The little voyage, beautiful outside the ship, and stiff and prim within, ended on the fourth day. The Semiramis ran past Manora Head and anchored near the Bar, which in those days was as bad as bad could be. My first impressions of the country, a marvellous contrast to Gujarat and Bombay, were as follows:—
"In those days Sind was in the most primitive state. The town, or rather village, of Karáchi was surrounded by a tall wall of guy swish, topped with fancy crenelles, and perpendicularly striped with what the Persians call Da mágheh, or nostril holes, down which the besieged could pour hot oil, or boiling water. Streets there were none; every house looked like a small fort, and they almost met over the narrow lanes that formed the only thoroughfares. The bazar, a long line of miserable shops, covered over with rude matting of date leaves, was the only place comparatively open. Nothing could exceed the filthiness of the town; sewers there were none. And the deodorization was effected by the dust. The harbour, when the tide was out, was a system of mud-flats, like the lagoons of Venice, when you approach them by the Murazzi. A mere sketch of a road, which in these days would be called a Frere highway, led from the nearest mud-bank to the Cantonment. The latter was in its earliest infancy. The ground of hard clay was still covered with milk-bush and desert vegetation, and only here and there a humble bungalow was beginning to be built. There was no sign of barracks, and two race-courses were laid out before any one thought of church or chapel.
"Yet Karáchi showed abundant sign of life. Sir Charles Napier thoroughly believed in its future, and loudly proclaimed that in a few years it would take the wind out of Bombay sails. The old Conqueror himself was temporarily staying there. He had his wife and two handsome daughters. His personal staff was composed of his two nephews, Captain William Napier and Lieutenant Byng. In his general Staff he had Major Edward Green, Assistant Adjutant-General, for Quarter-Master-General; Captain MacMurdo, who afterwards married his daughter; a civilian named Brown, alias 'Beer' Brown; Captain Young, of the Bengal army, as his Judge Advocate-General; and Captain Preedy for his Commissary-General. The latter was the son of a violent old officer in the Bombay army, and of whom many a queer story was told. One of them is as follows:—He was dining at a Dragoon mess at Poonah, when they began to sing a song which had been written by an officer of the regiment, and which had for refrain—
'Here's death to those
Who dare oppose
Her Majesty's Dragoons.'Old Preedy well knew that in the affair alluded to, the Dragoons, having ventured into a native village, had been soundly thrashed by the villagers. After patiently hearing the song out, he proposed to give the villagers a turn, but he had hardly finished his first verses—
'Success to who
Dare to bamboo
Her Majesty's Dragoons.'before he was duly kicked out of the Mess.
"Karáchi was then swarming with troops. The 78th Highlanders were cantoned there, and were presently joined by the 86th, or 'County Down Boys.' Both consumed a vast quantity of liquor, but in diametrically different ways. The kilts, when they felt fou, toddled quietly to bed, and slept off the debauch; the brogues quarrelled and fought, and made themselves generally disagreeable, and passed the night in the guard-house. There was horse artillery and foot artillery, and the former, when in uniform, turned out in such gorgeous gingerbread-gold coats, that gave a new point to the old sneer of 'buying a man at your own price, and selling him at his own,' and there were native regiments enough to justify brigade parades on the very largest scale."
The 18th was presently ordered off to Gharra, a desolate bit of rock and clay, which I described as follows:—
"Look at that unhappy hole—it is Gharra.
"The dirty heap of mud-and-mat hovels that forms the native village is built upon a mound, the débris of former Gharras, close to a creek which may or may not have been the 'western outlet of the Indus in Alexander's time.' All round it lies a—
'windy sea of land:'—
salt, flat, barren rock and sandy plain, where eternal sea-gales blow up and blow down a succession of hillocks—warts upon the foul face of the landscape—stretching far, far away, in all the regular irregularity of desolation.
"You see the cantonment with its falling brick lines outside, and its tattered thatched roofs peeping from the inside of a tall dense hedge of bright green milk-bush."
We were obliged to pitch tents, for there was no chance of lodging in the foul little village, at the head of the Gharra creek. Under the circumstances, of course, the work was very hard.
A sandstorm astonished an English visitor considerably.
"When we arose in the morning the sky was lowering, the air dark; the wind blew in puffs, and—unusual enough at the time of the year—it felt raw and searching. If you took the trouble to look towards the hills about eight a.m. you might have seen a towering column of sand from the rocky hills, mixed with powdered silt from the arid plains, flying away as fast as it could from the angry puffing Boreas.
"The gale increases—blast pursuing blast, roaring and sweeping round the walls and over the roofs of the houses with the frantic violence of a typhoon. There is a horror in the sound, and then the prospect from the windows! It reminds one of Firdausi's vast idea that one layer has been trampled off earth and added to the coats of the firmament. You close every aperture and inlet, in the hope of escaping the most distressing part of the phenomenon. Save yourself the trouble, all such measures are useless. The finer particles with which the atmosphere is laden would pass without difficulty through the eye of a needle; judge what comfortable thoroughfares they must find the chinks of these warped doors and the crannies of the puttyless munnions.
"It seems as though the dust recognized in our persons kindred matter. Our heads are powdered over in five minutes; our eyes, unless we sit with closed lids, feel as if a dash of cayenne had been administered to them; we sneeze like schoolboys after a first pinch of 'blackguard;' our epidermises are grittier than a loaf of provincial French bread, and washing would only be a mockery of resisting the irremediable evil.
"Now, Mr. Bull, if you wish to let your friends and old cronies at home see something of the produce of the East, call for a lighted candle, and sit down to compose an 'overland letter.' It will take you at least two hours and a half to finish the four pages, as the pen becomes clogged, and the paper covered every few minutes; moreover, your spectacles require wiping at least as often as your quill does. By the time the missive comes to hand it will contain a neat little cake of Indus mud and Scinde sand moulded in the form of paper. Tell Mrs. Bull that you went without your tiffin—lunch I mean—that you tried to sleep, but the novel sensation of being powdered all over made the attempt an abortive one—that it is impossible to cook during a dust-storm—and that you are in for a modification of your favourite 'intramural sepulture,' if the gale continues much longer. However, your days are safe enough; the wind will probably fall about five or six in the afternoon,—it is rare that it does not go down with the sun—and even should it continue during the night, it will be a farce compared to what we are enduring now."