Now, it is not good for the Christian¹’s health to hustle² the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles, and he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: ‘A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.’

— Solo from Libretto³ of Naulahka.

Tarvin stood on the platform of the station at Rawut Junction⁴ watching the dust cloud that followed the retreating Bombay mail. When it had disappeared, the heated air above the stone ballast began its dance again, and he turned blinking to India.

It was amazingly simple to come fourteen thousand miles. He had lain still in a ship for a certain time, and then had transferred himself to stretch at full length, in his shirt-sleeves, on the leather-padded bunk⁵ of the train which had brought him from Calcutta to Rawut Junction. The journey was long only as it kept him from sight of Kate, and kept him filled with thought of her. But was this what he had come for — the yellow desolation of a Rajputana desert, and the pinched-off perspective of the track? Topaz was cosier⁶ when they had got the church, the saloon, the school, and three houses up; the loneliness made him shiver. He saw that they did not mean to do any more of it. It was a desolation which doubled desolateness⁸, because it was left for done. It was final, intended, absolute. The grim solidity of the cut-stone station-house, the solid masonry⁹ of the empty platform, the mathematical exactitude of the station name-board looked for no future. No new railroad could help Rawut Junction. It had no ambition. It belonged to the Government. There was no green thing, no curved line, no promise of life that produces, within eyeshot of Rawut Junction. The mauve railroad-creeper on the station had been allowed to die from lack of attention.

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