midnight
For a night and a day they knew their surroundings ; and for a night and a day , skirting the edge of the great Indian Desert on a narrow-gauge line , they remembered how in the days of their apprenticeship they had come by that road from Bombay . Then the languages in which the names of the stations were written changed , and they launched south into a foreign land , where the very smells were new . Many long and heavily-laden grain trains were in front of them , and they could feel the hand of Jimmy Hawkins from far off . They waited in extemporised sidings blocked by processions of empty trucks returning to the north , and were coupled on to slow , crawling trains , and dropped at midnight , Heaven knew where ; but it was furiously hot ; and they walked to and fro among sacks , and dogs howled . Then they came to an India more strange to them than to the untravelled Englishman -- the flat , red India of palm-tree , palmyra-palm , and rice , the India of the picture-books , of _ Little Henry and His Bearer _ -- all dead and dry in the baking heat . They had left the incessant passenger-traffic of the north and west far and far behind them . Here the people crawled to the side of the train , holding their little ones in their arms ; and a loaded truck would be left behind , men and women clustering round and above it like ants by spilled honey .