The Talbot Mundy Megapack: 28 Classic Novels and Short Stories by Talbot Mundy

Author:Talbot Mundy [Mundy, Talbot]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: action, jimgrim, british, historical fiction, adventure
ISBN: 9781434443601
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

JUNGLE JEST (EPISODE 3)

CHAPTER 1

“Slow but sure—the Lord providing foresters”

Success in public service is the deuce. In a democracy they hate you. In any other kind of country you are overworked. But there are compensations. In India you get transferred and lent from pillar to post to cover the delinquencies of other men; but you may go, like Cotswold Ommony, in a barge with sixteen rowers down mile-wide waterways illuminated by an Indian moon.

Howard Craig, of Little Cold Springs near Omaha, Baptist missionary, says it is the same moon that shines everywhere; but Ommony refuses to believe him. What Ommony does not believe, and what he does, has caused him to fall foul of lots of men like Craig. He scorns the history books as poisonous fiction, the Bible as Hebrew politics mixed up with plagiarized mid-Asian ethics, and modern civilization as a shoddy re-hash of the worst of Rome, Egypt, Babylon, and Greece; pasted and held together by matter-worship, which is another name—so he says—for modern science. But he is the happiest man in India.

Concede him, though, no merit on the ground of contentment while the long sweeps rowed him southward, beating time to a song the boatmen’s ancestors had sung a thousand years ago. For as the King of England is the son of England’s king, so rowers are the sons of rowers, songs are the development of one song, and the same short, deep stroke drives Maharajah’s boats as always did keep time to steersman’s chanting, banishing discontent.

Nowadays the Maharajah owns a motor-boat; that is the fashion. Miserable men like viceroys and their secretaries, who must move with the times, and American millionaires, who believe they know what is due them, are conceded seats in the hot, noisy machine that hurries them into the picture and out again before they can spoil it. So gasoline has virtue.

But men who are known only by the work they do, and have no press notices, may enjoy the ancient pageantry. Cotswold Ommony leaned back under a moving canopy of colored stars in a stern seat that had been a royal throne; and his enormous dog Diana stood in the bows, rigid as a carving, baying whenever the temple bells ashore offended her. She looked like a figurehead—part of the boat.

There was a temple to every fifty yards of water-front, with palaces behind them and between. Branch water-lanes led at random amid fields and villages, and along all shore-fronts danced the new-moon-shaped lateens. There was no moon; but the stars seemed overcharged with light, and the Milky Way was awash with liquid fire.

Down in the boat’s waist, where the guns stuck up between the blanket-roll and leather bags, sat Ommony’s two servants. And forward, in the break below the little deck on which Diana the wolf-hound stood, was Toto, her attendant, expert at extracting fleas and thorns, eighteen years old and regarded in his own home circle as a made man. In deference to Ommony and the great Diana—not of Ephesus—he had postponed his wedding until this present wandering was over.

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