I was up at dawn, the next morning. In India the tourist's servant does

not sleep in a room in the hotel, but rolls himself up head and ears in

his blanket and stretches himself on the veranda, across the front of his

master's door, and spends the night there. I don't believe anybody's

servant occupies a room. Apparently, the bungalow servants sleep on the

veranda; it is roomy, and goes all around the house. I speak of

menservants; I saw none of the other sex. I think there are none, except

child-nurses. I was up at dawn, and walked around the veranda, past the

rows of sleepers. In front of one door a Hindoo servant was squatting,

waiting for his master to call him. He had polished the yellow shoes and

placed them by the door, and now he had nothing to do but wait. It was

freezing cold, but there he was, as motionless as a sculptured image, and

as patient. It troubled me. I wanted to say to him, “Don't crouch there

like that and freeze; nobody requires it of you; stir around and get

warm.” But I hadn't the words. I thought of saying 'jeldy jow', but I

couldn't remember what it meant, so I didn't say it. I knew another

phrase, but it wouldn't come to my mind. I moved on, purposing to

dismiss him from my thoughts, but his bare legs and bare feet kept him

there. They kept drawing me back from the sunny side to a point whence I

could see him. At the end of an hour he had not changed his attitude in

the least degree. It was a curious and impressive exhibition of meekness

and patience, or fortitude or indifference, I did not know which. But it

worried me, and it was spoiling my morning. In fact, it spoiled two

hours of it quite thoroughly. I quitted this vicinity, then, and left

him to punish himself as much as he might want to. But up to that time

the man had not changed his attitude a hair. He will always remain with

me, I suppose; his figure never grows vague in my memory. Whenever I

read of Indian resignation, Indian patience under wrongs, hardships, and

misfortunes, he comes before me. He becomes a personification, and

stands for India in trouble. And for untold ages India in trouble has

been pursued with the very remark which I was going to utter but didn't,

because its meaning had slipped me: “Jeldy jow!” (“Come, shove along!”)

Why, it was the very thing.

In the early brightness we made a long drive out to the Fort. Part of

the way was beautiful. It led under stately trees and through groups of

native houses and by the usual village well, where the picturesque gangs

are always flocking to and fro and laughing and chattering; and this time

brawny men were deluging their bronze bodies with the limpid water, and

making a refreshing and enticing show of it; enticing, for the sun was

already transacting business, firing India up for the day. There was

plenty of this early bathing going on, for it was getting toward

breakfast time, and with an unpurified body the Hindoo must not eat.

Then we struck into the hot plain, and found the roads crowded with

pilgrims of both sexes, for one of the great religious fairs of India was

being held, just beyond the Fort, at the junction of the sacred rivers,

the Ganges and the Jumna. Three sacred rivers, I should have said, for

there is a subterranean one. Nobody has seen it, but that doesn't

signify. The fact that it is there is enough. These pilgrims had come

from all over India; some of them had been months on the way, plodding

patiently along in the heat and dust, worn, poor, hungry, but supported

and sustained by an unwavering faith and belief; they were supremely

happy and content, now; their full and sufficient reward was at hand;

they were going to be cleansed from every vestige of sin and corruption

by these holy waters which make utterly pure whatsoever thing they touch,

even the dead and rotten. It is wonderful, the power of a faith like

that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and

the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such

incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining.

It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is.

No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination

marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites. There are choice great

natures among us that could exhibit the equivalent of this prodigious

self-sacrifice, but the rest of us know that we should not be equal to

anything approaching it. Still, we all talk self-sacrifice, and this

makes me hope that we are large enough to honor it in the Hindoo.

Two millions of natives arrive at this fair every year. How many start,

and die on the road, from age and fatigue and disease and scanty

nourishment, and how many die on the return, from the same causes, no one

knows; but the tale is great, one may say enormous. Every twelfth year

is held to be a year of peculiar grace; a greatly augmented volume of

pilgrims results then. The twelfth year has held this distinction since

the remotest times, it is said. It is said also that there is to be but

one more twelfth year—for the Ganges. After that, that holiest of all

sacred rivers will cease to be holy, and will be abandoned by the pilgrim

for many centuries; how many, the wise men have not stated. At the end

of that interval it will become holy again. Meantime, the data will be

arranged by those people who have charge of all such matters, the great

chief Brahmins. It will be like shutting down a mint. At a first glance

it looks most unbrahminically uncommercial, but I am not disturbed, being

soothed and tranquilized by their reputation. “Brer fox he lay low,” as

Uncle Remus says; and at the judicious time he will spring something on

the Indian public which will show that he was not financially asleep when

he took the Ganges out of the market.

Great numbers of the natives along the roads were bringing away holy

water from the rivers. They would carry it far and wide in India and

sell it. Tavernier, the French traveler (17th century), notes that

Ganges water is often given at weddings, “each guest receiving a cup or

two, according to the liberality of the host; sometimes 2,000 or 3,000

rupees' worth of it is consumed at a wedding.”

The Fort is a huge old structure, and has had a large experience in

religions. In its great court stands a monolith which was placed there

more than 2,000 years ago to preach (Budhism) by its pious inscription;

the Fort was built three centuries ago by a Mohammedan Emperor—a

resanctification of the place in the interest of that religion. There is

a Hindoo temple, too, with subterranean ramifications stocked with

shrines and idols; and now the Fort belongs to the English, it contains a

Christian Church. Insured in all the companies.

From the lofty ramparts one has a fine view of the sacred rivers. They

join at that point—the pale blue Jumna, apparently clean and clear, and

the muddy Ganges, dull yellow and not clean. On a long curved spit

between the rivers, towns of tents were visible, with a multitude of

fluttering pennons, and a mighty swarm of pilgrims. It was a troublesome

place to get down to, and not a quiet place when you arrived; but it was

interesting. There was a world of activity and turmoil and noise, partly

religious, partly commercial; for the Mohammedans were there to curse and

sell, and the Hindoos to buy and pray. It is a fair as well as a

religious festival. Crowds were bathing, praying, and drinking the

purifying waters, and many sick pilgrims had come long journeys in

palanquins to be healed of their maladies by a bath; or if that might not

be, then to die on the blessed banks and so make sure of heaven. There

were fakeers in plenty, with their bodies dusted over with ashes and

their long hair caked together with cow-dung; for the cow is holy and so

is the rest of it; so holy that the good Hindoo peasant frescoes the

walls of his hut with this refuse, and also constructs ornamental figures

out of it for the gracing of his dirt floor. There were seated families,

fearfully and wonderfully painted, who by attitude and grouping

represented the families of certain great gods. There was a holy man who

sat naked by the day and by the week on a cluster of iron spikes, and did

not seem to mind it; and another holy man, who stood all day holding his

withered arms motionless aloft, and was said to have been doing it for

years. All of these performers have a cloth on the ground beside them

for the reception of contributions, and even the poorest of the people

give a trifle and hope that the sacrifice will be blessed to him. At

last came a procession of naked holy people marching by and chanting, and

I wrenched myself away.

CHAPTER L.

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that

wears a fig-leaf.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

The journey to Benares was all in daylight, and occupied but a few hours.

It was admirably dusty. The dust settled upon you in a thick ashy layer

and turned you into a fakeer, with nothing lacking to the role but the

cow manure and the sense of holiness. There was a change of cars about

mid-afternoon at Moghul-serai—if that was the name—and a wait of two

hours there for the Benares train. We could have found a carriage and

driven to the sacred city, but we should have lost the wait. In other

countries a long wait at a station is a dull thing and tedious, but one

has no right to have that feeling in India. You have the monster crowd

of bejeweled natives, the stir, the bustle, the confusion, the shifting

splendors of the costumes—dear me, the delight of it, the charm of it

are beyond speech. The two-hour wait was over too soon. Among other

satisfying things to look at was a minor native prince from the backwoods

somewhere, with his guard of honor, a ragged but wonderfully gaudy gang

of fifty dark barbarians armed with rusty flint-lock muskets. The

general show came so near to exhausting variety that one would have said

that no addition to it could be conspicuous, but when this Falstaff and

his motleys marched through it one saw that that seeming impossibility

had happened.

We got away by and by, and soon reached the outer edge of Benares; then

there was another wait; but, as usual, with something to look at. This

was a cluster of little canvas-boxes—palanquins. A canvas-box is not

much of a sight—when empty; but when there is a lady in it, it is an

object of interest. These boxes were grouped apart, in the full blaze of

the terrible sun during the three-quarters of an hour that we tarried

there. They contained zenana ladies. They had to sit up; there was not

room enough to stretch out. They probably did not mind it. They are

used to the close captivity of their dwellings all their lives; when they

go a journey they are carried to the train in these boxes; in the train

they have to be secluded from inspection. Many people pity them, and I

always did it myself and never charged anything; but it is doubtful if

this compassion is valued. While we were in India some good-hearted

Europeans in one of the cities proposed to restrict a large park to the

use of zenana ladies, so that they could go there and in assured privacy

go about unveiled and enjoy the sunshine and air as they had never

enjoyed them before. The good intentions back of the proposition were

recognized, and sincere thanks returned for it, but the proposition

itself met with a prompt declination at the hands of those who were

authorized to speak for the zenana ladies. Apparently, the idea was

shocking to the ladies—indeed, it was quite manifestly shocking. Was

that proposition the equivalent of inviting European ladies to assemble

scantily and scandalously clothed in the seclusion of a private park? It

seemed to be about that.

Without doubt modesty is nothing less than a holy feeling; and without

doubt the person whose rule of modesty has been transgressed feels the

same sort of wound that he would feel if something made holy to him by

his religion had suffered a desecration. I say “rule of modesty” because

there are about a million rules in the world, and this makes a million

standards to be looked out for. Major Sleeman mentions the case of some

high-caste veiled ladies who were profoundly scandalized when some

English young ladies passed by with faces bare to the world; so

scandalized that they spoke out with strong indignation and wondered that

people could be so shameless as to expose their persons like that. And

yet “the legs of the objectors were naked to mid-thigh.” Both parties

were clean-minded and irreproachably modest, while abiding by their

separate rules, but they couldn't have traded rules for a change without

suffering considerable discomfort. All human rules are more or less

idiotic, I suppose. It is best so, no doubt. The way it is now, the

asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane

we should run out of building materials.

You have a long drive through the outskirts of Benares before you get to

the hotel. And all the aspects are melancholy. It is a vision of dusty

sterility, decaying temples, crumbling tombs, broken mud walls, shabby

huts. The whole region seems to ache with age and penury. It must take

ten thousand years of want to produce such an aspect. We were still

outside of the great native city when we reached the hotel. It was a

quiet and homelike house, inviting, and manifestly comfortable. But we

liked its annex better, and went thither. It was a mile away, perhaps,

and stood in the midst of a large compound, and was built bungalow

fashion, everything on the ground floor, and a veranda all around. They

have doors in India, but I don't know why. They don't fasten, and they

stand open, as a rule, with a curtain hanging in the doorspace to keep

out the glare of the sun. Still, there is plenty of privacy, for no

white person will come in without notice, of course. The native men

servants will, but they don't seem to count. They glide in, barefoot and

noiseless, and are in the midst before one knows it. At first this is a

shock, and sometimes it is an embarrassment; but one has to get used to

it, and does.

There was one tree in the compound, and a monkey lived in it. At first I

was strongly interested in the tree, for I was told that it was the

renowned peepul—the tree in whose shadow you cannot tell a lie. This

one failed to stand the test, and I went away from it disappointed.

There was a softly creaking well close by, and a couple of oxen drew

water from it by the hour, superintended by two natives dressed in the

usual “turban and pocket-handkerchief.” The tree and the well were the

only scenery, and so the compound was a soothing and lonesome and

satisfying place; and very restful after so many activities. There was

nobody in our bungalow but ourselves; the other guests were in the next

one, where the table d'hote was furnished. A body could not be more

pleasantly situated. Each room had the customary bath attached—a room

ten or twelve feet square, with a roomy stone-paved pit in it and

abundance of water. One could not easily improve upon this arrangement,

except by furnishing it with cold water and excluding the hot, in

deference to the fervency of the climate; but that is forbidden. It

would damage the bather's health. The stranger is warned against taking

cold baths in India, but even the most intelligent strangers are fools,

and they do not obey, and so they presently get laid up. I was the most

intelligent fool that passed through, that year. But I am still more

intelligent now. Now that it is too late.

I wonder if the 'dorian', if that is the name of it, is another

superstition, like the peepul tree. There was a great abundance and

variety of tropical fruits, but the dorian was never in evidence. It was

never the season for the dorian. It was always going to arrive from

Burma sometime or other, but it never did. By all accounts it was a most

strange fruit, and incomparably delicious to the taste, but not to the

smell. Its rind was said to exude a stench of so atrocious a nature that

when a dorian was in the room even the presence of a polecat was a

refreshment. We found many who had eaten the dorian, and they all spoke

of it with a sort of rapture. They said that if you could hold your nose

until the fruit was in your mouth a sacred joy would suffuse you from

head to foot that would make you oblivious to the smell of the rind, but

that if your grip slipped and you caught the smell of the rind before the

fruit was in your mouth, you would faint. There is a fortune in that

rind. Some day somebody will import it into Europe and sell it for

cheese.

Benares was not a disappointment. It justified its reputation as a

curiosity. It is on high ground, and overhangs a grand curve of the

Ganges. It is a vast mass of building, compactly crusting a hill, and is

cloven in all directions by an intricate confusion of cracks which stand

for streets. Tall, slim minarets and beflagged temple-spires rise out of

it and give it picturesqueness, viewed from the river. The city is as

busy as an ant-hill, and the hurly-burly of human life swarming along the

web of narrow streets reminds one of the ants. The sacred cow swarms

along, too, and goes whither she pleases, and takes toll of the

grain-shops, and is very much in the way, and is a good deal of a

nuisance, since she must not be molested.

Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than

legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together. From a

Hindoo statement quoted in Rev. Mr. Parker's compact and lucid Guide to

Benares, I find that the site of the town was the beginning-place of the

Creation. It was merely an upright “lingam,” at first, no larger than a

stove-pipe, and stood in the midst of a shoreless ocean. This was the

work of the God Vishnu. Later he spread the lingam out till its surface

was ten miles across. Still it was not large enough for the business;

therefore he presently built the globe around it. Benares is thus the

center of the earth. This is considered an advantage.

It has had a tumultuous history, both materially and spiritually. It

started Brahminically, many ages ago; then by and by Buddha came in

recent times 2,500 years ago, and after that it was Buddhist during many

centuries—twelve, perhaps—but the Brahmins got the upper hand again,

then, and have held it ever since. It is unspeakably sacred in Hindoo

eyes, and is as unsanitary as it is sacred, and smells like the rind of

the dorian. It is the headquarters of the Brahmin faith, and one-eighth

of the population are priests of that church. But it is not an

overstock, for they have all India as a prey. All India flocks thither

on pilgrimage, and pours its savings into the pockets of the priests in a

generous stream, which never fails. A priest with a good stand on the

shore of the Ganges is much better off than the sweeper of the best

crossing in London. A good stand is worth a world of money. The holy

proprietor of it sits under his grand spectacular umbrella and blesses

people all his life, and collects his commission, and grows fat and rich;

and the stand passes from father to son, down and down and down through

the ages, and remains a permanent and lucrative estate in the family. As

Mr. Parker suggests, it can become a subject of dispute, at one time or

another, and then the matter will be settled, not by prayer and fasting

and consultations with Vishnu, but by the intervention of a much more

puissant power—an English court. In Bombay I was told by an American

missionary that in India there are 640 Protestant missionaries at work.

At first it seemed an immense force, but of course that was a thoughtless

idea. One missionary to 500,000 natives—no, that is not a force; it is

the reverse of it; 640 marching against an intrenched camp of

300,000,000—the odds are too great. A force of 640 in Benares alone

would have its hands over-full with 8,000 Brahmin priests for adversary.

Missionaries need to be well equipped with hope and confidence, and this

equipment they seem to have always had in all parts of the world. Mr.

Parker has it. It enables him to get a favorable outlook out of

statistics which might add up differently with other mathematicians. For

instance:

“During the past few years competent observers declare that the number of

pilgrims to Benares has increased.”

And then he adds up this fact and gets this conclusion:

“But the revival, if so it may be called, has in it the marks of death.

It is a spasmodic struggle before dissolution.”

In this world we have seen the Roman Catholic power dying, upon these

same terms, for many centuries. Many a time we have gotten all ready for

the funeral and found it postponed again, on account of the weather or

something. Taught by experience, we ought not to put on our things for

this Brahminical one till we see the procession move. Apparently one of

the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion.

I should have been glad to acquire some sort of idea of Hindoo theology,

but the difficulties were too great, the matter was too intricate. Even

the mere A, B, C of it is baffling.

There is a trinity—Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu—independent powers,

apparently, though one cannot feel quite sure of that, because in one of

the temples there is an image where an attempt has been made to

concentrate the three in one person. The three have other names and

plenty of them, and this makes confusion in one's mind. The three have

wives and the wives have several names, and this increases the confusion.

There are children, the children have many names, and thus the confusion

goes on and on. It is not worth while to try to get any grip upon the

cloud of minor gods, there are too many of them.

It is even a justifiable economy to leave Brahma, the chiefest god of

all, out of your studies, for he seems to cut no great figure in India.

The vast bulk of the national worship is lavished upon Shiva and Vishnu

and their families. Shiva's symbol—the “lingam” with which Vishnu began

the Creation—is worshiped by everybody, apparently. It is the commonest

object in Benares. It is on view everywhere, it is garlanded with

flowers, offerings are made to it, it suffers no neglect. Commonly it is

an upright stone, shaped like a thimble—sometimes like an elongated

thimble. This priapus-worship, then, is older than history. Mr. Parker

says that the lingams in Benares “outnumber the inhabitants.”

In Benares there are many Mohammedan mosques. There are Hindoo temples

without number—these quaintly shaped and elaborately sculptured little

stone jugs crowd all the lanes. The Ganges itself and every individual

drop of water in it are temples. Religion, then, is the business of

Benares, just as gold-production is the business of Johannesburg. Other

industries count for nothing as compared with the vast and all-absorbing

rush and drive and boom of the town's specialty. Benares is the

sacredest of sacred cities. The moment you step across the

sharply-defined line which separates it from the rest of the globe, you

stand upon ineffably and unspeakably holy ground. Mr. Parker says: “It

is impossible to convey any adequate idea of the intense feelings of

veneration and affection with which the pious Hindoo regards 'Holy Kashi'

(Benares).” And then he gives you this vivid and moving picture:

“Let a Hindoo regiment be marched through the district, and as soon

as they cross the line and enter the limits of the holy place they

rend the air with cries of 'Kashi ji ki jai—jai! (Holy

Kashi! Hail to thee! Hail! Hail! Hail)'. The weary pilgrim

scarcely able to stand, with age and weakness, blinded by the dust

and heat, and almost dead with fatigue, crawls out of the oven-like

railway carriage and as soon as his feet touch the ground he lifts

up his withered hands and utters the same pious exclamation. Let a

European in some distant city in casual talk in the bazar mention

the fact that he has lived at Benares, and at once voices will be

raised to call down blessings on his head, for a dweller in Benares

is of all men most blessed.”

It makes our own religious enthusiasm seem pale and cold. Inasmuch as

the life of religion is in the heart, not the head, Mr. Parker's touching

picture seems to promise a sort of indefinite postponement of that

funeral.

CHAPTER LI.

Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its

laws or its songs either.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Yes, the city of Benares is in effect just a big church, a religious

hive, whose every cell is a temple, a shrine or a mosque, and whose every

conceivable earthly and heavenly good is procurable under one roof, so to

speak—a sort of Army and Navy Stores, theologically stocked.

I will make out a little itinerary for the pilgrim; then you will see how

handy the system is, how convenient, how comprehensive. If you go to

Benares with a serious desire to spiritually benefit yourself, you will

find it valuable. I got some of the facts from conversations with the

Rev. Mr. Parker and the others from his Guide to Benares; they are

therefore trustworthy.

1. Purification. At sunrise you must go down to the Ganges and bathe,

pray, and drink some of the water. This is for your general

purification.

2. Protection against Hunger. Next, you must fortify yourself against

the sorrowful earthly ill just named. This you will do by worshiping for

a moment in the Cow Temple. By the door of it you will find an image of

Ganesh, son of Shiva; it has the head of an elephant on a human body; its

face and hands are of silver. You will worship it a little, and pass on,

into a covered veranda, where you will find devotees reciting from the

sacred books, with the help of instructors. In this place are groups of

rude and dismal idols. You may contribute something for their support;

then pass into the temple, a grim and stenchy place, for it is populous

with sacred cows and with beggars. You will give something to the

beggars, and “reverently kiss the tails” of such cows as pass along, for

these cows are peculiarly holy, and this act of worship will secure you

from hunger for the day.

3. “The Poor Man's Friend.” You will next worship this god. He is at

the bottom of a stone cistern in the temple of Dalbhyeswar, under the

shade of a noble peepul tree on the bluff overlooking the Ganges, so you

must go back to the river. The Poor Man's Friend is the god of material

prosperity in general, and the god of the rain in particular. You will

secure material prosperity, or both, by worshiping him. He is Shiva,

under a new alias, and he abides in the bottom of that cistern, in the

form of a stone lingam. You pour Ganges water over him, and in return

for this homage you get the promised benefits. If there is any delay

about the rain, you must pour water in until the cistern is full; the

rain will then be sure to come.

4. Fever. At the Kedar Ghat you will find a long flight of stone steps

leading down to the river. Half way down is a tank filled with sewage.

Drink as much of it as you want. It is for fever.

5. Smallpox. Go straight from there to the central Ghat. At its

upstream end you will find a small whitewashed building, which is a

temple sacred to Sitala, goddess of smallpox. Her under-study is there

—a rude human figure behind a brass screen. You will worship this for

reasons to be furnished presently.

6. The Well of Fate. For certain reasons you will next go and do homage

at this well. You will find it in the Dandpan Temple, in the city. The

sunlight falls into it from a square hole in the masonry above. You will

approach it with awe, for your life is now at stake. You will bend over

and look. If the fates are propitious, you will see your face pictured

in the water far down in the well. If matters have been otherwise

ordered, a sudden cloud will mask the sun and you will see nothing. This

means that you have not six months to live. If you are already at the

point of death, your circumstances are now serious. There is no time to

lose. Let this world go, arrange for the next one. Handily situated, at

your very elbow, is opportunity for this. You turn and worship the image

of Maha Kal, the Great Fate, and happiness in the life to come is

secured. If there is breath in your body yet, you should now make an

effort to get a further lease of the present life. You have a chance.

There is a chance for everything in this admirably stocked and

wonderfully systemized Spiritual and Temporal Army and Navy Store. You

must get yourself carried to the

7. Well of Long Life. This is within the precincts of the mouldering and

venerable Briddhkal Temple, which is one of the oldest in Benares. You

pass in by a stone image of the monkey god, Hanuman, and there, among the

ruined courtyards, you will find a shallow pool of stagnant sewage. It

smells like the best limburger cheese, and is filthy with the washings of

rotting lepers, but that is nothing, bathe in it; bathe in it gratefully

and worshipfully, for this is the Fountain of Youth; these are the Waters

of Long Life. Your gray hairs will disappear, and with them your

wrinkles and your rheumatism, the burdens of care and the weariness of

age, and you will come out young, fresh, elastic, and full of eagerness

for the new race of life. Now will come flooding upon you the manifold

desires that haunt the dear dreams of the morning of life. You will go

whither you will find

8. Fulfillment of Desire. To wit, to the Kameshwar Temple, sacred to

Shiva as the Lord of Desires. Arrange for yours there. And if you like

to look at idols among the pack and jam of temples, there you will find

enough to stock a museum. You will begin to commit sins now with a

fresh, new vivacity; therefore, it will be well to go frequently to a

place where you can get

9. Temporary Cleansing from Sin. To wit, to the Well of the Earring.

You must approach this with the profoundest reverence, for it is

unutterably sacred. It is, indeed, the most sacred place in Benares, the

very Holy of Holies, in the estimation of the people. It is a railed

tank, with stone stairways leading down to the water. The water is not

clean. Of course it could not be, for people are always bathing in it.

As long as you choose to stand and look, you will see the files of

sinners descending and ascending—descending soiled with sin, ascending

purged from it. “The liar, the thief, the murderer, and the adulterer

may here wash and be clean,” says the Rev. Mr. Parker, in his book. Very

well. I know Mr. Parker, and I believe it; but if anybody else had said

it, I should consider him a person who had better go down in the tank and

take another wash. The god Vishnu dug this tank. He had nothing to dig

with but his “discus.” I do not know what a discus is, but I know it is a

poor thing to dig tanks with, because, by the time this one was finished,

it was full of sweat—Vishnu's sweat. He constructed the site that

Benares stands on, and afterward built the globe around it, and thought

nothing of it, yet sweated like that over a little thing like this tank.

One of these statements is doubtful. I do not know which one it is, but

I think it difficult not to believe that a god who could build a world

around Benares would not be intelligent enough to build it around the

tank too, and not have to dig it. Youth, long life, temporary

purification from sin, salvation through propitiation of the Great Fate

—these are all good. But you must do something more. You must

10. Make Salvation Sure. There are several ways. To get drowned in

the Ganges is one, but that is not pleasant. To die within the limits of

Benares is another; but that is a risky one, because you might be out of

town when your time came. The best one of all is the Pilgrimage Around

the City. You must walk; also, you must go barefoot. The tramp is

forty-four miles, for the road winds out into the country a piece, and

you will be marching five or six days. But you will have plenty of

company. You will move with throngs and hosts of happy pilgrims whose

radiant costumes will make the spectacle beautiful and whose glad songs

and holy pans of triumph will banish your fatigues and cheer your spirit;

and at intervals there will be temples where you may sleep and be

refreshed with food. The pilgrimage completed, you have purchased

salvation, and paid for it. But you may not get it unless you

11. Get Your Redemption Recorded. You can get this done at the Sakhi

Binayak Temple, and it is best to do it, for otherwise you might not be

able to prove that you had made the pilgrimage in case the matter should

some day come to be disputed. That temple is in a lane back of the Cow

Temple. Over the door is a red image of Ganesh of the elephant head, son

and heir of Shiva, and Prince of Wales to the Theological Monarchy, so to

speak. Within is a god whose office it is to record your pilgrimage and

be responsible for you. You will not see him, but you will see a Brahmin

who will attend to the matter and take the money. If he should forget to

collect the money, you can remind him. HE knows that your salvation is

now secure, but of course you would like to know it yourself. You have

nothing to do but go and pray, and pay at the

12. Well of the Knowledge of Salvation. It is close to the Golden

Temple. There you will see, sculptured out of a single piece of black

marble, a bull which is much larger than any living bull you have ever

seen, and yet is not a good likeness after all. And there also you will

see a very uncommon thing—an image of Shiva. You have seen his lingam

fifty thousand times already, but this is Shiva himself, and said to be a

good likeness. It has three eyes. He is the only god in the firm that

has three. “The well is covered by a fine canopy of stone supported by

forty pillars,” and around it you will find what you have already seen at

almost every shrine you have visited in Benares, a mob of devout and

eager pilgrims. The sacred water is being ladled out to them; with it

comes to them the knowledge, clear, thrilling, absolute, that they are

saved; and you can see by their faces that there is one happiness in this

world which is supreme, and to which no other joy is comparable. You

receive your water, you make your deposit, and now what more would you

have? Gold, diamonds, power, fame? All in a single moment these things

have withered to dirt, dust, ashes. The world has nothing to give you

now. For you it is bankrupt.

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 he 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 barren 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 £500,000 which

he had levied upon its Rajah, Cheit Singh, 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 European 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 in that kind of 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 a 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 we 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

cold, 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 crooked 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, made 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 hanging 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

never 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.