showed them how the carpets had been intricately weaved by hand, winding a coloured thread in between four other threads on a loom, before cutting it short and painstakingly continuing with the row.
By this time in the journey, even Kate was exhausted and had no wish to buy. Thankfully Peter was now becoming adjusted to the tactics of the salesmen:
“This is the only time you will visit here.”
“Much more expensive England.”
“You see something you like, you buy.”
“Other sizes also.”
So therefore he was able to get rid of the pest relatively swiftly.
That evening, they were able to acquire accommodation in the house of a local family, and even persuaded one of the family to be their guide for the next three or four days - Farouk had been left behind, but not forgotten. Their journey would take them back that way for a day or two before the final leg of their journey back to the ship. It was a slight diversion Kate was eager to make. Perhaps, Peter pondered, she wished to acquire more shopping there? What they had seen of the goods available in more Southern towns seemed either lesser quality or at best duplications of what they had already seen in Kashmir.
It was that night that the unpleasantness truly began.
Just before retiring to bed, the late night sounds of the village around them, Dr. Russell cautiously approached the task of examining his foot for sores, which he might have acquired over the past three or four days, especially as he had not had the opportunity to change his socks and they had begun to sweat a little. There was an almost intolerable wet yielding within the tissue of the large toe on his right foot. He removed his sock slowly, fearful that some of the flesh might tear away with the cotton.
He grimaced then pulled aside the cover to look at the problem. It was like no infection he had seen before, the triangular chunk of flesh underneath the peeling skin seemed almost liquefied. Embraced by a kind of horror, a grim fascination, he peeled back the skin, and washed the infected liquid out with a flannel and some water. Inside felt understandably raw. Beneath the shallow depth of fluid, there was a chunk of pyramid shaped flesh. He tugged at it experimentally and to his horror, it came free in his hand. He inhaled deeply with shock. The pyramidal abscess gleamed with a sweat of blood, like the inside of a strawberry.
He cried out, hobbling toward Kate’s room. She was knowledgeable about first aid; that room was also where the medical kit lay. Perhaps the flesh could be reattached.
He felt faintly ridiculous. He was behaving like he had amputated a finger, and of course, he was sure the damage could be repaired, albeit leaving in its wake a possible scar.
Kate awoke, dozily wondering what the panic was. She calmed him down, got him to sit and examined the injury. She asked first how it had been caused. As a biologist, but not a medical doctor, he could only conclude it was the result of some new disease, the infection of some biological agent that had come into contact with his foot.
“Perhaps you are lucky it is not worse,” she said calmly, trying to soothe him, whilst disinfecting the wound and placing upon it a small bandage. He winced at the former and felt better to see the later in place.
Although still a little sore as his socks grated on the surface of the bandage when he walked, he was surprised to find the rawness of the pain much less than expected. He experimented with walking back and forth across his room, as if testing out a new pair of shoes.
He had hoped to catch up on sleep following the troubled bus journey, but this night was disturbed by another nightmare, in which his fingers and toes began to come off, like windfall fruit breaking lose from the branches of a tree...
In the morning, he was therefore only slightly approaching as refreshed as he had aspired.
The next day, their appointed guide, Raj, took them some distance across the land in his horse driven cart. About twenty minutes through the green countryside was a large public garden, dating back to the time of the Moghuls. The family they had stayed with had intimated that the floral blooms were particularly attractive this time of year. Kate was keen to see this display and to wander in its more homely surroundings. Peter was eager also, but his interest was as a biologist, wondering if there were any unusual species native to this area, which might have been missed by previous explorers.
The journey was fairly bland, consisting of much the same type of scenery all the way through. The day was also windy, and it was cold in the exposed rear of the cart. Kate drew her coat tightly around her, and they both hugged their arms close to them as they watched the passing trees swinging and bowing in the wind.
Fortunately, the day had just begun to brighten by the time their arrival, and the wind had soon died down to a breeze. Raj, a young man with short, curly, black hair, helped Kate down from the cart. She looked around at a street with a few cows wandering between parked cars, then looked purposefully in the direction of the gate that obviously led to the gardens. Peter followed unassisted, but stopped two steps away from the cart. He had noticed a strange blotch on his exposed arms, having just rolled back his sleeves to accept the warmth of the sun.
He checked both ways to make sure no traffic was coming then turned his elbow to examine the blemish. It seemed much like the wound on his foot, only perhaps in an earlier stage of development. At that time, it was more like a blister. Pressing on it, it gave a little, as though holding trapped liquid, but there was no indication that it was as deep as the one on his toe. He frowned, a little concerned.
He was interrupted from his worries by a short, dirty girl with tangled hair. At first he tried to ignore the requests she was making to him; he didn’t understand the half-caught words she was saying in Hindi anyway. But as she persisted, he turned to her strictly:
“Cale jao,” he said, making a shooing movement with his hand and hurrying across the track to re-join the other two.
He caught up with them halfway up some stairs, just beyond the initial archway. It was good they had not gone far, for his toe injury made walking even briskly uncomfortable, let alone if he had to jog; besides he would have felt a fool doing a running limp.
An Indian man, purporting to be a gardener, had picked off the heads of two flowers and was offering them to Kate. He was asking for a small fee when Dr. Russell arrived. Peter was sceptical about what he had caught of this man’s claims, but Kate fetched out a token amount of money and paid him anyway.
Up the steps, a series of gardens were visible, separated by more stone stairs, leading up the hillside. Yellow, red and white flowers were in bloom, in between giant sycamore trees. On either side of the stairs, equidistant between the steps and the outer walls of the garden, carefully channelled streams flowed down, from their origin in fountains further up the gardens.
Kate stooped to smell some nearby roses. At the same time, Peter crouched by some flowers he had discovered, examining them, then making notes on their shape. His sketches were not quite in the same league as Kate’s.
“What’s that on your arm?” he heard her say and turned to answer.
“Oh, I think… ” he began, a shoot of worry returning to his mind at the thought of the new blister. Then he noticed she was looking at his other arm.
He lifted that arm, rotating it to see what she meant: there were two more blisters on the arm, one large, upon which the skin was just beginning to peel, one smaller.
“I’d better get checked out as soon as we finish here,” he said, aware of a slight tremor in his voice.
Upon their return to the house, they did inspect the blisters, although there was not much either could do; Kate was only a first aider and Peter only knew of medicine where it coincided with his knowledge of animal biology. An examination of his body revealed three similar blisters on his back and one on his front, which surprised him, because he would have thought he’d have noticed their presence.
Kate, although reluctant to delay their explorations, decided they would postpone further travelling, diverting instead to the nearest city, Del
hi, where there was an English medical doctor that Peter was acquainted with. If the infection would spread no further, then nothing had been lost in being safe, and if not ... well then it was better caught as soon as possible.
The journey began the next day, Kate hiring one of the locals to drive them into the city. Peter’s sleep had again been disturbed and he was now beginning to feel unwell. His stomach was upset and his worn nerves added an extra unpleasantness to the day. His thoughts as they travelled were preoccupied with what his doctor friend might say and to his mind, the sooner he could find an answer to the strange illness, the better.
With all this worrying, he barely found time to concern himself with the dream that had haunted him the night before. Although he might have expected to dream further of decay and disease, instead he had seen himself in a void, blacker than night. In the distance there had approached a golden yellow light, like the front of an oncoming steam train.
Come the day, he wondered briefly as to the significance of his phantasm, a little confused. He had had plenty of time to contemplate the light during the small hours of sleeplessness. Somehow at those hours it had captured his thoughts and held him entwined in that state between dream and wakefulness.
That, however, was not the end of the troubles that dawn brought,