Point de Galle presents a curious mixture of races. Cingalese, Kanditores, Tamils from South India, and Moormans, with crimson caftans and shaven crowns, form the bulk of the crowd that throng its streets; but, besides these, there are Portuguese, Chinese, Jews, Arabs, Parsees, Malays, Dutchmen, English, with half-caste burghers, and now and then a veiled Arab woman, or a Veddah, one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the island. Sir Charles Dilke speaks of "silent crowds of tall and graceful girls, as we at first supposed, wearing white petticoats and bodices, their hair carried off the face with a decorated hoop, and caught at the back by a high tortoise-shell comb. As they drew near, moustaches began to show, and I saw that they were men, whilst walking with them were women naked to the waist, combless, and far more rough and 'manly' than their husbands. Petticoats and chignons are male institutions in Ceylon."
With indefatigable energy of mind and body, Madame Pfeiffer visited Colombo and Kandy, the chief towns of the island. At the latter she obtained admission to the temple of Dagoba, which contains a precious relic of Buddha, namely, one of his teeth. The sanctuary enshrining it is a small chamber or cell, less than twenty feet in breadth. It is shrouded in darkness, for of windows there are none, and the door is curtained inside, still more effectually to exclude the light. Rich tapestry covers the walls and ceiling. But the principal object is the altar, which glitters with plates of silver, and is encrusted about the edges with precious stones. Upon it rests a bell-shaped case, about three feet high, and at the base three feet in diameter. It is made of silver, is elaborately gilt, and decorated with costly jewels. In the middle blazes a peacock of precious stones. Six smaller cases, said to be of gold, each diminishing in size, are enclosed within the large case, and under the last is the tooth of Buddha. It is as large as that of a great bull, so the great Indian philosopher must have had a monstrous jaw!
Madame Pfeiffer arrived at Madras on the 30th of October. Thence she proceeded to Calcutta, the city of palaces; but, of course, she adds nothing to the information furnished by a swarm of travellers. She saw the broad flood of the Ganges, and, filling a glass with its sacred water, drank to the health of the Europeans and all whom she loved.
Throughout her Indian travel she felt much vexed at being conveyed in a palanquin; it seemed a dishonouring of men to treat them as beasts of burden. However, necessity prevailed over her humanitarian scruples. Unlike the majority of Indian tourists, she went everywhere without an expensive retinue of attendants; she had but one servant, yet she contrived to go everywhere, and to see all that was to be seen. It is worth noting that she reduced the cost of travel to a minimum, and accomplished the circuit of the globe for a less sum than the rent of a furnished house in Mayfair for only a twelvemonth. It is true that she submitted to privations which the English tourist would deem insupportable; she embarked in sailing ships because they were cheaper than steamers; resorted to third-class railway carriages; avoided expensive hotels; lived always with the "masses" and on plainest fare; and dispensed with the services of dragoman or interpreter. But for all that her enjoyment was not the less, and she saw much which, had she travelled in the usual fashion, she would not have seen.
One is apt to think that a woman who accomplished such really remarkable feats of endurance and energy must have been endowed with great physical strength and robust proportions. But such was by no means the case. Her stature did not exceed—nay, was below—the average, and there was nothing masculine in her face or figure. "I smile," she says in one of her letters, "when I think of those who, knowing me only through my voyages, imagine that I must be more like a man than a woman! Those who expect to see me about six feet high, of bold demeanour, and with pistol in my belt, will find me a woman as peaceable and as reserved as most of those who have never set foot outside their native village."
At Benares she saw the bazaars, and the temples, and the palaces; the bathing in the Ganges, the burning of the dead on the bank of the sacred river, and a nautchni or dance of nautches; but her attention was chiefly drawn to the miserable fanaticism of the fakeers, who revelled in self-imposed tortures. Thus they stuck an iron hook through the flesh, and allowed themselves to be suspended by it at a height of twenty or twenty-five feet; or for long hours they stood upon one foot in the burning sunshine, with their arms rigidly extended in the air; or they held heavy weights in various positions, swinging round and round for hours together, and tearing the flesh from their bodies with red-hot pincers. One man held a heavy axe over his head as if about to fell a tree, and in this position stood immovable like a statue; another held the point of his toe to his nose. Yet, from one point of view, these men are right. What torture of the body can equal the torture of the soul? If it were possible by any amount of physical pain to still and silence the agony of conscience, who would not endure it? The greatest condemnation of the self-cruelty of the fakeers is—its uselessness.
In her tour through India Madame Pfeiffer visited Allahabad, at the junction of the Jumna and the Ganges; Agra, where she surveyed with admiring eyes the lovely Taj-Mahal, erected by the Sultan Jehan as a memorial to his favourite wife, and the Pearl Mosque, renowned for the beauty of its carving; Delhi, the ancient capital of the Moguls; the cave-temples of Ellora and Ajunta, and the great commercial port of Bombay.
Crossing the border of British India, she sailed to Bassora, and ascended the historic Tigris—so named from the tiger-like swiftness of its course—to Bagdad, that quaint Oriental city, which is associated with so many wonderful legends and not less wonderful "travellers' tales." This was of old the residence of the great Haroun-al-Raschid, a ruler of no ordinary sagacity and the hero of many a picturesque tradition, whose name the "Thousand and One Nights" have made familiar to every English reader. It is still a populous and wealthy city, with, we suspect, a future before it not less glorious than its past. Many of its houses are surrounded by blooming gardens; its shops are bright with the products of Eastern looms; and it descends in terraces to the river banks, which are lined with orchards and groves of palm. Over all extends the arch of a glowing sky.
From Bagdad Madame Pfeiffer made an excursion to the ruins of Babylon. They consist of massive fragments of walls and columns, lying on either side of the Euphrates.