It was six hours of struggle, mostly in the sun, before I got our things into our cabin, and half our luggage lay on deck for the night with natives camping on it! The officers on board were very pleasant and agreeable, as they were on board the last British India boat we were on, but the want of method in getting passengers and their baggage off the wharf and into boats and on board was almost incredible.…[38] There was a vein of amusement, I remember, when I can get my mind off the annoying parts of our "Embarkation." I got a chanter from a Chinese pedlar in the street in the morning—heard the unmistakeable reedy notes coming along the street as I did business in the the cool office of Messrs Cook & Co., and leaving papers and monies went and met the smiling Chinese pedlar of sweetmeats who sold me his chanter. The position of the notes is the same as on our chanter, and the fingering is the same; afterwards on board when I played a few notes on it the beady black eyes of the Ghurkas in the waist sparkled, and they pulled out their practice chanters from their kit at once—and there we were!—and the long-legged, almond-eyed Sikhs on their baggage looked on in languid wonder.
[38] Getting off at Calcutta was indescribable—if possible worse than the embarkation—a sauve qui peut.
Would you like a description of Calcutta? I wish I could give it. It was a little different from what I expected, smaller, and yet with ever so much more life and bustle on the river than I'd expected. Commerce doesn't go slow on account of heat, and here, as in Burmah, I was surprised to see so much picturesque lading and unlading of cargoes going on by the river banks, and the green grass and trees running from the banks into the town. But we will jump Calcutta, I think, it is too big an order; but before going on may I say that the architecture is, to my mind, better than it is said to be. In Holdich's "India" it is unfavourably compared with that in Bombay, but do you know, I almost prefer the classic style of Calcutta to the scientific rococco Bombay architecture, but I offer this opinion with the greatest diffidence, for I know the author of "India" is an artist—still—"I know what I like," as the burglar said when he took the spoons.
Benares.—One evening we took train from Calcutta to Benares. Flat fields of white poppies were on either side, and English park-like scenes, without the mansions, and we thanked our stars we had not to live in what the Norse call "Eng" or meadow land.
The things of interest in Benares are in order—first the Ghats, then a river called the Ganges, and the monkey temple; of course there are a great many natives, but from a cursory impression of the faces in the crowds, I think they rank after the monkeys.
We arrived on a feast day with the golden beauty of Burmah and its people fresh in our minds, and found these natives were painting the town red. They slopped a liquid the colour of red ink over their neighbours' more or less white clothes, and threw handfuls of vermilion powder over each other—an abominable shade of vermilion—so roads and people and sides of houses were all stained with these ugly colours; in fact, at the Ghats or terraces at the river side, where many thousands were congregated, the air was thick with the vermilion dust. From the water's edge up the steps to the palaces and temples and houses at the top, the terraces swarmed with thousands of people, and the talk and mirthless laughter rose and fell like the continuous clamour from a guillemot rookery.
The scenes we met in the streets were only to be described in language of the Elizabethan period. If to-day at home we pass obscurantism for morality, the Indian does the reverse; he tears the last shreds from our ideas of what Phallic worship might once have been.
I think the Ghats are the most nauseating place in the world; there, is Idolatry, in capital letters—the most terrible vision that a mind diseased could picture in horrible nightmare! for you see thousands of inferior specimens of men and women dabbling in the water's edge, doing all and every particular of the toilet in the same place almost touching each other, and right amongst them are dead people in pink or white winding sheets being burned, and the ashes and half-burned limbs being shoved into the water—and I forgot—there's a main sewer comes into the middle of this.
We got on to a boat with a cabin on it, and sat on its roof on decrepit cane chairs, and the rowers below with makeshift oars gradually pulled us up and down the face of the Ghats—what oars, and what a ramshackle tub of a boat—too old and tumble-down for a fisherman's hen run at home.