Allah! Allah! mendjié row strong; if we arrive in time, you shall have two annas (30 centimes). What is this floating three paces from here? The body of a man lying on his back. And yonder? A woman's corpse. And further off? The carcass of a horse. The crows, the kites, the vultures, are much interested in it. But we are landing. The passengers on board the steamboat are not all landed yet. You see there perhaps forty, fifty European dresses, and hundreds of Indian. In the second-class car, which we enter, we shall see Indians in muslin, who are named babou (or townspeople) through politeness. They are clerks in the Calcutta offices; they reside several leagues from here, come every day to town, and return home by the railroad. The compact mass of the poor are penned up in wretched third-class cars. The bell rings, the whistle blows, we are off.
Thirteen miles north of Calcutta in the third station, the first important one; we stop two minutes. Let us go down; we are at Serampore, an old Danish colony sold to England. We shall content ourselves there with a visit to the Hindoo gods, and we shall have enough to do if we see them all. There are, I think, more than fifty temples. Here is one that is no larger than one of the little wayside chapels we often see at home. At the further end, on a scaffold, is a god quite black, almost of human form, holding his two hands as though he were playing the flute. No flute is there, however. The god has the cut of a French conscript; at his feet there is a little woman a foot high, and a little god half a foot, an exact copy of the large one. The priest has observed us, and here he comes to speak to us. He is clad like the poorest of the Hindoos. What is your god's name? Answer unintelligible. Who are those two little personages? His wife and son. What does that god do? He eats. Indeed? Oh yes, sahib, he eats much. If you will give him some rice or flour he will be very thankful [{393}] to you, and it will be of great spiritual advantage to you. Oh! oh! but if we give him rice, will he eat it before us? Oh! of course not. He does not eat in company. I place the rice before him; I close the door carefully, and go away; when I come back some time after to open the door, he has it all eaten up. Thereupon we begin to laugh; the priest smiles, too, and we move away.
You meet under almost every large tree four or five of these gods, or even a greater number. Over them the Indians hang cocoa-nuts, full of a water which escapes drop by drop, from a little hole bored in the bottom. It is thus that they keep their gods cool. You often see a regular series of little temples, built one after the other, on the same base. Usually, there are six on one side, six on the other. In the centre of each of them there is a black stone, fairly representing an anvil covered with a hat. That stone is a god. A great number of them are sold in Calcutta at from ten to twelve rupees a piece (twenty-five or thirty francs).
But here is a temple of Kali, the terrible goddess of destruction, in honor of whom the sect of Togs has devoted itself to murder for ages long. They say there are still Togs who kill for killing's sake, especially in Bengal. The goddess is standing; she is almost black; has four arms armed with daggers and death's-heads; around her neck is a double necklace, which hangs to the ground, composed of hundreds of little figures also representing death's-heads. The best of it is that her tongue hangs down midway on her chest. To pull the tongue is a sign of astonishment in Bengal. Now Kali, returning one day from the war, with her chaplet of skulls round her neck, met a man, whom she naturally killed first and foremost. That is the dead body that lies under her feet. She asked the name of the individual, and was much surprised to find that she had killed her husband. Then she pulled her tongue, the best thing she could do. Having no other husband to kill, and even deprived recently of human sacrifices by the English government. Kali has enormous quantities of black kids sacrificed to her. I often see flocks of several hundreds of them coming into town; the votaries of Kali have their heads cut off at a celebrated temple we have here in Calcutta. For you must know, Calcutta signifies temple of Kali! I went one day to see these sacrifices. The temple is a small affair; but all around a great number of other gods, attracted, doubtless, by the scent of blood, come to establish their dwelling.
Let us go on. That great straw shed which you see yonder covers an enormous car, having a great number of very heavy wheels. Many a man those wheels have crushed. It is the car of Juggernaut, that devil to whose festivals the English government sent European soldiers only a few years since; not to maintain order, but to take part in the procession. Djaghernatt (the Indian name of this idol) remains with Bolaraham and Soubâdhra, his brother and sister, in a temple opposite the straw shed. A great number of the Indian gods have a taste for moving about; hence those kiosks that you see everywhere, and which serve them as resting-places. The prettiest is the shade of a banyan-tree, with about a hundred stems, a whole wood in itself.
But we must leave the Hindoo gods; we have barely time to pay a short visit to Chandernagor. Let us take the railroad again, and go on some minutes' ride further. Another time we shall, if you choose, come by water, ascending the Hoogly to twenty-one miles north of Calcutta. There, on the right bank of the broad river, is a strip of land two miles in length by one in breadth, where some sixty persons live in European style, with some thousands of Bengalese, who live in Indian fashion; it is the French colony.
The Indian employés cry with all [{394}] their might "Chan'nagore! Chan'nagore!" Let us get down, and out of the terminus, and when we have crossed that ditch, ten paces before us, we shall be in France. As the centre of the European habitations is a quarter of an hour's walk from this point, we throw ourselves here into a four-seated carriage, and thread our way through roads wretchedly out of repair, at the risk of upsetting an hundred times, or of getting sea-sick by the way. I have often passed that place in company with Frenchmen; we endeavored to feel an impression, by humming
"Vera les rives de France," etc. [Footnote 56]
[Footnote 56: "Toward the shores of France," etc.]
One day when I was making ready to brave those perilous roads in company with two Irishmen, there came into our carriage a large gentleman, whose weight would have been formidable to us, had I not managed to balance his pounds by my kilogrammes. [Footnote 57] By his appearance I took him for a Briton, and, therefore, took no pains to enter into conversation. But after a little, one of my Irishmen, annoyed by the jolting of the carriage, said to me in English: "Faith! these Frenchmen needn't boast of the way they keep these roads of theirs." At this remark, you should have seen my stout gentleman leap, and with a menacing air reply to my interlocutor: "I warn you to say nothing here against the French. I am a Frenchman."