In a yard outside bark was being unloaded from railway-trucks, ready for grinding up and infusing with "leaches." Three sorts of bark were being delivered—Babul (acacea antica), Sal (shoria robusta), and Rhea (not the native Rhea). There was a special and elaborate plant for making extract of bark, a process which was conducted in vacuo, so that the colour should not be affected by the boiling. In the same yard there were piles of sacks containing myrabolams from the Central Provinces, and in a corner I caught sight of a group of people dressed in strange sulphur-coloured cloaks, which covered head as well as body, leaving holes for the eyes as in a Mohammedan woman's burka—dresses that made me think of an auto-da-fé. The air about them was full of a cloudy yellow dust. "And what are these?" I asked the polite gentleman who was conducting me. "Those—oh—ah—they were not working the other day when the factory commissioners came round!" he said, laughing, and took me to look at something else. The bark extraction, as I said, was conducted in vacuo: this other process was evidently carried on in camera.

I do not think there is any near danger of India being turned into a machine, and the iron fetters of industrialism may even be welcome to a people living habitually at grips with starvation, and besides—has not one of the largest of the Cawnpore manufacturing companies set noble example in building a model village for their 3500 employees?

The manager was sorely exercised about pilfering propensities, and how much have I heard from Englishmen as to native thieving! I was assured that a Hindoo will so gently tickle with a straw the face of a sleeping traveller that he will turn his head just enough to permit abstraction of any valuables he may have placed under his pillow, and will then tickle the other cheek till the traveller turns back his head to its former position and sleeps on unharassed by any tiresome dreams. No such experience was ever mine, and in fact throughout my stay in the country I was never, to my knowledge, robbed of anything, and the only instance I encountered in India was that of a young French count who was relieved on the railway of much gold by a European train-thief. I wish, indeed, I could think such allegations all as unfounded as the accounts of the imaginary rope-trick.

In Lancashire I have seen many a crowd of mill-hands leaving work, and wanting to compare the similar moment at an Indian factory, I waited outside one of these at Cawnpore a little before closing time. Presently the men began to come out, at first in small batches and then in quickly-growing numbers—but what peculiar gymnastic exercise were they going through at the gates? A horizontal bamboo pole was fixed a couple of feet above the ground, and as each man raised his legs to step over this a chuprassee passed his hands over the workman's sides. Presently one was stopped and bidden to stand aside till the rest had passed. It was an ordeal by search and one of the various devices used to aid detection of the pilfering that I was assured is constant.

Through a small bronze gate, cast from one of the guns of the Shannon (those guns which bluejackets dragged all the way from Calcutta), every Englishman who goes to Cawnpore enters an octagonal sandstone screen in the middle of a small public park. Within, heavy and commonplace, Marochetti's marble angel stands in the centre above the closed well-head. There is not in the recorded history of any people a tragedy at once so terrible and so inimitably sad as that of the Cawnpore massacres: and on emerging from that small enclosed plot with its too ponderous angel, there can hardly be an Englishman who does not carry in his face the expression of a deep emotion. There are many churches in India, but there is no shrine so sacred to her rulers as the Cawnpore Well. Not far away stands the neem tree, on which some of the rebels were hung, and two larger trees are pointed out by the side of which sepoys were blown from the guns. The House of Massacre has long since been razed to the ground, and its site is now only marked by a block of black stone surmounted by a white marble cross and bearing an inscription in gold letters.

A road, shaded by some of the very same trees that hid the Nana Sahib's men on the 27th June 1857, leads to the brick-built ghat and its stone steps. They descend from each side of a small whitewashed Siva temple now, I think, no longer used. The steps are long and walled at each side: when I stood upon them no water lapped beneath. The Ganges was low and its main current had shifted away across the white stretch of sand beyond this narrower meandering stream. To the left the red brick piers of the Oudh and Rohilcund Railway Bridge paled in the heat haze to a faint pink colour. On the opposite shore a few lines of tall Kassa grass dry and dead, were ineffectually trying to protect patches of ground sown with melon seed. Overhead a peepul tree, an old tree—witness of all that terrible past—stretched a canopy of leaves that shimmered in the sunlight and danced in the little breeze, and while I stood there a Hindoo woman, ankles and wrists loaded with heavy silver bangles, went down the steps and over the sand to the water—that sacred water—to bathe and to wash her white garment.

CHAPTER XII
THE HOUSE OF DREAM

I lay quite motionless on my back upon the little stone platform that faces the south-west window—lay quite still and listened. In the intense noonday silence I could not hear even the chirp of a cricket. Often had Akhbar the Great reclined upon this stone bed of the place called Khawbgah, the House of Dream, and mused with roaming mind on government and power, the jealousies of sects and ministers, the ingratitude of dissolute sons, the tale of all the littleness of men and on his own ambition to build up a better and more perfect state.