It's picturesque and full of cover. I'm a
gunner. I've been here for months. It's lovely."
It might have been the hills under Mussoorie, and what our
cars expected to do in it I could not understand. But the
demon-driver who had been a road-racer took the 70 h.p.
Mercedes and threaded the narrow valleys, as well as
occasional half-Swiss villages full of Alpine troops, at a
restrained thirty miles an hour. He shot up a new-made road,
more like Mussoorie than ever, and did not fall down the
hillside even once. An ammunition-mule of a mountain-battery
met him at a tight corner, and began to climb a tree.
"See! There isn't another place in France where that could
happen," said Alan. "I tell you, this is a magnificent
country."
The mule was hauled down by his tail before he had reached the
lower branches, and went on through the woods, his
ammunition-boxes jinking on his back, for all the world as
though he were rejoining his battery at Jutogh. One expected to
meet the little Hill people bent under their loads under the
forest gloom. The light, the colour, the smell of wood smoke,
pine-needles, wet earth, and warm mule were all Himalayan. Only
the Mercedes was violently and loudly a stranger.
"Halt!" said Alan at last, when she had done everything except
imitate the mule.
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