Supping With Panthers by Tom Holland

and if truth be known, I wasn’t too upset to see its back.
    Only one footnote to this tale now remains to be told – and that the saddest and most ghastly of all. It happened that we were approaching the ravine that would lead us on to the Thibetan road. As we passed the statue of Kali, I saw that a figure was crouched in front of it, his clothes streaked with ashes and his head bowed to the dust. Slowly, he looked up and round at us. It was the brahmin, the old fakir. He rose to his feet unsteadily and pointed at us; he began to scream and then he walked forward, shrieking all the time, and as he drew near to Pumper and myself I suddenly saw a terrible brightness in his eyes. It reminded me of the woman we had taken prisoner, and when I stared at his skin beneath the ash I saw that it gleamed as the woman’s had done.
    ‘He has the disease!’ I shouted.
    ‘Are you sure?’ Pumper frowned, and when I said that I was, he ordered the brahmin to keep away. But the brahmin kept coming, and though he was ordered back a second time he would not halt, and Pumper had no choice but to beat him away. In the heat of the moment, as it were, he struck the brahmin across the face and the old man went staggering back into the dust. It looked bad and Pumper was appalled by what he had done, of course; he moved forward to go to the brahmin’s aid, but Eliot held his arm and pulled him back.
    ‘Give him money,’ he said, ‘but for God’s sake, you and your men must keep away from him.’
    Pumper nodded slowly. He shouted the order to his column, and as they marched past he threw a purse of rupees at the priest. But the old man flung them into the dirt He had risen to his feet by now, and he watched our progress with his burning eyes. As we advanced into the mouth of the ravine, the scream of his curse echoed after us. There was not a man, I think, who did not shiver at the sound.
    I asked Eliot what the brahmin had been saying to us. He frowned and looked uncomfortable, and as he spoke I began to feel pretty bad myself. The brahmin’s village, it seemed, had fallen prey to the disease; in his eyes, it was we who had brought the wrath of Kali down.
    ‘And his curse?’ I asked.
    Eliot looked me in the eye. ‘Colonel Paxton should beware.’
    ‘Of what?’
    Eliot frowned, and then shrugged. ‘Of a wretchedness such as the brahmin has known.’
    This worried me for a day or two, and I asked Pumper to watch his back. But he was an old lion and scorned my fears; as the days went by, I too found the brahmin slipping from my mind. We reached Simla. I was kept there for a while by the pen-pushers, and I had nothing much to do but kick my heels. I saw quite a bit of Pumper, naturally, and also Eliot, whose gammy leg was by now starting to mend. He had decided to return to England, I think, for his faith in his own research had been badly knocked by his experiences, and he told me he feared the disease in Kalikshutra was incurable. It disturbed me that he thought so, for I had seen for myself how fast it could spread, and I wondered if it would always be confined to the Himalayan heights. I remembered the brahmin. A couple of times, I had thought I saw him. I told myself that I had been mistaken or imagining things, but then one evening Eliot reported that he too had met him face to face in the bazaar. He had slipped away, but Eliot was certain it had been him. The medical authorities were informed, and a search begun. It turned up nothing – not a trace of the brahmin or the sickness was found.
    Even so, I warned Pumper to be on his mettle. He did agree to carry a gun at all times, but more in a spirit of compromise, I think, than from any conviction he might really be in danger, and I had the sense that he was humouring me. The days passed; still the brahmin wasn’t found, and I began to worry that I had been a bit of a fool. Pumper started to drop his guard. He was ribbing me by now, and one evening at the Club he got me to agree