On the Maidan, too, is seen the familiar sight of the troops of "bheesties" watering the roads at sundown. This primitive way of laying the dust becomes a great nuisance in crowded thoroughfares, when the bheestie is as likely as not to spurt the contents of his skin into the carriage.
Very curious figures these bheesties look as they come up from the riverside with their inverted goat-skin, the outline of the legs still seen, and slung, full to bursting, on their backs. They then begin to run along the road, ejecting the water to right and left of them by opening and closing sharply the small aperture. One would almost think that the municipality of Calcutta might have imported some watering-carts by this time.
It is a very funny sight to see a native squatted on the ground before his horse in a beseeching attitude, holding up to him a handful of hay; or, again, whilst the carriages wait by the Eden Gardens, to see the servants collected around a "hubble-bubble," drawing at it and passing it round in turns.
There is generally a camp near the fort in the Maidan, and polo is played there in the afternoon. Passing the rank and fashion of Anglo-Indian society, we drove to the Belvidere, the official residence of the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Henry Riders Thompson. It is a very beautiful house, and was the favourite residence of Warren Hastings. We came home round the other side of the Maidan, by Chowringee Road. The prison is the first building in this road, "and No. 1, Chowringee" has become a familiar name for it.
Friday, January 9th.—Morning after morning the sun rises in an unclouded sky, and this is the only advantage of the Indian climate. You may depend on fine weather, "may settle," as some one said to me, "the exact date of a picnic two months beforehand," without fears for the weather. The rainfall of the year is condensed into the three months of July, August, and September—the rainy season, the season of malarious fevers.
We went out early, and drove to Fort William. Inside those palisaded defences and once strong walls and towers, you find broad gravelled roads laid out round the quiet quadrangles, with neat barracks and arsenals, magazines, and storerooms. There are six gateways with drawbridges, and over each is a house for the commander-in-chief and the officers. The fort church and the Catholic chapel complete the military and non-bellicose-looking little town. In the centre there is the circular pillar with the sliding boom that daily drops at the hour of 1 p.m.
"Abdullah," our guide and native servant, then took us through the bathing-ghât on the Hooghley, and stopped before a space walled in, from the centre of which issued smoke. It was the "Nimtolla Burning-Chat," or crematorium, where the bodies of the natives are burnt.
In the centre of the square there was a burning pile, on which, face downwards, with the arms crossed behind the back, lay a body. The legs were also doubled up, but as we looked, first one and then the other relaxed with the heat and dropped down. A little further on there was a smouldering pile, where another body had been reduced to ashes, and in a corner a stretcher with a body covered over awaiting cremation. It takes three hours for each body to burn, and after it has been reduced to ashes, they are gathered up and cast into the sacred waters of the Hooghley. The Hindu lays the body on the pile, and places the fire in the mouth, but the Mohammedan (who has no caste) does the meaner parts of lighting and attending to the funeral pile. Government provides the wood and the attendants, making a charge of three rupees, seven annas, for an adult, with a reduced scale for children. Strange and wrong as it may seem to say so, there is no doubt that the horror of seeing the process seemed greatly lessened by the shade of the skin; were it white, we should not get over the ghastly sight for many a day.
That afternoon we drove out to the Botanical Gardens, crossing the Hooghley on a wooden bridge, and driving through the busy manufacturing suburb of Howrah, and the village of Seebpore. They are five miles from the town, and their beauty is consequently lost to Calcutta. Not one single person did we meet there that afternoon. The triad of noble trees, the banyan, with the peepul on either side, the glorious avenue of Palmyra palms, with others of asoke and mahogany branching off, are truly "wasting their freshness on a desert air."
There are groups of casuarina-trees about the lake, draped with tropical "climbers," or rattans, and a palmetum, or palm nursery, where different species of the family are tended and reared. We went into the cool, shady retreat, where the light struggles dimly through the cocoa-fibre netting on to the festoons of tropical parasites, the orchids and the ferns, forming a beautiful, natural outdoor conservatory. Passing the marble urn which bears an inscription by Bishop Heber to Dr. Roxburgh, curator of the garden, and to which so many avenues converge, we come to a grove. Under this we walked along, looking at the network of trunks, as we thought; but as we came to trace them home, we discovered that they were but gigantic roots, depending from the branches—part of the stupendous banyan-tree, that thus extends its monstrous bulk to a diameter of 800 feet. This grove is very beautiful, formed as it is of a colonnade of branches—of the 170 aërial depending roots.