You have heard of the Bombay ghauts. Ghaut is a native word, which means "passage through;" and it is applied by the resident not only to the railway cut between the hills, but to the hills themselves. These are of volcanic origin,—a sort of trap. Formed beneath the water, the mass cooled as it was thrown up, and the sides do not slope much. "When I gained an elevation of two thousand feet," says my correspondent, "and looked back, I saw hills of all shapes and sizes thrown up, and ravines thousands of feet below, all looking like the dried bed of an ocean. The table-land on which I stood is two thousand five hundred feet above the level of the sea; and, as this is the elevation at Poonah, the railroad from Campoolu winds as it can along the sides of the mountains. There are twenty-five tunnels through the solid rock on this road, each half a mile long or more. There are piers of solid stone, with arches spanning forty feet, which rise a hundred above the valley. Part of the grade was formed by lowering men with ropes, to drill the holes for blasting, a thousand feet above the ravine. There are twenty thousand workmen employed; and one-third, or about seven thousand, of these are"—what do you think? In a country where no European man can labor, where the native rests until compelled by his conqueror to work, in the year 1859 behold seven thousand women laboring in the ghauts! Climbing, climbing, through the cloudless day, women carry baskets of stone and earth upon their heads, to creep to the edge of the ravines, and fill with these tedious contributions thousands of perpendicular feet; and the men who pay them, doubtless, talk to their daughters about woman's lack of physical strength!
In Australia, the woman carries the burdens which man's indolence refuses; and the deserts of Africa bear the same testimony in freedom that we glean from the witness of slavery. In the West-India Islands, the patient negress toils by the side of her mate, doing to the full as hard a day's work, though encumbered by the weight of a child upon her back; but she does not share, in the same way, his hours of rest. The customs of Africa still prevail, and she offers her husband's food and tobacco on her knees.
Nor does the poetry of ancient Greece show us the so-long vaunted delicacy of the sex. Homer's princesses beat linen on the rocks, and Andromache shares all the functions of the groom:—
"For this, high fed in plenteous stalls ye stand,
Served with pure wheat, and by a princess' hand;
For this, my spouse, of great Actæon's line,
So oft hath steeped the strengthening grain in wine!"
We have crossed the boundary line of Europe, without any change in the indications; and we may drop from Homer to the middle ages, or modern times, as well.
The traveller who gazes admiringly upon the vineclad hills of the Jura, rising, terrace upon terrace, till the eye can scarce distinguish the limit between the work of man and the rock of ages which still crowns the summit, will learn with surprise that the mind which conceived of such stupendous labor, and the hand which held out honor and freedom as its reward, were a woman's.
Under a burning sun, or exposed to a bitter, glacial bisè, the first cultivators, partly women, climbed slowly and painfully, by rocky ledges or crevices, along those dangerous slopes and beetling cliffs, where trees were to be hewn down and briers plucked up, raising by manual efforts alone the stone necessary for the steps and walls, and the deep tunnels for the safe passage of the torrents which vegetation now conceals. And among them, wherever her donkey's foot could find a way, went the woman who devised the work and bestowed the guerdon, with the distaff on her saddle, which gives her to this day the name of Bertha the spinner.
Yes, it was Bertha, of the Transjurane, who, about the middle of the tenth century, undertook this work; opened the old Roman roads; and, in defending her people against the Saracen hordes, first devised, it may be, the modern telegraph. A prolonged line from her Alps to the Jura is still set with the solid stone towers from which Bertha's sentinels warned each other.[19]
On the 13th of April, 1809, the French and Bavarian prisoners held by the Tyrolese at Steinach were marched to Schwatz, and thence to Salzburg, under an escort of women: and the prisoners, at least, felt sufficient confidence in the physical strength of the guard; for they made no attempt to escape.