When Men fly from danger, it is natural for them to run farther than they need.
–The Mischiefs that ought justly to be apprehended from a Whig-government,
EVERY MORNING A MOB OF angry Hindoos convened outside the hospital hoping to have a conversation with Jack on his way in, and so every day Jack came a little earlier, stealing in through a back door where manure was carried out and food brought in. Because of that latter function it was the correct entrance for him to use anyway. He walked across an enclosed stable-yard, holding one hand before his face as a sort of visor, to break a trail through the horseflies. At least, he hoped that they were horseflies.
His passage was noticed and commented upon by insomniacal horses and camels, standing on splinted and bandaged limbs, or dangling from formidable slings, in stalls all round the yard. A tiger was here, too, being treated for an abscessed tooth, but she was kept in a cage in an out-building. Otherwise her fragrance, and the nearly inaudible sound she made when she yawned, would drive the horses and camels into frenzies. A horse supporting itself on two legs, and kicking with the remaining two, was dangerous enough; a horse in a sling, kicking with all four legs at once, was as dangerous as a cart-load of Afghans.
The insect situation did not improve when he went inside. In part, this was because the distinction between inside and outside was not closely observed in this part of the world; space was divided up by walls and screens, yes. But they all had great bloody holes in them (ornately shaped holes painstakingly carved by master craftsmen, yes, but none the less holes) to let in air and light and (or so Jack supposed in his more peevish moments) to keep buildings from bursting and falling down when the inmates got to farting-for these people ate beans, or, at any rate, a plethora of mysterious bean-like foodstuffs, as if they were all starving-which, come to think of it, they were.
At any rate, the result was that the gallery into which Jack had now entered was thick with flies, zinging through the darkness like spent grapeshot on the fringes of a battle, and crunching into his shaved head and raising welts. They had been drawn here, from all over the Indies, by the smell of diverse sick or injured creatures and their feed and their manure; for this hospital with all its stone screens and lattice-works was like a giant censer dispensing such fragrances into the air of Ahmadabad.
Past the mongoose with the suppurating eye, the jackal with mange, the half-paralyzed king cobra, the stunningly odoriferous civet-cat-with-bone-cancer, the mouse deer with the javelin wound did Jack proceed, and then entered a room filled with bird-cages of bent bamboo, where diverse broken-winged avians were on the mend. A peacock with an arrow stuck sideways all the way through his neck shuffled around, bumping into things and getting hung up on the cages and squawking in outrage. Jack gave him a wide berth, not wanting to get lockjaw off that arrowhead if the peacock should happen to execute a sharp turn in the vicinity of his knees.
Through a rickety door was a room piled floor to ceiling with even smaller cages housing sick or injured mice and rats, some of which sounded distinctly rabid. The less time spent here the better, and so Jack forged on to another room, and down some stone steps.
The smell here transcended mere badness. It was not a smell of mammals or even reptiles, but of an entirely different order of Creation. It was thrilling. For quite some time Jack had been breathing through his nose, but now he threw one arm over his face and sucked in air through the crook of his elbow. For the air in this, the deepest and innermost part of the hospital, was (he estimated) fifty percent insects by volume, a sort of writhing meat-cloud that continually hummed, as if he had climbed into an organ pipe. And if even one of those bugs got into a nostril and injured itself trying to struggle free of Jack’s nose-hairs, the caretakers would be sure to notice, and then Jack would be out of a job. For the same reason, he had altered his gait, and now shuffled along on bare feet, plowing carefully through the drifts and flurries of bugs on the floor, hoping there weren’t any scorpions there just now.
