There is, as the conjurers say, no deception about this tale- especially in a land as mysterious as the Great Indian desert
of the northwest.
Jukes, by accident, stumbled upon a village that is known to exist, though he is the only Englishman to have been there.
There is a story that if you go to the heart of Bikaner, which is in the heart of the Great Indian Desert, you shall not come upon a village, but a town where the dead, who did not die at the last moment on the way to the funeral pyre (the Hindu cremation ritual), or miraculously came alive just seconds before they were consigned to holy flames, have established their headquarters.
They are the living dead. Jukes, civil engineer during the British Raj (rule) in India, sets up camp on a desolate stretch between Pakpattan and Mubarakpur. On December 23, 1884, when Jukes fell slightly feverish on a full moon night, and irritable, he saddled his pony Pornic and rode into the wild desert. The horse went like thing possessed as a delirious Jukes spurs it. The pony tumbles over a sandy precipice overlooking the shallow Sutlej river on the other side of the desert.
Next Juke wakes up inside a horse-shoe shaped crater with steeply graded walls of sand almost 35 feet high. This crater enclosed a level piece of ground about fifty yards long – with a rude well in the centre. Round the bottom of the crater, about three feet from the ground, ran a series of 83 semi-circular ovoid, square and multilateral holes.
Each hole was shored with driftwood and bamboo. There was no sign of life- but a sickening stench pervaded the place.
Looking for an exit, Jukes mounts his pony and rides around the crater. But every attempt to rush the pony up the steep sand bank is met with a cascade of sand. Jukes had fallen into a trap “in the same model that antilons set for their preys”.
A pop of a rifle bullet breaks through Juke's animation. A countryboat patrolled the river mid-stream to prevent the inhabitants of the town of the living dead from escaping.
The rifle shot had drawn 65 human beings- like bedraggled animals- from their badgerhole.
“Sahib, Sahib, do you not know me, I am Gunga Dass, the telegraph master,” a high-pitched murmured to Jukes in English. Gunga Dass, who had survived an attack cholera and returned to life at his funeral, was banished to the town of the living dead, where everyone – the high and low castes- are cast off from the world.
Gunga Dass, a scrawny figure with matted hair, held a dead crow in his hand that he intended to spit roast for dinner.
Begins, engineer Morrowbie Juke's nightmarish adventure in town of the dead – with its mad inhabitants – till he is rescued up the crater with “punkah-ropes” by his dog boy Dumno.
The “Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” is one of the spooky India tales from the book, “The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales” by
Rudyard Kipling, set in British India, with an introduction by writer Ruskin Bond. It was published in September 2009.
The book keeps the reader on the edge as it opens up “native horrors” of British India, the “dead men's town” , crime and divine punishment, ghostly British riders in phantom 'rickshaws' (hand-drawn cabs), long-buried murders, haunted guest houses, spooky myths and lores surrounding the native Indian gentry and their women.
It has seven stories by one of the greatest story-tellers of the 20th century.
“It is Kipling's brilliance as a story-teller and stylist that carries the reader along. He was an enthusiastic and unapologetic chronicler of the British Empire at the zenith of its power,” says writer Ruskin Bond.
Kipling was reviled by liberals at home in England when the British power was on the declined, but he was honoured with the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907.
"Rudyard Joseph Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and baptised in Bombay Cathedral. At the age of six he went to school in England, but he returned to India when he was 17," Bond said.
For Kipling, the stories as he once said, "is not exactly a collection of downright ghost stories... it is a collection of facts that never quite explained themselves."