own character and personality did the rest. Wigram Battye too watched and listened and approved; and both he and Zarin carried favourable reports back to Mardan, with the result that the Guides, always on the look-out for good material, took note of Ensign Walter Hamilton of the 70th Foot as a possible future addition to their Corps.
The hot weather that year had not been as abominable as the previous one, but it was Wally's first and he suffered all the torments that can beset the novice undergoing his first experience of soaring temperatures. Prickly-heat, boils and sandfly-fever, dysentery, dengi and other hot-weather maladies plagued him by turn, and eventually he went down with a severe attack of heat-stroke and spent several days in a darkened room, convinced that he was dying – and with nothing done of all the many things he had hoped to do. On the advice of the M.O., his Colonel had packed him off to the hills to recuperate, and Ash had managed to get leave and gone with him.
Accompanied by Mahdoo and Gul Baz, the two had left by tonga for Murree, where rooms had been booked for them in one of the hotels that at this time of year were full of summer visitors escaping from the blazing heat of the plains.
Wally celebrated his own escape by falling in love with three young ladies at once: a pretty girl who sat with her mother at a near-by table in the dining-room, and the twin daughters of a High-Court Judge who had hired a cottage in the hotel grounds. His inability to choose between them prevented any of these affairs from becoming serious, but they inspired him to write a good deal of love-lorn verse, all of it deplorable, and led him to accept so many invitations to dine, dance or take tea that if Ash had not intervened, his chances of enjoying the rest and quiet advocated by the doctor would have been minimal. But Ash had no intention of wasting his leave dancing attendance on ‘a bunch of bird-witted girls and giddy grass-widows’, and said so with considerable force - adding a rider to the effect that in his opinion the objects of Wally's divided devotion were three of the most insipid damsels this side of Suez, and his doggerel was worthy of them.
‘The trouble with you,’ retorted the incensed poet, touched on the raw, ‘is that you have no soul. And what's more, if you're going to go on posing as a misogynist for the rest of your life just because some silly chit gave your fresh young illusions a black eye and a bloody nose a few years ago, you haven't any sense either. It's about time you got over Bertha or Bella or Belinda or whatever her name was, and realized that there are other women in the world – and very charming ones too. Not,’ conceded Wally generously, ‘that you have to marry them, of course. I don't think, myself, that a soldier should get married until he's at least thirty-five.’
‘ “A Daniel come to judgement”!’ mocked Ash. ‘Well, in that case, the sooner we remove ourselves from temptation the better.’
They removed themselves to Kashmir, leaving most of their luggage behind in the hotel and hiring hill ponies for the long trek between Murree and Baramullah, from where they turned aside to shoot duck on the Wula Lake and red bear and barasingh in the mountains above it.
It was Wally's first experience of high mountains, and gazing at the white crest of Nanga Parbat, the ‘Naked Mountain’, rising tall and stately above the long range of snows that ring Lalla Rookh's fabled valley, he could understand the awe that had moved Ash as a small boy to pray to the Dur Khaima. The whole country seemed extravagantly beautiful to him, from the lotus-strewn lakes and the winding, willow-fringed rivers, to the vast forests of deodar and chestnut that swept upwards to meet the shale and the great glaciers that lay above the snow line. He was loth to leave it, and 'Pindi seemed hotter and dustier