On the eve of our departure from Calcutta we dismissed the native servant we had engaged for our tour in the North-West Provinces, and whom we had been told was absolutely necessary for travelling in India. We found we were always running after him, instead of he after us, and we determined to adhere to our original plan, hitherto so successful, of travelling without the encumbrance of servants.
We left Calcutta that evening at eight o'clock, that is by Madras time, which the East India Railway follows, or at 8.30 by Calcutta time. There was a great crowd at the Howrah Terminus, on account of Saturday being one of the nights on which the mail-train leaves for Bombay, and we were unlucky in not getting a carriage to ourselves.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE SHRINES OF THE HINDU FAITH.
The next morning we awoke to find ourselves on the fruitful and cultivated plain of Bengal. We were flying by mud settlements, and passing through numberless paddy-fields, rice, pân, or betel-nut plantations. Here and there we came upon a field white with the poppy of the opium plant, or with a tall, standing crop of castor-oil shrub. Others again were filled with barley, and those coarse millets on which the natives subsist; and all the crops were kept alive and green by that terribly laborious process of irrigation. How familiar we became with the inclined causeway, up and down which the yoke of oxen toil, the native riding on the rope which draws the water up in leathern bags, and empties it into the irrigating channels. Each patch of cultivation, each field, has to be watered by this toilsome method.
One unconsciously acquires the idea that India is a country covered with vast primeval forest and jungle. Rather disappointing therefore are the two thousand miles or so one travels across from ocean to ocean, from Bombay to Calcutta, without seeing a vestige of either. Often we saw a herd of buffaloes, or a troop of monkeys, while paroquets, the little green love-birds, and other tropical species of the feathered tribe, perched along the telegraph wire. Here and there also a solitary heron, with grey wings and red bill, standing solemnly on the edge of a marshy pool.
The trains are heavy and enormously long, on account of the immense numbers of natives travelling, their rates being as low as one-third the first-class fares. The native servants are locked into a compartment next to the first class, where their masters are. There are outside venetian shutters to all the carriages, and every other window of the long carriage has blue or coloured glass—very charming, doubtless, for the glare of summer, but a great nuisance now, with short days and an early twilight. The refreshment-rooms on all the lines are exceptionally good; we have often dined there in preference to the hotel; but as for the luxuries of Indian travelling you often hear about, we did not find them. True, the Anglo-Indian invariably travels with an army of servants, a well-stored hamper, and thinks sixty pounds of ice in the carriage indispensable, but he is an exceptional mortal. A triangle, or fork of steel, thrice struck, and which gives forth a clear, melodious tone, is the signal at the stations for the "all aboard." Such is a description which fairly answers to all our succession of long railway journeys in India.
At 1 p.m. we crossed the bridge over the Kurumnasa, a river abhorred by the Indians, hence its name, signifying "virtue destroyer," and which forms the boundary-line between Bengal and the North-West Provinces. A branch line brought us to Rajghat, the station for Benares, as the city lies away on the further bank of the Ganges.
We crossed the Ganges on a bridge of boats, and from here obtained that magnificent coup-d'œil of the river frontage, with its palaces, its mosques and temples, its terraces and flights of steps, that is so striking. Rising above all the confused mass of buildings are the two beautiful minarets of the Mosque of Aurungzebe, slightly turned eastwards to catch the first gleams of the rising sun over the sacred waters.