IV.—CONCLUSION.
The Koutab Minar, which I had first viewed nine miles off from one of the little kiosquelets crowning the minarets of the Jammah Masjid, improved upon closer acquaintance. One recognizes in the word "minaret" the diminutive of "minar," the latter being to the former as a tower to a turret. This minar of Koutab's—it was erected by the Mussulman general Koutab-Oudeen-Eibeg in the year 1200 to commemorate his success over the Rajpút emperor Pirthi-Raj—is two hundred and twenty feet high, and the cunning architect who designed it managed to greatly intensify its suggestion of loftiness by its peculiar shape. Instead of erecting a shaft with unbroken lines, he placed five truncated cones one upon another in such a way that the impression of their successively lessening diameters should be lengthened by the four balconies which result from the projection of each lower cone beyond the narrower base of the cone placed on it—thus borrowing, as it were, the perspective effects of five shafts and concentrating them upon one. The lower portion, too, shows the near color of red—it is built of the universal red sandstone with which the traveler becomes so familiar—while the upper part reveals the farther color of white from its marble casing. Each cone, finally, is carved into reeds, like a bundle of buttresses supporting a weight enormous not by reason of massiveness, but of pure height.
The group of ruins about the Koutab Minar was also very fascinating to me. The Gate of Aladdin, a veritable fairy portal, with its bewildering wealth of arabesques and flowing traceries in white marble inlaid upon red stone; the Tomb of Altamsh; the Mosque of Koutab,—all these, lying in a singular oasis of trees and greenery that forms a unique spot in the arid and stony ruin-plain of Delhi, drew me with great power. I declared to Bhima Gandharva that it was not often in a lifetime that we could get so many centuries together to talk with at once, and wrought upon him to spend several days with me, unattended by servants, in this tranquil society of the dead ages, which still live by sheer force of the beautiful that was in them.
"Very pretty," said my companion, "but not by force of the beautiful alone. Do you see that iron pillar?" We were walking in the court of the Mosque of Koutab, and Bhima pointed, as he spoke, to a plain iron shaft about a foot in diameter rising in the centre of the enclosed space to a height of something over twenty feet. "Its base is sunken deeper in the ground than the upper part is high. It is in truth a gigantic nail, which, according to popular tradition, was constructed by an ancient king who desired to play Jael to a certain Sisera that was in his way. It is related that King Anang Pal was not satisfied with having conquered the whole of Northern India, and that a certain Brahman, artfully seizing upon the moment when his mind was foolish with the fumes of conquest, informed him there was but one obstacle to his acquisition of eternal power. 'What is that?' said King Anang Pal.—'It is,' said the Brahman, 'the serpent Sechnaga, who lies under the earth and stops it, and who at the same time has charge of Change and Revolution.—'Well, and what then?' said King Anang Pal.—'If the serpent were dead there would be no change,' said the Brahman.—'Well, and what then?' said King Anang Pal.—'If you should cause to be constructed a great nail of iron, I will show you a spot where it shall be driven so as to pierce the head of the serpent.' It was done; and the nail—being this column which you now contemplate—was duly driven. Then the Brahman departed from the court. Soon the king's mind began to work, to question, to doubt, to harass itself with a thousand speculations, until his curiosity was inflamed to such a degree that he ordered the nail to be drawn out. With great trouble and outlay this was done: slowly the heavy mass rose, while the anxious king regarded it. At last the lower end came to his view. Rama! it was covered with blood. 'Down with it again!' cries the joyful king: 'perhaps the serpent is not yet dead, and is escaping even now.' But, alas! it would not remain stable in any position, pack and shove howsoever they might. Then the wise Brahman returned. 'O king,' said he, in reply to the monarch's interrogatories, 'your curiosity has cost you your kingdom: the serpent has escaped. Nothing in the world can again give stability to the pillar or to your reign.' And it was true. Change still lived, and King Anang Pal, being up, quickly went down. It is from this pillar that yon same city gets its name. In the tongue of these people dilha is, being interpreted, 'tottering;' and hence Dilhi or Delhi. It must be confessed, however, that this is not the account which the iron pillar gives of itself, for the inscription there declares it to have been erected as a monument of victory by King Dhara in the year 317, and it is known as the Lâth (or pillar) of Dhara."
Next day we took train for Agra, which might be called Shah Jehan's "other city," for it was only after building the lovely monument to his queen—the Taj Mahal—which has made Agra famous all over the world, that he removed to Delhi, or that part of it known as Shahjehanabad. Agra, in fact, first attained its grandeur under Akbar, and is still known among the natives as Akbarabad.
"But I am all for Shah Jehan," I said as, after wandering about the great citadel and palace at the south of the city, we came out on the bank of the Jumna and started along the road which runs by the river to the Taj Mahal. "A prince in whose reign and under whose direct superintendence was fostered the style of architecture which produced that little Mouti Masjid (Pearl Mosque) which we saw a moment ago—not to speak of the Jammah Masjid of Delhi which we saw there, or of the Taj which we are now going to see—must have been a spacious-souled man, with frank and pure elevations of temper within him, like that exquisite white marble superstructure of the Mouti Masjid which rises from a terrace of rose, as if the glow of crude passion had thus lifted itself into the pure white of tried virtue."
A walk of a mile—during which my companion reviewed the uglinesses as well as the beauties of the great Mogol reign with a wise and impartial calmness that amounted to an affectionate rebuke of my inconsiderate effusiveness—brought us to the main gate of the long red stone enclosure about the Taj. This is itself a work of art—in red stone banded with white marble, surmounted by kiosques, and ornamented with mosaics in onyx and agate. But I stayed not to look at these, nor at the long sweep of the enclosure, crenellated and pavilioned. Hastening through the gate, and moving down a noble alley paved with freestone, surrounded on both sides with trees, rare plants and flowers, and having a basin running down its length studded with water-jets, I quickly found myself in front of that bewilderment of incrustations upon white marble which constitutes the visitor's first impression of this loveliest of Love's memorials.
I will not describe the Taj. This is not self-denial: the Taj cannot be described. One can, it is true, inform one's friends that the red stone platform upon which the white marble mausoleum stands runs some nine hundred and sixty feet east and west by three hundred and twenty north and south; that the dome is two hundred and seventy feet high; that the incrustations with which the whole superstructure is covered without and within are of rock-crystal, chalcedony, turquoise, lapis-lazuli, agate, carnaline, garnet, oynx, sapphire, coral, Pannah diamonds, jasper, and conglomerates, brought respectively from Malwa, Asia Minor, Thibet, Ceylon, Temen, Broach, Bundelcund, Persia, Colombo, Arabia, Pannah, the Panjab, and Jessalmir; that there are, besides the mausoleum, two exquisite mosques occupying angles of the enclosure, the one built because it is the Moslem custom to have a house of prayer near the tomb, the other because the architect's passion for symmetry demanded another to answer to the first, whence it is called Jawab ("the answer"); that out of a great convention of all the architects of the East one Isa (Jesus) Mohammed was chosen to build this monument, and that its erection employed twenty thousand men from 1630 to 1647, at a total cost of twelve millions of dollars; and, finally, that the remains of the beautiful queen variously known as Mumtazi Mahal, Mumtazi Zemani and Taj Bibi, as well as those of her royal husband, Shah Jehan, who built this tomb to her memory, repose here.
But this is not description. The only way to get an idea of the Taj Mahal is—to go and see it.
"But it is ten thousand miles!" you say.
"But it is the Taj Mahal," I reply with calmness. And no one who has seen the Taj will regard this answer as aught but conclusive.
But we had to leave it finally—it and Agra—and after a railway journey of some twelve hours, as we were nearing Allahabad my companion began, in accordance with his custom, to give me a little preliminary view of the peculiarities of the town.
"We are now approaching," he said, "a city which distinguishes itself from those which you have seen by the fact that besides a very rich past it has also a very bright future. It is situated at the southern point of the Lower Doab, whose fertile and richly-cultivated plains you have been looking at to-day. These plains, with their wealth, converge to a point at Allahabad, narrowing with the approach of the two rivers,—the Ganges and the Jumna—that enclose them. The Doab, in fact, derives its name from do, "two," and ab, "rivers." But Allahabad, besides being situated at the junction of the two great water-ways of India—for here the Jumna unites with the Ganges—is also equally distant from the great extremes of Bombay, Calcutta, and Lahore, and here centres the railway system which unites these widely-separated points. Add to this singular union of commercial advantages the circumstance—so important in an India controlled by Englishmen—that the climate, though warm, is perfectly wholesome, and you will see that Allahabad must soon be a great emporium of trade."
"Provided," I suggested, "Benares yonder—Benares is too close by to feel uninterested—will let it be so."
"Oh! Benares is the holy city. Benares is the blind Teiresias of India: it has beheld the Divine Form, and in this eternal grace its eyes have even lost the power of seeing those practical advancements which usually allure the endeavors of large cities. Allahabad, although antique and holy also, has never become so wrapped up in religious absorption."
On the day after our arrival my companion and I were driven by an English friend engaged in the cultivation of indigo to an indigo-factory near the town, in compliance with a desire I had expressed to witness the process of preparing the dye for market.
"Not long ago," I said to our friend as we were rolling out of the city, "I was wandering along the banks of that great lagoon of Florida which is called the Indian River, and my attention was often attracted to the evidences of extensive cultivation which everywhere abounded. Great ditches, growths of young forests upon what had evidently been well-ploughed fields within a century past, and various remains of settlements constantly revealed themselves. On inquiry I learned that these were the remains of those great proprietary indigo-plantations which were cultivated here by English grantees soon after Florida first came under English protection, and which were afterward mournfully abandoned to ruin upon the sudden recession of Florida by the English government."
"They are ruins of interest to me," said our English friend, "for one of them—perhaps some one that you beheld—represents the wreck of my great-great-grandfather's fortune. He could not bear to stay among the dreadful Spaniards and Indians; and so, there being nobody to sell to, he simply abandoned homestead, plantations and all, and returned to England, and, finding soon afterward that the East India Company was earnestly bent upon fostering the indigo-culture of India, he came here and recommenced planting. Since then we've all been indigo-planters—genuine 'blue blood,' we call ourselves."
Indigo itself had a very arduous series of toils to encounter before it could manage to assert itself in the world. The ardent advocates of its azure rival, woad, struggled long before they would allow its adoption. In 1577 the German government officially prohibited the use of indigo, denouncing it as that pernicious, deceitful and corrosive substance, the Devil's dye. It had, indeed, a worse fate in England, where hard names were supplemented by harsh acts, for in 1581 it was not only pronounced anathema maranatha by act of Parliament, but the people were authorized to institute search for it in their neighbors' dye-houses, and were empowered to destroy it wherever found. Not more than two hundred years have passed since this law was still in force. It was only after a determined effort, which involved steady losses for many years, that the East India Company succeeded in re-establishing the culture of indigo in Bengal. The Spanish and French in Central America and the West Indies had come to be large growers, and the production of St. Domingo was very large. But the revolt in the latter island, the Florida disasters and the continual unsettlement of Mexico, all worked favorably for the planters of India, who may now be called the indigo-producers of the world.
The seed is usually sown in the latter part of October in Bengal, as soon as the annual deposit of the streams has been reduced by drainage to a practicable consistency, though the sowing-season lasts quite on to the end of November. On dry ground the plough is used, the ryots, or native farm-laborers, usually planting under directions proceeding from the factory. There are two processes of extracting the dye, known as the method "from fresh leaves" and that "from dry leaves." I found them here manufacturing by the former process. The vats or cisterns of stone were in pairs, the bottom of the upper one of each couple being about on a level with the top of the lower, so as to allow the liquid contents of the former to run freely into the latter. The upper is the fermenting vat, or "steeper," and is about twenty feet square by three deep. The lower is the "beater," and is of much the same dimensions with the upper, except that its length is five or six feet greater. As the twigs and leaves of the plants are brought in from the fields the cuttings are placed in layers in the steeper, logs of wood secured by bamboo withes are placed upon the surface to prevent overswelling, and water is then pumped on or poured from buckets to within a few inches of the top. Fermentation now commences, and continues for fourteen or fifteen hours, varying with the temperature of the air, the wind, the nature of the water used and the ripeness of the plants. When the agitation of the mass has begun to subside the liquor is racked off into the lower vat, the "beater," and ten men set to work lustily beating it with paddles (busquets), though this is sometimes done by wheels armed with paddle-like appendages. Meanwhile, the upper vat is cleaned out, and the refuse mass of cuttings stored up to be used as fuel or as fertilizing material. After an hour and a half's vigorous beating the liquor becomes flocculent. The precipitation is sometimes hastened by lime-water. The liquor is then drained off the dye by the use of filtering-cloths, heat being also employed to drain off the yellow matter and to deepen the color. Then the residuum is pressed in bags, cut into three-inch cubes, dried in the drying-house and sent to market.
The dry-leaf process depends also upon maceration, the leaves being cropped from the ripe plant, and dried in the hot sunshine during two days, from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon.
On the next day, at an early hour in the morning, my companion and I betook us to the Plain of Alms. I have before mentioned that Allahabad, the ancient city of Prayaga, is doubly sanctified because it is at the junction of the Jumna and the Gauges, and these two streams are affluents of its sanctity as well as of its trade. The great plain of white sand which is enclosed between the blue lake-like expanses of the two meeting rivers is the Plain of Alms. In truth, there are three rivers which unite here—the Ganges, the Jumna and the Saravasti—and this thrice-hallowed spot is known in the Hindu mythologic system as the Triveni.
"But where is the third?" I asked as we stood gazing across the unearthly-looking reaches of white sand far down the blue sweep of the mysterious waters.
"Thereby hangs a tale," replied my companion. "It is invisible here, but I will show you what remains of it presently when we get into the fort. Here is a crowd of pilgrims coming to bathe in the purifying waters of the confluence: let us follow them."
As they reached the shore a Brahman left his position under a great parasol and placed himself in front of the troop of believers, who, without regard to sex, immediately divested themselves of all clothing except a narrow cloth about the loins, and followed him into the water. Here they proceeded to imitate his motions, just as pupils in a calisthenic class follow the movements of their teacher, until the ceremonies of purification were all accomplished.
"A most villainous-faced penitent!" I exclaimed as one of their number came out, and, as if wearied by his exertions, lay down near us on the sand.
Bhima Gandharva showed his teeth: "He is what your American soldiers called in the late war a substitute. Some rich Hindu, off somewhere in India, has found the burden of his sins pressing heavily upon him, while at the same time the cares of this world, or maybe bodily infirmities, prevent him from visiting the Triveni. Hence, by the most natural arrangement in the world, he has hired this man to come in his place and accomplish his absolution for him."
Striking off to the westward from the Plain of Alms, we soon entered the citadel of Akbar, which he built so as to command the junction of the two streams. Passing the Lâth (pillar) of Asoka, my companion led me down into the old subterranean Buddhistic temple of Patal Pouri and showed me the ancient Achaya Bat, or sacred tree-trunk, which its custodians declare to be still living, although more than two thousand years old. Presently we came to a spot under one of the citadel towers where a feeble ooze of water appeared.
"Behold," said my friend, "the third of the Triveni rivers! This is the river Saravasti. You must know that once upon a time, Saravasti, goddess of learning, was tripping along fresh from the hills to the west of Yamuna (the Jumna), bearing in her hand a book. Presently she entered the sandy country, when on a sudden a great press of frightful demons uprose, and so terrified her that in the absence of other refuge she sank into the earth. Here she reappears. So the Hindus fable."
On our return to our quarters we passed a verandah where an old pedagogue was teaching a lot of young Mussulmans the accidence of Oordoo, a process which he accomplished much as the "singing geography" man used to impart instruction in the olden days when I was a boy—to wit, by causing the pupils to sing in unison the A, B, C. Occasionally, too, the little, queer-looking chaps squatted tailor-wise on the floor would take a turn at writing the Arabic character on their slates. A friendly hookah in the midst of the group betrayed the manner in which the wise man solaced the labors of education.
On the next day, as our indigo-planter came to drive us to the Gardens of Chusru, he said, "An English friend of mine who is living in the Moffussil—the Moffussil is anywhere not in Calcutta, Bombay or Madras—not far from Patna has just written me that word has been brought from one of the Sontal villages concerning the depredations of a tiger from which the inhabitants have recently suffered, and that a grand hunt, elephant-back, has been organized through the combined contributions of the English and native elephant-owners. He presses me to come, and as an affair of this sort is by no means common—for it is no easy matter to get together and support a dozen elephants and the army of retainers considered necessary in a great hunt—I thought perhaps you would be glad to accompany me."
Of course I was; and Bhima Gandharva, though he would not take any active part in the hunt, insisted upon going along in order to see that no harm came to me.
On the next day, therefore, we all took train and fared south-eastward toward Calcutta, as far as to Bhagalpur, where we left the railway, sending our baggage on to Calcutta, and took private conveyance to a certain spot among the Rajmahal Mountains, where the camp had been fixed by retainers on the day before. It was near a village of the Sontals, which we passed before reaching it, and which was a singular-enough spectacle with its round roofed huts and a platform at its entrance, upon which, and under which, were ghastly heaps of the skulls of animals slain by the villagers. These Sontals reminded me of the Gónds whom I had seen, though they seemed to be far manlier representatives of the autochthonal races of India than the former. They are said to number about a million, and inhabit a belt of country some four hundred miles long by one hundred broad, including the Rajmahal Mountains, and extending from near the Bay of Bengal to the edge of Behar. So little have they been known that when in the year 1855 word was brought to Calcutta that the Sontals had risen and were murdering the Europeans, many of the English are said to have asked not only Who are the Sontals? but What are the Sontals?
The more inaccessible tops of the same mountains, the Rajmahal, are occupied by a much ruder set of people, the Mâlers, who appear to have been pushed up here by the Sontals, as the Sontals were themselves pressed by the incoming Aryans.
As we arrived at the camp I realized the words of our English friend concerning the magnitude of the preparations for a tiger-hunt undertaken on the present scale. The tents of the sportsmen, among whom were several English army officers and civil officials, besides a native rajah, were pitched in a beautiful glade canopied by large trees, and near these were the cooking-tents and the lodging-places of the servants, of whom there was the liberal allowance which is customary in India. Through the great tree-trunks I could see elephants, camels and horses tethered about the outskirts of the camp, while the carts, elephant-pads and other impedimenta lying about gave the whole the appearance of an army at bivouac. Indeed, it was not an inconsiderable force that we could have mustered. There were fifteen or twenty elephants in the party. Every elephant had two men, the mahaut and his assistant; every two camels, one man; every cart, two men; besides whom were the kholassies (tent-pitchers), the chikarries (native huntsmen to mark down and flush the tiger), letter-carriers for the official personages, and finally the personal servants of the party, amounting in all to something like a hundred and fifty souls. The commissary arrangements of such a body of men and beasts were no light matter, and had on this occasion been placed by contract in the hands of a flour-and-grain merchant from Patna. As night drew on the scene became striking in the extreme, and I do not think I felt the fact of India more keenly at any time than while Bhima Gandharva and I, slipping away from a party who were making merry over vast allowances of pale ale and cheroots, went wandering about under the stars and green leaves, picking our way among the huge forms of the mild-countenanced elephants and the bizarre figures of the camels.
On the next day, after a leisurely breakfast at eight—the hunt was to begin at midday—my kind host assigned me an elephant, and his servants proceeded to equip me for the hunt, placing in my howdah brandy, cold tea, cheroots, a rifle, a smooth-bore, ammunition, an umbrella, and finally a blanket.
"And what is the blanket for?" I asked.
"For the wild-bees; and if your elephant happens to stir up a nest of them, the very best thing in the world you can do is to throw it incontinently over your head," added my host, laughing.
The tiger had been marked down in a spot some three miles from camp, and when our battle-array, which had at first taken up the line of march in a very cozy and gentleman-militia sort of independence, had arrived within a mile of our destination the leader who had been selected to direct our movements caused us all to assume more systematic dispositions, issued orders forbidding a shot to be fired at any sort of game, no matter how tempting, less than the royal object of our chase, and then led the way down the glade, which now began to spread out into lower and wetter ground covered by tall grasses and thickets. The hunt now began in earnest. Hot, flushed, scratched as to the face by the tall reeds, rolling on my ungainly animal's back as if I were hunting in an open boat on a chopping sea, I had the additional nervous distraction of seeing many sorts of game—deer, wild-hogs, peafowl, partridges—careering about in the most exasperating manner immediately under my gun-muzzle. To add to my dissatisfaction, presently I saw a wild-hog dash out of a thicket with her young litter immediately across our path, and as my elephant stepped excitedly along one of his big fore feet crunched directly down on a beautiful little pig, bringing a quickly-smothered squeak which made me quite cower before the eye of Bhima Gandharva as he stood looking calmly forward beside me. So we tramped on through the thickets and grasses. An hour passed; the deployed huntsmen had again drawn in together, somewhat bored; we were all red-faced and twig-tattooed; no tiger was to be found; we gathered into a sort of circle and were looking at each other with that half-foolish, half-mad disconsolateness which men's faces show when they are unsuccessfully engaged in a matter which does not amount to much even after it is successfully achieved,—when suddenly my elephant flourished his trunk, uttered a shrill trumpeting sound, and dashed violently to one side, just as I saw a grand tiger, whose coat seemed to be all alive with throbbing spots, flying through the air past me to the haunches of the less wary elephant beside which mine had been walking. Instantly the whole party was in commotion. "Bagh! bagh!" yelled the mahauts and attendants: the elephants trumpeted and charged hither and thither. The tiger seemed to become fairly insane under the fusillade which greeted him; he leapt so desperately from one side to the other as to appear for a few moments almost ubiquitous, while at every discharge the frantic natives screamed "Lugga! lugga!" without in the least knowing whether he was hit (lugga) or not, till presently, when I supposed he must have received at least forty shots in his body, he fell back from a desperate attempt to scale the back of the rajah's elephant, and lay quite still.
"I thought that last shot of mine would finish him," said one of the English civil officials as we all crowded around the magnificent beast.
"Whether it did or not, I distinctly saw him cringe at my shot," hotly said another. "There's always a peculiar look a tiger has when he gets his death-wound: it's unmistakable when you once know it."
"And I'll engage to eat him," interjected a third, "if I didn't blow off the whole side of his face with my smooth-bore when he stuck his muzzle up into my howdah."
"Gentlemen," said our leader, a cool and model old hunter, "the shortest way to settle who is the owner of this tiger-skin is to examine the perforations in it."
Which we all accordingly fell to doing.
"B——, I'm afraid you've a heavy meal ahead of you: his muzzle is as guiltless of harm as a baby's," said one of the claimants.
"Well," retorted B——, "but I don't see any sign of that big bore of yours, either."
"By Jove!" said the leader in some astonishment as our search proceeded unsuccessfully, "has anybody hit him? Maybe he died of fright."
At this moment Bhima Gandharva calmly advanced, lifted up the great fore leg of the tiger and showed us a small blue hole just underneath it: at the same time he felt along the tiger's skin on the opposite side to the hole, rolled the bullet about under the cuticle where it had lodged after passing through the animal, and deftly making an incision with his knife drew it forth betwixt his thumb and finger. He handed it to the gentleman whose guests we were, and to whom the rifle belonged which had been placed in our howdah, and then modestly withdrew from the circle.
"There isn't another rifle in camp that carries so small a bullet," said our host, holding up the ball, "and there can't be the least doubt that the Hindu is the man who killed him."
Not another bullet-hole was to be found.
"When did you do it?" I asked of Bhima. "I knew not that you had fired at all."
"When he made his first leap from the thicket," he said quietly. "I feared he was going to land directly on you. The shot turned him."
At this the three discomfited claimants of the tiger-skin (which belongs to him who kills) with the heartiest English good-nature burst into roars of laughter, each at himself as well as the others, and warmly shook Bhima's hand amid a general outbreak of applause from the whole company.
Then amid a thousand jokes the tiffin-baskets were brought out, and we had a royal lunch while the tiger was "padded"—i.e., placed on one of the unoccupied elephants; and finally we got us back to camp, where the rest of the day was devoted to dinner and cheroots.
From the tiger to the town, from the cries of jackals to those of street-venders,—this is an easy transition in India; and it was only the late afternoon of the second day after the tiger-hunt when my companion and I were strolling along the magnificent Esplanade of Calcutta, having cut across the mountains, elephant-back, early in the morning to a station where we caught the down-train.
Solidity, wealth, trade, ponderous ledgers, capacious ships' bottoms, merchandise transformed to magnificence, an ample-stomached bourgeoisie,—this is what comes to one's mind as one faces the broad walk in front of Fort William and looks across the open space to the palaces, the domes, the columns of modern and English Calcutta; or again as one wanders along the strand in the evening when the aristocrats of commerce do congregate, and, as it were, gazette the lengths of their bank-balances in the glitter of their equipages and appointments; or again as one strolls about the great public gardens or the amplitudes of Tank Square, whose great tank of water suggests the luxury of the dwellers hereabout; or the numerous other paths of comfort which are kept so by constant lustrations from the skins of the water-bearers. The whole situation seems that of ease and indulgence. The very circular verandahs of the rich men's dwellings expand like the ample vests of trustees and directors after dinner. The city extends some four and a half miles along the left bank of the Hooghly, and its breadth between the "Circular Road" and the river is about a mile and a half. If one cuts off from this space that part which lies south of a line drawn eastward from the Beebee Ross Ghât to the Upper Circular Road—the northern portion thus segregated being the native town—one has a veritable city of palaces; and when to these one adds the magnificent suburbs lying beyond the old circumvallation of the "Mahratta Ditch"—Chitpore, Nundenbagh, Bobar, Simla, Sealdah, Entally, Ballygunge, Bhovaneepore, Allypore, Kidderpore—together with the riverward-sloping lawns and stately mansions of "Garden Reach" on the sea-side of town, and the great dockyards and warehouses of the right bank of the river opposite the city, one has enclosed a space which may probably vie with any similar one in the world for the appearances and the realities of wealth within it.
But if one should allow this first impression of Calcutta—an impression in which good eating and the general pampering of the flesh seem to be the most prominent features—to lead one into the belief that here is nothing but money-making and grossness, one would commit a serious mistake. It is among the rich babous, or commercial natives, of Calcutta that the remarkable reformatory movement known as "Young India" has had its origin, and it would really seem that the very same qualities of patience, of prudence, of foresight and of good sense which have helped these babous to accumulate their wealth are now about being applied to the nobler and far more difficult work of lifting their countrymen out of the degradations of old outworn customs and faiths upon some higher plane of reasonable behavior.
"In truth," said Bhima Gandharva to me one day as were taking our customary stroll along the Esplanade, "you have now been from the west of this country to the east of it. You have seen the Past of India: I wish that you may have at least a glimpse of its Future. Here comes a young babou of my acquaintance, to whom I will make you known. He is an enthusiastic member of 'Young India:' he has received a liberal education at one of the numerous schools which his order has so liberally founded in modern years, and you will, I am convinced, be pleased with the wisdom and moderation of his sentiments."
Just as I was reaching out my hand to take that of the babou, in compliance with Bhima's introduction, an enormous adjutant—one of the great pouched cranes (arghilahs) that stalk about Calcutta under protection of the law, and do much of the scavenger-work of the city—walked directly between us, eyeing each of us with his red round eyes in a manner so ludicrous that we all broke forth in a fit of laughter that lasted for several minutes, while the ungainly bird stalked away with much the stolid air of one who has seen something whereof he thinks but little.
The babou addressed me in excellent English, and after some preliminary inquiries as to my stay in Calcutta, accompanied by hospitable invitations, he gradually began, in response to my evident desire, to talk of the hopes and fears of the new party.
"It is our great misfortune," said he, "that we have here to do with that portion of my countrymen which is perhaps most deeply sunk in the mire of ancient custom. We have begun by unhesitatingly leading in the front ourselves whenever any disagreeable consequences are to be borne by reason of our infringement of the old customs. Take, for example, the problem of the peculiar position of women among the Hindus. Perhaps"—and here the babou's voice grew very grave and earnest—"the human imagination is incapable of conceiving a lot more wretched than that of the Hindu widow. By immemorial tradition she could escape it only through the flames of the satti, the funeral-pile upon which she could burn herself with the dead body of her husband. But the satti is now prohibited by the English law, and the poor woman who loses her husband is, according to custom, stripped of her clothing, arrayed in coarse garments and doomed thenceforth to perform the most menial offices of the family for the remainder of her life, as one accursed beyond redemption. To marry again is impossible: the man who marries a widow suffers punishments which no one who has not lived under the traditions of caste can possibly comprehend. The wretched widow has not even the consolations which come from books: the decent Hindu woman does not know how to read or write. There was still one avenue of escape from this life. She might have become a nautchni. What wonder that there are so many of these? How, then, to deal with this fatal superstition, or rather conglomerate of superstitions, which seems to suffer no more from attack than a shadow? We have begun the revolution by marrying widows just as girls are married, and by showing that the loss of caste—which indeed we have quite abolished among ourselves—entails necessarily none of those miserable consequences which the priests have denounced; and we strike still more deeply at the root of the trouble by instituting schools where our own daughters, and all others whom we can prevail upon to send, are educated with the utmost care. In our religion we retain Brahma—by whom we mean the one supreme God of all—and abolish all notions of the saving efficacy of merely ceremonial observances, holding that God has given to man the choice of right and wrong, and the dignity of exercising his powers in such accordance with his convictions as shall secure his eternal happiness. To these cardinal principles we subjoin the most unlimited toleration for other religions, recognizing in its fullest extent the law of the adaptation of the forms of relief to the varying moulds of character resulting from race, climate and all those great conditions of existence which differentiate men one from another."
"How," I asked, "do the efforts of the Christian missionaries comport with your own sect's?"
"Substantially, we work together. With the sincerest good wishes for their success—for every sensible man must hail any influence which instills a single new idea into the wretched Bengalee of low condition—I am yet free to acknowledge that I do not expect the missionaries to make many converts satisfactory to themselves, for I am inclined to think them not fully aware of the fact that in importing Christianity among the Hindus they have not only brought the doctrine, but they have brought the Western form of it, and I fear that they do not recognize how much of the nature of substance this matter of form becomes when one is attempting to put new wine into old bottles. Nevertheless, God speed them! I say. We are all full of hope. Signs of the day meet us everywhere. It is true that still, if you put yourself on the route to Orissa, you will meet thousands of pilgrims who are going to the temple at Jaghernâth (what your Sunday-school books call Juggernaut) for the purpose of worshiping the hideous idols which it contains; and although the English policemen accompany the procession of the Rattjattra—when the idol is drawn on the monstrous car by the frenzied crowd of fanatics—and enforce the law which now forbids the poor insane devotees from casting themselves beneath the fatal wheels, still, it cannot be denied that the devotees are there, nor that Jaghernâth is still the Mecca of millions of debased worshipers. It is also true that the pretended exhibitions of the tooth of Buddha can still inspire an ignorant multitude of people to place themselves in adoring procession and to debase themselves with the absurd rites of frenzy and unreason. Nor do I forget the fact that my countrymen are broken up into hundreds of sects, and their language frittered into hundreds of dialects. Yet, as I said, we are full of hope, and there can be no man so bold as to limit the capabilities of that blood which flows in English veins as well as in Hindu. Somehow or other, India is now not so gloomy a topic to read of or to talk of as it used to be. The recent investigations of Indian religion and philosophy have set many European minds upon trains of thought which are full of novelty and of promise. India is not the only land—you who are from America know it full well—where the current orthodoxy has become wholly unsatisfactory to many of the soberest and most practically earnest men; and I please myself with believing that it is now not wholly extravagant to speak of a time when these two hundred millions of industrious, patient, mild-hearted, yet mistaken Hindus may be found leaping joyfully forward out of their old shackles toward the larger purposes which reveal themselves in the light of progress."
At the close of our conversation, which was long and to me intensely interesting, the babou informed us that he had recently become interested with a company of Englishmen in reclaiming one of the numerous and hitherto wholly unused islands in the Sunderbunds for the purpose of devoting it to the culture of rice and sugar-cane, and that if we cared to penetrate some of the wildest and most picturesque portions of that strange region he would be glad to place at our disposal one of the boats of the company, which we would find lying at Port Canning. I eagerly accepted the proposition; and on the next day, taking the short railway which connects Calcutta and Port Canning, we quickly arrived at the latter point, and proceeded to bestow ourselves comfortably in the boat for a lazy voyage along the winding streams and canals which intersect the great marshes. It was not long after leaving Port Canning ere we were in the midst of the aquatic plants, the adjutants, the herons, the thousand sorts of water-birds, the crocodiles, which here abound.
The Sunderbunds—as the natives term that alluvial region which terminates the delta of the Ganges—can scarcely be considered either land or sea, but rather a multitudinous reticulation of streams, the meshes of which are represented by islands in all the various stages of consistency between water and dry land. Sometimes we floated along the lovely curves of canals which flowed underneath ravishing arches formed by the meeting overhead of great trees which leaned to each other from either bank; while again our course led us between shores which were mere plaits and interweavings of the long stems and broad leaves of gigantic water-plants. The islands were but little inhabited, and the few denizens we saw were engaged either in fishing or in the manufacture of salt from the brackish water. Once we landed at a collection of huts where were quartered the laborers of another company which had been successfully engaged in prosecuting the same experiment of rice-culture which our friend had just undertaken. It was just at the time when the laborers were coming in from the fields. The wife of the one to whose hut my curiosity led me had prepared his evening meal of rice and curry, and he was just sitting down to it as I approached. With incredible deftness he mingled the curry and the rice together—he had no knife, fork or spoon—by using the end-joints of his thumb and fingers: then, when he had sufficiently amalgamated the mass, he rolled up a little ball of it, placed the ball upon his crooked thumb as a boy does a marble, and shot it into his mouth without losing a grain. Thus he despatched his meal, and I could not but marvel at the neatness and dexterity which he displayed, with scarcely more need of a finger-bowl at the end than the most delicate feeder you shall see at Delmonico's.
The crops raised upon the rich alluvium of these islands were enormous, and if the other difficulties attending cultivation in such a region could be surmounted, there seemed to be no doubt of our friend the babou's success in his venture. But it was a wild and lonesome region, and as we floated along, after leaving the island, up a canal which flamed in the sunset like a great illuminated baldric slanting across the enormous shoulder of the world, a little air came breathing over me as if it had just blown from the mysterious regions where space and time are not, or are in different forms from those we know. A sense of the crudity of these great expanses of sea-becoming-land took possession of me; the horizon stretched away like a mere endless continuation of marshes and streams; the face of my companion was turned off sea-ward with an expression of ineffably mellow tranquillity; a glamour came about as if the world were again formless and void, and as if the marshes were chaos. I shivered with a certain eager expectation of beholding the shadowy outline of a great and beautiful spirit moving over the face of the waters to create a new world. I drew my gaze with difficulty from the heavens and turned toward my companion.
He was gone. The sailors also had disappeared.
And there, as I sat in that open boat, midst of the Sunderbunds, at my domestic antipodes, happened to me the most wondrous transformation which the tricksy stage-carpenters and scene-shifters of the brain have ever devised. For this same far-stretching horizon, which had just been alluring my soul into the depths of the creative period, suddenly contracted itself four-square into the somewhat yellowed walls of a certain apartment which I need not now further designate, and the sun and his flaming clouds became no more nor less than a certain half dozen of commonplace pictures upon these same yellowish walls; and the boat wherefrom I was about to view the birth of continents degraded itself into a certain—or, I had more accurately said, a very uncertain—cane chair, wherein I sit writing these lines and mourning for my lost Bhima Gandharva.