The sight of a tea-plantation is curious rather than pretty. The bushes have no beauty: they stand in long, neat rows, and each bush is trimmed to keep it low, broad, and flat. From a distance a tea-garden looks like a great bed of huge cabbages. Among these bushes groups of coolies, both men and women, are very busily at work, for there is plenty to do, not merely in gathering the leaves, but in keeping the bushes free from weeds, which would check and hinder their growth. Under the burning sun and in the moist earth weeds spring up in great profusion, and a plantation neglected for even a short time becomes choked with them.
All the tea-bushes are not alike. Some are of a darker colour than the rest, and the leaves are smaller. This is the China plant, while the lighter-coloured bushes with larger leaves are the Assam strain. The coolies at work among the plants are gaunt, thin, miserable-looking figures. This is not to be wondered at when their occupation is considered, exposing them as it does to attack after attack of the terrible Terai fever. When the rains are very heavy they often have to work knee-deep in water and mud beneath a burning sun, and this reduces their strength to withstand the poisonous malaria.
When the coolies have filled their baskets with leaves, they carry them up to the tea-factory. First, the leaves are weighed, to see how much each coolie has plucked; then they are carried to the withering-house. All the leaves are spread out on shallow canvas trays, and left all night to wither. Next morning the leaves are put into the rolling-machine, and after half an hour's rolling they come out in a huge wet mass of leaf. This mass is broken up and spread out to dry on trays, and left for some time to ferment. The process of fermentation is carefully watched, for upon this the aroma of the tea will depend, and the process must be checked at the right moment.
Of all the rooms in the tea-factory the fermenting-room is the most pleasant to visit. It is filled with the most delightful fragrance. Next, the tea is thrown into a machine, where it is dried by hot air, and after that it enters a huge sieve, where the first rough division of the crop is made into large and small leaves. The next sorting is by hand, when nimble fingers swiftly pick out the finer sorts of tea. After this final separation the tea is dried once more, and then taken to the warehouse, where it is packed ready to go into the market.
CHAPTER VII
THE GREAT PLAINS OF THE GANGES
Beyond the Terai the traveller, turning his back upon the Himalayas, enters a vast plain, hundreds of miles wide and a thousand miles long. From Calcutta in the east to beyond Delhi in the north-west, from the Himalayas in the north to the Vindhya Hills in the south spreads this vast sweep of land, the Plain of Hindostan. Into this plain flow a thousand streams, great and small, from the mountains which fringe its borders. Every stream, sooner or later, is gathered into the broad bosom of the Ganges, which winds its majestic current through the centre of the immense level. The Ganges is more than the great river of India: it is one of the great rivers of the world. To vast numbers of mankind it is a sacred stream, and to bathe in its holy waters is a privilege for which pilgrims will travel on foot from distant lands. But the mighty flood is put to other uses than that of worship. A network of canals gathers up the waters of itself and of its many tributaries, and spreads them abroad upon the fields of the husbandman, and makes the plain blossom into fertility.
To travel this plain reminds one of being at sea. On all hands it stretches away absolutely flat, and fades away into a misty horizon, save that at morning and evening the great snowy heights of the Himalayas shine out, and fade away again in the light of the rising and setting sun.
This great sunny plain swarms with life. It is covered with the villages of the Indian peasants; it is coloured with the bright patches of their crops, with green fields of paddy (rice), with golden wheat and barley, with poppies white in flower, with yellow mustard, with lentils, potatoes, castor-oil plants, and a score of other crops. These grow freely where water is. Where water is not, the land stretches bare and sterile, sand, stones, and rocks bleaching in the sun.
Here and there a group of trees proclaims a village. The palm and the feathery bamboo mingle their foliage; the huge banyan-tree stretches itself over the soil and sends down its long shoots, which strike it into the soil and form supports to the parent branches. Around the village pastures the herd of buffaloes, often watched by a small boy, and a clumsy cart, with wheels formed of two circles of solid wood, and drawn by two mild-eyed, hump-backed oxen, creaks by as it journeys towards a neighbouring place.