Dozens of gharries dodge past. Hundreds of rickshaws pull out of the way.
A great landau, drawn by a pair of thoroughbred Australian horses, driven by a Malay syce, and footman in full livery, and containing a bare-headed Chinese merchant, in the simple flowing garments of his nation, dashes along. The victoria and the dog-cart of the European, and the universal palanquin of the Anglo-Indian, form a perfect maze of wheels.
Suddenly the road is filled with a long line of bullock-carts. You swing your little pony sharply to one side, barely escaping the big wooden hub of the first cart. The syce springs down from behind, and belabors the native bullock driver, who, paying no attention to the blows rained upon his naked back, belabors his beasts in turn, calling down upon their ungainly humps the curses of his religion. The scene is so familiar that only a “globe-trotter” would notice it. Yet to me there is nothing more truly artistic, or more typically Indian in India, than a long line of these bullock-carts, laden with the products of the tropics,—pineapples, bananas, gambier, coffee,—urged on by a straight, graceful driver, winding slowly along a palm and banian shaded road. We would meet such processions at every turning, but never without recalling glorious childish pictures of the Holy Land and Bible scenery as we painted them, while our father read of a Sunday morning out of the old “Domestic Bible,”—we children pronounce it “Dom-i-stick,”—how the Lord said unto Moses, “Go take twenty fat bullocks and offer them as a sacrifice.” As we would see these “twenty fat bullocks” time and again, I confess, with a feeling of reluctance, that some of the gilt and rose tint was rubbed from our childish pictures, and that a realistic artist drawing from the life before him would not deck out the patient subject in quite our extravagant colors.
The color of the Indian bullock varies. Some are a dirty white, some a cream color, some almost pink, and a few are of the darker shades. They are about the size of our cows, seldom as large as a full-grown ox. Their horns, which are generally tipped with curiously carved knobs, and often painted in colors, are as diversified in their styles of architecture as are the horns of our cattle, though they are more apt to be straight and V-shaped. Their necks are always “bowed to the yoke,” to once more use biblical phraseology, and seem almost to invite its humiliating clasp. Above their front legs is the mark of their antiquity, the great clumsy, flabby, fleshy, tawny hump, always swaying from side to side, keeping time to every plodding step of its sleepy owner. This seemingly useless mountain of flesh serves as a cushion against which rests a yoke. Not the natty yoke of our rural districts, but a simple pole, with a pin of wood through each end, to ride on the outside of the bullocks’ necks. The burden comes against the projecting hump when the team pulls. To the centre of this yoke is tied, with strong withes of rattan, the pole of a cart, that in this nineteenth century is generally only to be seen in national museums, preserved as a relic of the first steps in the art of wagon building. And yet as a cart it is not to be despised: all the heavy traffic of the colonies is done within its rude board sides. It has two wheels, with heavy square spokes that are held on to a ponderous wooden axle-tree by two wooden pins. A platform bottom rests on the axle-tree, and two fence-like sides.
The genie of the cart, the hewer of wood and drawer of water, is a tall, wiry, bronze-colored Hindu. He has a yard of white gauze about his waist, and another yard twisted up into a turban on his head. The dictates of fashion do not interest him. He does not plod along year in and year out behind his team for the pittance of sixty cents per day, to squander on the outside of his person. Not he. He has a wife up near Simla. He hopes to go back next year, and buy a bit of ground back from the hill on the Allabadd road from his father-in-law, old Mohammed Mudd. They have cold weather up in Simla, and he knows of a certain gown he is going to buy of a Chinaman in the bazaar. But his bullocks lag, and he saws on the gamooty rope that is attached to their noses, and beats them half consciously with his rattan whip. Ofttimes he will stand stark upright in the cart for a full half-hour, with his rattan held above his head in a threatening attitude, and talk on and on to his animals, apotheosizing their strength and patience, telling them how they are sacred to Buddha, how they are the companions of man, and how they shall have an extra chupa of paddy when the sun goes down, and he has delivered to the merchant sahib on the quay his load of gambier; or he reproves them for their slowness and want of interest, and threatens them with the rod, and tells them to look how he holds it above them. If in the course of the harangue one of the dumb listeners pauses to pick a mouthful of young lallang grass by the roadside, the softly crooning tones give place to a shriek of denunciation.
The agile Kling springs down from his improvised pulpit, and rushes at the offender, calls him the offspring of a pariah dog, shows him the rattan, rubs it against his nose, threatening to cut him up with it into small pieces, and to feed the pieces to the birds. Then he discharges a volley of blows on the sleek sides of the offender, that seem to have little more effect than to raise a cloud of tiger gnats, and to cause the recipient to bite faster at the tender herbs.
As the bullock-cart that has blocked our way, and at the same time inspired this description, shambles along down the shady road, and out of the reach of the syce’s arms, the driver slips quietly up the pole of the cart until a hand rests on either hump, and commences to talk in a half-aggrieved, half-caressing tone to his team. Our syce translates. “He say bullock very bad to go to sleep before the palanquin of the Heaven-Born. If they no be better soon, their souls will no become men. He say he sorry that they make the great American sahib angry.”
The singular trio passes on, the driver praising and reprimanding by turns in the soft, musical tongue of his people, the historic beasts swinging lazily along, regardless of their illustrious past, all unconscious of the fact that their names are embalmed in sacred writ and Indian legend, and rounding a corner of the broad, red road, are lost to view amid the olive-green shadows of a clump of gently swaying bamboo. To me, for the moment, they seem to disappear, like phantoms, into the mists of the dim centuries, from out of which my imagination has called them forth.
Soon you are at the wide-open gates of the Botanic Garden. A perfect riot of strange tropical foliage bursts upon the view. The clean, red road winds about and among avenues of palms, waringhans, dark green mangosteens, casuarinas, and the sweet-smelling hibiscus, all alike covered with a hundred different parasitic vines and ferns. Artificial lakes and moats are filled with the giant pods of the superb Victoria regia, and the flesh-colored cups of the lotus.
In the translucent green twilight of the flower-houses a hundred varieties of the costly orchids thrive—not costly here. A shipload can be bought of the natives for three cents apiece.