Soonair, Friday, Jan. 18, 1839.
We halt here till Monday. There is a great gathering of petty chiefs,
and our arrival was very pretty. Each man came on his elephant, with a
few wild followers on horseback, some with a second elephant, and they
all scramble up to G., every individual giving him a bow and arrows, or
a matchlock. His hand was soon full, then his howdah was hung with them;
the hirkaru behind was buried in bows; then they boiled over into our
howdahs, and at every break in the road a fresh chief and more bows
appeared.
At last we came to Mr. E., bringing the Nahun rajah. Don't you in your
ignorance go and confound him with the old _Nabun_ rajah. This is the
Nahun chief whom we visited last year in the hills, and who is very
gentlemanlike and civilised. I have found out why I was so glad to see
him again. He has light blue eyes, and after three years of those
enormous black beads the natives habitually see with, these were mild
and refreshing. They all brought us to the camp in a drizzling rain,
which came on to a pour in the course of the day, and a wretched
business it always is. All the servants and camp followers look so
miserable and catch such bad colds. I thought when we were at Nabun that
an old man, a sort of prime minister of the rajah's, would make a good
drawing, and I told him so; and to-day he arrived, having made two
marches to have the picture drawn. He gave me his matchlock, which I
asked Captain D. to return with the usual speech, that it was much
better in his hands than in mine; but the old man said no; it was a
particularly good matchlock; he had shot with it very often, and I
should not easily find so good a one, so C. gave me a watch to present
to him in exchange, which quite delighted him. While Captain L. E. was
gone to fetch the watch, the old man took the opportunity to question my
jemadar about our habits, and I understood enough of the language to
make out that he was asking how many times we eat in the day. The
natives generally only eat once, but I believe they think our way of
eating at several different times rather grand; at all events, the
jemadar did not omit a spoonful, and it was rather shocking to hear how
many times in the day we were fed, beginning with the cup of coffee
before marching; and the afternoon cup of tea sounded wrong and
_waste-not-want-not-ish_. However, the old sirdar said it was all 'wah
wah'--excellent, to be able to eat so much.
Saturday, Jan. 19.
There was rather a pretty durbar this morning--two hundred of those Sikh
chiefs who gave our great Apollo his bows yesterday; and as they were
only shown in by fives and sixes, it made a very long durbar, and we
went over to make a sketch of it. I never can make a likeness of G. to
my mind, and yet there is always a look of your M. in my drawings of
him, so there must be a likeness somehow, either in the sketches or in
G. and M. That gentlemanlike Nahun rajah made Mr. A. bring him all
across the tent to shake hands with F. and me, all owing to his blue
eyes. Nobody with black eyes would have dreamed of so European an idea.
G. went out shooting this afternoon. There are heaps of partridges and
quails in this part of the country.
I thought of going out too, with my matchlock, only C. has claimed it
for the Company. We had a large dinner to-day, forty-five; all the
officers of the cavalry and artillery who leave us on Monday. One or two
of them got particularly drunk. They say some of them are always so,
more or less, but it happened to be _more_ this evening.
Sunday, Jan. 20.
Mr. Y. set off after church to go back to Simla for his wife's
_accouchement_. He will go scrambling up to Simla in a shorter time than
the post goes. He borrows a horse here, and rides a camel there, and the
Putteealah rajah is to lend him a palanquin; and he set off with some
cold dinner in one hand and 'Culpepper's Midwifery' in the other, which
he borrowed of Dr. D. at the last minute. He is very pleasant and
amusing; more like R. than ever.
Such a pleasure! a letter from the agent at Calcutta to say a box of
millinery has arrived at the Custom House per 'Robert Small.' Mine, to a
certainty! It has been rather more than seven months making its voyage,
and will be three more coming to the hills. I think it is about the last
great invoice for which I shall trouble you. Calcutta may provide itself
for the last few months; and my next order will be for a pelisse and
bonnet, &c., at _Portsmouth_. Good!
Monday, Jan. 21.
Rather a long march; and that generally brings a large riding party
together at the end; and once more W. and I had one of our hysterical
fits of laughter at the extraordinary folly of a march. We feel so
certain that people who live in houses, and get up by a fire at a
reasonable hour and then go quietly to breakfast, would think us raving
mad, if they saw nine Europeans of steady age and respectable habits,
going galloping every morning at sunrise over a sandy plain, followed by
quantities of black horsemen, and then by ten miles of beasts of burden
carrying things which, after all, will not make the nine madmen even
decently comfortable. We have discovered that a mad doctor is coming out
here, and we think it must be a delicate attention of yours; but when he
sees us ride into Rag Fair every morning, for no other reason than that
we have left another Rag Fair ten miles behind, I am sure he will say he
can do us no good. It is very kind of you to have sent him, but we are
incurable, thank you, and as long as we are left at large we shall go
about in this odd way. There is your missing September letter, with T.'s
and E.'s dear Journals. It went to Calcutta, and came with the October
packet. Newsalls sounds very delightful, and I mean to live there
constantly, and to see a great many cricket matches. How very
disagreeable that Sister should look so young. I look much older now
than she did when we came away, so we shall never know which of us ought
to respect the other.
Tuesday, Jan. 22.
We are more mad than ever!--at least we have got ourselves into one of
those scrapes that mad people do. There is a wretched little rivulet, a
thing not so big as that ditch by old Holledge's, at Elmer's End, which
we were to have crossed this morning. This little creek, which is quite
dry ten months of the year, and at the best of times is only called the
Gugga, suddenly chose to rise in the night, and there is now seven feet
of water in it, which puts crossing out of the question. There is only
one boat, and a helpless magistrate on the other side.
The cavalry and artillery who left us yesterday will of course be
stopped by the same river higher up, and Mr. C. has sent to carry off
their one boat too; and in the meantime we are at a dead lock. Luckily,
there is very good shooting here. I could not imagine this morning why
Wright did not come to dress me after the bugles sounded, and I kept
sending message after message to her, with a sort of wild idea that
everybody would march, and I should be left lying in bed in the middle
of this desert, with nothing to put on, and no glass to dress by; a sort
of utter destitution.
The hirkaru who slept in the tent happened to speak no English, so I
never understood a word of the long Hindustani speeches he kept
screaming through the partitions, and at last Wright came, cold and
sleepy. 'Law, ma'am, did not you know the river was full, and we can't
go? and all the things have come back except the kitchen things, so I
thought you would like a good sleep.' Luckily, the kitchen recrossed
before breakfast time.
Noodeean, Thursday, Jan. 24.
That little ditch the Gugga is quite pompous with twenty feet of water,
and it has been dry for three years, and was nearly so on Monday, so we
are just a day too late. We moved eight miles nearer to it merely for
the love of moving, and are now at Noodeean--evidently a corruption of
Noodleland, or the land to which we noodles should come. I want to leave
the last camp standing, and to march backwards and forwards between the
two; it would be just as good as any other Indian tour. We came on
elephants to this place, careering wildly over the country, that the
gentlemen might shoot; there never was anything like the tribes of
quails and partridges, but it is very difficult to shoot them from an
elephant. The hotty goes lumbering on, and it is just a chance whether
the gun that is pointed at a hare on the ground, is not jerked up so as
to kill a rock pigeon overhead. G. killed ten quails, which was more
than anybody else did. Rajah Hindu Rao, who is now so habitually with us
that we look upon him as a native aide-de-camp, took pains to miss, I
think, that he might not seem to shoot better than G.
In the afternoon G. went out on foot with Captain X. and shot an
antelope, which is really a great feat. There is a Mr. N., the
magistrate to whom we rightfully belong to-day, and who ought to be
wringing his hands constantly, and plying eternally between our camp and
the river, a victim to remorse that he has not made a bridge of boats in
time; instead of which, N.'s tents are seen in the distance the other
side of the water, and he never stirs from them, and all the notice he
has taken of us is a message that perhaps he had better go back and
prepare for us at Hansi, as there seems little chance of our crossing
for a week. We tell Mr. C. that if he had been N. this never would have
happened. He has got two boats from those unhappy regiments up the
river, and moreover he has succeeded to-day in recovering great part of
Mrs. B.'s stolen property, her bracelets and some of her gowns, which
have been _buried_ in some Sikh village, and I fancy are not the better
for the operation. The thieves have been sent up to Runjeet, and his
justice is rather severe, I am afraid.
C. set off yesterday with all his clerks and establishment, and writes
word that by making the villagers work all night, he has passed them
all, except the camels, who detest water and will not swim. X. and A.
went off this afternoon to pass our goods, and W. went in the evening.
Friday, Jan. 25.
We marched this morning, that is, we rode five miles to this wicked
little Gugga, which is not forty yards wide, and yet gives us all this
trouble. Captain S. overtook us half-way, and said that he had been
detained by finding Wright and Jones at the last camp left without any
conveyance. Their elephant, by some mistake, had been sent on to the
ghaut, and all the usual spare resources had been sent away last night,
so he found them _walking_. He sent them his elephant as soon as he
could overtake it, but they had walked two miles, much to the wonder of
the natives.
I never saw such a scene as the ghaut--such a conglomeration of carts,
sepoys, bullocks, trunks, &c., and 600 camels, who would not go any
way. About 200 had been coaxed over. F. and I went down there after
luncheon, and sat on the shore to see the fun. W., X., P., and L. E. had
each taken the command of one of the boats; and with one European the
natives work very well. They each had on their broad white feather hats
to keep off the sun, and a long stick to keep the people from crowding
into the boats, and looked like pictures of slave-drivers, and were
screaming and gesticulating, and hauling packages in and out. The only
way of passing the camels was by tying six of them in a string to the
tail of an elephant, who then swam across, dragging them all after him.
They did so hate it! I suppose it must be much the same as we should
feel if we were dragged through a bed of hot sand, which is what the
camels really love. The water was like a deep canal; nothing was to be
seen of the elephant but his trunk, and the mahout standing on his back
holding on like grim death by the elephant's ears. The hackeries were
pushed into the water, some of them very high covered carts, but they
disappeared instantly, and were dragged under the water; then if they
stuck anywhere, a dear, good elephant would go in and rake about and
push them along with his great hard head. A little further up, there
might be seen a troop of bullocks refusing to take the water, and at
last driven in, and their owners swimming behind and holding on by their
tails. This has been going on ever since Tuesday morning. Captain P. and
his sergeant have not had their clothes off for three days, and look
thoroughly exhausted. The tent pitchers have also been at work in the
water for three days. What I hate most in a camp is the amount of human
and brute suffering it induces; luckily, there were no lives lost this
time; an elephant picked up one little boy who was drowning. Webb's tame
bear was nearly lost, and when he got into the boat, he turned round to
X. and said, 'I hope, sir, Miss Eden seed me a saving of my bear; it
would make such a pretty _skitch_.' The villain N. met us at the ghaut,
and came to visit us in the morning--not the least ashamed of
himself--but he is by no means an unpolished _jungle-man_: rather the
contrary, jolly and pleasant, only that he has nearly forgotten his
English. He laughs like that Dr. G. we used to know, and says with a
great 'Ho! ho! ho!' If it had not been an inconvenience on account of
supplies, it is just as well you should have been stopped in this way.
You ought to see the hard-_ships_ of a camp life.' I wonder what the
ships of a camp life are which are not _hard_-ships?