Here, There and Everywhere

by Lord Frederic Hamilton

This admirable orchestra made the evenings very pleasant. We put on white ties and tail-coats every night for dinner in the open shamyanah, where the Maharajah provided us with an excellent European repast served on solid silver plates. As the endless resources of this wonderful camp included an ice-making machine, he also gave us iced champagne every evening. As an example of how thorough the Maharajah was in his arrangements, he had brought three of his mallees, or native gardeners, with him, their sole function being to gather wild jungle-flowers daily, and to decorate the tables and tents with them.

Neither the Maharajah nor his family ever touched any of the European food, though, as they were not Hindoos, but belonged to the Bramo-Somaj religion, there were no caste-laws to prevent their doing so. Half-way through dinner the servants brought in large square silver boxes, some of rice, others of various curries: hot curries, dry curries, Ceylon curries, and green vegetable curries; these constituted their dinner, and most excellent they were.

I really must pay a tribute to the graceful and delightful Maharanee, who presided with such dignity and charm at these gatherings. I had first met the Maharanee in London, in 1887, at the festivities in connection with Queen Victoria's Jubilee. The Maharanee, the daughter of a very ancient Bengal family, was then quite young. She had only emerged "from behind the curtain," as natives of India say, for six months. In other words, she had just emancipated herself from the seclusion of the Zenana, where she had lived since her marriage. She had then very delicate features, and most lovely eyes, with exquisitely moulded hands and arms. Very wisely she had not adopted European fashions in their entirety, but had retained the becoming saree of gold or silver tissue or brocade, throwing the end of it over her head as a veil, and looking perfectly charming in it. Everything in England must have seemed strange to her, the climate, the habits, and the mode of living, and yet this little Princess behaved as though she had been used to it all her life, and still managed to retain the innate dignity of the high-caste native lady.

As one travels through life certain pictures remain vividly clear-cut in the memory. The evenings in that shooting-camp are amongst these. I can still imagine myself strolling with an extremely comely lady along the stretches of natural lawn that crowned the bluff above the river, the gurgle and splashing of the stream loud in our ears as we looked over the unending expanse of jungle below us, vast and full of mystery under the brilliant moonlight of India. In India the moonlight is golden, not silvery as with us. The great grey sea of scrub, with an occasional prominent tree catching this golden light on its clear-cut outline, had something awe-inspiring about it, for here one was face to face with real Nature. A faint and distant roar was also a reminder that the jungle had its inhabitants, and through it all came the quaintly incongruous strains of the orchestra playing a selection from "The Mikado":

"My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time,
To make the punishment fit the crime,
The punishment fit the crime."

The moonlit jungle night-scene, and the familiar air with its London associations were such endless thousands of miles apart.

On the floor of my drawing-room, in Westminster, the skin of a bear reposes close to those of two tigers. This is how he came there: We were at breakfast when kubber of a bear only two miles away was brought in. The Maharajah at once ordered the howdah-elephants round. Opposite me on the breakfast-table stood a large plate of buns, which the camp baker made most admirably. Ever since my earliest childhood I had gone on every possible occasion to the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park, and was therefore in a position to know what was the favourite food of the ursine race. That they did not exist on buns in the jungle was due to a lack of opportunity rather than to a lack of inclination, so I argued that the dainty would prove just as irresistible to a bear in the jungle as it did to his brethren in the big pit near the entrance to the Zoo, and ignoring the rather cheap gibes of the rest of the party, I provided myself with half-a-dozen buns, three of which I attached by long strings to the front of my howdah, where they swung about like an edible pawnbroker's sign. The bear was lying in a very small patch of bamboo, and broke cover at once. As I had anticipated, the three swinging buns proved absolutely irresistible to him. He came straight up to me, I shot him with a smooth-bore, and he is most decorative in his present position, but it was all due to the buns. The Maharajah told me, much to my surprise, that far more natives were killed by bears than by tigers in that part of India.

The jungle was very diversified: in places it consisted of flat tablelands of scrub, varied with broad open spaces broken by thick clumps ("topes" they are called by Anglo-Indians) of bamboo. In other parts there were rocky ravines covered with forest growth, and on the low ground far-stretching and evil-smelling swamps spread themselves, the home of the rhinoceros and water buffalo.

I had no idea of an elephant's climbing powers. These huge beasts make their way quite easily up rocky ascents no horse could negotiate. In coming down steep declivities, the wise creatures extend their hind-legs, using them as brakes. Cautious old Chota Begum would never ford any river without sounding the depth with her trunk at every step. On one occasion two of the Maharajah's fishermen were paddling native dug-outs down-stream as we approached a river. Chota Begum, who had never before seen a dug-out, took them for crocodiles, trumpeted loudly with alarm, and refused to enter the water until they were quite out of sight. The curious intelligence of the animal is seen when they are ordered to remove a tree which blocks the road. Chota Begum would place her right foot against the trunk and give a little tentative shove. Not satisfied with the leverage, she would shift her foot again and again until she had found the right spot, then, throwing her whole weight on to her foot, the tree would snap off like a wooden match.

There was a great amount of bird-life in the jungle. It abounded in peacocks, and these birds are a glorious sight sailing down-wind through the sunlight with their tails streaming behind them, at a pace which would leave any pheasant standing. As peacocks are regarded as sacred by Hindoos, the Maharajah had particularly begged us not to shoot any. There were plenty of other birds, snipe, partridges, florican and jungle-cocks, the two latter greatly esteemed for their flesh. I shot a jungle-cock, and was quite disappointed at finding him a facsimile of our barndoor game-cock, for I had imagined that he would have the velvety black wing starred with cream-coloured eyes, which we associate with the "jungle-cock wing" of salmon flies. The so-called "jungle-cock" in a "Jock Scott" fly is furnished by a bird found, I believe, only round Madras. An animal peculiar to this part of Assam is the pigmy hob, the smallest of the swine family. These little beasts, no larger than guinea-pigs, go about in droves of about fifty, and move through the grass with such incredible rapidity that the eye is unable to follow them. The elephants, oddly enough, are scared to death by the pigmy hogs, for the little creatures have tushes as sharp as razors, and gash the elephants' feet with them as they run past them.