[84] A patemar is a coasting vessel, built generally in Bombay. It has prow and stern alike, double planked—a handsome craft of about two hundred tons burden, with two masts and great wide lateen sails.
CHAPTER XIII.
The Taptee River.—Surat and its Environs.—The Borahs and Kholees of Guzerat.—Baroda, the Capital of the Guicowars.—Fakeers, or Relic-Carriers, of Baroda.—Cambay.—Mount Aboo.—Jain Temples on Mount Aboo, etc.
The views along the Western Ghauts and the coast are very grand. We soon lost sight of all their varied beauty, and in a couple of days entered the splendid river Taptee, which flows broad and deep immediately under the walls of the city of Surat.
Almost at the mouth of the Taptee stands a lovely little island; opposite to this is a little town called Domus, a quaint, homelike-looking place, where Europeans spend the hot months. The river flows for miles through a richly-cultivated suburb of gardens, plantations, and beautiful houses, till it reaches the city, which is walled with bastions at certain points, but the walls and towers are fast crumbling away. At one extremity stands the famous old castle of Surat, about three hundred years old, looking older and more stained with time and age than even the fortress of Damaun.
Surat has a double wall and twice twelve gates, inner and outer, communicating with one another. But its history is even more varied and complicated than its "world-protecting" walls and wooden-leaved gates. It is written in the ruins found everywhere in the gardens, palaces of the nawabs, rajahs, and peishwas, as well as in the factories of the Dutch, French, Portuguese, and English, most of which are now transformed into hospitals, lunatic asylums, hotels for European travellers, or pleasure-houses and grounds for wealthy natives.
Here are also grand English and Dutch cemeteries, where many noted English and Dutch lie magnificently entombed in stately mausoleums, in order to impress the Oriental mind, which is always disposed to attach a certain kind of sanctity to piles of brick, mortar, and stone, whether priest, prophet, or knave lie interred beneath.
We tried to visit the "Pinjrapoore," or hospital for sick animals, here; it seems to be arranged much on the same plan as that in Bombay, but this place was too filthy to enter, and in that respect much inferior. Attached to it are large granaries, where all the damaged grain of the bazaars is piled up for the use of the sick animals in the hospital; and this it is which has rendered this place a perfect pest-house of insects and vermin of all kinds.