Today I leafed for a long time through my journal from Assam. With what effort I deciphered the notes of each day and transcribed them into the notebook I had begun with my new life. I was seized by a strange feeling: that I was living the existence of a pioneer, that my work building railways in the jungle was far more effective for India than a dozen books about her, that this world so ancient and our work together so new still awaited its novelist; for a different India than that of travel reports and novels was revealing itself to me then, among the tribes, beside people known until then only to ethnologists, beside that poisonous flora of Assam, in the endless rain, in the humid and dizzying heat. I wanted to give life to these places drowned in ferns and lianas, with their people so fierce and innocent. I wanted to discover their aesthetics and their morals, and each day I gathered anecdotes, took photographs, sketched genealogies.

The deeper I ventured into the wilderness, the more a hidden dignity and an unsuspected pride grew within me. I was good and just in the jungle, more honest and calmer than in the cities.

But the rains... What nights of struggle with neurasthenia, listening to that unforgettable rhythm of water on the roof, endless downpours, days on end, interrupted only by hours of hot, misty drizzle, through which I passed as through a greenhouse, for those invisibly tiny drops carried the most exhausting perfumes, and

I could scarcely bear to keep my head bowed; I had to throw it back on my shoulders and run with flared nostrils and parted lips. In the evenings I would sit in my comfortable, cool room or pace the veranda of the bungalow, trying to recapture the taste of tobacco (which not even my most exaggerated precautions had saved from the damp), and sometimes I felt I could not endure any longer. I would feel the urge to clench my fists and strike the wooden balustrade, to howl and rush out into the rain, into the darkness, anywhere, to a land where the sky did not pour down eternally and the grass was not so tall, so wet, so fleshy. I longed to see flowers again, to walk through fields like those in Tamluk, to feel the salty breeze or the dry wind of the desert, for those vapors and vegetal scents had driven me mad.

I was alone with the three servants and the bungalow watchman, and when a traveler happened by—an inspector from some jute plantation or a department agent, or a tea merchant on his way to China—we would share a bottle of whisky. I drank every evening, as soon as I finished my inspection and returned to the bungalow for my bath. It was an hour when I could scarcely feel my own flesh; if I scratched myself then, I felt no pain. And yet I felt my nerves like