I do not claim that the pilgrims do their acts of worship in the order

and sequence above charted out in this Itinerary of mine, but I think

logic suggests that they ought to do so. Instead of a helter-skelter

worship, we then have a definite starting-place, and a march which

carries the pilgrim steadily forward by reasoned and logical progression

to a definite goal. Thus, his Ganges bath in the early morning gives him

an appetite; he kisses the cow-tails, and that removes it. It is now

business hours, and longings for material prosperity rise in his mind,

and be goes and pours water over Shiva's symbol; this insures the

prosperity, but also brings on a rain, which gives him a fever. Then he

drinks the sewage at the Kedar Ghat to cure the fever; it cures the fever

but gives him the smallpox. He wishes to know how it is going to turn

out; he goes to the Dandpan Temple and looks down the well. A clouded

sun shows him that death is near. Logically his best course for the

present, since he cannot tell at what moment he may die, is to secure a

happy hereafter; this he does, through the agency of the Great Fate. He

is safe, now, for heaven; his next move will naturally be to keep out of

it as long as he can. Therefore he goes to the Briddhkal Temple and

secures Youth and long life by bathing in a puddle of leper-pus which

would kill a microbe. Logically, Youth has re-equipped him for sin and

with the disposition to commit it; he will naturally go to the fane which

is consecrated to the Fulfillment of Desires, and make arrangements.

Logically, he will now go to the Well of the Earring from time to time to

unload and freshen up for further banned enjoyments. But first and last

and all the time he is human, and therefore in his reflective intervals

he will always be speculating in "futures." He will make the Great

Pilgrimage around the city and so make his salvation absolutely sure; he

will also have record made of it, so that it may remain absolutely sure

and not be forgotten or repudiated in the confusion of the Final

Settlement. Logically, also, he will wish to have satisfying and

tranquilizing personal knowledge that that salvation is secure; therefore

he goes to the Well of the Knowledge of Salvation, adds that completing

detail, and then goes about his affairs serene and content; serene and

content, for he is now royally endowed with an advantage which no

religion in this world could give him but his own; for henceforth he may

commit as many million sins as he wants to and nothing can come of it.

Thus the system, properly and logically ordered, is neat, compact,

clearly defined, and covers the whole ground. I desire to recommend it

to such as find the other systems too difficult, exacting, and irksome

for the uses of this fretful brief life of ours.

However, let me not deceive any one. My Itinerary lacks a detail. I

must put it in. The truth is, that after the pilgrim has faithfully

followed the requirements of the Itinerary through to the end and has

secured his salvation and also the personal knowledge of that fact, there

is still an accident possible to him which can annul the whole thing. If

he should ever cross to the other side of the Ganges and get caught out

and die there he would at once come to life again in the form of an ass.

Think of that, after all this trouble and expense. You see how

capricious and uncertain salvation is there. The Hindoo has a childish

and unreasoning aversion to being turned into an ass. It is hard to tell

why. One could properly expect an ass to have an aversion to being

turned into a Hindoo. One could understand that he could lose dignity by

it; also self-respect, and nine-tenths of his intelligence. But the

Hindoo changed into an ass wouldn't lose anything, unless you count his

religion. And he would gain much--release from his slavery to two

million gods and twenty million priests, fakeers, holy mendicants, and

other sacred bacilli; he would escape the Hindoo hell; he would also

escape the Hindoo heaven. These are advantages which the Hindoo ought to

consider; then he would go over and die on the other side.

Benares is a religious Vesuvius. In its bowels the theological forces

have been heaving and tossing, rumbling, thundering and quaking, boiling,

and weltering and flaming and smoking for ages. But a little group of

missionaries have taken post at its base, and they have hopes. There are

the Baptist Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, the London

Missionary Society, the Wesleyan Missionary Society, and the Zenana Bible

and Medical Mission. They have schools, and the principal work seems to

be among the children. And no doubt that part of the work prospers best,

for grown people everywhere are always likely to cling to the religion

they were brought up in.

CHAPTER LII.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

In one of those Benares temples we saw a devotee working for salvation in

a curious way. He had a huge wad of clay beside him and was making it up

into little wee gods no bigger than carpet tacks. He stuck a grain of

rice into each--to represent the lingam, I think. He turned them out

nimbly, for he had had long practice and had acquired great facility.

Every day he made 2,000 gods, then threw them into the holy Ganges. This

act of homage brought him the profound homage of the pious--also their

coppers. He had a sure living here, and was earning a high place in the

hereafter.

The Ganges front is the supreme show-place of Benares. Its tall bluffs

are solidly caked from water to summit, along a stretch of three miles,

with a splendid jumble of massive and picturesque masonry, a bewildering

and beautiful confusion of stone platforms, temples, stair-flights, rich

and stately palaces--nowhere a break, nowhere a glimpse of the bluff

itself; all the long face of it is compactly walled from sight by this

crammed perspective of platforms, soaring stairways, sculptured temples,

majestic palaces, softening away into the distances; and there is

movement, motion, human life everywhere, and brilliantly costumed

--streaming in rainbows up and down the lofty stairways, and massed in

metaphorical flower-gardens on the miles of great platforms at the

river's edge.

All this masonry, all this architecture represents piety. The palaces

were built by native princes whose homes, as a rule, are far from

Benares, but who go there from time to time to refresh their souls with

the sight and touch of the Ganges, the river of their idolatry. The

stairways are records of acts of piety; the crowd of costly little

temples are tokens of money spent by rich men for present credit and hope

of future reward. Apparently, the rich Christian who spends large sums

upon his religion is conspicuous with us, by his rarity, but the rich

Hindoo who doesn't spend large sums upon his religion is seemingly

non-existent. With us the poor spend money on their religion, but they

keep back some to live on. Apparently, in India, the poor bankrupt

themselves daily for their religion. The rich Hindoo can afford his

pious outlays; he gets much glory for his spendings, yet keeps back a

sufficiency of his income for temporal purposes; but the poor Hindoo is

entitled to compassion, for his spendings keep him poor, yet get him no

glory.

We made the usual trip up and down the river, seated in chairs under an

awning on the deck of the usual commodious hand-propelled ark; made it

two or three times, and could have made it with increasing interest and

enjoyment many times more; for, of course, the palaces and temples would

grow more and more beautiful every time one saw them, for that happens

with all such things; also, I think one would not get tired of the

bathers, nor their costumes, nor of their ingenuities in getting out of

them and into them again without exposing too much bronze, nor of their

devotional gesticulations and absorbed bead-tellings.

But I should get tired of seeing them wash their mouths with that

dreadful water and drink it. In fact, I did get tired of it, and very

early, too. At one place where we halted for a while, the foul gush from

a sewer was making the water turbid and murky all around, and there was a

random corpse slopping around in it that had floated down from up

country. Ten steps below that place stood a crowd of men, women, and

comely young maidens waist deep in the water-and they were scooping it up

in their hands and drinking it. Faith can certainly do wonders, and this

is an instance of it. Those people were not drinking that fearful stuff

to assuage thirst, but in order to purify their souls and the interior of

their bodies. According to their creed, the Ganges water makes

everything pure that it touches--instantly and utterly pure. The sewer

water was not an offence to them, the corpse did not revolt them; the

sacred water had touched both, and both were now snow-pure, and could

defile no one. The memory of that sight will always stay by me; but not

by request.

A word further concerning the nasty but all-purifying Ganges water. When

we went to Agra, by and by, we happened there just in time to be in at

the birth of a marvel--a memorable scientific discovery--the discovery

that in certain ways the foul and derided Ganges water is the most

puissant purifier in the world! This curious fact, as I have said, had

just been added to the treasury of modern science. It had long been

noted as a strange thing that while Benares is often afflicted with the

cholera she does not spread it beyond her borders. This could not be

accounted for. Mr. Henkin, the scientist in the employ of the government

of Agra, concluded to examine the water. He went to Benares and made his

tests. He got water at the mouths of the sewers where they empty into

the river at the bathing ghats; a cubic centimetre of it contained

millions of germs; at the end of six hours they were all dead. He caught

a floating corpse, towed it to the shore, and from beside it he dipped up

water that was swarming with cholera germs; at the end of six hours they

were all dead. He added swarm after swarm of cholera germs to this

water; within the six hours they always died, to the last sample.

Repeatedly, he took pure well water which was bare of animal life, and

put into it a few cholera germs; they always began to propagate at once,

and always within six hours they swarmed--and were numberable by millions

upon millions.

For ages and ages the Hindoos have had absolute faith that the water of

the Ganges was absolutely pure, could not be defiled by any contact

whatsoever, and infallibly made pure and clean whatsoever thing touched

it. They still believe it, and that is why they bathe in it and drink

it, caring nothing for its seeming filthiness and the floating corpses.

The Hindoos have been laughed at, these many generations, but the

laughter will need to modify itself a little from now on. How did

they find out the water's secret in those ancient ages? Had they

germ-scientists then? We do not know. We only know that they had a

civilization long before we emerged from savagery. But to return to

where I was before; I was about to speak of the burning-ghat.

They do not burn fakeers--those revered mendicants. They are so holy

that they can get to their place without that sacrament, provided they be

consigned to the consecrating river. We saw one carried to mid-stream

and thrown overboard. He was sandwiched between two great slabs of

stone.

We lay off the cremation-ghat half an hour and saw nine corpses burned.

I should not wish to see any more of it, unless I might select the

parties. The mourners follow the bier through the town and down to the

ghat; then the bier-bearers deliver the body to some low-caste natives

--Doms--and the mourners turn about and go back home. I heard no crying

and saw no tears, there was no ceremony of parting. Apparently, these

expressions of grief and affection are reserved for the privacy of the

home. The dead women came draped in red, the men in white. They are

laid in the water at the river's edge while the pyre is being prepared.

The first subject was a man. When the Doms unswathed him to wash him, he

proved to be a sturdily built, well-nourished and handsome old gentleman,

with not a sign about him to suggest that he had ever been ill. Dry wood

was brought and built up into a loose pile; the corpse was laid upon it

and covered over with fuel. Then a naked holy man who was sitting on

high ground a little distance away began to talk and shout with great

energy, and he kept up this noise right along. It may have been the

funeral sermon, and probably was. I forgot to say that one of the

mourners remained behind when the others went away. This was the dead

man's son, a boy of ten or twelve, brown and handsome, grave and

self-possessed, and clothed in flowing white. He was there to burn his

father. He was given a torch, and while he slowly walked seven times

around the pyre the naked black man on the high ground poured out his

sermon more clamorously than ever. The seventh circuit completed, the

boy applied the torch at his father's head, then at his feet; the flames

sprang briskly up with a sharp crackling noise, and the lad went away.

Hindoos do not want daughters, because their weddings make such a ruinous

expense; but they want sons, so that at death they may have honorable

exit from the world; and there is no honor equal to the honor of having

one's pyre lighted by one's son. The father who dies sonless is in a

grievous situation indeed, and is pitied. Life being uncertain, the

Hindoo marries while he is still a boy, in the hope that he will have a

son ready when the day of his need shall come. But if he have no son, he

will adopt one. This answers every purpose.

Meantime the corpse is burning, also several others. It is a dismal

business. The stokers did not sit down in idleness, but moved briskly

about, punching up the fires with long poles, and now and then adding

fuel. Sometimes they hoisted the half of a skeleton into the air, then

slammed it down and beat it with the pole, breaking it up so that it

would burn better. They hoisted skulls up in the same way and banged and

battered them. The sight was hard to bear; it would have been harder if

the mourners had stayed to witness it. I had but a moderate desire to

see a cremation, so it was soon satisfied. For sanitary reasons it would

be well if cremation were universal; but this form is revolting, and not

to be recommended.

The fire used is sacred, of course--for there is money in it. Ordinary

fire is forbidden; there is no money in it. I was told that this sacred

fire is all furnished by one person, and that he has a monopoly of it and

charges a good price for it. Sometimes a rich mourner pays a thousand

rupees for it. To get to paradise from India is an expensive thing.

Every detail connected with the matter costs something, and helps to

fatten a priest. I suppose it is quite safe to conclude that that

fire-bug is in holy orders.

Close to the cremation-ground stand a few time-worn stones which are

remembrances of the suttee. Each has a rough carving upon it,

representing a man and a woman standing or walking hand in hand, and

marks the spot where a widow went to her death by fire in the days when

the suttee flourished. Mr. Parker said that widows would burn themselves

now if the government would allow it. The family that can point to one

of these little memorials and say: "She who burned herself there was an

ancestress of ours," is envied.

It is a curious people. With them, all life seems to be sacred except

human life. Even the life of vermin is sacred, and must not be taken.

The good Jain wipes off a seat before using it, lest he cause the death

of-some valueless insect by sitting down on it. It grieves him to have

to drink water, because the provisions in his stomach may not agree with

the microbes. Yet India invented Thuggery and the Suttee. India is a

hard country to understand. We went to the temple of the Thug goddess,

Bhowanee, or Kali, or Durga. She has these names and others. She is the

only god to whom living sacrifices are made. Goats are sacrificed to

her. Monkeys would be cheaper. There are plenty of them about the

place. Being sacred, they make themselves very free, and scramble around

wherever they please. The temple and its porch are beautifully carved,

but this is not the case with the idol. Bhowanee is not pleasant to look

at. She has a silver face, and a projecting swollen tongue painted a

deep red. She wears a necklace of skulls.

In fact, none of the idols in Benares are handsome or attractive. And

what a swarm of them there is! The town is a vast museum of idols--and

all of them crude, misshapen, and ugly. They flock through one's dreams

at night, a wild mob of nightmares. When you get tired of them in the

temples and take a trip on the river, you find idol giants, flashily

painted, stretched out side by side on the shore. And apparently

wherever there is room for one more lingam, a lingam is there. If Vishnu

had foreseen what his town was going to be, he would have called it

Idolville or Lingamburg.

The most conspicuous feature of Benares is the pair of slender white

minarets which tower like masts from the great Mosque of Aurangzeb. They

seem to be always in sight, from everywhere, those airy, graceful,

inspiring things. But masts is not the right word, for masts have a

perceptible taper, while these minarets have not. They are 142 feet

high, and only 8 1/2 feet in diameter at the base, and 7 1/2 at the

summit--scarcely any taper at all. These are the proportions of a

candle; and fair and fairylike candles these are. Will be, anyway, some

day, when the Christians inherit them and top them with the electric

light. There is a great view from up there--a wonderful view. A large

gray monkey was part of it, and damaged it. A monkey has no judgment.

This one was skipping about the upper great heights of the mosque

--skipping across empty yawning intervals which were almost too wide for

him, and which he only just barely cleared, each time, by the skin of his

teeth. He got me so nervous that I couldn't look at the view. I

couldn't look at anything but him. Every time he went sailing over one

of those abysses my breath stood still, and when he grabbed for the perch

he was going for, I grabbed too, in sympathy. And he was perfectly

indifferent, perfectly unconcerned, and I did all the panting myself.

He came within an ace of losing his life a dozen times, and I was so

troubled about him that I would have shot him if I had had anything to do

it with. But I strongly recommend the view. There is more monkey than

view, and there is always going to be more monkey while that idiot

survives, but what view you get is superb. All Benares, the river, and

the region round about are spread before you. Take a gun, and look at

the view.

The next thing I saw was more reposeful. It was a new kind of art. It

was a picture painted on water. It was done by a native. He sprinkled

fine dust of various colors on the still surface of a basin of water, and

out of these sprinklings a dainty and pretty picture gradually grew, a

picture which a breath could destroy. Somehow it was impressive, after

so much browsing among massive and battered and decaying fanes that rest

upon ruins, and those ruins upon still other ruins, and those upon still

others again. It was a sermon, an allegory, a symbol of Instability.

Those creations in stone were only a kind of water pictures, after all.

A prominent episode in the Indian career of Warren Hastings had Benares

for its theater. Wherever that extraordinary man set his foot, he left

his mark. He came to Benares in 1781 to collect a fine of L500,000 which

he had levied upon its Rajah, Cheit Singly on behalf of the East India

Company. Hastings was a long way from home and help. There were,

probably, not a dozen Englishmen within reach; the Rajah was in his fort

with his myriads around him. But no matter. From his little camp in a

neighboring garden, Hastings sent a party to arrest the sovereign. He

sent on this daring mission a couple of hundred native soldiers sepoys

--under command of three young English lieutenants. The Rajah submitted

without a word. The incident lights up the Indian situation

electrically, and gives one a vivid sense of the strides which the

English had made and the mastership they had acquired in the land since

the date of Clive's great victory. In a quarter of a century, from being

nobodies, and feared by none, they were become confessed lords and

masters, feared by all, sovereigns included, and served by all,

sovereigns included. It makes the fairy tales sound true. The English

had not been afraid to enlist native soldiers to fight against their own

people and keep them obedient. And now Hastings was not afraid to come

away out to this remote place with a handful of such soldiers and send

them to arrest a native sovereign.

The lieutenants imprisoned the Rajah in his own fort. It was beautiful,

the pluckiness of it, the impudence of it. The arrest enraged the

Rajah's people, and all Benares came storming about the place and

threatening vengeance. And yet, but for an accident, nothing important

would have resulted, perhaps. The mob found out a most strange thing, an

almost incredible thing--that this handful of soldiers had come on this

hardy errand with empty guns and no ammunition. This has been attributed

to thoughtlessness, but it could hardly have been that, for in such large

emergencies as this, intelligent people do think. It must have been

indifference, an over-confidence born of the proved submissiveness of the

native character, when confronted by even one or two stern Britons in

their war paint. But, however that may be, it was a fatal discovery that

the mob had made. They were full of courage, now, and they broke into

the fort and massacred the helpless soldiers and their officers.

Hastings escaped from Benares by night and got safely away, leaving the

principality in a state of wild insurrection; but he was back again

within the month, and quieted it down in his prompt and virile way, and

took the Rajah's throne away from him and gave it to another man. He was

a capable kind of person was Warren Hastings. This was the only time he

was ever out of ammunition. Some of his acts have left stains upon his

name which can never be washed away, but he saved to England the Indian

Empire, and that was the best service that was ever done to the Indians

themselves, those wretched heirs of a hundred centuries of pitiless

oppression and abuse.

CHAPTER LIII.

True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.

--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

It was in Benares that I saw another living god. That makes two.

I believe I have seen most of the greater and lesser wonders of the

world, but I do not remember that any of them interested me so

overwhelmingly as did that pair of gods.

When I try to account for this effect I find no difficulty about it.

I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because

of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get

almost all our wonders at second hand. We are eager to see any

celebrated thing--and we never fail of our reward; just the deep

privilege of gazing upon an object which has stirred the enthusiasm or

evoked the reverence or affection or admiration of multitudes of our race

is a thing which we value; we are profoundly glad that we have seen it,

we are permanently enriched from having seen it, we would not part with

the memory of that experience for a great price. And yet that very

spectacle may be the Taj. You cannot keep your enthusiasms down, you

cannot keep your emotions within bounds when that soaring bubble of

marble breaks upon your view. But these are not your enthusiasms and

emotions--they are the accumulated emotions and enthusiasms of a thousand

fervid writers, who have been slowly and steadily storing them up in your

heart day by day and year by year all your life; and now they burst out

in a flood and overwhelm you; and you could not be a whit happier if they

were your very own. By and by you sober down, and then you perceive that

you have been drunk on the smell of somebody else's cork. For ever and

ever the memory of my distant first glimpse of the Taj will compensate me

for creeping around the globe to have that great privilege.

But the Taj--with all your inflation of delusive emotions, acquired at

second-hand from people to whom in the majority of cases they were also

delusions acquired at second-hand--a thing which you fortunately did not

think of or it might have made you doubtful of what you imagined were

your own what is the Taj as a marvel, a spectacle and an uplifting and

overpowering wonder, compared with a living, breathing, speaking

personage whom several millions of human beings devoutly and sincerely

and unquestioningly believe to be a God, and humbly and gratefully

worship as a God?

He was sixty years old when I saw him. He is called Sri 108 Swami

Bhaskarananda Saraswati. That is one form of it. I think that that is

what you would call him in speaking to him--because it is short. But you

would use more of his name in addressing a letter to him; courtesy would

require this. Even then you would not have to use all of it, but only

this much:

Sri 108 Matparamahansrzpairivrajakacharyaswamibhaskaranandasaraswati.

You do not put "Esq." after it, for that is not necessary. The word

which opens the volley is itself a title of honor "Sri." The "108"

stands for the rest of his names, I believe. Vishnu has 108 names which

he does not use in business, and no doubt it is a custom of gods and a

privilege sacred to their order to keep 108 extra ones in stock. Just

the restricted name set down above is a handsome property, without the

108. By my count it has 58 letters in it. This removes the long German

words from competition; they are permanently out of the race.

Sri 108 S. B. Saraswati has attained to what among the Hindoos is called

the "state of perfection." It is a state which other Hindoos reach by

being born again and again, and over and over again into this world,

through one re-incarnation after another--a tiresome long job covering

centuries and decades of centuries, and one that is full of risks, too,

like the accident of dying on the wrong side of the Ganges some time or

other and waking up in the form of an ass, with a fresh start necessary

and the numerous trips to be made all over again. But in reaching

perfection, Sri 108 S. B. S. has escaped all that. He is no longer a

part or a feature of this world; his substance has changed, all

earthiness has departed out of it; he is utterly holy, utterly pure;

nothing can desecrate this holiness or stain this purity; he is no longer

of the earth, its concerns are matters foreign to him, its pains and

griefs and troubles cannot reach him. When he dies, Nirvana is his; he

will be absorbed into the substance of the Supreme Deity and be at peace

forever.

The Hindoo Scriptures point out how this state is to be reached, but it

is only once in a thousand years, perhaps, that candidate accomplishes

it. This one has traversed the course required, stage by stage, from the

beginning to the end, and now has nothing left to do but wait for the

call which shall release him from a world in which he has now no part nor

lot. First, he passed through the student stage, and became learned in

the holy books. Next he became citizen, householder, husband, and

father. That was the required second stage. Then--like John Bunyan's

Christian he bade perpetual good-bye to his family, as required, and went

wandering away. He went far into the desert and served a term as hermit.

Next, he became a beggar, "in accordance with the rites laid down in the

Scriptures," and wandered about India eating the bread of mendicancy. A

quarter of a century ago he reached the stage of purity. This needs no

garment; its symbol is nudity; he discarded the waist-cloth which he had

previously worn. He could resume it now if he chose, for neither that

nor any other contact can defile him; but he does not choose.

There are several other stages, I believe, but I do not remember what

they are. But he has been through them. Throughout the long course he

was perfecting himself in holy learning, and writing commentaries upon

the sacred books. He was also meditating upon Brahma, and he does that

now.

White marble relief-portraits of him are sold all about India. He lives

in a good house in a noble great garden in Benares, all meet and proper

to his stupendous rank. Necessarily he does not go abroad in the

streets. Deities would never be able to move about handily in any

country. If one whom we recognized and adored as a god should go abroad

in our streets, and the day it was to happen were known, all traffic

would be blocked and business would come to a standstill.

This god is comfortably housed, and yet modestly, all things considered,

for if he wanted to live in a palace he would only need to speak and his

worshipers would gladly build it. Sometimes he sees devotees for a

moment, and comforts them and blesses them, and they kiss his feet and go

away happy. Rank is nothing to him, he being a god. To him all men are

alike. He sees whom he pleases and denies himself to whom he pleases.

Sometimes he sees a prince and denies himself to a pauper; at other times

he receives the pauper and turns the prince away. However, he does not

receive many of either class. He has to husband his time for his

meditations. I think he would receive Rev. Mr. Parker at any time. I

think he is sorry for Mr. Parker, and I think Mr. Parker is sorry for

him; and no doubt this compassion is good for both of them.

When we arrived we had to stand around in the garden a little while and

wait, and the outlook was not good, for he had been turning away

Maharajas that day and receiving only the riff-raff, and we belonged in

between, somewhere. But presently, a servant came out saying it was all

right, he was coming.

And sure enough, he came, and I saw him--that object of the worship of

millions. It was a strange sensation, and thrilling. I wish I could

feel it stream through my veins again. And yet, to me he was not a god,

he was only a Taj. The thrill was not my thrill, but had come to me

secondhand from those invisible millions of believers. By a hand-shake

with their god I had ground-circuited their wire and got their monster

battery's whole charge.

He was tall and slender, indeed emaciated. He had a clean cut and

conspicuously intellectual face, and a deep and kindly eye. He looked

many years older than he really was, but much study and meditation and

fasting and prayer, with the arid life he had led as hermit and beggar,

could account for that. He is wholly nude when he receives natives, of

whatever rank they may be, but he had white cloth around his loins now, a

concession to Mr. Parker's Europe prejudices, no doubt.

As soon as I had sobered down a little we got along very well together,

and I found him a most pleasant and friendly deity. He had heard a deal

about Chicago, and showed a quite remarkable interest in it, for a god.

It all came of the World's Fair and the Congress of Religions. If India

knows about nothing else American, she knows about those, and will keep

them in mind one while.

He proposed an exchange of autographs, a delicate attention which made me

believe in him, but I had been having my doubts before. He wrote his in

his book, and I have a reverent regard for that book, though the words

run from right to left, and so I can't read it. It was a mistake to

print in that way. It contains his voluminous comments on the Hindoo

holy writings, and if I could make them out I would try for perfection

myself. I gave him a copy of Huckleberry Finn. I thought it might rest

him up a little to mix it in along with his meditations on Brahma, for he

looked tired, and I knew that if it didn't do him any good it wouldn't do

him any harm.

He has a scholar meditating under him--Mina Bahadur Rana--but we did not

see him. He wears clothes and is very imperfect. He has written a

little pamphlet about his master, and I have that. It contains a

wood-cut of the master and himself seated on a rug in the garden. The

portrait of the master is very good indeed. The posture is exactly that

which Brahma himself affects, and it requires long arms and limber legs,

and can be accumulated only by gods and the india-rubber man. There is a

life-size marble relief of Shri 108, S.B.S. in the garden. It

represents him in this same posture.

Dear me! It is a strange world. Particularly the Indian division of it.

This pupil, Mina Bahadur Rana, is not a commonplace person, but a man of

distinguished capacities and attainments, and, apparently, he had a fine

worldly career in front of him. He was serving the Nepal Government in a

high capacity at the Court of the Viceroy of India, twenty years ago. He

was an able man, educated, a thinker, a man of property. But the longing

to devote himself to a religious life came upon him, and he resigned his

place, turned his back upon the vanities and comforts of the world, and

went away into the solitudes to live in a hut and study the sacred

writings and meditate upon virtue and holiness and seek to attain them.

This sort of religion resembles ours. Christ recommended the rich to

give away all their property and follow Him in poverty, not in worldly

comfort. American and English millionaires do it every day, and thus

verify and confirm to the world the tremendous forces that lie in

religion. Yet many people scoff at them for this loyalty to duty, and

many will scoff at Mina Bahadur Rana and call him a crank. Like many

Christians of great character and intellect, he has made the study of his

Scriptures and the writing of books of commentaries upon them the loving

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.