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(98) I found myself faced that winter with a lone Christmas at Laisong. The Zemi New Year Feast of Hgangi fell directly after; so it looked as though we were in for a riotous time. |
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By dint of a great deal of scraping and stinting I had saved up enough to buy a small mithan. This was brought over from Tolpui, up the valley, killed by the cook and left at the water- point for the village blacksmith to cut up. I had arranged to go down and supervise this, but some domestic crisis intervened at the critical moment, and when I ran down there at last - alas ! for the slate-grey hide I had planned as a bedside rug, for steaks, for sirloins, for any joint whatever ! Hide and all, the carcase had been hacked to pieces with dao and axe, in the purest Naga style; nothing remained but a pile of tripe and a mound of bleeding hunks weighing a pound or so each. The cook and I went gingerly through the heap. After much gruesome Scotland Yard work, we found something which, by a stretch of the imagination, might once have been rather like a roasting piece. So that was chosen; and we sent it back to camp for my Christmas dinner next day. |
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At eleven o'clock on Christmas morning, the cook reported sick with fever. But, he said, he had arranged everything with Paodekumba. I was on no account to spoil my holiday by sweating over a stove myself. |
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When, that evening, Namkia entered the room with a triumphant sweep and my Christmas feast on a tray, he laid before me a sodden bone - a bone wringing, waterlogged; (99) a bone from which depended in places ragged bunches of what seemed to be wet, brown string - my poor joint, warmed in tepid fat some time that morning, laid in a gallon of water, and boiled unremittingly ever since. |
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I opened a tinned tongue. |
