563296589345

‘Nga Yin is shaking himself! Nga Yin is shaking himself!’
Flory watched them unintelligently. Who was Nga Yin? Nga is the prefix given to criminals. Nga
Yin must be a dacoit. Why was he shaking himself? Then he remembered. Nga Yin was a giant
supposed by the Burmese to be buried, like Typhaeus, beneath the crust of the earth. Of course! It was
an earthquake.
‘An earthquake!’ he exclaimed, and he remembered Elizabeth and moved to pick her up. But she
was already sitting up, unhurt, and rubbing the back of her head.
‘Was that an earthquake?’ she said in a rather awed voice.
Mrs Lackersteen’s tall form came creeping round the corner of the veranda, clinging to the wall
like some elongated lizard. She was exclaiming hysterically:
‘Oh dear, an earthquake! Oh, what a dreadful shock! I can’t bear it–my heart won’t stand it! Oh
dear, oh dear! An earthquake!’
Mr Lackersteen tottered after her, with a strange ataxic step caused partly by earth-tremors and
partly by gin.
‘An earthquake, dammit!’ he said.
Flory and Elizabeth slowly picked themselves up. They all went inside, with that queer feeling in
the soles of the feet that one has when one steps from a rocking boat onto the shore. The old butler
was hurrying from the servants’ quarters, thrusting his pagri on his head as he came, and a troop of
twittering chokras after him.
‘Earthquake, sir, earthquake!’ he bubbled eagerly.
‘I should damn well think it was an earthquake,’ said Mr Lackersteen as he lowered himself
cautiously into a chair. ‘Here, get some drinks, butler. By God, I could do with a nip of something
after that.’
They all had a nip of something. The butler, shy yet beaming, stood on one leg beside the table,
with the tray in his hand. ‘Earthquake, sir, big earthquake!’ he repeated enthusiastically. He was
bursting with eagerness to talk; so, for that matter, was everyone else. An extraordinary joie de vivre
had come over them all as soon as the shaky feeling departed from their legs. An earthquake is such
fun when it is over. It is so exhilarating to reflect that you are not, as you well might be, lying dead
under a heap of ruins. Wim one accord they all burst out talking: ‘My dear, I’ve never had such a
shock–I fell absolutely flat on my back–I thought it was a dam’ pariah dog scratching itself under the
floor–I thought it must be an explosion somewhere–’ and so on and so forth; the usual earthquakechatter.
Even the butler was included in the conversation.
‘I expect you can remember ever so many earthquakes, can’t you, butler?’ said Mrs Lackersteen,
quite graciously, for her.
‘Oh yes, madam, many earthquakes! 1887, 1899, 1906, 1912–many, many I can remember, madam!’
‘The 1912 one was a biggish one,’ Flory said.
‘Oh, sir, but 1906 was bigger! Very bad shock, sir! And big heathen idol in the temple fall down on
top of the thathanabaing, that is Buddhist bishop, madam, which the Burmese say mean bad omen for
failure of paddy crop and foot-and-mouth disease. Also in 1887 my first earthquake I remember, when
I was a little chokra, and Major Maclagan sahib was lying under the table and promising he sign the