One is glad to be told for the ten thousandth time, after hearing this ghastly tale, of the clerk Clive leaving his ledgers and pens and leading an army to crush the wretches at Plassy. But, like most things of the kind, the horrors of the Black Hole have been exaggerated, until sympathy, palled, refuses longer to be torn and bled over imaginary as well as real terrors. There have been many worse catastrophes, and of a nature that should appeal more strongly to the heart. Men, women, and children have gone down in flood and pestilence, free from any stain of wrong, which can not be said of the victims of the Black Hole. We can not forget altogether that they were in India not of right, but as conquerors, and that they were originally, at least, in the wrong. But the sufferers in the Johnstown flood, the thousands who died in the Lisbon, Krakatoa, and Martinique disasters, and other thousands that go down in ships at sea—these innocent victims demand sympathy much more.
It seemed that most of my sight-seeing in Calcutta was to be limited to horrible things. Indeed, the visitor is often hurried from horror to horror, as if he were in some "chamber of horrors" in a museum. I was taken to the burning ghaut, where dead bodies are cremated. I saw some five hundred little fires, which were so many pyres for the dead. I had heard much of the burning of live women in order that they should accompany their dead masters, and out of sheer curiosity asked the guard if there were men only in the fires. For answer, he took a long hook, thrust it into one of the fires, pulled it back and on its prongs brought the charred leg of a man. Immediately birds of prey (adjutants) pounced down upon the smoking flesh and bore it away. These birds are the scavengers of Calcutta, and the special guardians of the ghaut. Cremation is a great economy in India. It costs only half a cent to burn a body.
Another horror shall complete this gruesome part of my story. Being very fond of shrimps, one day I inquired, in a moment of forgetfulness—for it is a safe rule not to ask the source of anything in the East—where and how they got these shrimps. I was taken to the fishing grounds in the mouth of the river, and there saw millions of these prawns flocking, like petty scavengers, about the dead bodies that continually float down the Ganges. Human flesh was their favorite food. This was enough for me. I stopped eating shrimps in India, as I had stopped eating Canton ginger preserves in China.
On the second day of my stay in Calcutta I received cards to the reception given by Lord Dalhousie to Lord Canning, the new Governor-General. Lord Dalhousie, the retiring Governor-General, was dying. In fact he had been dying for months. I shall not go into any description of the exceedingly brilliant reception. It made an ineffaceable impression upon me because of the grouping on that occasion of some of the most splendid of the British administrators and of some of the most daring of their enemies, who were even then plotting revolution and bloodshed. I was introduced to both the passing and the coming Governor-General and to General Havelock, afterwards the gallant fighter at Lucknow. I had the rare privilege of seeing these three men talking amicably with the great Nana Sahib, the leader of the Hindus at Cawnpore.
The voyage from Calcutta to Suez was almost devoid of incident. We put into Madras, a barren, flat, and dismal place, to take on passengers, and then sailed for Point de Galle, Ceylon. At this place I saw, for the first time, elephants employed in carrying and piling heavy timbers. They go about their task with an intelligence that is nearly human, lifting heavy teak timbers and placing them in regular order in great piles. I had not before supposed that any animals possessed so much sense.
Coming down to Aden, two thousand miles from Galle, sleeping with the bulkhead open opposite my berth, one night I felt something slap me in the face. As I was all alone, I did not know what to make of it. There was no light, and I could not see. As soon as I fell asleep another slap came. I had heard about the insects of the tropics, but had no idea they were of such size as to cause these slaps. In the morning, I found out what had been the matter. Nine flying-fish lay dead in my berth.
At Aden, the most barren and gloomy place I have ever seen, we went out to the cantonments, which must have been built thousands of years ago. We hurried up the Red Sea to Suez, and then crossed over by land from Suez, eighty-four miles, to Cairo, with six hundred camels in the caravan. We had coaches carrying six passengers. I have a good idea of what the Sahara Desert is from having seen this desert between Suez and Cairo. Just before we reached Cairo, there was a cry from one of the coaches for us to look up at the sky. There were masts, minarets, and the whole city, in fact, painted on the sky. It was my first sight of the mirage I had heard so much about. We were then half-way from Suez to Cairo.
I put up at Shepheard's Hotel, and immediately arranged to go out to the pyramids, ten miles from Cairo. Fifty donkey boys rivaled one another to get my custom. My donkey started off, and the first thing I knew he was rolling over me in the sand. He had stepped in a gopher-hole, and down he went. Travelers now go out in trolley-cars, eat ice-cream and drink champagne under the shade of the pyramids, and a splendid hotel stands alongside the Sphinx.
In going up the pyramids it took three Arabs, two to push and one to pull, to get me to the top. When we got half-way up, an Arab wanted more bakshish. I talked to him pretty loud in something he didn't understand, and he consented to take me farther. The top of the pyramid of Ghizeh has been taken away, and the pyramid is now about fifteen feet square at the summit. I made up my mind, the moment I saw the pyramids, that these gigantic blocks were not stone, but had been produced by one of the lost arts in preparing concrete. It occurred to me, as the pyramids were hollow to the base, that they had been storehouses for grain, and were not built as tombs for the Rameses and Ptolemies. Humane kings had built them, I thought, in order to employ labor in time of dearth.
As all travelers are told, it was said that a man would go down one pyramid and come up on another in so many minutes. I had seen such a number of "fakes" in my travels that, as I could not tell one Chinaman from another, how should I be able to tell one Arab from another? When this trick was done for me I thought it did not follow that the man on the other pyramid was the man who had been with me.