Scinde - 1861 Author:Richard Francis Burton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XVII. REFLECTIONS ON THE FIELD OF MEEANEE. Next to the arrival at a " station," nothing more uncomfortable than the departure from one. We order... more »ed our camels to be here yesterday evening. They arrived this morning, and in what a state ! One of them is ill; your dromedary has hurt his leg ; two have torn their noses, and all of them have lost or injured their furniture. The surwans are as surly as " bargees," and look as if they could murder us. Not one of our Portuguese sober yet. They were invited to dinner by the messman of the regiment, a compatriots; the result is that none can walk, one can waddle. The Moslems have, with all possible difficulty, torn themselves away from Bazar-sirens. And the Hindoos are in a terrible state of indigestion, theconsequence of a farewell feast of rice and curry given in honour of them by their fellow caste-men. Camel drivers. It is a chilly morning. All our people, except the Affghans and the Hill men, look collapsed with the cold. The miserables have encased their bodies in posting, become Macintoshes by dint of wear; they have folded the ends of their turbans round their jaws, but their legs are almost naked, their feet quite so. Our pardesi horsekeepers crouch upon their heels in a stupid state, and glide about like distressed ghosts, wrapped up in their dripping blankets, paralysed and wretched beyond all power of description. It will never do to leave them to themselves, or they will work hard to die of torpor. The only way to cure them is compulsory labour;—make them saddle the camels, hoist the boxes, tie the salitahs, and trudge along the road as fast as their legs will carry them. The first rainy day we have had in Scinde. But a year ago, Mr. Bull, how you would have grumbled at the prospect of this in...« less