A whipping meets the case." "But the stone?
Why shouldn't he sit on it ?" "Wait one minute, sahib, and then see." He formed his hands into a trumpet and bellowed through them in a high-pitched, nasal, ululating order to somebody behind: "Oh-h-h--Battee-lao!" The black, dark roadside echoed it and a dot of light leapt up as a man came running with what gradually grew into a lamp.
Mahommed Gunga seized the lamp, bent for a few seconds over the still sprawling fakir, whipped him again twice, cursed him and kicked him, until he got up and ran like a spectre for the gloom beyond the trees.
Then, with a rather stately sweep of the lamp, and a tremble in his voice that was probably intentional--designed to make Cunningham at least aware of the existence of emotion before he looked--he let the light fall on the slab on which the fakir had been squatting.
"Look, Cunningham-sahib!" The youngster bent down above the slab and tried, in the fitful light, to make out what the markings were that ran almost from side to side, in curves, across the stone; but it was too dark--the light was too fitful; the marks themselves were too faint from the constant squatting of roadside wanderers.
Mahommed Gunga set the lamp down on the stone, and he and the attendant took little sticks, sharp-pointed, with which they began to dig hurriedly, scratching and scraping at what presently showed, even in that rising and falling light, as Roman lettering.

Soon Cunningham himself began to lend a hand.

He made out a date first, and he could feel it with his fingers before his eyes deciphered it.

Gradually, letter by letter--word by word--he read it off, feeling a strange new thrill run through him, as each line followed, like a voice from the haunted past.
A.D.1823.

A.D.
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF GENERAL ROBERT FRANCIS CUNNINGHAM WHO DIED ON THIS SPOT AETAT 81 FROM WOUNDS INFLICTED BY A TIGER There was no sound audible except the purring of the lamp flame and the heavy breathing of the three as Cunningham gazed down at the very crudely carved, stained, often-desecrated slab below which lay the first of the Anglo-Indian Cunninghams.
This man--these crumbled bones that lay under a forgotten piece of rock--had made all of their share of history.