We began running past the corrugated iron shacks of a bazaar. The shack roofs were painted light green and the sky above was the palest blue. We ran around a curve and, by leaning over the veranda railing, I could observe the little engine. The two blokes on the tender would pick up lumps of coal and pass them around the side of the cab to the fireman, who would inspect them, as if considering their suitability, but he never in practice rejected them. He just put them on the fire. As for the two men on the buffer beam, I believed they were laying down sand so as to increase traction – and we were now beginning to climb. I looked though the glass door at Fisher on his basket chair. He had got hold of a newspaper, and he was opening and closing the pages with great rapidity, as though trying to catch the news by surprise.
It seemed perfectly possible that he had meant to shoot me with a silenced pistol on the night train to Jamalpur. But silencers were fiddly bits of kit, and something had gone wrong, so he had fired with an unprotected Webley, but he had done so in the darkness, and it was John Young who had taken the bullet. But no pistol had been found on him; and what about the Indians who’d been galloping away on horseback?
We were running through thinner forest; pine trees were appearing among the bamboo, and India was beginning to be below us. The train went into a tight curve on the edge of the hill, and it kept curving through a short tunnel. While we were in this tunnel, the other train was on top of the tunnel. We were looping the loop, as on a fairground ride, and at the end of the loop we were much higher. The plain of paddy fields lay below: the giant chessboard on which the British played their game of empire.
We came into another station. A painted board said ‘Rangtong’ and there was nobody there but the station master, who stood on the platform looking mightily pleased with himself. As we pulled away, I heard the rattling of the glass door. Fisher came out on to the veranda. He leant far out over the back railing.
‘Come here,’ he called, still leaning over the side.
‘Why?’
‘Something queer about the track.’
Was he really interested in small gauge railways? We were now approaching a second curve, a second loop. The train gave a lurch, and as we continued our curving progress, with the right side of the train now overhanging the edge of the drop down into the plain of Bengal. The veranda railing protecting us from this drop – a drop of some two thousand feet, I thought – was somewhat lower than waist height, so while the drop was big, the railing protecting us from it was small. The train curved and curved, and then we were two thousand two hundred feet above Bengal, and still overhanging the drop as we rattled across the face of a mountain.
‘Come here and look at this,’ Fisher demanded again.
Remaining behind him, I said, ‘Look at bloody what? I’ll look at it from here, if it’s all right with you.’
‘The track,’ he said again. ‘Something’s missing.’
The train hit another curve, which swung us sharply to the right, projecting us yet further over the drop. Could it be there really was something amiss with the rails? The carriage did seem to be rattling badly – and there were women and children inside. I inched forward so that I was alongside Fisher. We watched the unwinding of the little track. The outer rail was two feet from the edge. If you fell on to that track and rolled even slightly you’d be gone, falling away into thick clouds, the plain of Bengal having now been replaced by a damp mist.
‘What’s missing?’ I said.
Fisher turned to face me, his eyes bulging, his moustache fluttering in the backdraft of the little train. It was the first time I had seen it move. Behind us the glass door rattled. We both turned. One of the women was there, and one of the children: a boy. The woman was holding her hat against the breeze with one hand, while the other hand rested on the shoulder of the boy. He stepped over to the railing of the veranda and gave a polite cough. He was being sick into the cloud. A case of either motion or mountain sickness.
I turned back towards Fisher. ‘What did you want to tell me about?’
He pointed down, and for a while he didn’t speak, and we watched the rails.
‘No track shoes,’ Fisher said, at length.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘The rails are screwed directly on to the sleepers.’ It was an economy measure permissible on small-gauge railways, where not so much ‘give’ was needed in the rails. I said as much to Fisher, but I did not believe he listened.
The boy had stopped being sick, and he looked to be benefitting from the colder air. He was eyeing Fisher curiously. Fisher put his hand into his suit-coat pocket, and I was on the point of knocking him over the veranda when I realised this was not his gun hand that he was reaching with, but his left. Out came a paper bag. He held the bag in front of the boy, who took from it a boiled sweet.