Roving East and Roving West

{Illustration: TWO MEN ADMIRING FUJI FROM A WINDOW From Hokusai's A Hundred Views of Fuji } (Illustrations not available in this file)
Yes, Sir, there are two objects of curiosity, e.g., the Christian world and the Mahometan world. —DR. JOHNSON.
Motion recollected in tranquillity. —WORDSWORTH ( very nearly ).
CONTENTS


Although India is a land of walkers, there is no sound of footfalls. Most of the feet are bare and all are silent: dark strangers overtake one like ghosts.
Both in the cities and the country some one is always walking. There are carts and motorcars, and on the roads about Delhi a curious service of camel omnibuses, but most of the people walk, and they walk ever. In the bazaars they walk in their thousands; on the long, dusty roads, miles from anywhere, there are always a few, approaching or receding.
It is odd that the only occasion on which Indians break from their walk into a run or a trot is when they are bearers at a funeral, or have an unusually heavy head-load, or carry a piano. Why there is so much piano-carrying in Calcutta I cannot say, but the streets (as I feel now) have no commoner spectacle than six or eight merry, half-naked fellows, trotting along, laughing and jesting under their burden, all with an odd, swinging movement of the arms.
One of one's earliest impressions of the Indians is that their hands are inadequate. They suggest no power.
Not only is there always some one walking, but there is always some one resting. They repose at full length wherever the need for sleep takes them; or they sit with pointed knees. Coming from England one is struck by so much inertness; for though the English labourer can be lazy enough he usually rests on his feet, leaning against walls: if he is a land labourer, leaning with his back to the support; if he follows the sea, leaning on his stomach.
It was interesting to pass on from India and its prostrate philosophers with their infinite capacity for taking naps, to Japan, where there seems to be neither time nor space for idlers. Whereas in India one has continually to turn aside in order not to step upon a sleeping figure—the footpath being a favourite dormitory—in Japan no one is ever doing nothing, and no one appears to be weary or poor.