Most of the public buildings in Madras, such as the Railway Station, the Government Offices and the Law Courts, are of red brick, and their architecture an ingenious mixture of East and West.
Maimed and deformed beggars seem to abound. They come up to you shaking their quivering limbs, showing you sores or touching your arm softly with uncanny hands to draw your eyes to see some monstrous horror of a leg.
I wanted, before leaving the South, to see the Nilgiris, and with this end took train inland to Mettapalaiyam, where I changed on to the narrow gauge railway which climbs one in twelve, a central rack-rail making such an angle possible. As the engine was at the lower end I was able to sit on the extreme front of the train and watch the scenery to advantage. A look-out man by my side stopped the train in one deep cutting as we caught sight of a piece of rock which had fallen from above and lay across the metals in front of us. There were some coolies near at hand, and the obstacle was quickly removed, but it dramatically suggested one of the dangers of mountain railways.
The vegetation was very like that on the journey to Newara Eliya in Ceylon; bamboos, areca-nut palms, plantains and the same little orange-flowered shrub everywhere. Here and there the red earth showed but only rarely for where there were no trees the ground was generally bare grey rock. Hanging in gum trees or eucalyptus I noticed many paper nests of wasps. At Runnymede Station, 4500 feet above sea-level, we were turned into a siding for a down-coming train to pass. This was full of children shouting and cheering loudly, coming away for Christmas holidays from the Lawrence Asylum School at Ootacamund.
As we crossed small bridges over clefts and gorges I could see torrents under my feet between the sleepers; and then, rugged and precipitous, the hillside dropped below on one side and reared up on the other far above our heads, as we crept along some narrow ledge.
At Coonoor, which was, at the time of my visit, still the end of the railway, I shared a two-horse "tonga" with an engineer. He had been for many years making railways in Assam, had been down with dysentery and about to go home on leave when he was asked at Calcutta to get the "Ooty" railway finished, and change of air and a "soft" job had decided him to take the work.
HINDOO MOTHER AND CHILD.
A good linguist, he was fond of the natives generally and especially of the Hindoos. Living for long periods sixty or seventy miles from any white face, he had grown to dislike "society" and hated calling at the private houses of officials. "They don't understand me," he said, "and they never know the native as I know him. At the 'Holi' festival I make holiday with my people. Early in the morning I go into their quarters, right into their houses and throw the red water at their women, and then I have them all up to my camp in parties and they dance to me and all have a royal time. Sometimes it costs me three or four hundred rupees but I enjoy it, and they have few pleasures in their lives. Put a lighted cracker in a Hindoo girl's hand and tell her just when to throw it away, and the delight of it will last her for months. Of course they buy a few fireworks themselves, but they can't afford the big pieces and their joy well repays me. As to the talk of unrest, it's all bunkum,—except among the baboos and a few mischievous priests in their pay. What does the average native know about the partition of Bengal? He knows nothing, as a rule, about political divisions at all, and as for wanting to be ruled by his own people, the last thing in the world he wants is a native judge. He knows well enough what that means—judgment for the side that pays most. No—they get some Western learning, but they don't get made straight. That's one of the reasons why it's impossible to give a native engineer a top post anywhere. He can't resist bribery, and his sense of 'izzat' makes him diddle his employers twice over. After all it is a point of honour with your native not to take a bribe from an Englishman; he regards it as entirely different from taking bribes from his own people. That is his sense of 'izzat,' and to compensate for his loss of personal honour he must make double out of the deal. The other reason is that a native always loses his head in a crisis."