That took care of him for the rest of the morning: no more blinding flashes. The red shape would appear rhythmically over his head for a while as he walked alongside the placid donkey, then he would drop it, run after it, and start again. He improved rapidly, and kept the ball going for longer and longer. I could tell when he began to experiment with closing his eyes, because he tended to veer slowly away from the donkey’s side, the ball slapping between his hands as he headed for the fields to the side, or came closer and closer to the animal’s sharp little hooves as the beast followed a turn in the road and her barefoot master did not.

Most entertaining—although I was glad we were no longer on the crowded Grand Trunk Road. The boy would surely be crushed in the first mile.

In the meantime, Holmes and I conversed, almost exclusively in Hindustani now. My brain had grown calluses with the heavy use, and I no longer found the exercise exhausting.

“How old do you think Bindra is?” I said to Holmes in the vernacular tongue.

“He is of the hill people, and they are small. I think him older than he appears.”

“I thought he might be—he was watching one of the girls in that last village, and she had to be at least thirteen. Are hill people round of face, like him? From his features, I thought at first he was mentally retarded.”

“Oh, that he is not.”

“He really should be in school, then.”

“You may find he has been, at some time in his past. I saw him reading a notice on a wall the other day.”

“Then what on earth was he doing shovelling muck for a horse-dealer?”

But Holmes could not answer that, any more than I.

Chapter Twelve

Over the week of our sojourn, the radiant and majestic line of snow-covered peaks had grown from a line of white teeth to a wall of jagged peaks stretching so wide there was nothing else in their half of the world, towering so high they ate the sky itself. Step by step we had been drawn into their icy embrace, until finally on Wednesday we reached the town of Kalka, huddled at their very feet.