I have often been asked how we travel in India? Well, where there are no railways, and you have a good metalled road, you travel by horse-dâk, as it is termed;—that is, you hire a carriage, which is a four-wheeled cab slightly altered, and engage relays of horses at every five or six miles; and by travelling all night to escape the heat, you manage to accomplish 60 or 70 miles between dinner and breakfast-time pretty comfortably, at a cost of about a shilling per mile.
The horses are an abominable set of brutes, and generally begin by obstinately refusing to stir a step, or, perhaps, lying down in the shafts. Then the native coachman, after patiently undoing the rotten harness and getting the animal once more on his legs, addresses him by all manner of endearing epithets. “Go on, my brother,” (horse doesn’t move); “go on, my son, my brave, my hero,” (no result); a cut with the whip, followed by a vicious kick from the horse. Coachee changes his language—“Go on, you scoundrel—you villain;” a shower of blows, a volley of abuse from the passenger inside, more kicks and plunges from the horse, and finally, by the aid of the whole stable establishment, who push behind, whack the horse, and simultaneously yell like fiends, off you go at the rate of ten miles an hour, the horse never stopping until he gets to the end of his stage.
If there is no road, as happens very often, you must be content with the old-fashioned palanquin or doolie, a species of coffin with doors at the sides, in which you are carried on men’s shoulders at an average rate of three miles per hour, the bearers being changed every ten miles. When I first landed in India, I travelled from Calcutta to Allahabad, a distance of 500 miles, in this way, taking twelve days on the road; the journey being now accomplished by rail in about twenty hours.
After your night’s journey, in which you have probably accomplished some 35 miles, you are glad to espy a solitary house—a dâk-bungalow, as it is termed—in which you can get temporary rest and refreshment; so the doolie is deposited in the verandah; the hot and dusty traveller, who has hardly had a wink of sleep all night, emerges from the inside of the coffin, and summons the native servant, who in white robes and with a venerable grey beard, might sit for a portrait of any of the Old Testament patriarchs. Then ensues something like the following dialogue, which I must translate from the Hindustani, in which it is spoken:—“What can I have for breakfast?” say you.—“Your lordship can have everything.”—“Very well, then, bring me a beef-steak.”—“Beefy-e-steak! nourisher of the poor! how can your slave get any?”—“Well, then, a mutton chop.”—“Mutton-e-chāp! cherisher of the humble! there are none left.”—“Well, what is there?”—“Perhaps, O great king, there may be a fowl.”—“Then get it ready.” Exit the servant, and in another minute you hear a violent clucking in the back-yard, and see the man in hot chase of a venerable cock, who evinces the strongest disinclination to have his few remaining days curtailed to satisfy your unholy hunger. But it is all of no use—he is captured; his head is turned towards Mecca, and the Mahomedan cook, muttering “Bismillah,” “in the name of God the compassionate and merciful,” cuts the fowl’s throat, and in twenty minutes more it is smoking on your table.
And now my watch warns me that I have tried your patience long enough. I have endeavoured to give you some idea of the nature of Anglo-Indian life, and of that country which has so often been described as the brightest jewel in the British Crown. But, after all, the only way to know much of a country is to see it; and I often wonder that more Englishmen do not pay a flying visit to India now that it is so accessible. Many certainly do go there now-a-days for a short time, and are, I am sure, well rewarded for their pains; but they are very, very few in proportion to those who might go, if they only knew how to set about it, and perhaps I cannot conclude my lecture better than by taking you all a journey there on paper, just as if I were Mr. Cook, and you were a party of tourists.
We start from the Waterloo Station and run down to Southampton, going on board one of the fine steamers of the P. & O., as it is always called, which I need not say is short for the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. The mails are on board, the last good-byes have been said, and we are steaming down Channel and across the Bay of Biscay, until, on the fifth day, we cast anchor off the Rock of Gibraltar. A few hours’ delay for coaling, and we run on to Malta, and find ourselves in Valetta Harbour, wandering about the quaint old town, eating oranges, buying lace, or examining the old church of St. John, with its relics and monuments that carry us back to the middle ages. Another three days’ run and we are landed at Alexandria, and getting our first peep at the East from the top of a donkey. But the train is ready, and we speed through the flat, fertile country watered by the Nile, cross that muddy and venerable stream which has puzzled all the geographers from Herodotus to Livingstone, get a glimpse of the Pyramids in the distance, and cross that terrible desert which is still what it was when Moses led the Israelites through it more than 3000 years ago; and in twelve hours from the time of leaving the Mediterranean, are on board the other mail steamer in the Red Sea. Six days’ run takes us to its mouth, and we are anchored off Aden, a strong military post built on a barren rock, where we stay a few hours for coaling, and then enter on the last stage of our voyage. Five days’ run across the Indian Ocean and we sight the magnificent harbour of Bombay; and then a little steamer carries us all off to the shore, and we are driving to Pallonjee’s Hotel under a fierce sun, tempered only by the sea-breeze, and through streets thronged by motley crowds of natives, in which the few white men are altogether lost.
From Bombay, the Great Indian Peninsular Railway will take you 600 miles in about twenty-five hours to Jubbulpore, up the steep inclines of the Western Ghat mountains, and through the dense jungles and undulating hills of Central India.
Another run of 220 miles takes you to Allahabad, the modern capital of the North-west Provinces, situated at the confluence of the Ganges and Jumna, a great military and civil station, but dusty and disagreeable. Here resides the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-west Provinces, a territory larger than France, with 30,000,000 inhabitants. From Allahabad we may travel south-east to Calcutta, 600 miles distant, passing Benares, the holy city; Patna, famous for opium; and many others; or north-west to Agra, Delhi, and Lahore; the last, 700 miles distant, the capital of the Punjab, where resides another of our great pro-consuls, as Macaulay calls them, viz. the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab.