Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

“I request leave, sir, to look into the Thar beyond Bikaner and see what might be found there,” Smithers said.

It was a daring request. Smithers was our best surveyor, and the entire subcontinent needed measuring for the system of railways that we intended to create in its immense expanse, and nobody was planning to run track through the desert beyond Bikaner, for there was nothing there. Plenty of urgent work awaited Smithers between Delhi and Jodhpur, between Calcutta and Bombay, and elsewhere.

But Yule rose with that glitter of excitement in his eyes again and began pulling maps from a portfolio under his desk and spreading them out, the big thirty-two-miles-to-the-inch map and a smaller one of the Frontier, pointing to this place and that one in the Thar and asking if one of them might have been the one of which that Portuguese had spoken, and we knew that Smithers’ request had been granted.

What I did not expect was that Brewster would be allowed to accompany him. Plainly it was a dangerous expedition and Smithers ought not to have been permitted to undertake it alone, but I would have thought that a subaltern or two and half a dozen native trackers would be the appropriate complement. Indeed Brewster was a strong and healthy young man who would readily be able to handle the rigours of the Thar, but an abundance of work awaited him right here in Calcutta and it struck me as remarkably extravagant for Yule to be willing to risk not one but two of our best engineers on such a fantastic endeavour at this critical time in the development of the nascent Indian railway system.

But I had failed to reckon with two traits of Yule’s character. One was his insatiable scholarly curiosity, which had drawn him to the close study not only of Marco Polo’s huge book but of the texts of many another early traveller whose names meant nothing to me: Ibn Batuta, for example, and Friar Jordanus, and Odoric of Pordenone. We were living at a time when the remaining unknown places of the world were opening before us, and the discovery — or rediscovery — of strange and marvellous regions of Asia held great fascination for him. Though he himself could not leave his high responsibilities in Calcutta, Smithers would serve as his surrogate in the far-off Thar.

Then, too, I had overlooked Yule’s profound complexity of spirit. As I have already noted, he is not at all the grim, stolid, monolithic administrator that he appears to a casual observer to be. I have spoken of his irritability and impatience; I should mention also his bursts of temper, followed by spells of black depression and almost absolute silence, and also the — well, eccentricity that has led him, a man who happens to be colourblind, to dress in the most outlandish garb and think it utterly normal. (I have in mind his brilliant claret-coloured trousers, which he always insisted were silver-grey.) He is complicated; he is very much his own man. So if he had taken it into his mind to send our highly valued Smithers off to look for lost cities in the Thar, nothing would stop him.

And when he asked Smithers what sort of complement he thought he would need, Smithers replied, “Why, Brewster and I can probably deal with everything all by ourselves, sir. We don’t want a great silly crowd of bearers and trackers, you know, to distract us as we try to cope with those musical spectres in the desert.”

Quickly I looked at Brewster and saw that he was as amazed as I was to find himself requisitioned for the expedition. But he made a quick recovery and managed a grin of boyish eagerness, as if he could think of nothing more jolly than to go trekking off into a pathless haunted desert with his hero Smithers. And Yule showed no reaction at all to Smithers’ request: once again he demonstrated his approval simply through silence.

Of course, getting to the Thar would be no easy matter. It lies at the opposite side of the subcontinent from Calcutta, far off in the north-west, beyond Lucknow, beyond Agra, beyond Delhi. And, as I have said, all of this was taking place at a time before we had built the Indian railway system. Smithers had just made the round trip from Calcutta to Bikaner and back, fifteen hundred miles or more, by an arduous journey down the Grand Trunk Road, India’s backbone before the railways existed. I have no idea how he travelled — by horse, by camel, by bullock-cart, by affiliating himself with merchant caravans, by any such means he could. And now he — and Brewster — would have to do it all over again. The journey would take months.

I should mention that Smithers had been engaged for the past year and a half to the Adjutant’s daughter, Helena, a young woman as notable for her beauty as for her sweetness of temperament, and the wedding was due to take place in just another dozen weeks or so. I wondered how Smithers would be able to prevail on her for a postponement; but prevail he did, either through his own force of personality or the innately accommodating nature that is so typical of women, and the wedding was postponed. We held a grand farewell party for Smithers and Brewster at Fort William, where nothing was asked and nothing was volunteered about the reason for their departure, and in the small hours of the night we stood by the bank of the river with brandy-glasses in hand, singing the grand old songs of our native country so far away, and then in the morning they set out to find whatever it was that they were destined to find in the Great Indian Desert.

The weeks passed, and turned into months.

Helena, the Adjutant’s lovely daughter, came to us now and again to ask whether there had been any word from her wandering fiancé. Of course I could see that she was yearning to get him back from the Thar and take him off to England for a lifetime of pink-faced fair-haired children, tea, cool fresh air, and clean linens. “I love him so,” she would say.

The poor girl! The poor girl!

I knew that Smithers was India through and through, and that if she ever did get him back from the Thar there would be another quest after that, and another, and another.

I knew too that there had been an engagement before she had met Smithers, a Major invalided home from Lahore after some sort of dreary scandal involving drinking and gambling, about which I had wanted to hear no details. She was twenty-six, already. The time for making those pink-faced babies was running short.

The months went by, and Smithers and Brewster did not return from the Thar. Yule began to grow furious. His health was not good — the air of India had never been right for him, and Bengal can be a monotonous and depressing place, oppressively dank and humid much of the year — and he could see retirement from the Service not very far in his future; but he desperately wanted to know about that valley in the Thar before he left. And, for all that desperate curiosity of his, work was work and there was a railroad line to build and Smithers and Brewster were needed here, not drifting around in some sandy wasteland far away.

Yule’s health gave way quite seriously in the spring of 1859 and he took himself home to Scotland for a rest. His older brother George, who had not been out of India for thirty years, went with him. They were gone three months. Since the voyage out and the voyage back took a month each, that left them only a month at home, but he returned greatly invigorated, only to be much distressed and angered by the news that Smithers and Brewster were still unaccounted for.

From time to time the Adjutant’s daughter came to inquire about her fiancé. Of course I had no news for her.

“I love him so!” she cried.

The poor girl.

Then one day there was a stir in town, as there often is when a caravan from some distant place arrives, and shortly thereafter Brewster presented himself at my office at the Public Works Department. Not Brewster and Smithers: just Brewster.