As we sat on the terrace a native pedlar approached with two portentous bundles. He salaamed, and proceeded to unload his wares in front of us. His stock, however, consisted entirely of European goods—small wares such as tapes and buttons, studs, soaps and perfumes, patent medicines, and such articles as are supposed to meet the wants of travellers. This Indian Autolycus addressed us as “Father” and “Mother,” and like the “Mad Hatter” commenced his speeches by saying “me very poor man,” following this announcement by urgent appeals to us to buy, after each purchase, beginning all over again afresh. Probably he felt he had to make the most of his English, as well as of his stock and his opportunities.
After another look at the Golden Temple, which it was impossible to approach without a crowd and without clumsy canvas shoes over our own, we made our way round to the Atal tower. Here, again, before entering the anything but clean marble court shoes had to be put off. It is an octagonal shrine, or tomb, having curious beaten metal plates, gilded figure designs in repoussé over the doors, but the decorative art here was much inferior in design and detail to what we had seen further south.
We then drove to the public gardens in which stands the pavilion of Ranji Singh. The gardens are full of beautiful palms and trees of many different kinds, including fine cypresses and splendid clumps of bamboos. The roads around Amritzar are lined with trees, and one sees enormous banyans spreading their great branches and masses of dark green foliage and casting deep shadows on the long avenues. Large plantations and fruit gardens, too, surround the city, so that it has a very attractive look although on a dead level.
Oranges of a large rough-skinned kind are grown here. They are deep-coloured, and more like lemons in shape. There was also a very small circular orange about the size of a large cherry in the hotel garden, where roses, pansies, and violets were blooming freely. The native gardener was generally to the fore in offering us small posies or buttonholes whenever he had an opportunity and for a consideration.
We left Amritzar for Lahore on January the 15th, having another long wait for the Punjab mail, this time three hours behind time. However, about noon another train came up and we were advised by the stationmaster to go on by that in preference to waiting longer for the mail. This train, he said, would take us to Lahore more quickly than the quick train, which sounds like a contradiction in terms. It is only about an hour’s journey.
The country between Amritzar and Lahore is, again, flat and has no striking features. Fields under irrigation green with young crops of corn, often smothered in charlock, alternated with dry fields or the standing canes of ripe crops, and stubbles of some newly reaped. The wells were plentiful. Some of the irrigation wells in this district are of a different pattern and mechanism to the simple draw-well seen generally. A pair of oxen turn a horizontal heavy wooden wheel which has slots at regular intervals around the outside of its rim. These slots catch the projecting spokes or straight cogs of another wheel, also horizontally placed and smaller in size, and this in turn by means of the cogs moves a large water wheel arranged in a vertical position, the projecting cogs catching the spokes of this wheel, which has a series of leather buckets or water pots attached to its broad rim, on the same principle as we see in dredging machines. As the wheel turns the buckets are dipped one after the other into the well, and as they rise again full empty their contents into a trough immediately in front of the wheel, which communicates with another trough connected with the irrigating trenches, which are thus supplied with water.
The station at Lahore was comparatively quiet and was a pleasing contrast to the turbulent crowd at Amritzar. The Charing Cross hotel received us, but anything less suggestive of the associations its name recalled it would be difficult to imagine. It was of the usual extended bungalow type, with long arcades in front of ranges of ground floor rooms, spacious and lofty and reminding rather of the vast rooms one sees on the stage with raftered ceilings and whitewashed walls. The lower wall of our sitting-room, however, was hung with very interesting Indian hand-painted cotton hangings, which gave it rather a distinguished appearance. There was a bedroom, something between a prison and a chapel, and dressing and the usual bath rooms, with zinc tubs, opening out beyond. There were large sitting and dining rooms, the latter an enormous one, like the nave of a church, lighted by a clerestory only, and cold enough, where people dined rather frigidly, each group at a safe distance at separate little round tables. We were glad of a log-fire in the evenings, though the sun was powerful enough during the day. “The Charing Cross post office” was close by, which had one pigeon hole, and where the stamps were sold outside under the verandah, by a native squatting on the ground.
ENJOYING A LOG FIRE AT LAHORE
A fine broad avenue through the English quarter is called “The Mall,” and here the principal government buildings are situated, the Law courts and the Museum, and the principal stores and bungalows. This British residential and business quarter is quite distinct and lies quite clear outside the walls of the native city of Lahore. It is laid out in broad drives with tan rides at the side, and bordered with trees. Bungalows and shops and stores in the shape of bungalows standing detached in gardens are arranged pleasantly from the modern residential point of view, and forms quite a “garden city,” only marred by the atrocious way in which the traders announce their names and business in staring white block-letters on black boards. One piano warehouse, I noticed, had even a sky sign. Even the private residences are often disfigured in the same way by black boards with the name of the occupier in the ugliest block-letters.