Following the Equator, Complete
by
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
Part 8 out of 10
labor of his life. Like them, he has believed that his was not an idle
and foolish waste of his life, but a most worthy and honorable employment
of it. Yet, there are many people who will see in those others, men
worthy of homage and deep reverence, but in him merely a crank. But I
shall not. He has my reverence. And I don't offer it as a common thing
and poor, but as an unusual thing and of value. The ordinary reverence,
the reverence defined and explained by the dictionary costs nothing.
Reverence for one's own sacred things--parents, religion, flag, laws, and
respect for one's own beliefs--these are feelings which we cannot even
help. They come natural to us; they are involuntary, like breathing.
There is no personal merit in breathing. But the reverence which is
difficult, and which has personal merit in it, is the respect which you
pay, without compulsion, to the political or religious attitude of a man
whose beliefs are not yours. You can't revere his gods or his politics,
and no one expects you to do that, but you could respect his belief in
them if you tried hard enough; and you could respect him, too, if you
tried hard enough. But it is very, very difficult; it is next to
impossible, and so we hardly ever try. If the man doesn't believe as we
do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean it does nowadays,
because now we can't burn him.
We are always canting about people's "irreverence," always charging this
offense upon somebody or other, and thereby intimating that we are better
than that person and do not commit that offense ourselves. Whenever we
do this we are in a lying attitude, and our speech is cant; for none of
us are reverent--in a meritorious way; deep down in our hearts we are all
irreverent. There is probably not a single exception to this rule in the
earth. There is probably not one person whose reverence rises higher
than respect for his own sacred things; and therefore, it is not a thing
to boast about and be proud of, since the most degraded savage has that
--and, like the best of us, has nothing higher. To speak plainly, we
despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the
pale of our own list of sacred things. And yet, with strange
inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the
things which are holy to us. Suppose we should meet with a paragraph
like the following, in the newspapers:
"Yesterday a visiting party of the British nobility had a picnic at Mount
Vernon, and in the tomb of Washington they ate their luncheon, sang
popular songs, played games, and danced waltzes and polkas."
Should we be shocked? Should we feel outraged? Should we be amazed?
Should we call the performance a desecration? Yes, that would all
happen. We should denounce those people in round terms, and call them
hard names.
And suppose we found this paragraph in the newspapers:
"Yesterday a visiting party of American pork-millionaires had a picnic in
Westminster Abbey, and in that sacred place they ate their luncheon, sang
popular songs, played games, and danced waltzes and polkas."
Would the English be shocked? Would they feel outraged? Would they be
amazed? Would they call the performance a desecration? That would all
happen. The pork-millionaires would be denounced in round terms; they
would be called hard names.
In the tomb at Mount Vernon lie the ashes of America's most honored son;
in the Abbey, the ashes of England's greatest dead; the tomb of tombs,
the costliest in the earth, the wonder of the world, the Taj, was built
by a great Emperor to honor the memory of a perfect wife and perfect
mother, one in whom there was no spot or blemish, whose love was his stay
and support, whose life was the light of the world to him; in it her
ashes lie, and to the Mohammedan millions of India it is a holy place; to
them it is what Mount Vernon is to Americans, it is what the Abbey is to
the English.
Major Sleeman wrote forty or fifty years ago (the italics are mine):
"I would here enter my humble protest against the quadrille and
lunch parties which are sometimes given to European ladies and
gentlemen of the station at this imperial tomb; drinking and dancing
are no doubt very good things in their season, but they are sadly
out of place in a sepulchre."
Were there any Americans among those lunch parties? If they were
invited, there were.
If my imagined lunch-parties in Westminster and the tomb of Washington
should take place, the incident would cause a vast outbreak of bitter
eloquence about Barbarism and Irreverence; and it would come from two
sets of people who would go next day and dance in the Taj if they had a
chance.
As we took our leave of the Benares god and started away we noticed a
group of natives waiting respectfully just within the gate--a Rajah from
somewhere in India, and some people of lesser consequence. The god
beckoned them to come, and as we passed out the Rajah was kneeling and
reverently kissing his sacred feet.
If Barnum--but Barnum's ambitions are at rest. This god will remain in
the holy peace and seclusion of his garden, undisturbed. Barnum could
not have gotten him, anyway. Still, he would have found a substitute
that would answer.
CHAPTER LIV.
Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a
bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth
$4 a minute.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
A comfortable railway journey of seventeen and a half hours brought us to
the capital of India, which is likewise the capital of Bengal--Calcutta.
Like Bombay, it has a population of nearly a million natives and a small
gathering of white people. It is a huge city and fine, and is called the
City of Palaces. It is rich in historical memories; rich in British
achievement--military, political, commercial; rich in the results of the
miracles done by that brace of mighty magicians, Clive and Hastings. And
has a cloud kissing monument to one Ochterlony.
It is a fluted candlestick 250 feet high. This lingam is the only large
monument in Calcutta, I believe. It is a fine ornament, and will keep
Ochterlony in mind.
Wherever you are, in Calcutta, and for miles around, you can see it; and
always when you see it you think of Ochterlony. And so there is not an
hour in the day that you do not think of Ochterlony and wonder who he
was. It is good that Clive cannot come back, for he would think it was
for Plassey; and then that great spirit would be wounded when the
revelation came that it was not. Clive would find out that it was for
Ochterlony; and he would think Ochterlony was a battle. And he would
think it was a great one, too, and he would say, "With three thousand I
whipped sixty thousand and founded the Empire--and there is no monument;
this other soldier must have whipped a billion with a dozen and saved the
world."
But he would be mistaken. Ochterlony was a man, not a battle. And he
did good and honorable service, too; as good and honorable service as has
been done in India by seventy-five or a hundred other Englishmen of
courage, rectitude, and distinguished capacity. For India has been a
fertile breeding-ground of such men, and remains so; great men, both in
war and in the civil service, and as modest as great. But they have no
monuments, and were not expecting any. Ochterlony could not have been
expecting one, and it is not at all likely that he desired one--certainly
not until Clive and Hastings should be supplied. Every day Clive and
Hastings lean on the battlements of heaven and look down and wonder which
of the two the monument is for; and they fret and worry because they
cannot find out, and so the peace of heaven is spoiled for them and lost.
But not for Ochterlony. Ochterlony is not troubled. He doesn't suspect
that it is his monument. Heaven is sweet and peaceful to him. There is
a sort of unfairness about it all.
Indeed, if monuments were always given in India for high achievements,
duty straitly performed, and smirchless records, the landscape would be
monotonous with them. The handful of English in India govern the Indian
myriads with apparent ease, and without noticeable friction, through
tact, training, and distinguished administrative ability, reinforced by
just and liberal laws--and by keeping their word to the native whenever
they give it.
England is far from India and knows little about the eminent services
performed by her servants there, for it is the newspaper correspondent
who makes fame, and he is not sent to India but to the continent, to
report the doings of the princelets and the dukelets, and where they are
visiting and whom they are marrying. Often a British official spends
thirty or forty years in India, climbing from grade to grade by services
which would make him celebrated anywhere else, and finishes as a
vice-sovereign, governing a great realm and millions of subjects; then he
goes home to England substantially unknown and unheard of, and settles
down in some modest corner, and is as one extinguished. Ten years later
there is a twenty-line obituary in the London papers, and the reader is
paralyzed by the splendors of a career which he is not sure that he had
ever heard of before. But meanwhile he has learned all about the
continental princelets and dukelets.
The average man is profoundly ignorant of countries that lie remote from
his own. When they are mentioned in his presence one or two facts and
maybe a couple of names rise like torches in his mind, lighting up an
inch or two of it and leaving the rest all dark. The mention of Egypt
suggests some Biblical facts and the Pyramids-nothing more. The mention
of South Africa suggests Kimberly and the diamonds and there an end.
Formerly the mention, to a Hindoo, of America suggested a name--George
Washington--with that his familiarity with our country was exhausted.
Latterly his familiarity with it has doubled in bulk; so that when
America is mentioned now, two torches flare up in the dark caverns of his
mind and he says, "Ah, the country of the great man Washington; and of
the Holy City--Chicago." For he knows about the Congress of Religion, and
this has enabled him to get an erroneous impression of Chicago.
When India is mentioned to the citizen of a far country it suggests
Clive, Hastings, the Mutiny, Kipling, and a number of other great events;
and the mention of Calcutta infallibly brings up the Black Hole. And so,
when that citizen finds himself in the capital of India he goes first of
all to see the Black Hole of Calcutta--and is disappointed.
The Black Hole was not preserved; it is gone, long, long ago. It is
strange. Just as it stood, it was itself a monument; a ready-made one.
It was finished, it was complete, its materials were strong and lasting,
it needed no furbishing up, no repairs; it merely needed to be let alone.
It was the first brick, the Foundation Stone, upon which was reared a
mighty Empire--the Indian Empire of Great Britain. It was the ghastly
episode of the Black Hole that maddened the British and brought Clive,
that young military marvel, raging up from Madras; it was the seed from
which sprung Plassey; and it was that extraordinary battle, whose like
had not been seen in the earth since Agincourt, that laid deep and strong
the foundations of England's colossal Indian sovereignty.
And yet within the time of men who still live, the Black Hole was torn
down and thrown away as carelessly as if its bricks were common clay, not
ingots of historic gold. There is no accounting for human beings.
The supposed site of the Black Hole is marked by an engraved plate. I
saw that; and better that than nothing. The Black Hole was a prison--a
cell is nearer the right word--eighteen feet square, the dimensions of an
ordinary bedchamber; and into this place the victorious Nabob of Bengal
packed 146 of his English prisoners. There was hardly standing room for
them; scarcely a breath of air was to be got; the time was night, the
weather sweltering hot. Before the dawn came, the captives were all dead
but twenty-three. Mr. Holwell's long account of the awful episode was
familiar to the world a hundred years ago, but one seldom sees in print
even an extract from it in our day. Among the striking things in it is
this. Mr. Holwell, perishing with thirst, kept himself alive by sucking
the perspiration from his sleeves. It gives one a vivid idea of the
situation. He presently found that while he was busy drawing life from
one of his sleeves a young English gentleman was stealing supplies from
the other one. Holwell was an unselfish man, a man of the most generous
impulses; he lived and died famous for these fine and rare qualities; yet
when he found out what was happening to that unwatched sleeve, he took
the precaution to suck that one dry first. The miseries of the Black
Hole were able to change even a nature like his. But that young
gentleman was one of the twenty-three survivors, and he said it was the
stolen perspiration that saved his life. From the middle of Mr.
Holwell's narrative I will make a brief excerpt:
"Then a general prayer to Heaven, to hasten the approach of the
flames to the right and left of us, and put a period to our misery.
But these failing, they whose strength and spirits were quite
exhausted laid themselves down and expired quietly upon their
fellows: others who had yet some strength and vigor left made a last
effort at the windows, and several succeeded by leaping and
scrambling over the backs and heads of those in the first rank, and
got hold of the bars, from which there was no removing them. Many
to the right and left sunk with the violent pressure, and were soon
suffocated; for now a steam arose from the living and the dead,
which affected us in all its circumstances as if we were forcibly
held with our heads over a bowl full of strong volatile spirit of
hartshorn, until suffocated; nor could the effluvia of the one be
distinguished from the other, and frequently, when I was forced by
the load upon my head and shoulders to hold my face down, I was
obliged, near as I was to the window, instantly to raise it again to
avoid suffocation. I need not, my dear friend, ask your
commiseration, when I tell you, that in this plight, from half an
hour past eleven till near two in the morning, I sustained the
weight of a heavy man, with his knees in my back, and the pressure
of his whole body on my head. A Dutch surgeon who had taken his
seat upon my left shoulder, and a Topaz (a black Christian soldier)
bearing on my right; all which nothing could have enabled me to
support but the props and pressure equally sustaining me all around.
The two latter I frequently dislodged by shifting my hold on the
bars and driving my knuckles into their ribs; but my friend above
stuck fast, held immovable by two bars.
"I exerted anew my strength and fortitude; but the repeated trials
and efforts I made to dislodge the insufferable incumbrances upon me
at last quite exhausted me; and towards two o'clock, finding I must
quit the window or sink where I was, I resolved on the former,
having bore, truly for the sake of others, infinitely more for life
than the best of it is worth. In the rank close behind me was an
officer of one of the ships, whose name was Cary, and who had
behaved with much bravery during the siege (his wife, a fine woman,
though country born, would not quit him, but accompanied him into
the prison, and was one who survived). This poor wretch had been
long raving for water and air; I told him I was determined to give
up life, and recommended his gaining my station. On my quitting it
he made a fruitless attempt to get my place; but the Dutch surgeon,
who sat on my shoulder, supplanted him. Poor Cary expressed his
thankfulness, and said he would give up life too; but it was with
the utmost labor we forced our way from the window (several in the
inner ranks appearing to me dead standing, unable to fall by the
throng and equal pressure around). He laid himself down to die; and
his death, I believe, was very sudden; for he was a short, full,
sanguine man. His strength was great; and, I imagine, had he not
retired with me, I should never have been able to force my way. I
was at this time sensible of no pain, and little uneasiness; I can
give you no better idea of my situation than by repeating my simile
of the bowl of spirit of hartshorn. I found a stupor coming on
apace, and laid myself down by that gallant old man, the Rev. Mr.
Jervas Bellamy, who laid dead with his son, the lieutenant, hand in
hand, near the southernmost wall of the prison. When I had lain
there some little time, I still had reflection enough to suffer some
uneasiness in the thought that I should be trampled upon, when dead,
as I myself had done to others. With some difficulty I raised
myself, and gained the platform a second time, where I presently
lost all sensation; the last trace of sensibility that I have been
able to recollect after my laying down, was my sash being uneasy
about my waist, which I untied, and threw from me. Of what passed
in this interval, to the time of my resurrection from this hole of
horrors, I can give you no account."
There was plenty to see in Calcutta, but there was not plenty of time for
it. I saw the fort that Clive built; and the place where Warren Hastings
and the author of the Junius Letters fought their duel; and the great
botanical gardens; and the fashionable afternoon turnout in the Maidan;
and a grand review of the garrison in a great plain at sunrise; and a
military tournament in which great bodies of native soldiery exhibited
the perfection of their drill at all arms, a spectacular and beautiful
show occupying several nights and closing with the mimic storming of a
native fort which was as good as the reality for thrilling and accurate
detail, and better than the reality for security and comfort; we had a
pleasure excursion on the 'Hoogly' by courtesy of friends, and devoted
the rest of the time to social life and the Indian museum. One should
spend a month in the museum, an enchanted palace of Indian antiquities.
Indeed, a person might spend half a year among the beautiful and
wonderful things without exhausting their interest.
It was winter. We were of Kipling's "hosts of tourists who travel up and
down India in the cold weather showing how things ought to be managed."
It is a common expression there, "the cold weather," and the people think
there is such a thing. It is because they have lived there half a
lifetime, and their perceptions have become blunted. When a person is
accustomed to 138 in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not
valuable. I had read, in the histories, that the June marches made
between Lucknow and Cawnpore by the British forces in the time of the
Mutiny were made weather--138 in the shade and had taken it for
historical embroidery. I had read it again in Serjeant-Major
Forbes-Mitchell's account of his military experiences in the Mutiny
--at least I thought I had--and in Calcutta I asked him if it was true,
and he said it was. An officer of high rank who had been in the thick of
the Mutiny said the same. As long as those men were talking about what
they knew, they were trustworthy, and I believed them; but when they said
it was now "cold weather," I saw that they had traveled outside of their
sphere of knowledge and were floundering. I believe that in India "cold
weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through
the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which
will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.
It was observable that brass ones were in use while I was in Calcutta,
showing that it was not yet time to change to porcelain; I was told the
change to porcelain was not usually made until May. But this cold
weather was too warm for us; so we started to Darjeeling, in the
Himalayas--a twenty-four hour journey.
CHAPTER LV.
There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been
squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy
neighbor.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
FROM DIARY:
February 14. We left at 4:30 P.M. Until dark we moved through rich
vegetation, then changed to a boat and crossed the Ganges.
February 15. Up with the sun. A brilliant morning, and frosty. A
double suit of flannels is found necessary. The plain is perfectly
level, and seems to stretch away and away and away, dimming and
softening, to the uttermost bounds of nowhere. What a soaring,
strenuous, gushing fountain spray of delicate greenery a bunch of bamboo
is! As far as the eye can reach, these grand vegetable geysers grace the
view, their spoutings refined to steam by distance. And there are fields
of bananas, with the sunshine glancing from the varnished surface of
their drooping vast leaves. And there are frequent groves of palm; and
an effective accent is given to the landscape by isolated individuals of
this picturesque family, towering, clean-stemmed, their plumes broken and
hanging ragged, Nature's imitation of an umbrella that has been out to
see what a cyclone is like and is trying not to look disappointed. And
everywhere through the soft morning vistas we glimpse the villages, the
countless villages, the myriad villages, thatched, built of clean new
matting, snuggling among grouped palms and sheaves of bamboo; villages,
villages, no end of villages, not three hundred yards apart, and dozens
and dozens of them in sight all the time; a mighty City, hundreds of
miles long, hundreds of miles broad, made all of villages, the biggest
city in the earth, and as populous as a European kingdom. I have seen no
such city as this before. And there is a continuously repeated and
replenished multitude of naked men in view on both sides and ahead. We
fly through it mile after mile, but still it is always there, on both
sides and ahead--brown-bodied, naked men and boys, plowing in the fields.
But not woman. In these two hours I have not seen a woman or a girl
working in the fields.
"From Greenland's icy mountains,
From India's coral strand,
Where Afric's sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand.
From many an ancient river,
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver
Their land from error's chain."
Those are beautiful verses, and they have remained in my memory all my
life. But if the closing lines are true, let us hope that when we come
to answer the call and deliver the land from its errors, we shall secrete
from it some of our high-civilization ways, and at the same time borrow
some of its pagan ways to enrich our high system with. We have a right
to do this. If we lift those people up, we have a right to lift
ourselves up nine or ten grades or so, at their expense. A few years ago
I spent several weeks at Tolz, in Bavaria. It is a Roman Catholic
region, and not even Benares is more deeply or pervasively or
intelligently devout. In my diary of those days I find this:
"We took a long drive yesterday around about the lovely country
roads. But it was a drive whose pleasure was damaged in a couple of
ways: by the dreadful shrines and by the shameful spectacle of gray
and venerable old grandmothers toiling in the fields. The shrines
were frequent along the roads--figures of the Saviour nailed to the
cross and streaming with blood from the wounds of the nails and the
thorns.
"When missionaries go from here do they find fault with the pagan
idols? I saw many women seventy and even eighty years old mowing
and binding in the fields, and pitchforking the loads into the
wagons."
I was in Austria later, and in Munich. In Munich I saw gray old women
pushing trucks up hill and down, long distances, trucks laden with
barrels of beer, incredible loads. In my Austrian diary I find this:
"In the fields I often see a woman and a cow harnessed to the plow,
and a man driving.
"In the public street of Marienbad to-day, I saw an old, bent,
gray-headed woman, in harness with a dog, drawing a laden sled over
bare dirt roads and bare pavements; and at his ease walked the
driver, smoking his pipe, a hale fellow not thirty years old."
Five or six years ago I bought an open boat, made a kind of a canvas
wagon-roof over the stern of it to shelter me from sun and rain; hired a
courier and a boatman, and made a twelve-day floating voyage down the
Rhone from Lake Bourget to Marseilles. In my diary of that trip I find
this entry. I was far down the Rhone then:
"Passing St. Etienne, 2:15 P.M. On a distant ridge inland, a tall
openwork structure commandingly situated, with a statue of the
Virgin standing on it. A devout country. All down this river,
wherever there is a crag there is a statue of the Virgin on it. I
believe I have seen a hundred of them. And yet, in many respects,
the peasantry seem to be mere pagans, and destitute of any
considerable degree of civilization.
" . . . . We reached a not very promising looking village about
4 o'clock, and I concluded to tie up for the day; munching fruit and
fogging the hood with pipe-smoke had grown monotonous; I could not
have the hood furled, because the floods of rain fell unceasingly.
The tavern was on the river bank, as is the custom. It was dull
there, and melancholy--nothing to do but look out of the window into
the drenching rain, and shiver; one could do that, for it was bleak
and cold and windy, and country France furnishes no fire. Winter
overcoats did not help me much; they had to be supplemented with
rugs. The raindrops were so large and struck the river with such
force that they knocked up the water like pebble-splashes.
"With the exception of a very occasional woodenshod peasant, nobody
was abroad in this bitter weather--I mean nobody of our sex. But
all weathers are alike to the women in these continental countries.
To them and the other animals, life is serious; nothing interrupts
their slavery. Three of them were washing clothes in the river
under the window when I arrived, and they continued at it as long as
there was light to work by. One was apparently thirty; another--the
mother!--above fifty; the third--grandmother!--so old and worn and
gray she could have passed for eighty; I took her to be that old.
They had no waterproofs nor rubbers, of course; over their shoulders
they wore gunnysacks--simply conductors for rivers of water; some of
the volume reached the ground; the rest soaked in on the way.
"At last a vigorous fellow of thirty-five arrived, dry and
comfortable, smoking his pipe under his big umbrella in an open
donkey-cart-husband, son, and grandson of those women! He stood up
in the cart, sheltering himself, and began to superintend, issuing
his orders in a masterly tone of command, and showing temper when
they were not obeyed swiftly enough.
"Without complaint or murmur the drowned women patiently carried out
the orders, lifting the immense baskets of soggy, wrung-out clothing
into the cart and stowing them to the man's satisfaction. There
were six of the great baskets, and a man of mere ordinary strength
could not have lifted any one of them. The cart being full now, the
Frenchman descended, still sheltered by his umbrella, entered the
tavern, and the women went drooping homeward, trudging in the wake
of the cart, and soon were blended with the deluge and lost to
sight.
"When I went down into the public room, the Frenchman had his bottle
of wine and plate of food on a bare table black with grease, and was
"chomping" like a horse. He had the little religious paper which is
in everybody's hands on the Rhone borders, and was enlightening
himself with the histories of French saints who used to flee to the
desert in the Middle Ages to escape the contamination of woman. For
two hundred years France has been sending missionaries to other
savage lands. To spare to the needy from poverty like hers is fine
and true generosity."
But to get back to India--where, as my favorite poem says--
"Every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile."
It is because Bavaria and Austria and France have not introduced their
civilization to him yet. But Bavaria and Austria and France are on their
way. They are coming. They will rescue him; they will refine the
vileness out of him.
Some time during the forenoon, approaching the mountains, we changed from
the regular train to one composed of little canvas-sheltered cars that
skimmed along within a foot of the ground and seemed to be going fifty
miles an hour when they were really making about twenty. Each car had
seating capacity for half-a-dozen persons; and when the curtains were up
one was substantially out of doors, and could see everywhere, and get all
the breeze, and be luxuriously comfortable. It was not a pleasure
excursion in name only, but in fact.
After a while the stopped at a little wooden coop of a station just
within the curtain of the sombre jungle, a place with a deep and dense
forest of great trees and scrub and vines all about it. The royal Bengal
tiger is in great force there, and is very bold and unconventional. From
this lonely little station a message once went to the railway manager in
Calcutta: "Tiger eating station-master on front porch; telegraph
instructions."
It was there that I had my first tiger hunt. I killed thirteen. We were
presently away again, and the train began to climb the mountains. In one
place seven wild elephants crossed the track, but two of them got away
before I could overtake them. The railway journey up the mountain is
forty miles, and it takes eight hours to make it. It is so wild and
interesting and exciting and enchanting that it ought to take a week. As
for the vegetation, it is a museum. The jungle seemed to contain samples
of every rare and curious tree and bush that we had ever seen or heard
of. It is from that museum, I think, that the globe must have been
supplied with the trees and vines and shrubs that it holds precious.
The road is infinitely and charmingly crooked. It goes winding in and
out under lofty cliffs that are smothered in vines and foliage, and
around the edges of bottomless chasms; and all the way one glides by
files of picturesque natives, some carrying burdens up, others going down
from their work in the tea-gardens; and once there was a gaudy wedding
procession, all bright tinsel and color, and a bride, comely and girlish,
who peeped out from the curtains of her palanquin, exposing her face with
that pure delight which the young and happy take in sin for sin's own
sake.
By and by we were well up in the region of the clouds, and from that
breezy height we looked down and afar over a wonderful picture--the
Plains of India, stretching to the horizon, soft and fair, level as a
floor, shimmering with heat, mottled with cloud-shadows, and cloven with
shining rivers. Immediately below us, and receding down, down, down,
toward the valley, was a shaven confusion of hilltops, with ribbony roads
and paths squirming and snaking cream-yellow all over them and about
them, every curve and twist sharply distinct.
At an elevation of 6,000 feet we entered a thick cloud, and it shut out
the world and kept it shut out. We climbed 1,000 feet higher, then began
to descend, and presently got down to Darjeeling, which is 6,000 feet
above the level of the Plains.
We had passed many a mountain village on the way up, and seen some new
kinds of natives, among them many samples of the fighting Ghurkas. They
are not large men, but they are strong and resolute. There are no better
soldiers among Britain's native troops. And we had passed shoals of
their women climbing the forty miles of steep road from the valley to
their mountain homes, with tall baskets on their backs hitched to their
foreheads by a band, and containing a freightage weighing--I will not say
how many hundreds of pounds, for the sum is unbelievable. These were
young women, and they strode smartly along under these astonishing
burdens with the air of people out for a holiday. I was told that a
woman will carry a piano on her back all the way up the mountain; and
that more than once a woman had done it. If these were old women I
should regard the Ghurkas as no more civilized than the Europeans.
At the railway station at Darjeeling you find plenty of cab-substitutes
--open coffins, in which you sit, and are then borne on men's shoulders up
the steep roads into the town.
Up there we found a fairly comfortable hotel, the property of an
indiscriminate and incoherent landlord, who looks after nothing, but
leaves everything to his army of Indian servants. No, he does look after
the bill--to be just to him--and the tourist cannot do better than follow
his example. I was told by a resident that the summit of Kinchinjunga is
often hidden in the clouds, and that sometimes a tourist has waited
twenty-two days and then been obliged to go away without a sight of it.
And yet went not disappointed; for when he got his hotel bill he
recognized that he was now seeing the highest thing in the Himalayas.
But this is probably a lie.
After lecturing I went to the Club that night, and that was a comfortable
place. It is loftily situated, and looks out over a vast spread of
scenery; from it you can see where the boundaries of three countries come
together, some thirty miles away; Thibet is one of them, Nepaul another,
and I think Herzegovina was the other. Apparently, in every town and
city in India the gentlemen of the British civil and military service
have a club; sometimes it is a palatial one, always it is pleasant and
homelike. The hotels are not always as good as they might be, and the
stranger who has access to the Club is grateful for his privilege and
knows how to value it.
Next day was Sunday. Friends came in the gray dawn with horses, and my
party rode away to a distant point where Kinchinjunga and Mount Everest
show up best, but I stayed at home for a private view; for it was very
old, and I was not acquainted with the horses, any way. I got a pipe and
a few blankets and sat for two hours at the window, and saw the sun drive
away the veiling gray and touch up the snow-peaks one after another with
pale pink splashes and delicate washes of gold, and finally flood the
whole mighty convulsion of snow-mountains with a deluge of rich
splendors.
Kinchinjunga's peak was but fitfully visible, but in the between times it
was vividly clear against the sky--away up there in the blue dome more
than 28,000 feet above sea level--the loftiest land I had ever seen, by
12,000 feet or more. It was 45 miles away. Mount Everest is a thousand
feet higher, but it was not a part of that sea of mountains piled up
there before me, so I did not see it; but I did not care, because I think
that mountains that are as high as that are disagreeable.
I changed from the back to the front of the house and spent the rest of
the morning there, watching the swarthy strange tribes flock by from
their far homes in the Himalayas. All ages and both sexes were
represented, and the breeds were quite new to me, though the costumes of
the Thibetans made them look a good deal like Chinamen. The prayer-wheel
was a frequent feature. It brought me near to these people, and made
them seem kinfolk of mine. Through our preacher we do much of our
praying by proxy. We do not whirl him around a stick, as they do, but
that is merely a detail. The swarm swung briskly by, hour after hour, a
strange and striking pageant. It was wasted there, and it seemed a pity.
It should have been sent streaming through the cities of Europe or
America, to refresh eyes weary of the pale monotonies of the
circus-pageant. These people were bound for the bazar, with things to
sell. We went down there, later, and saw that novel congress of the wild
peoples, and plowed here and there through it, and concluded that it
would be worth coming from Calcutta to see, even if there were no
Kinchinjunga and Everest.
CHAPTER LVI.
There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he
can't afford it, and when he can.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
On Monday and Tuesday at sunrise we again had fair-to-middling views of
the stupendous mountains; then, being well cooled off and refreshed, we
were ready to chance the weather of the lower world once more.
We traveled up hill by the regular train five miles to the summit, then
changed to a little canvas-canopied hand-car for the 35-mile descent. It
was the size of a sleigh, it had six seats and was so low that it seemed
to rest on the ground. It had no engine or other propelling power, and
needed none to help it fly down those steep inclines. It only needed a
strong brake, to modify its flight, and it had that. There was a story
of a disastrous trip made down the mountain once in this little car by
the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, when the car jumped the track and
threw its passengers over a precipice. It was not true, but the story
had value for me, for it made me nervous, and nervousness wakes a person
up and makes him alive and alert, and heightens the thrill of a new and
doubtful experience. The car could really jump the track, of course; a
pebble on the track, placed there by either accident or malice, at a
sharp curve where one might strike it before the eye could discover it,
could derail the car and fling it down into India; and the fact that the
lieutenant-governor had escaped was no proof that I would have the same
luck. And standing there, looking down upon the Indian Empire from the
airy altitude of 7,000 feet, it seemed unpleasantly far, dangerously far,
to be flung from a handcar.
But after all, there was but small danger-for me. What there was, was
for Mr. Pugh, inspector of a division of the Indian police, in whose
company and protection we had come from Calcutta. He had seen long
service as an artillery officer, was less nervous than I was, and so he
was to go ahead of us in a pilot hand-car, with a Ghurka and another
native; and the plan was that when we should see his car jump over a
precipice we must put on our break [sp.] and send for another pilot.
It was a good arrangement. Also Mr. Barnard, chief engineer of the
mountain-division of the road, was to take personal charge of our car,
and he had been down the mountain in it many a time.
Everything looked safe. Indeed, there was but one questionable detail
left: the regular train was to follow us as soon as we should start, and
it might run over us. Privately, I thought it would.
The road fell sharply down in front of us and went corkscrewing in and
out around the crags and precipices, down, down, forever down, suggesting
nothing so exactly or so uncomfortably as a croaked toboggan slide with
no end to it. Mr. Pugh waved his flag and started, like an arrow from a
bow, and before I could get out of the car we were gone too. I had
previously had but one sensation like the shock of that departure, and
that was the gaspy shock that took my breath away the first time that I
was discharged from the summit of a toboggan slide. But in both
instances the sensation was pleasurable--intensely so; it was a sudden
and immense exaltation, a mixed ecstasy of deadly fright and unimaginable
joy. I believe that this combination makes the perfection of human
delight.
The pilot car's flight down the mountain suggested the swoop of a swallow
that is skimming the ground, so swiftly and smoothly and gracefully it
swept down the long straight reaches and soared in and out of the bends
and around the corners. We raced after it, and seemed to flash by the
capes and crags with the speed of light; and now and then we almost
overtook it--and had hopes; but it was only playing with us; when we got
near, it released its brake, make a spring around a corner, and the next
time it spun into view, a few seconds later, it looked as small as a
wheelbarrow, it was so far away. We played with the train in the same
way. We often got out to gather flowers or sit on a precipice and look
at the scenery, then presently we would hear a dull and growing roar, and
the long coils of the train would come into sight behind and above us;
but we did not need to start till the locomotive was close down upon us
--then we soon left it far behind. It had to stop at every station,
therefore it was not an embarrassment to us. Our brake was a good piece
of machinery; it could bring the car to a standstill on a slope as steep
as a house-roof.
The scenery was grand and varied and beautiful, and there was no hurry;
we could always stop and examine it. There was abundance of time. We
did not need to hamper the train; if it wanted the road, we could switch
off and let it go by, then overtake it and pass it later. We stopped at
one place to see the Gladstone Cliff, a great crag which the ages and the
weather have sculptured into a recognizable portrait of the venerable
statesman. Mr. Gladstone is a stockholder in the road, and Nature began
this portrait ten thousand years ago, with the idea of having the
compliment ready in time for the event.
We saw a banyan tree which sent down supporting stems from branches which
were sixty feet above the ground. That is, I suppose it was a banyan;
its bark resembled that of the great banyan in the botanical gardens at
Calcutta, that spider-legged thing with its wilderness of vegetable
columns. And there were frequent glimpses of a totally leafless tree
upon whose innumerable twigs and branches a cloud of crimson butterflies
had lighted--apparently. In fact these brilliant red butterflies were
flowers, but the illusion was good. Afterward in South Africa, I saw
another splendid effect made by red flowers. This flower was probably
called the torch-plant--should have been so named, anyway. It had a
slender stem several feet high, and from its top stood up a single tongue
of flame, an intensely red flower of the size and shape of a small
corn-cob. The stems stood three or four feet apart all over a great
hill-slope that was a mile long, and make one think of what the Place
de la Concorde would be if its myriad lights were red instead of white
and yellow.
A few miles down the mountain we stopped half an hour to see a Thibetan
dramatic performance. It was in the open air on the hillside. The
audience was composed of Thibetans, Ghurkas, and other unusual people.
The costumes of the actors were in the last degree outlandish, and the
performance was in keeping with the clothes. To an accompaniment of
barbarous noises the actors stepped out one after another and began to
spin around with immense swiftness and vigor and violence, chanting the
while, and soon the whole troupe would be spinning and chanting and
raising the dust. They were performing an ancient and celebrated
historical play, and a Chinaman explained it to me in pidjin English as
it went along. The play was obscure enough without the explanation; with
the explanation added, it was (opake). As a drama this ancient
historical work of art was defective, I thought, but as a wild and
barbarous spectacle the representation was beyond criticism.
Far down the mountain we got out to look at a piece of remarkable
loop-engineering--a spiral where the road curves upon itself with such
abruptness that when the regular train came down and entered the loop, we
stood over it and saw the locomotive disappear under our bridge, then in
a few moments appear again, chasing its own tail; and we saw it gain on
it, overtake it, draw ahead past the rear cars, and run a race with that
end of the train. It was like a snake swallowing itself.
Half-way down the mountain we stopped about an hour at Mr. Barnard's
house for refreshments, and while we were sitting on the veranda looking
at the distant panorama of hills through a gap in the forest, we came
very near seeing a leopard kill a calf.--[It killed it the day before.]
--It is a wild place and lovely. From the woods all about came the songs
of birds,--among them the contributions of a couple of birds which I was
not then acquainted with: the brain-fever bird and the coppersmith. The
song of the brain-fever demon starts on a low but steadily rising key,
and is a spiral twist which augments in intensity and severity with each
added spiral, growing sharper and sharper, and more and more painful,
more and more agonizing, more and more maddening, intolerable,
unendurable, as it bores deeper and deeper and deeper into the listener's
brain, until at last the brain fever comes as a relief and the man dies.
I am bringing some of these birds home to America. They will be a great
curiosity there, and it is believed that in our climate they will
multiply like rabbits.
The coppersmith bird's note at a certain distance away has the ring of a
sledge on granite; at a certain other distance the hammering has a more
metallic ring, and you might think that the bird was mending a copper
kettle; at another distance it has a more woodeny thump, but it is a
thump that is full of energy, and sounds just like starting a bung. So
he is a hard bird to name with a single name; he is a stone-breaker,
coppersmith, and bung-starter, and even then he is not completely named,
for when he is close by you find that there is a soft, deep, melodious
quality in his thump, and for that no satisfying name occurs to you. You
will not mind his other notes, but when he camps near enough for you to
hear that one, you presently find that his measured and monotonous
repetition of it is beginning to disturb you; next it will weary you,
soon it will distress you, and before long each thump will hurt your
head; if this goes on, you will lose your mind with the pain and misery
of it, and go crazy. I am bringing some of these birds home to America.
There is nothing like them there. They will be a great surprise, and it
is said that in a climate like ours they will surpass expectation for
fecundity.
I am bringing some nightingales, too, and some cue-owls. I got them in
Italy. The song of the nightingale is the deadliest known to
ornithology. That demoniacal shriek can kill at thirty yards. The note
of the cue-owl is infinitely soft and sweet--soft and sweet as the
whisper of a flute. But penetrating--oh, beyond belief; it can bore
through boiler-iron. It is a lingering note, and comes in triplets, on
the one unchanging key: hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o; then a silence of
fifteen seconds, then the triplet again; and so on, all night. At first
it is divine; then less so; then trying; then distressing; then
excruciating; then agonizing, and at the end of two hours the listener is
a maniac.
And so, presently we took to the hand-car and went flying down the
mountain again; flying and stopping, flying and stopping, till at last we
were in the plain once more and stowed for Calcutta in the regular train.
That was the most enjoyable day I have spent in the earth. For rousing,
tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that approaches the
bird-flight down the Himalayas in a hand-car. It has no fault, no
blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty-five miles of it
instead of five hundred.
CHAPTER LVII.
She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what
you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a
parrot.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man
or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun
visits on his round. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing over
looked. Always, when you think you have come to the end of her
tremendous specialties and have finished banging tags upon her as the
Land of the Thug, the Land of the Plague, the Land of Famine, the Land of
Giant Illusions, the Land of Stupendous Mountains, and so forth, another
specialty crops up and another tag is required. I have been overlooking
the fact that India is by an unapproachable supremacy--the Land of
Murderous Wild Creatures. Perhaps it will be simplest to throw away the
tags and generalize her with one all-comprehensive name, as the Land of
Wonders.
For many years the British Indian Government has been trying to destroy
the murderous wild creatures, and has spent a great deal of money in the
effort. The annual official returns show that the undertaking is a
difficult one.
These returns exhibit a curious annual uniformity in results; the sort of
uniformity which you find in the annual output of suicides in the world's
capitals, and the proportions of deaths by this, that, and the other
disease. You can always come close to foretelling how many suicides will
occur in Paris, London, and New York, next year, and also how many deaths
will result from cancer, consumption, dog-bite, falling out of the
window, getting run over by cabs, etc., if you know the statistics of
those matters for the present year. In the same way, with one year's
Indian statistics before you, you can guess closely at how many people
were killed in that Empire by tigers during the previous year, and the
year before that, and the year before that, and at how many were killed
in each of those years by bears, how many by wolves, and how many by
snakes; and you can also guess closely at how many people are going to be
killed each year for the coming five years by each of those agencies.
You can also guess closely at how many of each agency the government is
going to kill each year for the next five years.
I have before me statistics covering a period of six consecutive years.
By these, I know that in India the tiger kills something over 800 persons
every year, and that the government responds by killing about double as
many tigers every year. In four of the six years referred to, the tiger
got 800 odd; in one of the remaining two years he got only 700, but in
the other remaining year he made his average good by scoring 917. He is
always sure of his average. Anyone who bets that the tiger will kill
2,400 people in India in any three consecutive years has invested his
money in a certainty; anyone who bets that he will kill 2,600 in any
three consecutive years, is absolutely sure to lose.
As strikingly uniform as are the statistics of suicide, they are not any
more so than are those of the tiger's annual output of slaughtered human
beings in India. The government's work is quite uniform, too; it about
doubles the tiger's average. In six years the tiger killed 5,000
persons, minus 50; in the same six years 10,000 tigers were killed, minus
400.
The wolf kills nearly as many people as the tiger--700 a year to the
tiger's 800 odd--but while he is doing it, more than 5,000 of his tribe
fall.
The leopard kills an average of 230 people per year, but loses 3,300 of
his own mess while he is doing it.
The bear kills 100 people per year at a cost of 1,250 of his own tribe.
The tiger, as the figures show, makes a very handsome fight against man.
But it is nothing to the elephant's fight. The king of beasts, the lord
of the jungle, loses four of his mess per year, but he kills forty--five
persons to make up for it.
But when it comes to killing cattle, the lord of the jungle is not
interested. He kills but 100 in six years--horses of hunters, no doubt
--but in the same six the tiger kills more than 84,000, the leopard
100,000, the bear 4,000, the wolf 70,000, the hyena more than 13,000,
other wild beasts 27,000, and the snakes 19,000, a grand total of more
than 300,000; an average of 50,000 head per year.
In response, the government kills, in the six years, a total of 3,201,232
wild beasts and snakes. Ten for one.
It will be perceived that the snakes are not much interested in cattle;
they kill only 3,000 odd per year. The snakes are much more interested
in man. India swarms with deadly snakes. At the head of the list is the
cobra, the deadliest known to the world, a snake whose bite kills where
the rattlesnake's bite merely entertains.
In India, the annual man-killings by snakes are as uniform, as regular,
and as forecastable as are the tiger-average and the suicide-average.
Anyone who bets that in India, in any three consecutive years the snakes
will kill 49,500 persons, will win his bet; and anyone who bets that in
India in any three consecutive years, the snakes will kill 53,500
persons, will lose his bet. In India the snakes kill 17,000 people a
year; they hardly ever fall short of it; they as seldom exceed it. An
insurance actuary could take the Indian census tables and the
government's snake tables and tell you within sixpence how much it would
be worth to insure a man against death by snake-bite there. If I had a
dollar for every person killed per year in India, I would rather have it
than any other property, as it is the only property in the world not
subject to shrinkage.
I should like to have a royalty on the government-end of the snake
business, too, and am in London now trying to get it; but when I get it
it is not going to be as regular an income as the other will be if I get
that; I have applied for it. The snakes transact their end of the
business in a more orderly and systematic way than the government
transacts its end of it, because the snakes have had a long experience
and know all about the traffic. You can make sure that the government
will never kill fewer than 110,000 snakes in a year, and that it will
newer quite reach 300,000 too much room for oscillation; good speculative
stock, to bear or bull, and buy and sell long and short, and all that
kind of thing, but not eligible for investment like the other. The man
that speculates in the government's snake crop wants to go carefully. I
would not advise a man to buy a single crop at all--I mean a crop of
futures for the possible wobble is something quite extraordinary. If he
can buy six future crops in a bunch, seller to deliver 1,500,000
altogether, that is another matter. I do not know what snakes are worth
now, but I know what they would be worth then, for the statistics show
that the seller could not come within 427,000 of carrying out his
contract. However, I think that a person who speculates in snakes is a
fool, anyway. He always regrets it afterwards.
To finish the statistics. In six years the wild beasts kill 20,000
persons, and the snakes kill 103,000. In the same six the government
kills 1,073,546 snakes. Plenty left.
There are narrow escapes in India. In the very jungle where I killed
sixteen tigers and all those elephants, a cobra bit me but it got well;
everyone was surprised. This could not happen twice in ten years,
perhaps. Usually death would result in fifteen minutes.
We struck out westward or northwestward from Calcutta on an itinerary of
a zig-zag sort, which would in the course of time carry us across India
to its northwestern corner and the border of Afghanistan. The first part
of the trip carried us through a great region which was an endless
garden--miles and miles of the beautiful flower from whose juices comes
the opium, and at Muzaffurpore we were in the midst of the indigo
culture; thence by a branch road to the Ganges at a point near Dinapore,
and by a train which would have missed the connection by a week but for
the thoughtfulness of some British officers who were along, and who knew
the ways of trains that are run by natives without white supervision.
This train stopped at every village; for no purpose connected with
business, apparently. We put out nothing, we took nothing aboard. The
train bands stepped ashore and gossiped with friends a quarter of an
hour, then pulled out and repeated this at the succeeding villages. We
had thirty-five miles to go and six hours to do it in, but it was plain
that we were not going to make it. It was then that the English officers
said it was now necessary to turn this gravel train into an express. So
they gave the engine-driver a rupee and told him to fly. It was a simple
remedy. After that we made ninety miles an hour. We crossed the Ganges
just at dawn, made our connection, and went to Benares, where we stayed
twenty-four hours and inspected that strange and fascinating piety-hive
again; then left for Lucknow, a city which is perhaps the most
conspicuous of the many monuments of British fortitude and valor that are
scattered about the earth.
The heat was pitiless, the flat plains were destitute of grass, and baked
dry by the sun they were the color of pale dust, which was flying in
clouds. But it was much hotter than this when the relieving forces
marched to Lucknow in the time of the Mutiny. Those were the days of 138
deg. in the shade.
CHAPTER, LVIII.
Make it a point to do something every day that you don't want to do.
This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty
without pain.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
It seems to be settled, now, that among the many causes from which the
Great Mutiny sprang, the main one was the annexation of the kingdom of
Oudh by the East India Company--characterized by Sir Henry Lawrence as
"the most unrighteous act that was ever committed." In the spring of
1857, a mutinous spirit was observable in many of the native garrisons,
and it grew day by day and spread wider and wider. The younger military
men saw something very serious in it, and would have liked to take hold
of it vigorously and stamp it out promptly; but they were not in
authority. Old-men were in the high places of the army--men who should
have been retired long before, because of their great age--and they
regarded the matter as a thing of no consequence. They loved their
native soldiers, and would not believe that anything could move them to
revolt. Everywhere these obstinate veterans listened serenely to the
rumbling of the volcanoes under them, and said it was nothing.
And so the propagators of mutiny had everything their own way. They
moved from camp to camp undisturbed, and painted to the native soldier
the wrongs his people were suffering at the hands of the English, and
made his heart burn for revenge. They were able to point to two facts of
formidable value as backers of their persuasions: In Clive's day, native
armies were incoherent mobs, and without effective arms; therefore, they
were weak against Clive's organized handful of well-armed men, but the
thing was the other way, now. The British forces were native; they had
been trained by the British, organized by the British, armed by the
British, all the power was in their hands--they were a club made by
British hands to beat out British brains with. There was nothing to
oppose their mass, nothing but a few weak battalions of British soldiers
scattered about India, a force not worth speaking of. This argument,
taken alone, might not have succeeded, for the bravest and best Indian
troops had a wholesome dread of the white soldier, whether he was weak or
strong; but the agitators backed it with their second and best point
prophecy--a prophecy a hundred years old. The Indian is open to prophecy
at all times; argument may fail to convince him, but not prophecy. There
was a prophecy that a hundred years from the year of that battle of
Clive's which founded the British Indian Empire, the British power would
be overthrown and swept away by the natives.
The Mutiny broke out at Meerut on the 10th of May, 1857, and fired a
train of tremendous historical explosions. Nana Sahib's massacre of the
surrendered garrison of Cawnpore occurred in June, and the long siege of
Lucknow began. The military history of England is old and great, but I
think it must be granted that the crushing of the Mutiny is the greatest
chapter in it. The British were caught asleep and unprepared. They were
a few thousands, swallowed up in an ocean of hostile populations. It
would take months to inform England and get help, but they did not falter
or stop to count the odds, but with English resolution and English
devotion they took up their task, and went stubbornly on with it, through
good fortune and bad, and fought the most unpromising fight that one may
read of in fiction or out of it, and won it thoroughly.
The Mutiny broke out so suddenly, and spread with such rapidity that
there was but little time for occupants of weak outlying stations to
escape to places of safety. Attempts were made, of course, but they were
attended by hardships as bitter as death in the few cases which were
successful; for the heat ranged between 120 and 138 in the shade; the way
led through hostile peoples, and food and water were hardly to be had.
For ladies and children accustomed to ease and comfort and plenty, such a
journey must have been a cruel experience. Sir G. O. Trevelyan quotes
an example:
"This is what befell Mrs. M----, the wife of the surgeon at a
certain station on the southern confines of the insurrection. 'I
heard,' she says, 'a number of shots fired, and, looking out, I saw
my husband driving furiously from the mess-house, waving his whip.
I ran to him, and, seeing a bearer with my child in his arms, I
caught her up, and got into the buggy. At the mess-house we found
all the officers assembled, together with sixty sepoys, who had
remained faithful. We went off in one large party, amidst a general
conflagration of our late homes. We reached the caravanserai at
Chattapore the next morning, and thence started for Callinger. At
this point our sepoy escort deserted us. We were fired upon by
match-lockmen, and one officer was shot dead. We heard, likewise,
that the people had risen at Callinger, so we returned and walked
back ten miles that day. M---- and I carried the child alternately.
Presently Mrs. Smalley died of sunstroke. We had no food amongst
us. An officer kindly lent us a horse. We were very faint. The
Major died, and was buried; also the Sergeant-major and some women.
The bandsmen left us on the nineteenth of June. We were fired at
again by match-lockmen, and changed direction for Allahabad. Our
party consisted of nine gentlemen, two children, the sergeant and
his wife. On the morning of the twentieth, Captain Scott took
Lottie on to his horse. I was riding behind my husband, and she was
so crushed between us. She was two years old on the first of the
month. We were both weak through want of food and the effect of the
sun. Lottie and I had no head covering. M---- had a sepoy's cap I
found on the ground. Soon after sunrise we were followed by
villagers armed with clubs and spears. One of them struck Captain
Scott's horse on the leg. He galloped off with Lottie, and my poor
husband never saw his child again. We rode on several miles,
keeping away from villages, and then crossed the river. Our thirst
was extreme. M---- had dreadful cramps, so that I had to hold him
on the horse. I was very uneasy about him. The day before I saw
the drummer's wife eating chupatties, and asked her to give a piece
to the child, which she did. I now saw water in a ravine. The
descent was steep, and our only drinkingvessel was M----'s cap. Our
horse got water, and I bathed my neck. I had no stockings, and my
feet were torn and blistered. Two peasants came in sight, and we
were frightened and rode off. The sergeant held our horse, and
M---- put me up and mounted. I think he must have got suddenly faint,
for I fell and he over me, on the road, when the horse started off.
Some time before he said, and Barber, too, that he could not live
many hours. I felt he was dying before we came to the ravine. He
told me his wishes about his children and myself, and took leave.
My brain seemed burnt up. No tears came. As soon as we fell, the
sergeant let go the horse, and it went off; so that escape was cut
off. We sat down on the ground waiting for death. Poor fellow! he
was very weak; his thirst was frightful, and I went to get him
water. Some villagers came, and took my rupees and watch. I took
off my wedding-ring, and twisted it in my hair, and replaced the
guard. I tore off the skirt of my dress to bring water in, but was
no use, for when I returned my beloved's eyes were fixed, and,
though I called and tried to restore him, and poured water into his
mouth, it only rattled in his throat. He never spoke to me again.
I held him in my arms till he sank gradually down. I felt frantic,
but could not cry. I was alone. I bound his head and face in my
dress, for there was no earth to buy him. The pain in my hands and
feet was dreadful. I went down to the ravine, and sat in the water
on a stone, hoping to get off at night and look for Lottie. When I
came back from the water, I saw that they had not taken her little
watch, chain, and seals, so I tied them under my petticoat. In an
hour, about thirty villagers came, they dragged me out of the
ravine, and took off my jacket, and found the little chain. They
then dragged me to a village, mocking me all the way, and disputing
as to whom I was to belong to. The whole population came to look at
me. I asked for a bedstead, and lay down outside the door of a hut.
They had a dozen of cows, and yet refused me milk. When night came,
and the village was quiet, some old woman brought me a leafful of
rice. I was too parched to eat, and they gave me water. The
morning after a neighboring Rajah sent a palanquin and a horseman to
fetch me, who told me that a little child and three Sahibs had come
to his master's house. And so the poor mother found her lost one,
'greatly blistered,' poor little creature. It is not for Europeans
in India to pray that their flight be not in the winter."
In the first days of June the aged general, Sir Hugh Wheeler commanding
the forces at Cawnpore, was deserted by his native troops; then he moved
out of the fort and into an exposed patch of open flat ground and built a
four-foot mud wall around it. He had with him a few hundred white
soldiers and officers, and apparently more women and children than
soldiers. He was short of provisions, short of arms, short of
ammunition, short of military wisdom, short of everything but courage and
devotion to duty. The defense of that open lot through twenty-one days
and nights of hunger, thirst, Indian heat, and a never-ceasing storm of
bullets, bombs, and cannon-balls--a defense conducted, not by the aged
and infirm general, but by a young officer named Moore--is one of the
most heroic episodes in history. When at last the Nana found it
impossible to conquer these starving men and women with powder and ball,
he resorted to treachery, and that succeeded. He agreed to supply them
with food and send them to Allahabad in boats. Their mud wall and their
barracks were in ruins, their provisions were at the point of exhaustion,
they had done all that the brave could do, they had conquered an
honorable compromise,--their forces had been fearfully reduced by
casualties and by disease, they were not able to continue the contest
longer. They came forth helpless but suspecting no treachery, the Nana's
host closed around them, and at a signal from a trumpet the massacre
began. About two hundred women and children were spared--for the
present--but all the men except three or four were killed. Among the
incidents of the massacre quoted by Sir G. O. Trevelyan, is this:
"When, after the lapse of some twenty minutes, the dead began to
outnumber the living;--when the fire slackened, as the marks grew
few and far between; then the troopers who had been drawn up to the
right of the temple plunged into the river, sabre between teeth, and
pistol in hand. Thereupon two half-caste Christian women, the wives
of musicians in the band of the Fifty-sixth, witnessed a scene which
should not be related at second-hand. 'In the boat where I was to
have gone,' says Mrs. Bradshaw, confirmed throughout by Mrs. Betts,
'was the school-mistress and twenty-two misses. General Wheeler
came last in a palkee. They carried him into the water near the
boat. I stood close by. He said, 'Carry me a little further
towards the boat.' But a trooper said, 'No, get out here.' As the
General got out of the palkee, head-foremost, the trooper gave him a
cut with his sword into the neck, and he fell into the water. My
son was killed near him. I saw it; alas! alas! Some were stabbed
with bayonets; others cut down. Little infants were torn in pieces.
We saw it; we did; and tell you only what we saw. Other children
were stabbed and thrown into the river. The schoolgirls were burnt
to death. I saw their clothes and hair catch fire. In the water, a
few paces off, by the next boat, we saw the youngest daughter of
Colonel Williams. A sepoy was going to kill her with his bayonet.
She said, 'My father was always kind to sepoys.' He turned away,
and just then a villager struck her on the head with a club, and she
fell into the water. These people likewise saw good Mr. Moncrieff,
the clergyman, take a book from his pocket that he never had leisure
to open, and heard him commence a prayer for mercy which he was not
permitted to conclude. Another deponent observed an European making
for a drain like a scared water-rat, when some boatmen, armed with
cudgels, cut off his retreat, and beat him down dead into the mud."
The women and children who had been reserved from the massacre were
imprisoned during a fortnight in a small building, one story high--a
cramped place, a slightly modified Black Hole of Calcutta. They were
waiting in suspense; there was none who could foretaste their fate.
Meantime the news of the massacre had traveled far and an army of
rescuers with Havelock at its head was on its way--at least an army which
hoped to be rescuers. It was crossing the country by forced marches, and
strewing its way with its own dead men struck down by cholera, and by a
heat which reached 135 deg. It was in a vengeful fury, and it stopped
for nothing neither heat, nor fatigue, nor disease, nor human opposition.
It tore its impetuous way through hostile forces, winning victory after
victory, but still striding on and on, not halting to count results. And
at last, after this extraordinary march, it arrived before the walls of
Cawnpore, met the Nana's massed strength, delivered a crushing defeat,
and entered.
But too late--only a few hours too late. For at the last moment the Nana
had decided upon the massacre of the captive women and children, and had
commissioned three Mohammedans and two Hindoos to do the work. Sir G.
O. Trevelyan says:
"Thereupon the five men entered. It was the short gloaming of
Hindostan--the hour when ladies take their evening drive. She who
had accosted the officer was standing in the doorway. With her were
the native doctor and two Hindoo menials. That much of the business
might be seen from the veranda, but all else was concealed amidst
the interior gloom. Shrieks and scuffing acquainted those without
that the journeymen were earning their hire. Survur Khan soon
emerged with his sword broken off at the hilt. He procured another
from the Nana's house, and a few minutes after appeared again on the
same errand. The third blade was of better temper; or perhaps the
thick of the work was already over. By the time darkness had closed
in, the men came forth and locked up the house for the night. Then
the screams ceased, but the groans lasted till morning.
"The sun rose as usual. When he had been up nearly three hours the
five repaired to the scene of their labors over night. They were
attended by a few sweepers, who proceeded to transfer the contents
of the house to a dry well situated behind some trees which grew
hard by. 'The bodies,' says one who was present throughout, 'were
dragged out, most of them by the hair of the head. Those who had
clothing worth taking were stripped. Some of the women were alive.
I cannot say how many; but three could speak. They prayed for the
sake of God that an end might be put to their sufferings. I
remarked one very stout woman, a half-caste, who was severely
wounded in both arms, who entreated to be killed. She and two or
three others were placed against the bank of the cut by which
bullocks go down in drawing water. The dead were first thrown in.
Yes: there was a great crowd looking on; they were standing along
the walls of the compound. They were principally city people and
villagers. Yes: there were also sepoys. Three boys were alive.
They were fair children. The eldest, I think, must have been six or
seven, and the youngest five years. They were running around the
well (where else could they go to?), and there was none to save
them. No one said a word or tried to save them.'
"At length the smallest of them made an infantile attempt to get
away. The little thing had been frightened past bearing by the
murder of one of the surviving ladies. He thus attracted the
observation of a native who flung him and his companions down the
well."
The soldiers had made a march of eighteen days, almost without rest, to
save the women and the children, and now they were too late--all were
dead and the assassin had flown. What happened then, Trevelyan hesitated
to put into words. "Of what took place, the less said is the better."
Then he continues:
"But there was a spectacle to witness which might excuse much.
Those who, straight from the contested field, wandered sobbing
through the rooms of the ladies' house, saw what it were well could
the outraged earth have straightway hidden. The inner apartment was
ankle-deep in blood. The plaster was scored with sword-cuts; not
high up as where men have fought, but low down, and about the
corners, as if a creature had crouched to avoid the blow. Strips of
dresses, vainly tied around the handles of the doors, signified the
contrivance to which feminine despair had resorted as a means of
keeping out the murderers. Broken combs were there, and the frills
of children's trousers, and torn cuffs and pinafores, and little
round hats, and one or two shoes with burst latchets, and one or two
daguerreotype cases with cracked glasses. An officer picked up a
few curls, preserved in a bit of cardboard, and marked 'Ned's hair,
with love'; but around were strewn locks, some near a yard in
length, dissevered, not as a keepsake, by quite other scissors."
The battle of Waterloo was fought on the 18th of June, 1815. I do not
state this fact as a reminder to the reader, but as news to him. For a
forgotten fact is news when it comes again. Writers of books have the
fashion of whizzing by vast and renowned historical events with the
remark, "The details of this tremendous episode are too familiar to the
reader to need repeating here." They know that that is not true. It is
a low kind of flattery. They know that the reader has forgotten every
detail of it, and that nothing of the tremendous event is left in his
mind but a vague and formless luminous smudge. Aside from the desire to
flatter the reader, they have another reason for making the remark-two
reasons, indeed. They do not remember the details themselves, and do not
want the trouble of hunting them up and copying them out; also, they are
afraid that if they search them out and print them they will be scoffed
at by the book-reviewers for retelling those worn old things which are
familiar to everybody. They should not mind the reviewer's jeer; he
doesn't remember any of the worn old things until the book which he is
reviewing has retold them to him.
I have made the quoted remark myself, at one time and another, but I was
not doing it to flatter the reader; I was merely doing it to save work.
If I had known the details without brushing up, I would have put them in;
but I didn't, and I did not want the labor of posting myself; so I said,
"The details of this tremendous episode are too familiar to the reader to
need repeating here." I do not like that kind of a lie; still, it does
save work.
I am not trying to get out of repeating the details of the Siege of
Lucknow in fear of the reviewer; I am not leaving them out in fear that
they would not interest the reader; I am leaving them out partly to save
work; mainly for lack of room. It is a pity, too; for there is not a
dull place anywhere in the great story.
Ten days before the outbreak (May 10th) of the Mutiny, all was serene at
Lucknow, the huge capital of Oudh, the kingdom which had recently been
seized by the India Company. There was a great garrison, composed of
about 7,000 native troops and between 700 and 800 whites. These white
soldiers and their families were probably the only people of their race
there; at their elbow was that swarming population of warlike natives, a
race of born soldiers, brave, daring, and fond of fighting. On high
ground just outside the city stood the palace of that great personage,
the Resident, the representative of British power and authority. It
stood in the midst of spacious grounds, with its due complement of
outbuildings, and the grounds were enclosed by a wall--a wall not for
defense, but for privacy. The mutinous spirit was in the air, but the
whites were not afraid, and did not feel much troubled.
Then came the outbreak at Meerut, then the capture of Delhi by the
mutineers; in June came the three-weeks leaguer of Sir Hugh Wheeler in
his open lot at Cawnpore--40 miles distant from Lucknow--then the
treacherous massacre of that gallant little garrison; and now the great
revolt was in full flower, and the comfortable condition of things at
Lucknow was instantly changed.
There was an outbreak there, and Sir Henry Lawrence marched out of the
Residency on the 30th of June to put it down, but was defeated with heavy
loss, and had difficulty in getting back again. That night the memorable
siege of the Residency--called the siege of Lucknow--began. Sir Henry
was killed three days later, and Brigadier Inglis succeeded him in
command.
Outside of the Residency fence was an immense host of hostile and
confident native besiegers; inside it were 480 loyal native soldiers, 730
white ones, and 500 women and children.
In those days the English garrisons always managed to hamper themselves
sufficiently with women and children.
The natives established themselves in houses close at hand and began to
rain bullets and cannon-balls into the Residency; and this they kept up,
night and day, during four months and a half, the little garrison
industriously replying all the time. The women and children soon became
so used to the roar of the guns that it ceased to disturb their sleep.
The children imitated siege and defense in their play. The women--with
any pretext, or with none--would sally out into the storm-swept grounds.
The defense was kept up week after week, with stubborn fortitude, in the
midst of death, which came in many forms--by bullet, small-pox, cholera,
and by various diseases induced by unpalatable and insufficient food, by
the long hours of wearying and exhausting overwork in the daily and
nightly battle in the oppressive Indian heat, and by the broken rest
caused by the intolerable pest of mosquitoes, flies, mice, rats, and
fleas.
Six weeks after the beginning of the siege more than one-half of the
original force of white soldiers was dead, and close upon three-fifths of
the original native force.
But the fighting went on just the same. The enemy mined, the English
counter-mined, and, turn about, they blew up each other's posts. The
Residency grounds were honey-combed with the enemy's tunnels. Deadly
courtesies were constantly exchanged--sorties by the English in the
night; rushes by the enemy in the night--rushes whose purpose was to
breach the walls or scale them; rushes which cost heavily, and always
failed.
The ladies got used to all the horrors of war--the shrieks of mutilated
men, the sight of blood and death. Lady Inglis makes this mention in her
diary:
"Mrs. Bruere's nurse was carried past our door to-day, wounded in
the eye. To extract the bullet it was found necessary to take out
the eye--a fearful operation. Her mistress held her while it was
performed."
The first relieving force failed to relieve. It was under Havelock and
Outram; and arrived when the siege had been going on for three months.
It fought its desperate way to Lucknow, then fought its way through the
city against odds of a hundred to one, and entered the Residency; but
there was not enough left of it, then, to do any good. It lost more men
in its last fight than it found in the Residency when it got in. It
became captive itself.
The fighting and starving and dying by bullets and disease went steadily
on. Both sides fought with energy and industry. Captain Birch puts this
striking incident in evidence. He is speaking of the third month of the
siege:
"As an instance of the heavy firing brought to bear on our position
this month may be mentioned the cutting down of the upper story of a
brick building simply by musketry firring. This building was in a
most exposed position. All the shots which just missed the top of
the rampart cut into the dead wall pretty much in a straight line,
and at length cut right through and brought the upper story tumbling
down. The upper structure on the top of the brigade-mess also fell
in. The Residency house was a wreck. Captain Anderson's post had
long ago been knocked down, and Innes' post also fell in. These two
were riddled with round shot. As many as 200 were picked up by
Colonel Masters."
The exhausted garrison fought doggedly on all through the next month
October. Then, November 2d, news came Sir Colin Campbell's relieving
force would soon be on its way from Cawnpore.
On the 12th the boom of his guns was heard.
On the 13th the sounds came nearer--he was slowly, but steadily, cutting
his way through, storming one stronghold after another.
On the 14th he captured the Martiniere College, and ran up the British
flag there. It was seen from the Residency.
Next he took the Dilkoosha.
On the 17th he took the former mess-house of the 32d regiment--a
fortified building, and very strong. "A most exciting, anxious day,"
writes Lady Inglis in her diary. "About 4 P.M., two strange officers
walked through our yard, leading their horses"--and by that sign she knew
that communication was established between the forces, that the relief
was real, this time, and that the long siege of Lucknow was ended.
The last eight or ten miles of Sir Colin Campbell's march was through
seas of, blood. The weapon mainly used was the bayonet, the fighting was
desperate. The way was mile-stoned with detached strong buildings of
stone, fortified, and heavily garrisoned, and these had to be taken by
assault. Neither side asked for quarter, and neither gave it. At the
Secundrabagh, where nearly two thousand of the enemy occupied a great
stone house in a garden, the work of slaughter was continued until every
man was killed. That is a sample of the character of that devastating
march.
There were but few trees in the plain at that time, and from the
Residency the progress of the march, step by step, victory by victory,
could be noted; the ascending clouds of battle-smoke marked the way to
the eye, and the thunder of the guns marked it to the ear.
Sir Colin Campbell had not come to Lucknow to hold it, but to save the
occupants of the Residency, and bring them away. Four or five days after
his arrival the secret evacuation by the troops took place, in the middle
of a dark night, by the principal gate, (the Bailie Guard). The two
hundred women and two hundred and fifty children had been previously
removed. Captain Birch says:
"And now commenced a movement of the most perfect arrangement and
successful generalship--the withdrawal of the whole of the various
forces, a combined movement requiring the greatest care and skill.
First, the garrison in immediate contact with the enemy at the
furthest extremity of the Residency position was marched out. Every
other garrison in turn fell in behind it, and so passed out through
the Bailie Guard gate, till the whole of our position was evacuated.
Then Havelock's force was similarly withdrawn, post by post,
marching in rear of our garrison. After them in turn came the
forces of the Commander-in-Chief, which joined on in the rear of
Havelock's force. Regiment by regiment was withdrawn with--the
utmost order and regularity. The whole operation resembled the
movement of a telescope. Stern silence was kept, and the enemy took
no alarm."
Lady Inglis, referring to her husband and to General Sir James Outram,
sets down the closing detail of this impressive midnight retreat, in
darkness and by stealth, of this shadowy host through the gate which it
had defended so long and so well:
"At twelve precisely they marched out, John and Sir James Outram
remaining till all had passed, and then they took off their hats to
the Bailie Guard, the scene of as noble a defense as I think history
will ever have to relate."
CHAPTER LIX.
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist
but you have ceased to live.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict
truth.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
We were driven over Sir Colin Campbell's route by a British officer, and
when I arrived at the Residency I was so familiar with the road that I
could have led a retreat over it myself; but the compass in my head has
been out of order from my birth, and so, as soon as I was within the
battered Bailie Guard and turned about to review the march and imagine
the relieving forces storming their way along it, everything was upside
down and wrong end first in a moment, and I was never able to get
straightened out again. And now, when I look at the battle-plan, the
confusion remains. In me the east was born west, the battle-plans which
have the east on the right-hand side are of no use to me.
The Residency ruins are draped with flowering vines, and are impressive
and beautiful. They and the grounds are sacred now, and will suffer no
neglect nor be profaned by any sordid or commercial use while the British
remain masters of India. Within the grounds are buried the dead who gave
up their lives there in the long siege.
After a fashion, I was able to imagine the fiery storm that raged night
and day over the place during so many months, and after a fashion I could
imagine the men moving through it, but I could not satisfactorily place
the 200 women, and I could do nothing at all with the 250 children. I
knew by Lady Inglis' diary that the children carried on their small
affairs very much as if blood and carnage and the crash and thunder of a
siege were natural and proper features of nursery life, and I tried to
realize it; but when her little Johnny came rushing, all excitement,
through the din and smoke, shouting, "Oh, mamma, the white hen has laid
an egg!" I saw that I could not do it. Johnny's place was under the
bed. I could imagine him there, because I could imagine myself there;
and I think I should not have been interested in a hen that was laying an
egg; my interest would have been with the parties that were laying the
bombshells. I sat at dinner with one of those children in the Club's
Indian palace, and I knew that all through the siege he was perfecting
his teething and learning to talk; and while to me he was the most
impressive object in Lucknow after the Residency ruins, I was not able to
imagine what his life had been during that tempestuous infancy of his,
nor what sort of a curious surprise it must have been to him to be
marched suddenly out into a strange dumb world where there wasn't any
noise, and nothing going on. He was only forty-one when I saw him, a
strangely youthful link to connect the present with so ancient an episode
as the Great Mutiny.
By and by we saw Cawnpore, and the open lot which was the scene of
Moore's memorable defense, and the spot on the shore of the Ganges where
the massacre of the betrayed garrison occurred, and the small Indian
temple whence the bugle-signal notified the assassins to fall on. This
latter was a lonely spot, and silent. The sluggish river drifted by,
almost currentless. It was dead low water, narrow channels with vast
sandbars between, all the way across the wide bed; and the only living
thing in sight was that grotesque and solemn bald-headed bird, the
Adjutant, standing on his six-foot stilts, solitary on a distant bar,
with his head sunk between his shoulders, thinking; thinking of his
prize, I suppose--the dead Hindoo that lay awash at his feet, and whether
to eat him alone or invite friends. He and his prey were a proper accent
to that mournful place. They were in keeping with it, they emphasized
its loneliness and its solemnity.
And we saw the scene of the slaughter of the helpless women and children,
and also the costly memorial that is built over the well which contains
their remains. The Black Hole of Calcutta is gone, but a more reverent
age is come, and whatever remembrancer still exists of the moving and
heroic sufferings and achievements of the garrisons of Lucknow and
Cawnpore will be guarded and preserved.
In Agra and its neighborhood, and afterwards at Delhi, we saw forts,
mosques, and tombs, which were built in the great days of the Mohammedan
emperors, and which are marvels of cost, magnitude, and richness of
materials and ornamentation, creations of surpassing grandeur, wonders
which do indeed make the like things in the rest of the world seem tame
and inconsequential by comparison. I am not purposing to describe them.
By good fortune I had not read too much about them, and therefore was
able to get a natural and rational focus upon them, with the result that
they thrilled, blessed, and exalted me. But if I had previously
overheated my imagination by drinking too much pestilential literary hot
Scotch, I should have suffered disappointment and sorrow.
I mean to speak of only one of these many world-renowned buildings, the
Taj Mahal, the most celebrated construction in the earth. I had read a
great deal too much about it. I saw it in the daytime, I saw it in the
moonlight, I saw it near at hand, I saw it from a distance; and I knew
all the time, that of its kind it was the wonder of the world, with no
competitor now and no possible future competitor; and yet, it was not my
Taj. My Taj had been built by excitable literary people; it was solidly
lodged in my head, and I could not blast it out.
I wish to place before the reader some of the usual descriptions of the
Taj, and ask him to take note of the impressions left in his mind. These
descriptions do really state the truth--as nearly as the limitations of
language will allow. But language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure
vehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that
they will not inflate the facts--by help of the reader's imagination,
which is always ready to take a hand, and work for nothing, and do the
bulk of it at that.
I will begin with a few sentences from the excellent little local
guide-book of Mr. Satya Chandra Mukerji. I take them from here and there
in his description:
"The inlaid work of the Taj and the flowers and petals that are to
be found on all sides on the surface of the marble evince a most
delicate touch."
That is true.
"The inlaid work, the marble, the flowers, the buds, the leaves, the
petals, and the lotus stems are almost without a rival in the whole
of the civilized world."
"The work of inlaying with stones and gems is found in the highest
perfection in the Taj."
Gems, inlaid flowers, buds, and leaves to be found on all sides. What do
you see before you? Is the fairy structure growing? Is it becoming a
jewel casket?
"The whole of the Taj produces a wonderful effect that is equally
sublime and beautiful."
Then Sir William Wilson Hunter:
"The Taj Mahal with its beautiful domes, 'a dream of marble,' rises
on the river bank."
"The materials are white marble and red sandstone."
"The complexity of its design and the delicate intricacy of the
workmanship baffle description."
Sir William continues. I will italicize some of his words:
"The mausoleum stands on a raised marble platform at each of whose
corners rises a tall and slender minaret of graceful proportions and
of exquisite beauty. Beyond the platform stretch the two wings, one
of which is itself a mosque of great architectural merit. In the
center of the whole design the mausoleum occupies a square of 186
feet, with the angles deeply truncated so also form an unequal
octagon. The main feature in this central pile is the great dome,
which swells upward to nearly two-thirds of a sphere and tapers at
its extremity into a pointed spire crowned by a crescent. Beneath
it an enclosure of marble trellis-work surrounds the tomb of the
princess and of her husband, the Emperor. Each corner of the
mausoleum is covered by a similar though much smaller dome erected
on a pediment pierced with graceful Saracenic arches. Light is
admitted into the interior through a double screen of pierced
marble, which tempers the glare of an Indian sky while its whiteness
prevents the mellow effect from degenerating into gloom. The
internal decorations consist of inlaid work in precious stones, such
as agate, jasper, etc., with which every squandril or salient point
in the architecture is richly fretted. Brown and violet marble is
also freely employed in wreaths, scrolls, and lintels to relieve the
monotony of white wall. In regard to color and design, the interior
of the Taj may rank first in the world for purely decorative
workmanship; while the perfect symmetry of its exterior, once seen
can never be forgotten, nor the aerial grace of its domes, rising
like marble bubbles into the clear sky. The Taj represents the most
highly elaborated stage of ornamentation reached by the
Indo-Mohammedan builders, the stage in which the architect ends and
the jeweler begins. In its magnificent gateway the diagonal
ornamentation at the corners, which satisfied the designers of the
gateways of Itimad-ud-doulah and Sikandra mausoleums is superseded
by fine marble cables, in bold twists, strong and handsome. The
triangular insertions of white marble and large flowers have in like
manner given place to fine inlaid work. Firm perpendicular lines in
black marble with well proportioned panels of the same material are
effectively used in the interior of the gateway. On its top the
Hindu brackets and monolithic architraves of Sikandra are replaced
by Moorish carped arches, usually single blocks of red sandstone, in
the Kiosks and pavilions which adorn the roof. From the pillared
pavilions a magnificent view is obtained of the Taj gardens below,
with the noble Jumna river at their farther end, and the city and
fort of Agra in the distance. From this beautiful and splendid
gateway one passes up a straight alley shaded by evergreen trees
cooled by a broad shallow piece of water running along the middle of
the path to the Taj itself. The Taj is entirely of marble and gems.
The red sandstone of the other Mohammedan buildings has entirely
disappeared, or rather the red sandstone which used to form the
thickness of the walls, is in the Taj itself overlaid completely
with white marble, and the white marble is itself inlaid with
precious stones arranged in lovely patterns of flowers. A feeling
of purity impresses itself on the eye and the mind from the absence
of the coarser material which forms so invariable a material in Agra
architecture. The lower wall and panels are covered with tulips,
oleanders, and fullblown lilies, in flat carving on the white
marble; and although the inlaid work of flowers done in gems is very
brilliant when looked at closely, there is on the whole but little
color, and the all-prevailing sentiment is one of whiteness,
silence, and calm. The whiteness is broken only by the fine color
of the inlaid gems, by lines in black marble, and by delicately
written inscriptions, also in black, from the Koran. Under the dome
of the vast mausoleum a high and beautiful screen of open tracery in
white marble rises around the two tombs, or rather cenotaphs of the
emperor and his princess; and in this marvel of marble the carving
has advanced from the old geometrical patterns to a trellis-work of
flowers and foliage, handled with great freedom and spirit. The two
cenotaphs in the center of the exquisite enclosure have no carving
except the plain Kalamdan or oblong pen-box on the tomb of Emperor
Shah Jehan. But both cenotaphs are inlaid with flowers made of
costly gems, and with the ever graceful oleander scroll."
Bayard Taylor, after describing the details of the Taj, goes on to say:
"On both sides the palm, the banyan, and the feathery bamboo mingle
their foliage; the song of birds meets your ears, and the odor of
roses and lemon flowers sweetens the air. Down such a vista and
over such a foreground rises the Taj. There is no mystery, no sense
of partial failure about the Taj. A thing of perfect beauty and of
absolute finish in every detail, it might pass for the work of genii
who knew naught of the weaknesses and ills with which mankind are
beset."
All of these details are true. But, taken together, they state a
falsehood--to you. You cannot add them up correctly. Those writers know
the values of their words and phrases, but to you the words and phrases
convey other and uncertain values. To those writers their phrases have
values which I think I am now acquainted with; and for the help of the
reader I will here repeat certain of those words and phrases, and follow
them with numerals which shall represent those values--then we shall see
the difference between a writer's ciphering and a mistaken reader's--
Precious stones, such as agate, jasper, etc.--5.
With which every salient point is richly fretted--5.
First in the world for purely decorative workmanship--9.
The Taj represents the stage where the architect ends and the jeweler
begins--5.
The Taj is entirely of marble and gems--7.
Inlaid with precious stones in lovely patterns of flowers--5.
The inlaid work of flowers done in gems is very brilliant
(followed by a most important modification which the reader is sure to
read too carelessly)--2.
The vast mausoleum--5.
This marvel of marble--5.
The exquisite enclosure--5.
Inlaid with flowers made of costly gems--5.
A thing of perfect beauty and absolute finish--5.
Those details are correct; the figures which I have placed after them
represent quite fairly their individual, values. Then why, as a whole,
do they convey a false impression to the reader? It is because the
reader--beguiled by, his heated imagination--masses them in the wrong
way. The writer would mass the first three figures in the following way,
and they would speak the truth
Total--19
But the reader masses them thus--and then they tell a lie--559.
The writer would add all of his twelve numerals together, and then the
sum would express the whole truth about the Taj, and the truth only--63.
But the reader--always helped by his imagination--would put the figures
in a row one after the other, and get this sum, which would tell him a
noble big lie:
559575255555.
You must put in the commas yourself; I have to go on with my work.
The reader will always be sure to put the figures together in that wrong
way, and then as surely before him will stand, sparkling in the sun, a
gem-crusted Taj tall as the Matterhorn.
I had to visit Niagara fifteen times before I succeeded in getting my
imaginary Falls gauged to the actuality and could begin to sanely and
wholesomely wonder at them for what they were, not what I had expected
them to be. When I first approached them it was with my face lifted
toward the sky, for I thought I was going to see an Atlantic ocean
pouring down thence over cloud-vexed Himalayan heights, a sea-green wall
of water sixty miles front and six miles high, and so, when the toy
reality came suddenly into view--that beruiled little wet apron hanging
out to dry--the shock was too much for me, and I fell with a dull thud.
Yet slowly, surely, steadily, in the course of my fifteen visits, the
proportions adjusted themselves to the facts, and I came at last to
realize that a waterfall a hundred and sixty-five feet high and a quarter
of a mile wide was an impressive thing. It was not a dipperful to my
vanished great vision, but it would answer.
I know that I ought to do with the Taj as I was obliged to do with
Niagara--see it fifteen times, and let my mind gradually get rid of the
Taj built in it by its describers, by help of my imagination, and
substitute for it the Taj of fact. It would be noble and fine, then, and
a marvel; not the marvel which it replaced, but still a marvel, and fine
enough. I am a careless reader, I suppose--an impressionist reader; an
impressionist reader of what is not an impressionist picture; a reader
who overlooks the informing details or masses their sum improperly, and
gets only a large splashy, general effect--an effect which is not
correct, and which is not warranted by the particulars placed before me
particulars which I did not examine, and whose meanings I did not
cautiously and carefully estimate. It is an effect which is some
thirty-five or forty times finer than the reality, and is therefore a
great deal better and more valuable than the reality; and so, I ought
never to hunt up the reality, but stay miles away from it, and thus
preserve undamaged my own private mighty Niagara tumbling out of the
vault of heaven, and my own ineffable Taj, built of tinted mists upon
jeweled arches of rainbows supported by colonnades of moonlight. It is a
mistake for a person with an unregulated imagination to go and look at an
illustrious world's wonder.
I suppose that many, many years ago I gathered the idea that the Taj's
place in the achievements of man was exactly the place of the ice-storm
in the achievements of Nature; that the Taj represented man's supremest
possibility in the creation of grace and beauty and exquisiteness and
splendor, just as the ice-storm represents Nature's supremest possibility
in the combination of those same qualities. I do not know how long ago
that idea was bred in me, but I know that I cannot remember back to a
time when the thought of either of these symbols of gracious and
unapproachable perfection did not at once suggest the other. If I
thought of the ice-storm, the Taj rose before me divinely beautiful; if I
thought of the Taj, with its encrustings and inlayings of jewels, the
vision of the ice-storm rose. And so, to me, all these years, the Taj
has had no rival among the temples and palaces of men, none that even
remotely approached it it was man's architectural ice-storm.
Here in London the other night I was talking with some Scotch and English
friends, and I mentioned the ice-storm, using it as a figure--a figure
which failed, for none of them had heard of the ice-storm. One
gentleman, who was very familiar with American literature, said he had
never seen it mentioned in any book. That is strange. And I, myself,
was not able to say that I had seen it mentioned in a book; and yet the
autumn foliage, with all other American scenery, has received full and
competent attention.
The oversight is strange, for in America the ice-storm is an event. And
it is not an event which one is careless about. When it comes, the news
flies from room to room in the house, there are bangings on the doors,
and shoutings, "The ice-storm! the ice-storm!" and even the laziest
sleepers throw off the covers and join the rush for the windows. The
ice-storm occurs in midwinter, and usually its enchantments are wrought
in the silence and the darkness of the night. A fine drizzling rain
falls hour after hour upon the naked twigs and branches of the trees, and
as it falls it freezes. In time the trunk and every branch and twig are
incased in hard pure ice; so that the tree looks like a skeleton tree
made all of glass--glass that is crystal-clear. All along the underside
of every branch and twig is a comb of little icicles--the frozen drip.
Sometimes these pendants do not quite amount to icicles, but are round
beads--frozen tears.
The weather clears, toward dawn, and leaves a brisk pure atmosphere and a
sky without a shred of cloud in it--and everything is still, there is not
a breath of wind. The dawn breaks and spreads, the news of the storm
goes about the house, and the little and the big, in wraps and blankets,
flock to the window and press together there, and gaze intently out upon
the great white ghost in the grounds, and nobody says a word, nobody
stirs. All are waiting; they know what is coming, and they are waiting
waiting for the miracle. The minutes drift on and on and on, with not a
sound but the ticking of the clock; at last the sun fires a sudden sheaf
of rays into the ghostly tree and turns it into a white splendor of
glittering diamonds. Everybody catches his breath, and feels a swelling
in his throat and a moisture in his eyes-but waits again; for he knows
what is coming; there is more yet. The sun climbs higher, and still
higher, flooding the tree from its loftiest spread of branches to its
lowest, turning it to a glory of white fire; then in a moment, without
warning, comes the great miracle, the supreme miracle, the miracle
without its fellow in the earth; a gust of wind sets every branch and
twig to swaying, and in an instant turns the whole white tree into a
spouting and spraying explosion of flashing gems of every conceivable
color; and there it stands and sways this way and that, flash! flash!
flash! a dancing and glancing world of rubies, emeralds, diamonds,
sapphires, the most radiant spectacle, the most blinding spectacle, the
divinest, the most exquisite, the most intoxicating vision of fire and
color and intolerable and unimaginable splendor that ever any eye has
rested upon in this world, or will ever rest upon outside of the gates of
heaven.
By, all my senses, all my faculties, I know that the icestorm is Nature's
supremest achievement in the domain of the superb and the beautiful; and
by my reason, at least, I know that the Taj is man's ice-storm.
In the ice-storm every one of the myriad ice-beads pendant from twig and
branch is an individual gem, and changes color with every motion caused
by the wind; each tree carries a million, and a forest-front exhibits the
splendors of the single tree multiplied by a thousand.
It occurs to me now that I have never seen the ice-storm put upon canvas,
and have not heard that any painter has tried to do it. I wonder why
that is. Is it that paint cannot counterfeit the intense blaze of a
sun-flooded jewel? There should be, and must be, a reason, and a good one,
why the most enchanting sight that Nature has created has been neglected
by the brush.
Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict
truth. The describers of the Taj have used the word gem in its strictest
sense--its scientific sense. In that sense it is a mild word, and
promises but little to the eye-nothing bright, nothing brilliant, nothing
sparkling, nothing splendid in the way of color. It accurately describes
the sober and unobtrusive gem-work of the Taj; that is, to the very
highly-educated one person in a thousand; but it most falsely describes
it to the 999. But the 999 are the people who ought to be especially
taken care of, and to them it does not mean quiet-colored designs wrought
in carnelians, or agates, or such things; they know the word in its wide
and ordinary sense only, and so to them it means diamonds and rubies and
opals and their kindred, and the moment their eyes fall upon it in print
they see a vision of glorious colors clothed in fire.
These describers are writing for the "general," and so, in order to make
sure of being understood, they ought to use words in their ordinary
sense, or else explain. The word fountain means one thing in Syria,
where there is but a handful of people; it means quite another thing in
North America, where there are 75,000,000. If I were describing some
Syrian scenery, and should exclaim, "Within the narrow space of a quarter
of a mile square I saw, in the glory of the flooding moonlight, two
hundred noble fountains--imagine the spectacle!" the North American would
have a vision of clustering columns of water soaring aloft, bending over
in graceful arches, bursting in beaded spray and raining white fire in
the moonlight-and he would be deceived. But the Syrian would not be
deceived; he would merely see two hundred fresh-water springs--two
hundred drowsing puddles, as level and unpretentious and unexcited as so
many door-mats, and even with the help of the moonlight he would not lose
his grip in the presence of the exhibition. My word "fountain" would be
correct; it would speak the strict truth; and it would convey the strict
truth to the handful of Syrians, and the strictest misinformation to the
North American millions. With their gems--and gems--and more gems--and
gems again--and still other gems--the describers of the Taj are within
their legal but not their moral rights; they are dealing in the strictest
scientific truth; and in doing it they succeed to admiration in telling
"what ain't so."
CHAPTER LX.
SATAN (impatiently) to NEW-COMER. The trouble with you Chicago people
is, that you think you are the best people down here; whereas you are
merely the most numerous.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
We wandered contentedly around here and there in India; to Lahore, among
other places, where the Lieutenant-Governor lent me an elephant. This
hospitality stands out in my experiences in a stately isolation. It was
a fine elephant, affable, gentlemanly, educated, and I was not afraid of
it. I even rode it with confidence through the crowded lanes of the
native city, where it scared all the horses out of their senses, and
where children were always just escaping its feet. It took the middle of
the road in a fine independent way, and left it to the world to get out
of the way or take the consequences. I am used to being afraid of
collisions when I ride or drive, but when one is on top of an elephant
that feeling is absent. I could have ridden in comfort through a
regiment of runaway teams. I could easily learn to prefer an elephant to
any other vehicle, partly because of that immunity from collisions, and
partly because of the fine view one has from up there, and partly because
of the dignity one feels in that high place, and partly because one can
look in at the windows and see what is going on privately among the
family. The Lahore horses were used to elephants, but they were
rapturously afraid of them just the same. It seemed curious. Perhaps
the better they know the elephant the more they respect him in that
peculiar way. In our own case--we are not afraid of dynamite till we get
acquainted with it.
We drifted as far as Rawal Pindi, away up on the Afghan frontier--I think
it was the Afghan frontier, but it may have been Hertzegovina--it was
around there somewhere--and down again to Delhi, to see the ancient
architectural wonders there and in Old Delhi and not describe them, and
also to see the scene of the illustrious assault, in the Mutiny days,
when the British carried Delhi by storm, one of the marvels of history
for impudent daring and immortal valor.
We had a refreshing rest, there in Delhi, in a great old mansion which
possessed historical interest. It was built by a rich Englishman who had
become orientalized--so much so that he had a zenana. But he was a
broadminded man, and remained so. To please his harem he built a mosque;
to please himself he built an English church. That kind of a man will
arrive, somewhere. In the Mutiny days the mansion was the British
general's headquarters. It stands in a great garden--oriental fashion
--and about it are many noble trees. The trees harbor monkeys; and they
are monkeys of a watchful and enterprising sort, and not much troubled
with fear. They invade the house whenever they get a chance, and carry
off everything they don't want. One morning the master of the house was
in his bath, and the window was open. Near it stood a pot of yellow
paint and a brush. Some monkeys appeared in the window; to scare them
away, the gentleman threw his sponge at them. They did not scare at all;
they jumped into the room and threw yellow paint all over him from the
brush, and drove him out; then they painted the walls and the floor and
the tank and the windows and the furniture yellow, and were in the
dressing-room painting that when help arrived and routed them.
Two of these creatures came into my room in the early morning, through a
window whose shutters I had left open, and when I woke one of them was
before the glass brushing his hair, and the other one had my note-book,
and was reading a page of humorous notes and crying. I did not mind the
one with the hair-brush, but the conduct of the other one hurt me; it
hurts me yet. I threw something at him, and that was wrong, for my host
had told me that the monkeys were best left alone. They threw everything
at me that they could lift, and then went into the bathroom to get some
more things, and I shut the door on them.
At Jeypore, in Rajputana, we made a considerable stay. We were not in
the native city, but several miles from it, in the small European
official suburb. There were but few Europeans--only fourteen but they
were all kind and hospitable, and it amounted to being at home. In
Jeypore we found again what we had found all about India--that while the
Indian servant is in his way a very real treasure, he will sometimes bear
watching, and the Englishman watches him. If he sends him on an errand,
he wants more than the man's word for it that he did the errand. When
fruit and vegetables were sent to us, a "chit" came with them--a receipt
for us to sign; otherwise the things might not arrive. If a gentleman
sent up his carriage, the chit stated "from" such-and-such an hour "to"
such-and-such an hour--which made it unhandy for the coachman and his two
or three subordinates to put us off with a part of the allotted time and
devote the rest of it to a lark of their own.
We were pleasantly situated in a small two-storied inn, in an empty large
compound which was surrounded by a mud wall as high as a man's head. The
inn was kept by nine Hindoo brothers, its owners. They lived, with their
families, in a one-storied building within the compound, but off to one
side, and there was always a long pile of their little comely brown
children loosely stacked in its veranda, and a detachment of the parents
wedged among them, smoking the hookah or the howdah, or whatever they
call it. By the veranda stood a palm, and a monkey lived in it, and led
a lonesome life, and always looked sad and weary, and the crows bothered
him a good deal.
The inn cow poked about the compound and emphasized the secluded and
country air of the place, and there was a dog of no particular breed, who
was always present in the compound, and always asleep, always stretched
out baking in the sun and adding to the deep tranquility and
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