ON THE WAY TO GOALUNDA,
21st June 1892.
Pictures in an endless variety, of sand-banks, fields and their crops, and villages, glide into view on either hand—of clouds floating in the sky, of colours blossoming when day meets night. Boats steal by, fishermen catch fish; the waters make liquid, caressing sounds throughout the livelong day; their broad expanse calms down in the evening stillness, like a child lulled to sleep, over whom all the stars in the boundless sky keep watch—then, as I sit up on wakeful nights, with sleeping banks on either side, the silence is broken only by an occasional cry of a jackal in the woods near some village, or by fragments undermined by the keen current of the Padma, that tumble from the high cliff-like bank into the water.
Not that the prospect is always of particular interest—a yellowish sandbank, innocent of grass or tree, stretches away; an empty boat is tied to its edge; the bluish water, of the same shade as the hazy sky, flows past; yet I cannot tell how it moves me. I suspect that the old desires and longings of my servant-ridden childhood—when in the solitary imprisonment of my room I pored over the Arabian Nights, and shared with Sinbad the Sailor his adventures in many a strange land—are not yet dead within me, but are roused at the sight of any empty boat tied to a sand-bank.
If I had not heard fairy tales and read the Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe in childhood, I am sure views of distant banks, or the farther side of wide fields, would not have stirred me so—the whole world, in fact, would have had for me a different appeal.
What a maze of fancy and fact becomes tangled up within the mind of man! The different strands—petty and great—of story and event and picture, how they get knotted together!