Could we but throw open our service to the natives, our government might, with advantage to civilization, be extended over the whole of the native States; for, whether we are ever to leave India or whether we are to remain there till the end of time, there can be no doubt but that the course best adapted to raise the moral condition of the natives is to mould Hindostan into a homogeneous empire sufficiently strong to stand by itself against all attacks from without, and internally governed by natives, under a gradually weakened control from at home. If, after careful trial, we find that we cannot educate the people to become active supporters of our power, then it will be time to make use of the native princes and grandees; but it is to be hoped that the people, as they become well taught, will also become the mainstay of our democratic rule.
The present attitude of the mass of the people is one of indifference and neutrality, which in itself lends a kind of passive strength to our rule. During the mutiny of 1857, the people neither aided nor opposed us; and even had the whole of the land-owners been against us, as were those of Oude, it is doubtful whether they could have raised their villagers and peasants. Were our policemen relatively equal to their officers and to the magistrates, we should never hear of native disaffection, but we cannot count upon the attachment of the people so long as it is possible for our constables to procure confessions by the bribery of villagers or the application of pots full of wasps to their stomachs.
In the matter of the annexation of those native States which still cumber the earth, we are not altogether free agents. We swallow up States like Bhawulpore just as Russia consumes Bokhara. Everywhere indeed, in Asia, strong countries must inevitably swallow up their weaker neighbors. Failure of heirs, broken treaties, irregular frontiers—all these are reasons or assumed reasons for advance; but the end is certain, and is exemplified in the march of England from Calcutta to Peshawur and of Russia from the Aral to Turkestan. Our experience in the case of the Punjaub shows that even honest discouragement of farther advances on the part of the rulers of the stronger power will not always suffice to prevent annexation.
CHAPTER XV.
SCINDE.
NEAR Mithun Kote, we steamed suddenly into the main stream of the Indus, the bed of which is here a mile and a quarter wide. Although the river at the time of my visit was rising fast, it was far from being at its greatest height. In January, it brings down but forty thousand cubic feet of water every second, but in August it pours down four hundred and fifty thousand. The river-bed is rarely covered with running water, but the stream cuts a channel for itself upon one shore, and flows in a current of eight or nine miles an hour, while the remainder of the bed is filled with half-liquid sand.
The navigation of the Indus is monotonous enough. Were it not for the climate, the view would resemble that on the Maas, near Rotterdam, though with alligators lining the banks instead of logs from the Upper Meuse; but climate affects color, and every country has tints of its own. California is golden, New Zealand a black-green, Australia yellow, the Indus valley is of a blazing red. Although every evening the Beloochee Mountains came in sight as the sun sank down behind them, and revealed their shapes in shadow, all through the day the landscape was one of endless flats. The river is a dirty flood, now swift, now sluggish, running through a country in which sand deserts alternate only with fields of stone. Villages upon the banks there are none, and from town to town is a day‘s journey at the least. The only life in the view is given by an occasional sail of gigantic size and curious shape, belonging to some native craft or other on her voyage from the Punjaub to Kurrachee. On our journey down the Indus, we passed hundreds of ships, but met not one. They are built of timber, which is plentiful in the Himalayas, upon the head-waters of the river, and carry down to the sea the produce of the Punjaub. The stream is so strong, that the ships are broken up in Scinde, and the crews walk back 1000 miles along the bank. In building his ships upon the Hydaspes, and sailing them down the Indus to its mouth, Alexander did but follow the custom of the country. The natives, however, break up their ships at Kotree, whereas the Macedonian intrusted his to Nearchus for the voyage to the Gulf of Persia and a survey of the coast.
Geographically, the Indus valley is but a portion of the Great Sahara. Those who know the desert well, say that from Cape Blanco to Khartoom, from Khartoom to Muscat, from Muscat to Moultan, the desert is but one; the same in the absence of life, the same in such life as it does possess. The Valley of the Nile is but an oasis, the Gulfs of Persia and of Aden are but trifling breaks in its vast width. Rainless, swept by dry hot winds laden with prickly sand, traversed everywhere by low ranges of red and sunburnt rocks, strewn with jagged stones, and dotted here and there with a patch of dates gathered about some ancient well, such is the Sahara for a length of near six thousand miles. On the Indus banks, the sand is as salt as it is at Suez, and there are as many petrified trees between Sukkur and Kurrachee as there are in the neighborhood of Cairo.
Our days on board were all passed upon one plan. Each morning we rose at dawn, which came about half-past four, and, watching the starting of the ship from the bank where she had been moored all night, we got a cool walk in our sleeping-clothes before we bathed and dressed. The heat then suffocated us quietly till four, when we would reassert the majesty of man by bathing, and attempting to walk or talk till dinner, which was at five. At dark we anchored, and after watching the water-turtles at their play, or hunting for the monstrous water-lizards known as “gos,”—apparently the ichneumons called in Egypt “gots,”—or sometimes fishing for great mud-fish with wide mouths and powerful teeth, we would resume our sleeping-clothes (in which, but for the dignity of the Briton in the eyes of the native crew, we should have dined and spent the day). At half-past seven or eight, we lay down on deck, and forgot our sorrows in sleep, or engaged in a frantic struggle with the cockroaches. In the latter conflict we—in our dreams at least—were not victorious, and once in an awful trance I believed myself carried off by one leg in the jaws of a gigantic cockroach, and pushed with his feelers down into his horrid hole.
Each hour passed on the Indus differs from the others only in the greater or less portion of it which is devoted to getting off the sand-banks. After steaming gallantly down a narrow but deep and swift piece of the river, we would come to a spot at which the flood would lose itself in crossing its bed from one bank to the other. Backing the engines, but being whirled along close to the steep bank by the remaining portion of the current, we soon felt a shock, the recoil from which upset us, chairs and all, it being noticeable that we always fell up stream, and not with our heads in the direction in which the ship was going. As soon as we were fairly stuck, the captain flew at the pilot, and kicked him round the deck—a process always borne with fortitude, although the pilot was changed every day. The only pilot never kicked was one who came on board near Bhawulpore, and who carried a jeweled tulwar, or Afghan scimetar, but even he was threatened. The kicking over, an entry of the time of grounding was made by the captain in the pilot‘s book, and the mate was ordered out in a boat to sound, while the native soldiers on board the flats we were towing began quietly to cook their dinner. The mate having found a sort of channel, though sometimes it had a ridge across it over which the steamer could not pass without touching, he returned for a kedge, which he fixed in the sand, and we were soon warped up to it by the use of the capstan, the native crew singing merrily the while. Every now and then, however, we would take the ground in the center of the ship, and with deep water all round, and then, instead of getting off, we for hours together only pivoted round and round. One of the Indus boats, with a line regiment on board, was once aground for a month near Mithun Kote, to the entire destruction of all the wild boars in the neighborhood.
The kicking of the unfortunate pilots was not a pleasant sight, but there were sometimes comic incidents attached to our periodic groundings. Once I noticed that the five men who were constantly sounding with colored poles in different parts of the ship and flats, had got into a monotonous chorus of “pánché——é pot” (“five feet”)—we drawing only three, so that we went ahead confidently at full speed, when suddenly we ran aground with a violent shock. On the re-sounding of our course by the boat‘s crew, we found that our pole-men must, for some time past, have been guessing the soundings to save the trouble of looking. These fellows richly deserved a kicking, but the pilots are innocent of any fault but inability to keep pace with the rapid changes of the river-course.