Part 25 (2/2)
Went to the railway station, we were obliged to do so. We must leave the river to get down to Rangoon and Western India, to catch our return P. & O. from Bombay. We have decided to return by the north of India, and not by Ceylon, though we are drawn both ways. Ceylon route by steamer all the way, seems so much easier for tired travellers, than going overland in trains; but what would friends at home say if we missed Benares, Agra, and Delhi.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
... A native stationmaster, in a perfunctory manner, points out the kind of 1st cla.s.s carriage we have to travel in. It is not inviting, and we get back to the river, and make a jotting of our steamer and the sh.o.r.e against the evening sky, and the bullock-carts slowly stirring the dust into a golden haze.... Then we go to live on sh.o.r.e with friends for a day or two.
I despair of making anything, in the meantime, of the Arrakan PaG.o.da, and the great golden Buddha with the wonderful light on it, and the kneeling tribesmen and women from over Asia. It is one of the finest, if not _the_ finest, subject for painting I have ever seen, and yet I can't see one telling composition. Looking at the people kneeling, from the side, you can't see the Buddha, and, looking at the Buddha, you only see the peoples' backs.
CHAPTER x.x.xVIII
From the train to Rangoon, you see very little of the country: we felt rather unhappy in it after the comfort of the steamer. A native stationmaster lost half our luggage for us--vowed he'd put it on board.
I knew that he knew that he had not done so, but I could do nothing. It was glaringly hot at the station; several Europeans wore black spectacles, and I had to do the same, for needle like pains ran through my eyes since the day on the snipe jheel at Bhamo.
The first part of the journey was smooth enough, but bless me! they brought up the Royal train from Rangoon at ten miles an hour faster than we travel down! How uneasily must have lain a head that is to wear a crown.
We couldn't sleep at night for the carriage seemed to be going in every direction at once--waggled about like a basket, and we shook so much we laughed at a mosquito that aimed at a particular feature. But in the early morning we did actually sleep for a little, and about 4 or 5 A.M.
were awakened, for tea, and plague inspection at 6 A.M., about two hours before getting into Rangoon!--a plague on tea and inspectors at that hour of the morning!
It wasn't pure joy that journey. Ah! and it was sad too, getting to the cultivated plains round Rangoon--eternal rice fields and toiling Indians--uglier and uglier as we neared civilisation. The saddest sight of all, the half-bred Burman and Indian woman or man--the woman the worst; with, perhaps, a face of Burmese cast, over-shadowed with the hungry expression of the Indian, and a black thin shank and flat foot showing under the lungy, where should be rounded calf and clean cut foot. We may be great colonists we Britons, but I fear our stocking Burmah with scourings from India is only great as an evil.
Now I will pa.s.s Rangoon in my journal. We stayed a day or two at a lodging in a detached teak villa in a compound which contained native servants, and crows _ad nauseum_--it was dull, stupid and dear, and we were sorry we had not gone to the hotel, and our greatest pleasure was visiting the Shwey PaG.o.da again, and the greatest unpleasantness was getting on board the British India boat the ”Lunka” for Calcutta. We were literally bundled pell mell on board, some twenty pa.s.sengers and baggage, and some five hundred native troops all in a heap in the waist on top of us--what a miserable muddle. The French pa.s.sengers smiled derisively at the inefficacy or rather total absence of any system of embarkation of pa.s.sengers, and the Americans opened their eyes! Always they repeat on board--”Why, you first cla.s.s pa.s.sengers don't pay us.” On the Irrawaddy river boats they say this too, but they make you jolly comfortable for all that.
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 pa.s.sengers and their baggage off the wharf and into boats and on board was almost incredible....[38] There was a vein of amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 gra.s.s 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 cla.s.sic 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 pa.s.s obscurantism for morality, the Indian does the reverse; he tears the last shreds from our ideas of what Phallic wors.h.i.+p 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 makes.h.i.+ft 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.
Holy Gunga! What a crowd of men and women line the edge of these steps knee deep in the water, and babble and jabber and pray, day after day, and pretend to wash themselves, without soap! Only one man of the thousands I saw was proportionably shaped; and one woman was white, an Albino, I wish I could forget her bluey whiteness! and I saw boys doing Sandow exercises, evidently trying to bring up their biceps--poor little devils--how can they? They haven't time--they will be married and reproducing other little fragilities like themselves, before they are out of their teens!
The monkey temple is full of monkeys, and they have less apish expressions than the priests. The Prince of Wales saw it the patron told me, and added, ”Princess give handsome presents--also Maharajahs--from 100 rupees to 50.” So I gave one, very willingly, to get out, and thought it cheap at the price. Besides the nastiness of the monkeys, there was much blood of sacrifices drying on the ground and altars, and this was covered with flies; there are some abominable rites in this temple, but they are now _not supposed_ to sacrifice children.
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