h from his cell as the door was
incautiously opened that evening, a bound and scramble into a tree, a
leap to an out-house roof, another scramble, and a drop which would
settle the matter. If something broke he was done, if nothing broke he
was within a few yards of six-foot-high crops which extended to the
confines of the jungle, wherein were neither police, telegraph offices,
railways, roads, nor other apparatus of the enemy. Nothing broke--Duri
Reformatory saw Moussa Isa no more. For a week he travelled only by
night, and thereafter boldly by day, getting lifts in _bylegharies_,[45]
doing odd jobs, living as the crows and jackals live when jobs were
unavailable, receiving many a kindness from other wayfarers, especially
those of the poorer sort, but always faring onward to the West, ever
onward to the setting sun, always to the sea and Africa, until the
wonderful and blessed day when he believed for a moment that he was mad
and that his eyes and brain were playing him tricks.... After months and
months of weary travel, always toward the setting sun, he had arrived
one terrible evening of June at a wide river and a marvellous bridge--a
great bridge hung by mighty chains upon mightier posts which stood up on
either distant bank. It was a _pukka_ road, a Grand Trunk Road suspended
in the air across a river well-nigh great as Father Nile himself.

[45] Bullock carts.

On the banks of this river stood an ancient walled city of tall houses
separated by narrow streets, a city of smells and filth, wherein there
were no Sahibs, few Hindus and many Mussulmans. In a mud-floored
miserable _mussafarkhana_,[46] without its gates, Moussa Isa slept,
naked, hungry and very sad--for he somehow seemed to have missed the
sea. Surely if one kept on due westward always to the setting sun, one
reached the sea in time? The time was growing long, however, and he was
among a strange people, few of whom understood the Hindustani he had
learnt at Duri. Luckily they were largely Mussulmans. Should he abandon
the setting sun and take to the river, following it until it reached the
sea? He could take ship then for Africa by creeping aboard in the
darkness, and hiding himself until the ship had started.... There might
be no city at the mouth of the river when he got there. It might never
reach the sea. It might just vanish into some desert like the
Webi-Shebeyli in Somaliland. No, he would keep on toward the West,
crossing the great bridge in th