At Jeypore an English-speaking native official had been told off to take us about during our stay. When we were thanking him and saying good-bye, he remarked that the next person whom he was to conduct was a judge from Southern India. The judge was a native Indian, but as he did not know the language of the Jeypore State he had sent in advance to ask to be provided with a guide who could speak English. Formerly the lingua franca of the upper, or educated, classes was Persian, of the lower ones Urdu—the kind of Hindustani spoken by the Mohammedan, and afterwards by the English army. Of course both languages still prevail, but all educated Indians learn English in addition to two or three of the hundred-odd languages spoken in the Peninsula. On a later visit a Hyderabad noble was taking my daughter and me to see various sights. I noticed that he talked to a good many natives in the course of our excursion, and as they appeared to be of different castes and occupations, I asked him at last how many languages he had talked during the day. After a little reflection he reckoned up six. It will not be such a very easy matter to get all these people into the category of enlightened electors.
On our voyage home I occupied myself by writing the article already mentioned as appearing in The Nineteenth Century—from which I extract the following supplement to my recollections:
“Caste is the ruling note in India. The story which tells how the level plains of Kathiawar were reclaimed from the sea illustrates this. The egrets laid their eggs on the former ocean-line and the wave swept them away. The egrets swore that the sea should be filled up until she surrendered the eggs. They summoned the other birds to help them, and all obeyed their call except the eagle. He was the favourite steed of Vishnu, so thought himself exonerated from mundane duties. But Vishnu looked askance at him and said that he should be put out of caste unless he went to help his fellows. Back he flew to Kathiawar, and when the sea saw that the royal bird had joined the ranks of her opponents she succumbed and gave back the eggs.
“Hindu respect for animal life entails consequences which make one wonder how the earth can provide not only for the swarms of human inhabitants, including unproductive religious mendicants, but also for such numbers of mischievous beasts. Some castes will kill no animals at all, and all Hindus hold so many as sacred that peacocks, monkeys, and pigeons may be seen everywhere, destroying crops and eating people out of house and home. The people of a town, driven to desperation, may be induced to catch the monkeys, fill a train with them, and dispatch it to discharge its cargo at some desolate spot; but woe betide a simicide! The monkeys in any given street will resent and lament the capture of a comrade, but do not care at all if a stranger is carried off. He is not of their caste.”
MEDITATIONS OF A WESTERN WANDERER
In May 1889—The National Review also published the following verses, which I wrote after reading Sir Alfred Lyall’s “Meditations of a Hindu Prince.” I called them “Meditations of a Western Wanderer”:
“All the world over, meseemeth, wherever my footsteps have trod,
The nations have builded them temples, and in them have imaged their God.
Of the temples the Nature around them has fashioned and moulded the plan,
And the gods took their life and their being from the visions and longings of man.
“So the Greek bade his marble be instinct with curves of the rock-riven foam,
Within it enshrining the Beauty and the Lore of his sunlitten home;
And the Northman hewed deep in the mountain and reared his huge pillars on high,
And drank to the strength of the thunder and the force flashing keen from the sky.
“But they knew, did those builders of old time, that wisdom and courage are vain,
That Persephonē rises in springtide to sink in the winter again,
That the revelling halls of Walhalla shall crumble when ages have rolled
O’er the deep-rooted stem of the World-ash and the hardly-won Treasure of gold.
“I turn to thee, mystical India, I ask ye, ye Dreamers of earth,
Of the Whence and the Whither of spirit, of the tale of its birth and rebirth.
For the folks ye have temples and legends and dances to heroes and kings,
But ye sages know more, would ye tell it, of the soul with her god-given wings.
“Ah, nations have broken your barriers; ah, empires have drunk of your stream,
And each ere it passed bore its witness, and left a new thought for your dream:
The Moslem saith, ‘One is the Godhead,’ the Brahmin ‘Inspiring all,’
The Buddhist, ‘The Law is Almighty, by which ye shall stand or shall fall.’
“Yea, verily One the All-Father; yea, Brahmin, all life is from Him,
And Righteous the Law of the Buddha, but the path of attainment is dim.
Is God not afar from His creature—the Law over-hard to obey?
Wherein shall the Life be of profit to man seeing evil bear sway?
“Must I ask of the faith which to children and not to the wise is revealed?
By it shall the mist be uplifted? By it shall the shrine be unsealed?
Must I take it, the often-forgotten yet echoing answer of youth—
‘’Tis I,’ saith the Word of the Father, ‘am the Way and the Life and the Truth’?
“The Truth dwelleth ay with the peoples, let priests hide its light as they will;
’Tis spirit to spirit that speaketh, and spirit aspireth still;
Wherever I seek I shall find it, that infinite longing of man
To rise to the house of his Father, to end where his being began.
“And the secret that gives him the power, the message that shows him the way,
Is the Light he will struggle to follow, the Word he perforce will obey.
It is not the voice of the whirlwind, nor bolt from the storm-kindled dome;
’Tis stillness that bringeth the tidings—the child knows the accents of home.”
We had a calm voyage to Suez in the Bengal. It was fortunate that it was calm—for the Bengal was quite an old-fashioned ship. I think only something over 3,000 tons—different from the Arcadia, then the show-ship of the P. and O. fleet. I was amused once to come across an account by Sir Richard Burton of a voyage which he took in the Bengal years before, when he described the P. and O. as having done away with the terrors of ocean travel by having provided such a magnificent vessel.
We spent nine days at Cairo and Alexandria and saw the usual sights, then quite new to us; but it is generally a mistake to visit one great land with a history and antiquities of its own when the mind has just been captured by another. Anyhow, we were so full of the glories of India that Egypt failed to make the appeal to us which she would otherwise have done, and which she did on subsequent visits. The mosques in particular seemed to us inferior to the marble dreams of Delhi and Agra. Moreover on this occasion we did not ascend the Nile and see the wonderful temples. The one thing which really impressed me was the Sphinx, though I regret to say that my husband and son entirely declined to share my feelings. Lord Kitchener was then, as Adjutant to Sir Francis Grenfell, Colonel Kitchener. He afterwards became a great friend of ours, but we first made his acquaintance on this visit to Cairo. We had a most interesting inspection of the Barrage works under the guidance of Sir Colin Moncrieff and dined with the Khedive, and at the British Agency.
From Alexandria we went by an Egyptian steamer—at least a steamer belonging to an Egyptian line—to Athens, which we reached on March 15th, accompanied by Lady Galloway. On this voyage I performed the one heroic deed of my life, with which bad sailors like myself will sympathise. The crew of this ship was mainly Turkish—the native Egyptians being no good as seamen, but the captain, Losco by name, was a Maltese and exceedingly proud of being a British subject.