about their legs and reaching to the ground. The poorer women have only
a scanty saree to complete the costume; the more wealthy display
stockings and boots; a white bodice cut low, with open sleeves and no
basque leaves a roll of skin visible between the skirt and the bodice.
The men wear a long loin-cloth of English trouser-stuff, a white jacket
buttoned over the bare skin, and a twist of back hair like a woman's, in
which they stick a celluloid comb, coronet-fashion--such a comb as is
used in Europe to keep the hair back from a child's forehead. And all
the race are too slender, too pliant, their eyes too long and slightly
darkened with kohl; the boys especially have an unpleasant, ambiguous
look.
In every shop of the High Street jewellers are on the look-out for
customers, hale them in, tease them to buy, and open for inspection
little bags or cardboard boxes kept in safes, and containing the finest
sapphires in the world. The day slips by in bargaining for the gems, in
endless discussions and feigned departures. The indefatigable vendors
return to the charge, run after the customer, wait for him at the door
of a rival dealer, and drag him back again. Then there is a fresh
dispute over prices, till irresistible argument at last brings down the
estimates to a third or a quarter of what they were at starting.
KANDY
Inland from Colombo it is pure enchantment to travel among the rich and
tangled vegetation of every shade of green that grows by the margins of
the pools, the rivers, and the rice-fields. At first, skirting the
shallows, where men, standing to their waists in water, were fishing
with large nets which they managed but clumsily, the flat banks are
overgrown with anthuriums, their broad leaves of dark velvet or of light
gauze splashed with rose and white, mirrored in the channels that form a
network to irrigate the rice-swamps. Then ferns, bamboos, and feathery
reeds in every varying shade of gold; creepers clinging to the trunks of
coco trees or phoenix-palms bear bunches of pink or yellow blossoms
between the palm-leaves, invading everything with their luxuriance, and
forming a gaudy undergrowth below the tall trees--a light but
impenetrable thicket where the sun casts warm purple shadows.
Higher on the hills, amid the rich bright verdure of the
tea-plantations, we find magnolias, pines, and the Campeachy medlar, all
wreathed with climbing plants and invaded by the young growth of palms,
by rattans which have succeeded in piercing the awning of parasites that
hangs, starred with flowers, from tree to tree--flowers like lamps
shining among the ripe coco-nuts, mango fruit, and papaws.
Beyond a wide valley that lay far beneath us a mountain-range gleamed
softly in the blue distance, starry and sapphire-hued above rising
levels of delicate green. Here, in the fresher air, floated the
fragrance of mosses and alpine flowers, and above the cascades falling
in showers we could see the tangle of climbing plants, ferns, orchids,
and hibiscus, a swaying curtain all woven of leaves and blossoms.
A plantation of theobromas (cacao), carefully enclosed and tended, with
their puckered leaves, and fruit-pods as large as an ostrich egg hanging
from the trunk and the larger branches, seemed quite melancholy, like
wild things tethered.
Then some gardens looking like hothouses, concealing bungalows, and a
gleaming lake among the greenery--and this was Kandy.
In front of a Buddhist temple were some tanks in which enormous
tortoises were swimming. On the building, above carvings of elephants in
relief on the stone, were a number of mural paintings, artless and
terrible scenes set forth with the utmost scorn of perspective and
chiaroscuro: a place of torment where green monsters thrust the damned
against trees of which the trunks are saws, and enormous red and yellow
birds devour living victims.
Inside the temple was the fragrance of fresh flowers, brought as
offerings, with grains of rice threaded like semi-transparent beads on
the flexible pale green stem. A huge Buddha here, of many-coloured
stones bedizened with gold, gleams in the shade of the altar, and two
bonzes in front of the idol were quarrelling at great length, with
screams like angry cats and vehement gesticulations, for the possession
of some small object which constantly passed from one to the other.
Adjacent to this temple was the court-house, a hall of ancient splendour
in the time of the kings of Kandy. It stood wide open, the walls lined
with carved wood panels. The court was sitting under the punkhas that
swung with regular monotony, the judges robed in red. One of the
accused, standing in a sort of pen, listened unmoved to the pleading. A
large label bearing the number 5 hung over his breast. Behind a barrier
stood other natives, each decorated with a number, under the charge of
sepoys. One of them, having been wounded in the murderous fray for which
they were being tried, lay at full length on a litter covered with
pretty matting, red and white and green, stretched on bamboo legs. A
long robe of light silk enveloped his legs, and he alone of them all had
charming features, long black eyes with dark blue depths, his face
framed in a sort of halo of silky, tangled hair. He, like the man now
being sentenced and those who had gone through their examination,
seemed quite indifferent to the judges and the lawyers. He mildly waved
a palm leaf which served him as a fan, and looked as if he were
listening to voices in a dream, very far away.
An interpreter translated to the accused the questions put by the judge,
who understood the replies, though he was not allowed to speak excepting
in English.
Then a fat native lawyer began to speak, and silence fell on the crowd
of three or four hundred listeners sitting behind the accused, as if
they were in church. The monotonous voice went on and on, urging every
plea.
Even more than the assembly of their relatives and friends, the
prisoners at the bar maintained the impassive mien of men who attach no
disgrace to a sentence pronounced by a conquering race; they would take
the penalty without a murmur, as one of the inevitable incidents of this
life, which to them is but a stage, a passage to a higher existence.
The song of birds in the mitigated atmosphere of the dying day came in
from outside, for a moment almost drowning the pleader's weariful tones
as he poured forth his statement, emphasized by sweeping gestures.
In the mystery of a polychrome temple, whose walls are closely covered
with sculptured bas-reliefs of gods in the shape of men or animals, is a
relic, the sacred tooth of Buddha; and all about the precious object,
which is enclosed in a series of shrines within impenetrable walls,
there is no sign of respect, but all the noise and bustle of a fair, a
perfect turmoil of hurrying, chattering folk, whose only anxiety is to
keep unbelievers away from the sacred spot.
The forest round Kandy is glorious, an exuberance, a crush of trees
growing as thick as they can stand, the dense tangle of boughs and
leaves outgrown by some enormous _ficus_, or tall _terminalia_, whose
sharp, angular roots have pushed through the soil while its trunk,
twisting in a spiral, has made its way to a prodigious height, ending a
thick dome of foliage. This, again, is overgrown by delicate creepers
decking the green mass with their flowers. Spreading banyans, with a
hundred stems thrown out like branches and ending in roots, form
colonnades of a rosy grey hue like granite, and might seem to be the
vestiges of some colossal church with a dark vault above, scarcely
pierced here and there by a gleam of blue light from the sky beyond.
Among these giants of the forest dwells a whole nation of bending ferns
as pliant as feathers, of clinging plants hanging in dainty curtains of
flowers from tree to tree. Sometimes between the screen of flowers a bit
of road comes into view, deep in impalpable brick-red dust, of the same
tint as the fruits that hang in branches from the trees.
A kind of lemon plant, with picotee-like flowers of a texture like
crystalline pearl, its petals delicately fringed, exhales a fresh scent
like verbena. Then, on an ebony-tree, overgrown with succulent leaves
forming an edging to every bough, is a bird--as it would seem--a lilac
bird, with open wings, which, as we approach, turns into an orchid.
Above a large fan-palm the pale fronds of a talipot soar towards the
sky, gracefully recurved like enormous ostrich plumes. A fluff, a down,
of flowers clings to the stems of the magnificent crest, a delicate pale
cloud; and the broad leaves of the tree, which will die when it has
blossomed, are already withering and drooping on the crown. Then, in the
clearings made by the recent decay of such a giant, falling where it had
stood, and crushing the bamboos and _phoenix_ that grew round its foot,
the flowers sprang in myriads--great sunflowers, shrubs of _poinsettia_,
with its tufts of red or white bracts at the end of a branch of green
leaves, surrounding a small inconspicuous blossom, and tall,
lavender-blue lilies.
There was not a sound, not a bird, excepting on the fringe of the
forest. As we penetrated further there soon was no undergrowth even on
the dry soil, between the ever closer array of trees; the creepers hung
very low, tangled with clinging parasites; and between the stilt-like
and twining roots and the drooping boughs, the path, now impracticable,
suddenly ended in face of the total silence and black shade that exhaled
a strong smell of pepper, while not a leaf stirred.
Colombo again; and again the jewellers and their blue stones--an
intoxicating, living blue.
In the harbour, where there was a light breeze blowing, the little
outrigged canoes had hoisted large sails, white edged with black, and
vanished into the distance, skimming like winged things over the
intensely blue water.
Men were carrying mud in enormous turtle-shells that they used for
baskets.
Little beggar-girls with a depraved look, artful little hussies, pursued
us coaxingly: "Give something, sahib, to pretty Cingalee girl, who wants
to go over sea to where the gentlemens live."
MADRAS
The city produces an impression as of a town built in the clouds and
then dropped, scattered over the plain with vast arid and barren spaces
left between the houses. In the native and Moslem quarters, indeed,
there is a crowd of buildings, closely packed, crammed together on quite
a small plot of ground; and among them the electric tramway runs its
cars, useless just now, and empty of travellers, for it is the beginning
of Ramadan, and the Mohammedans in broad daylight are letting off
crackers in honour of the festival.
In the hotel compound--more absurd than all the rest, lost in a waste of
open land beyond the seething native town--there was a swarm of coolie
servants, their wives and their children, who played all day at climbing
about the coaches put up under the trees. And, without ceasing, a
maddening hubbub of laughter and crying came up from this litter of
brats, more weariful than the silence of vacancy all around.
The draught-oxen all had their horns painted in gaudy colours,
generally one horn blue and the other green.
In the evening, in the open street, we came upon a circle of bystanders
all beating time, while in the midst four little girls were dancing,
wearing the sarong, but naked to the waist. They leaned very much over
to the right, resting the right elbow on the groin, clapping the right
hand with the left, and throwing back the left leg. All four did the
same, round and round, and this went on again and again without a pause,
under the pale light of the stars filtering through an enormous banyan
tree. Occasionally a woman among the crowd would give a slow, long-drawn
cry, and the dancers answered in very short notes, piercingly shrill.
In the native town, on a tank in front of a temple, a raft was moving
very slowly. Under a dazzlingly gorgeous canopy stood an idol of gold,
covered with garlands and jewels. A dense crowd, white and fragrant with
jasmine and sandal-wood, stood about the sacred pool and on the steps,
and bowed reverently as the divinity floated past.
One old man, indeed, bowed so low that he fell into the water, and all
the worshippers shouted with laughter.
The streets were hung with gaudy flags and coloured paper. Altars had
been erected, four poles supporting an awning with flounces of
bright-coloured silk, and under them a quantity of idols, of vases
filled with amaryllis and roses, and even dainty little Dresden
figures--exquisite curtseying _Marquises_, quite out of their element
among writhing Vishnus and Kalis.
That evening, near the temple where the god, having left the tank, was
receiving the flowers and scents offered by his votaries, there was
howling and yelling from the crowd of Hindoos, all crushing and pushing,
but going nowhere. And louder yet the noise of the tom-toms, which the
musicians raised to the desired pitch by warming them in front of big
fires throwing off clouds of acrid smoke.
In one tent there was a display of innumerable gilt images, very
suggestive of Jesuit influence--mincing, chubby angels, martyrs carrying
palm-branches, and ecstatic virgins with clasped hands, all serving to
decorate the shrine in which the god was to be carried back to the
temple. Coloured fires lighted the workmen, and in the background the
temple was darkly visible, with only a few dim lamps shrouded in
incense, and burning before Rama, whose festival was being kept.
The god having been placed in the shrine, which was enormously heavy,
and took a hundred men to carry it, the procession set out. First two
drums, then some children burning coloured fire and whirling fireworks
round above their heads. Three oxen with housings of velvet, richly
embroidered in gold, carried tom-tom drummers, and behind them came the
priests and the god, hardly visible among the lights and flowers on the
shrine. A breath of awe fell on the crowd as the divinity came by; they
bowed in adoration with clasped hands and heads bent very low.
To light the way, coolies carried long iron tridents tipped with balls
of tow soaked in oil. The mass moved slowly forward through the people,
suddenly soothed to silence. The procession paused at the wayside
altars, and then, in the middle of a circle formed by the torch-bearers
and coloured lights, the sacred bayadères appeared--three girls with
bare heads, dressed in stiff new sarongs heavy with tinkling trinkets,
and an old woman crowned with a sort of very tall cylindrical tiara of
red velvet embroidered with gold. Very sweet-toned bagpipes and some
darboukhas played a slow tune, and the dancers began to move; they spun
slowly round, their arms held out, their bodies kept rigid, excepting
when they bowed to the shrine. The crude light of the red fire or the
sulphurous flare of the torches fell on their glittering ornaments,
alternately festive and mysterious, shedding over the performance an
atmosphere at once dreamy and magically gorgeous.
Then all went out, died gently away; the tom-toms and pipe attending the
god's progress alone were audible in the silence; till in the distance a
great blaze of light flashed out, showing a crowd of bright turbans and
the glittering splendour of the shrine going up the steps to the temple
where, till next year, Rama would remain--the exiled god, worshipped for
his wisdom which enabled him to discover the secrets, to find the true
path, and win the forgiveness of his father.
The doors were shut; all was silence--the stillness of the star-lit
night.
Many hapless creatures here suffer from elephantiasis, and even quite
little children are to be seen with an ankle stiffened, or perhaps both
the joints ossified; and the whole limb will by-and-by be swollen by the
disease, a monstrous mass dreadfully heavy to drag about. Other forms of
lupus affect the face, and almost always, amid a crowd watching some
amusing performance, a head suddenly appears of ivory whiteness, the
skin clinging to the bone or disfigured by bleeding sores.
Steaming over the transparent and intensely blue sea, we presently
perceived an opaquer streak of sandy matter, getting denser, and
becoming at last liquid, extremely liquid, yellow mud--the waters of the
Ganges, long before land was in sight. Between the low banks, with their
inconspicuous vegetation, a desolate shore, we could have fancied we
were still at sea when we had already reached the mouth of the sacred
stream. Some Hindoos on board drew up the water in pails to wash their
hands and face, fixing their eyes in adoration on the thick sandy fluid.
Enormous steamships crossed our bows, and in the distance, like a flock
of Ibis, skimmed a whole flotilla of boats with broad red sails, through
which the low sun was shining. The banks closed in, the landscape grew
more definite--tall palm trees, plots of garden ground, factory
chimneys, a high tower. On the water was an inextricable confusion of
canoes and row-boats flitting among the steamships and sailing barks
moored all along the town that stretched away out of sight.
CALCUTTA
An aggressive capital! Palaces of concrete and stucco washed with yellow
stand cheek by jowl with commission agencies and hovels, and all without
a suspicion of style, not even giving one the impression of a southern
city. In the streets, thick with dust, an all-prevailing turmoil as of a
fair is prolonged to the latest hours of night. Red uniforms and "young
England" tourist suits ending their career in rags on half-breed
coolies--a wearisome staleness and total effacement of local colour,
worse than commonplace; and then, above all, a very strong and
nauseating smell of lotus and tallow, with an after-gust of something
peppery and acrid.
In the street of native shops the possible purchaser is attacked by
storm, every voice yelps out prices. The dealers scrambled into my
carriage with a whole catalogue of bargains poured out in a mixed lingo,
and with such overpowering insistence that I had to fly. An electric
tram-car, provided with a loud bell that rings without ceasing, runs
through the suburbs, a dirty swarming quarter where the streets are
alive with naked children, fowls and pigs wallowing in heaps of filth
and the mud made by watering the road.
Past a magnificent railway station, and through a manufacturing district
of tall furnaces, we came to the quiet country and the Ganges, bordered
with gardens, where creepers in flower hang over the muddy stream
stained with iridescent grease and soot.
Round the railway station crowds the village of Chandernagore, the huts
close together, with no land to spare, and at length we were in the city
of houses, with broad terraces in front in a classic style, with
colonnades and decorations in relief, and broad eaves overhanging for
shade. And beautiful gardens, bougainvilleas, and almond trees,
white-blossomed faintly touched with pink, hedge in streets with
foreign-sounding names. The air was full of the fresh scent of water and
greenery and of the blessed peace of silence--so rare in India.
The cathedral, embowered in shrubs and tall banyans, stands on a square,
where a pedestal awaits the bust of Dupleix.
A stone parapet runs along the river road, and below it the grassy bank
slopes gently to the clear and limpid stream of the Ganges. On the
shores of the sacred river fine trees overshadow many idols, and fresh
flowers are constantly laid at their feet.
In the city, which is swept and cleaned till it is hard to believe
oneself among Hindoos, there are six hundred tanks, for the most part
stagnant, in which the natives wash themselves and their clothes. Round
others, which are gradually being appropriated to the use of the
residents, and all about the houses, bamboos are planted and "flame of
the forest," covered with enormous red star-shaped blossoms as solid as
fruit, and trees curtained with creepers of fragile growth--one long
garden extending almost to the bazaar.
At night the sound of a remote tom-tom attracted me to a large square
shaded by giant trees. In a very tiny hut made of matting, a misshapen
statue of Kali, bedizened with a diadem, a belt, nanparas, and bangles
made of beads and gold tinsel, stood over a prostrate image in clay of
Siva, lying on his back. In front of this divinity, under an awning
stretched beneath the boughs of a banyan tree, two nautch-girls in
transparent sarees were dancing a very smooth sliding step to the
accompaniment of two bagpipes and some drums. The Hindoo spectators sat
in a circle on the ground--a white mass dimly lighted by a few
lanterns--and sang to the music a soft, monotonous chant.
Then a man rose, and standing on the bayadères' carpet, he recited, in
verses of equal measure, a sort of heroic legend, making his voice big,
and emphasizing his words with grand gesticulation. One of the dancers
spoke the antistrophe, and this went on interminably, till their voices
gradually sank to mere hollow and expressionless intoning, while they
swayed their bodies to and fro like children who do not know their
lesson.
Then the dancing began again, interrupted for a minute by the call of
the night-watchman as he went past carrying a long bamboo. He paused for
a moment to watch the performance, and then was lost in the darkness.
At last, when it was very late, the reciter lifted the heavy idol on to
his head. A few worshippers followed him, carrying the flowers, the
little jars and the baskets offered to the goddess, and the procession
marched off towards the Ganges; while the nautch-girls went on with
their performance, giving loud, sharp shrieks out of all time with the
shrill but somnolent music.
The bearer of Kali walked into the sacred river up to his knees, and
then dropped the idol. The Hindoos who had followed him fell prostrate
in fervent prayer, hiding their face in their hands, and then flung
after the goddess, now lost in the waters, all the baskets, jars, and
flowers, to be carried down the stream. For a moment the silver paper
crown which had floated up spun on the water that was spangled by the
moon, and then it sank in an eddy.
The people came back to the dancing, which went on till daylight. The
music could be heard in the distance, drowned from time to time by the
yelling of the jackals or the watchman's call, and it was not till
daybreak that the drumming ceased.
In the little white church, all open windows, mass was performed by a
priest with a strong Breton accent. During the sermon, to an
accompaniment of parrots' screaming and kites' whistling, there was a
constant rustle of fans, which were left on each seat till the following
Sunday. The church was white and very plain; French was spoken, and
little native boys showed us to our places on benches. Old women in
sarees were on their knees, waving their arms to make large signs of the
cross. A worthy Sister presided at the harmonium, and the little
schoolgirls sang in their sweet young voices airs of the most insipid
type; but after the incessant hubbub of bagpipes and tom-toms their
music seemed to me quite delicious, raising visions in my mind of
masterpieces of harmony and grace.
In the afternoon--calm and almost cool--I went to call on the Resident,
who talked to me of India in the days of Dupleix, of its departed glory,
and the poor old fort of Chandernagore, once impregnable and now
demolished under the provisions of treaties; and as we walked on through
the town, between gardens that look like the great parks of the French
kings, all the past seemed to live again on this forgotten spot of
earth, and every moment, in the silence of the purple dusk, I could have
fancied that I saw in the avenues, under the tall phoenix palms, the
shades of powdered _marquises_ in skirts with full farthingales, and of
gallant knights of St. Louis; then from a far distance came the sound of
a piano--some simple melody quavering in the air that was so full of
memories.
DARJEELING