Publisher's Synopsis
Against the blue sky to the north lay a dark blur that, as our troop train ran on through the level plains of Eastern Bengal, rose ever higher and took shape-the distant line of the Himalayas. Around us the restful though tame scenery of the little Cooch Behar State. The chess-board pattern of mud-banked rice fields, long groves of the graceful feathery bamboo, here and there a tiny hamlet of palm-thatched huts-on their low roofs great sprawling green creepers with white blotches that look like skulls but are only ripe melons. But the dark outlines of the distant mountains drew my gaze and brought the heads of my sepoys out of the carriage windows to stare at them. For somewhere on the face of those hills was Buxa Duar, the little fort that was to be our home for the next two years. For four days my detachment of two hundred men of the 120th Rajputana Infantry had been whirled across India from west to east towards it. From Baroda we had come-Baroda with its military cantonment set in an English-like park, its vast native city with the gaily painted houses and narrow streets where the Gaikwar's Cavalry rode with laced jackets and slung pelisses like the Hussars of old, and his sentries mounted guard over gold and silver cannons in a dingy backyard. Where in low rooms, set out in glass cases, as in a cheap draper's shop, were the famous pearl-embroidered carpets and gorgeous jewels of the State, worth a king's ransom.
