Free The Sun in the Morning by M. M. Kaye

months’ solitary in a particularly spartan jail. In the course of time it came to the turn of Second-Lieutenant C. Kaye to take over this unenviable chore, and accompanied by areluctant but resigned platoon of Punjabis he set off into the wide and sandy yonder. Only to put in for an extension when the three months were up.
    Such a thing had never happened before in the history of the regiment, but the astonished Adjutant (having first made sure that young Kaye had not gone off his head) agreed to his taking over the new platoon. And at the end of the next spell of duty received another request for a further extension. Tacklow eventually succeeded in spending nine months there — and would probably have been quite content to spend the rest of his life there had his seniors not decided that enough was enough. He told me that he enjoyed every minute of it because, apart from inventing a number of new and original ploys to keep the platoon interested and on their toes, it gave him time to think and read and write. And also, of course, because he quite literally did not know what it was like to be bored; which is a trait that I have been fortunate enough to inherit from him, and for which I have always been truly grateful.
    He was deeply interested in languages, butterflies, astrology, history, cricket and stamps. And fly-fishing, of course. So he was never without something to think about or puzzle over, study, watch, make notes on or collect, and it is my belief that he could have recited Wisden * from memory — probably backwards as well as forwards! He had an outsize brain, but not a grain of common-sense; or of social sense either. Like the Cat That Walked By Himself, ‘all places were alike to him’, and he was perfectly content with his own company.
    He liked peace and quiet. Especially the latter. And he would not have liked our present-day world at all. The noise! The squabbling; the recrimination. The whingeing and complaining. The
fuss
! I don’t believe I ever saw Tacklow lose his temper or heard him raise his voice in anger. Which does not mean that he could not be angry. But never shouting-angry, or worse, cold, unpleasant, up-tight angry. And at no time did he ever let the sun go down on his wrath.
    He was interested, too, in the strange workings of fate. For instance when he was in his twenties he became acquainted with a man who, many years previously, having fallen sick while on garrison duty in an isolated outpost on India’s North-West Frontier, had been sent off tothe nearest hospital in a
dooly
* escorted by half-a-dozen sepoys only a few hours before the outpost was attacked and overrun, leaving no survivors. The
dooly
with its carriers and escort had been ambushed among the hills and met a similar fate — with one exception: the sick man, though badly wounded and left for dead, was found to be alive by the relief column that arrived too late to save the garrison of the outpost. He recovered and was sent home on sick leave; only to become, once again, the sole survivor of a tragedy when the transport in which he sailed went down in a great storm in the Indian Ocean. Later still, on another wild night of storm the hansom cab in which he had been driving to the station to catch a train was delayed by the gale, so that by the time he reached the station the guard had already blown his whistle and the train had begun to move. He sprinted down the platform in a frantic attempt to catch it, and only just failed to do so; thereby saving his life yet again, for the train happened to be the one that toppled into the black, icy, gale-whipped water in the terrible Tay Bridge disaster of 1879.
    Tacklow was enormously intrigued by this story, for he, like the little Padre in Thornton Wilder’s
Bridge of San Luis Rey
, was convinced that if there was any underlying pattern in individual human existence, it must show in a case such as this, and that anyone who had escaped death by the