After hearing their reading, I was interested in noticing certain advantages a Santal child has over a British one in his arithmetic. Santal toes are readily available well as fingers for addition, and in the absence of writing paper, quick calculations could be made on the sanded floor. Even his black skin could be lightly scratched with the fingernail, leaving a grey mark. There were sixty of these nights-schools, sufficient to provide an aim for a different evening walk for two months, and I became very fond of these excursions as a relaxation. 
On rarer occasions, I succeeded in snatching a weekend in camp with a distant European, meeting him at a pre-arranged halfway-house. During the rainy season, these excursions could be hazardous; the old Ford became embedded in rivers, or if the crossing was safely made, the river might later become swollen and one could be marooned in camp for days. On one such occasion, I held a Gallup poll on the villagers, to find out how many had heard of Gandhi; few had.
 

More often I made solitary jungle escapes which, like departures of royalty or film stars, were kept a close secret up to the moment of leaving, to prevent an invasion of my bungalow by the blind. These breaks were islands of peace in the stormy sea of daily existence. One relaxed and lived with nature, observing the birds, but watchful for ants and snakes. One even managed to push aside reflection that the penalty for weekend escape might mean a hundred and twenty blind on Monday. 
 

Sometimes I returned to frank horror of a different kind. 
December nights were chilly, and a villager had placed a small brazier of glowing charcoal under his low rope bed (charpoy). His coverlet caught fire, causing him extensive burns which were now invaded by maggots. Or between harvests, when granaries were empty, babies and toddlers were brought to hospital incurably blind from a nutritional disease keratomalacia in the cornea of the eyes which had literally sloughed away. Mercifully perhaps they had little chance of survival in so unequal a struggle for existence. Some later casual illness would be met by fatalistic parents with neglect and there would be an end. Should any by chance survive, some would join India's procession of a million beggars. 

To purge the mind of such tragedies, I one day set off in the early morning on a six-mile tramp to explore the surrounding country and climb a neighbouring wooded hill that looked inviting. I stopped first at a Hindu potter's village, to watch fascinated, the apparently effortless spin of his wheel, and the skill of the potter's slow, sure fingers. Even the decorative border was made in the soft revolving clay by varying the position of a finger nail. It was fun to guess at the final shape and it seemed only a few minutes work to complete each pot or jar. Pottery is one of the oldest of man's arts, and one felt the solemnity of being in the presence of an hereditary craftsman. 
Then leaving dwellings behind, I picked my way through scrub and jungle, where Lizards and Chameleons darted from my feet, and a great semia and tamarind trees shaded me from the sun. A blue jay darted from a branch, surprising me with the gay display of her suddenly outstretched wings; screeching parakeets of lovely greens darted from tree to tree, and on the leaves of a mango tree I came on the nest of a busy tailor-bird. Believe it or not, he had stitched two leaves quite neatly together with strands from a cotton tree, even rumpling his 'thread-ends' into a knot to make the stitches hold. 

It was leopard country, and one sometimes heard their cat-like cry at night from my bungalow, but they were never seen by day. The largest animal I came across was a lizard or Iguana about four feet long. He appeared sluggish and harmless, but his tenacious grip was the secret weapon of Mahratta warriors in the seventeenth century. They used his ancestors to scale the precipices or battlements of forts, carrying a rope with them, which themselves then climbed. I left it sunning itself, and began to make mental note of landmarks to ensure my safe return journey, boulders of unusual shape or curves in dry river beds, and marked confusing bridle-paths with arrows made from twigs. 

I had been climbing all the time, so it was only a short stiff climb to the summit, where I sat looking across a forest of tree-tops that stretched to the horizon on all sides. Native huts, built of baked mud and straw, so blended with the landscape that they were invisible, and I could have been the only man alive. Somewhere far beyond that horizon lay the mighty heart of cities and the friendliness of home, which the passage of time had dimmed in my mind, making them lack reality. 

In a solitude and silence that it first seemed complete, I presently began to hear a whole host of country sounds reminding me of Natural History programmes on the BBC - the dull thud of a woodcutter's axe, the musical tinkle of cow-bells, the warbling note of a shepherd boy's bamboo lute , the bulbul's song, and the intermittent metallic cymbal of the copper-smith bird, the hum of wild bees and the chirp of invisible crickets. The distant cry of a child borne on the wind, the cooing of doves, a woodpecker chiseling his nest in a tree, a herd-boy's shout of command as he marshaled his herd from a mound like a general manoeuvering troops, the raucous grunt of buffaloes wallowing neck-deep in muddy pools. The creak of the wooden shaft of a well being worked by bullocks, the rumble of far-off thunder and a sudden puff of wind that stirred the tree-tops making a sound like wavelets breaking on a distant shore, a cock crowing. The strains of a plaintive song sung by an unknown traveler on a hidden path, haunting like that of Wordsworth's 'Solitary Reaper'. 

On my return journey I came on the Santal wood-cutter I had heard, dark, sinewy, hacking down young jungle trees to his heart's content. I asked him a few questions, to which he gave the usual exasperating Santal reply to any question (even if he knew the answer) - 'Okobadai?' 'Who knows?' 
Knowing Santal fondness for deforestation, I begged him to leave a few trees standing, at which he grinned sheepishly and asked for a match.
 
 

Farther on I overtook some Santal women gathering faggots who give me an ingenuous, merry 'Johar' and was soon attracted to a Santal village by a beating of tom-toms. A Santal 'war-dance' was in progress, with an all-male cast. But alas for the encroachment of civilisation, one of the dancers waved a closed umbrella instead of a spear. 
Some small boys whom I had expected to take part in imitation of their elders squatted apart rather subdued. I discovered they had just undergone one of those toughening-up puberty ceremonies common to primitive tribes, in this case a branding of the forearms with a burning rag. 

The Santal village differed markedly from the Hindu potter's one I had visited earlier, in which the dwellings were huddled together. In this, two rows of separate huts, each with a little fenced garden, flanked a single village street. Halfway down the street was the 'smithy' where village cronies gathered to chat, and at its end a bandstand like erection made of six bamboo poles and a grass roof. This was the Manjhi Than, where ancestor worship took place and the council of village elders conferred. This consisted of headman, adviser, two priests, a custodian of public morals, and a messenger. 

But the sun was sinking low in the sky, and it was time to return from my jungle escape. There is no twilight in the East, so I hurried on across the narrow bunds between the rice fields, as a trio of foxes sped to their covert, and I to my white bungalow among the trees, and tomorrow's blind.