Aden is a wild and desolate spot, made of fiery rocks. One cannot imagine any one living here; but Richard's old friend, Dr. Steinhaüser, so often mentioned in these pages, lived here for twenty-five years, and dropped down dead in Switzerland. On the thirty-first day I have the following entry:—"A charming day, and no one died. Have seen the prettiest sight possible, late afternoon. Thousands of dolphins playing leap-frog under our bows, and keeping up with the ship." If it had not been for Richard we should have been put into quarantine, through the captain not knowing English, and not being able to explain why he had had twenty-three deaths on board. The yellow flag was already hoisted up; the pilgrims were in despair; but on Richard explaining to the pilot, he pushed off to fetch the doctor, and we were allowed to land, running into Bombay. The last we saw of the holy mob was as a stream of black ants trickling down the ladders and the ropes, hardly able to wait for the boats, and giving us something like a cheer.
Arrived in Bombay, Richard took me to see all the scenes described in the beginning of this book in the early part of his life, and he said, "It is a curious thing, that although I hated them when I was obliged to live here, now that I am not obliged I can look back upon these scenes with a certain amount of affection and interest, although I would not live here again for anything. The old recollection makes me sad and melancholy." We were under very happy auspices there, because Mr. Frederick Foster Arbuthnot, who now lives at 18, Park Lane, had been a friend of Richard's for many, many years, and mine too; he was "Collector" at Bombay, and occupied a great position, so that he used to take us out everywhere in his four-in-hand or in his boats, and we saw everything all over Bombay and its environs, which, though familiar to Richard, was entirely new to me, and we were also introduced to all the Society. The things that I found most interesting were a certain Ali Abdullah, the son of a Syrian Bedawin, of the tribe of Anazeh, who married a Christian, Europeanized himself, settled here, and keeps stables of four or five hundred horses, imports from Persia and elsewhere. We saw some perfect colts, one for £200, and some two hundred kadishi, about fourteen hands high, useful, but not pretty, worth about £12 or £14 in Syria. To the Garapooree Island we went to see the wonderful Hindoo caves, called the Elephant Caves, covered with carvings, cut out of solid blocks, of their Trinity—Shiva, Krishna, and Vishnu. There is something to see all round the Bay.
The Bhendi Bazar is the best sight of all. In its way, it is almost as striking and various as the bazars at Jeddah, so picturesque with its coloured temples, irregular coloured houses, and its wares to sell. There one sees something of native life in its native town. Malabar Hill is very pretty, with its picturesque bungalows and vegetation. Mr. Arbuthnot took us to Bandora, which was to him what Bludán was to us in Syria, or Opçina at Trieste. He had there a charming bungalow and stables by the sea, on Salsette Island, a cool, refreshing, rural, and solitary place. The drive there took us through the bazar, and the beautiful Máhim woods, a cocoa-palm forest, and across an inlet of the sea, which looks like a lake, and divides Bombay from Salsette. On a rising country, with wooded hills and the Ghauts for a background, there is a romantic church, built by the old Portuguese two hundred and fifty years ago, called Nossa Senhora do Monte. It commands a beautiful view, and the water (like a lake in the depression) surrounds it. We always went to Bandora every Saturday to Monday during our stay in Bombay, and always met charming people—the late Duke of Sutherland, Admiral Reginald Macdonald, Admiral Lambert; and Mr. Albert Grey arrived.
Sind.
Now the Sind expedition came off. First, Bassein Dámán, Surat, the first English factory in India, with the tombs of Vaux and Tom Coryat; then Diu, a Head and Fort, Ja'afarábád, the ruins of Somanáth, the home of the famous Gates; the Dwáriká Pagoda, Kachh (Cutch), Mandavi, and the Indus mouths. We called upon the village Chiefs; we chatted with the villagers; we learnt much about the country, and we taught the country something about ourselves. Gujarat was the next place—Káthiawár and Junágarh, better known as Gírnár. And then to Manhóra, where the British arms first showed the vaunting Sindi and the blustering Beloch what the British lion can do when disposed to be carnivorous, and thence to Karáchi town. There we visited every part of the Unhappy Valley, and particularly the Belochis of the hills (with whom Richard had so much to do when under Sir Walter Scott). He writes indignantly about the way Mirza Ali Akbar Kahn Bahadúr was treated by the Government, being removed from the service, and his pension refused in 1847—it is said to annoy Sir Charles Napier, Richard's Chief.
Everywhere he goes (as he recounts in "Sind Revisited," which he wrote from our journal on return) he visits the old scenes of his former life, saluting them, letting the changes sink into his mind, and taking an everlasting farewell of them. He was very apt to do this in places where he had lived. He notices the ruin of the Indian army—the great difference between his time and now. He said, "Were I a woman, I would have sat down and had a good cry." There was only one of his joyous crew still breathing. The buildings had grown magnificent, but everything else had changed for the worse; the old hospitality was gone; there was no more jollity, no more larking boys; everything so painfully respectable, and so degenerated. He went to visit the old alligator tanks, where they used to go and worry them with their bull-terriers, and the boys used to jump on them and ride them. "No such skylarking now," he remarked. Then he waxes sentimental at the place where he had a serious flirtation with a Persian girl. There is the shop where he used to write with phosphorus on the wall. He had three shops in Karáchi, where he appeared in different disguises, and was considered a saint when he was so disguised and appeared in such or such a character. Then we went back to Baroda, where he was quartered so long, and to see the Goanese church, to which he transferred himself in 1843, and to Gharra, where he had to live so miserably. He traces the foundation of the lines of his old regiment, where he says, "None of us died, because we were young and strong; but we led the life of salamanders." He says, "There lies the old village, which saw so many of our 'little games;' a cluster of clay hovels, with its garnishing of dry thorns, as artlessly disposed as the home of the nest-building ape. How little it has changed; how much have we!" He next goes to Nagar (everywhere pronounced Nangar), and to Thathá, and Kalyan Kot, and the Mekli Hills (holy places), where he composed the following poem:—
"LEGEND OF THE LAKKÍ HILLS.
"In awful majesty they stand,
Yon ancient of an earlier earth,
High towering o'er the lowly land
That in their memories had birth;
And spurning from their stony feet
The rebel tides, that rush to beat
And break where rock and water meet.
Hoar their heads and black their brows,
And scarred their ribbèd sides, where ploughs
Old Age his own peculiar mark
Of uneffaceable decay;
And high and haughty, stern and stark,
As monarchs to whose mighty sway,
A hundred nations bow—stand they.
"Within the deep dark cleft of rock dividing,
Two giants taller than their kin,
Whence the sharp blade of piercing torrent gliding,
Here flashes sudden on the sight, there hiding
'Mid stones all voice with crashing din;
Where earthborn shade with skylight blends,
A grot of grisly gloom impends
The source from which the wave descends.
"Upon its horrid mouth, I ween,
The foot of man hath never been;
The foulest bird of prey would shrink
To nestle on that noisome brink.
Now the warm cauldron's sulphury fumes upseething,
As sighs that Stygian pit exhales,
The cavern's pitchy entrance veils,
Then in the wind's cold breath the vapours wreathing,
Dissolve—again the eye defines
The dripping portals' jagged lines.
"A glorious vision from that cave
Glittered before my gazing eye;
A seraph-face, like one that beams
Upon his sight, when blissful dreams
Round holy hermit's pillow fly.
A form of light, as souls that cleave
The darksome dungeon of the grave,
When awful judgment hour is nigh.
And oh, that voice! Can words express
The fulness of its loveliness,
Its rare and wondrous melody?
Ah, no! no mortal tongue may be
So powerful in poesy!
"Might I but gaze upon that brow,
Might I but hear that witching strain,
The joys that all the Seven Climes[1] know,
The charms that all the heavens show,
Were mine—but mine in vain.
"A moment pass'd the sound away,
Faded the vision from my sight;
And all was as it was before—
Vapour and gloom and deaf'ning roar.
Then soft arose that sound again—
Again appeared that form of light
Athwart the blue mist, purely white;
As from the main, at break of day,
Springs high to heaven the silvery spray.
"She beckoneth to me,
And in that smile there is
Promise of love and bliss,
Enduring endlessly.
"Whirled my brain, my heedless foot
Already left the verge
Where the water-spirit pours
His bolts of feathery surge,
Where iron rocks around, beneath,
Stand quick to do the work of death.
When, swift as thought, an icy arm
Against my falling bosom prest;
Its mighty touch dissolved the charm,
As suns disperse the mists that rest
On heathery mountains' dewy crest.
"I heard the angry waters rave,
I saw the horrors of the grave
That yawned to gulf its prey;
And started back in such dismay,
As wretch that, waked from midnight sleep,
Descries through shadows, glooming deep,
The ghost of murdered victim glide,
In gory robes, his couch beside.
I looked towards the darkling cave;
No more the vision glittered there,
No music charmed the echoing air—
That strain so sweet! that face so fair!—
And, but for one shrilly shriek
Of fiendish rage that smote mine ear,
And, but for one horrent thrill
That seemed with ice my veins to thrill;
Well had I deem'd 'twas Fancy's freak,
That scene, whose vivid features lie
On Memory's page typed durably."
We go to Sundan, to Jarak, to the Phuleli river, where he spent some time in his early days with a moonshee, and make a pilgrimage to the Indus river, and eventually to Hyderabad (Sind) and to Kotri the Fort, where, as he says, for the sake of "auld lang syne," he visits every place to right and left on his way, even the Agency and the old road. He says the changes take away his breath.