FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR A JOURNEY AROUND THE WORLD BY MARK TWAIN SAMUEL L. CLEMENS

 Part 6

CHAPTER LI. 

Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes itslaws or its songs either. --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar. 

Yes, the city of Benares is in effect just a big church, a religioushive, whose every cell is a temple, a shrine or a mosque, and whose everyconceivable earthly and heavenly good is procurable under one roof, so tospeak--a sort of Army and Navy Stores, theologically stocked. 

I will make out a little itinerary for the pilgrim; then you will see howhandy the system is, how convenient, how comprehensive. If you go toBenares with a serious desire to spiritually benefit yourself, you willfind it valuable. I got some of the facts from conversations with theRev. Mr. Parker and the others from his Guide to Benares; they aretherefore trustworthy. 

1. Purification. At sunrise you must go down to the Ganges and bathe, pray, and drink some of the water. This is for your generalpurification. 

2. Protection against Hunger. Next, you must fortify yourself againstthe sorrowful earthly ill just named. This you will do by worshiping fora moment in the Cow Temple. By the door of it you will find an image ofGanesh, son of Shiva; it has the head of an elephant on a human body; itsface and hands are of silver. You will worship it a little, and pass on, into a covered veranda, where you will find devotees reciting from thesacred books, with the help of instructors. In this place are groups ofrude and dismal idols. You may contribute something for their support;then pass into the temple, a grim and stenchy place, for it is populouswith sacred cows and with beggars. You will give something to thebeggars, and "reverently kiss the tails" of such cows as pass along, forthese cows are peculiarly holy, and this act of worship will secure youfrom hunger for the day. 

3. "The Poor Man's Friend. " You will next worship this god. He is atthe bottom of a stone cistern in the temple of Dalbhyeswar, under theshade of a noble peepul tree on the bluff overlooking the Ganges, so youmust go back to the river. The Poor Man's Friend is the god of materialprosperity in general, and the god of the rain in particular. You willsecure material prosperity, or both, by worshiping him. He is Shiva, under a new alias, and he abides in the bottom of that cistern, in theform of a stone lingam. You pour Ganges water over him, and in returnfor this homage you get the promised benefits. If there is any delayabout the rain, you must pour water in until the cistern is full; therain will then be sure to come. 

4. Fever. At the Kedar Ghat you will find a long flight of stone stepsleading down to the river. Half way down is a tank filled with sewage. Drink as much of it as you want. It is for fever. 

5. Smallpox. Go straight from there to the central Ghat. At itsupstream end you will find a small whitewashed building, which is atemple sacred to Sitala, goddess of smallpox. Her under-study is there--a rude human figure behind a brass screen. You will worship this forreasons to be furnished presently. 

6. The Well of Fate. For certain reasons you will next go and do homageat this well. You will find it in the Dandpan Temple, in the city. Thesunlight falls into it from a square hole in the masonry above. You willapproach it with awe, for your life is now at stake. You will bend overand look. If the fates are propitious, you will see your face picturedin the water far down in the well. If matters have been otherwiseordered, a sudden cloud will mask the sun and you will see nothing. Thismeans that you have not six months to live. If you are already at thepoint of death, your circumstances are now serious. There is no time tolose. Let this world go, arrange for the next one. Handily situated, atyour very elbow, is opportunity for this. You turn and worship the imageof Maha Kal, the Great Fate, and happiness in the life to come issecured. If there is breath in your body yet, you should now make aneffort to get a further lease of the present life. You have a chance. There is a chance for everything in this admirably stocked andwonderfully systemized Spiritual and Temporal Army and Navy Store. Youmust get yourself carried to the

7. Well of Long Life. This is within the precincts of the mouldering andvenerable Briddhkal Temple, which is one of the oldest in Benares. Youpass in by a stone image of the monkey god, Hanuman, and there, among theruined courtyards, you will find a shallow pool of stagnant sewage. Itsmells like the best limburger cheese, and is filthy with the washings ofrotting lepers, but that is nothing, bathe in it; bathe in it gratefullyand worshipfully, for this is the Fountain of Youth; these are the Watersof Long Life. Your gray hairs will disappear, and with them yourwrinkles and your rheumatism, the burdens of care and the weariness ofage, and you will come out young, fresh, elastic, and full of eagernessfor the new race of life. Now will come flooding upon you the manifolddesires that haunt the dear dreams of the morning of life. You will gowhither you will find

8. Fulfillment of Desire. To wit, to the Kameshwar Temple, sacred toShiva as the Lord of Desires. Arrange for yours there. And if you liketo look at idols among the pack and jam of temples, there you will findenough to stock a museum. You will begin to commit sins now with afresh, new vivacity; therefore, it will be well to go frequently to aplace where you can get

9. Temporary Cleansing from Sin. To wit, to the Well of the Earring. You must approach this with the profoundest reverence, for it isunutterably sacred. It is, indeed, the most sacred place in Benares, thevery Holy of Holies, in the estimation of the people. It is a railedtank, with stone stairways leading down to the water. The water is notclean. Of course it could not be, for people are always bathing in it. As long as you choose to stand and look, you will see the files ofsinners descending and ascending--descending soiled with sin, ascendingpurged from it. "The liar, the thief, the murderer, and the adulterermay here wash and be clean, " says the Rev. Mr. Parker, in his book. Verywell. I know Mr. Parker, and I believe it; but if anybody else had saidit, I should consider him a person who had better go down in the tank andtake another wash. The god Vishnu dug this tank. He had nothing to digwith but his "discus. " I do not know what a discus is, but I know it is apoor thing to dig tanks with, because, by the time this one was finished, it was full of sweat--Vishnu's sweat. He constructed the site thatBenares stands on, and afterward built the globe around it, and thoughtnothing of it, yet sweated like that over a little thing like this tank. One of these statements is doubtful. I do not know which one it is, butI think it difficult not to believe that a god who could build a worldaround Benares would not be intelligent enough to build it around thetank too, and not have to dig it. Youth, long life, temporarypurification from sin, salvation through propitiation of the Great Fate--these are all good. But you must do something more. You must

10. Make Salvation Sure. There are several ways. To get drowned inthe Ganges is one, but that is not pleasant. To die within the limits ofBenares is another; but that is a risky one, because you might be out oftown when your time came. The best one of all is the Pilgrimage Aroundthe City. You must walk; also, you must go barefoot. The tramp isforty-four miles, for the road winds out into the country a piece, andyou will be marching five or six days. But you will have plenty ofcompany. You will move with throngs and hosts of happy pilgrims whoseradiant costumes will make the spectacle beautiful and whose glad songsand holy pans of triumph will banish your fatigues and cheer your spirit;and at intervals there will be temples where you may sleep and berefreshed with food. The pilgrimage completed, you have purchasedsalvation, and paid for it. But you may not get it unless you

11. Get Your Redemption Recorded. You can get this done at the SakhiBinayak Temple, and it is best to do it, for otherwise you might not beable to prove that you had made the pilgrimage in case the matter shouldsome day come to be disputed. That temple is in a lane back of the CowTemple. Over the door is a red image of Ganesh of the elephant head, sonand heir of Shiva, and Prince of Wales to the Theological Monarchy, so tospeak. Within is a god whose office it is to record your pilgrimage andbe responsible for you. You will not see him, but you will see a Brahminwho will attend to the matter and take the money. If he should forget tocollect the money, you can remind him. He knows that your salvation isnow secure, but of course you would like to know it yourself. You havenothing to do but go and pray, and pay at the

12. Well of the Knowledge of Salvation. It is close to the GoldenTemple. There you will see, sculptured out of a single piece of blackmarble, a bull which is much larger than any living bull you have everseen, and yet is not a good likeness after all. And there also you willsee a very uncommon thing--an image of Shiva. You have seen his lingamfifty thousand times already, but this is Shiva himself, and said to be agood likeness. It has three eyes. He is the only god in the firm thathas three. "The well is covered by a fine canopy of stone supported byforty pillars, " and around it you will find what you have already seen atalmost every shrine you have visited in Benares, a mob of devout andeager pilgrims. The sacred water is being ladled out to them; with itcomes to them the knowledge, clear, thrilling, absolute, that they aresaved; and you can see by their faces that there is one happiness in thisworld which is supreme, and to which no other joy is comparable. Youreceive your water, you make your deposit, and now what more would youhave? Gold, diamonds, power, fame? All in a single moment these thingshave withered to dirt, dust, ashes. The world has nothing to give younow. For you it is bankrupt. 

I do not claim that the pilgrims do their acts of worship in the orderand sequence above charted out in this Itinerary of mine, but I thinklogic suggests that they ought to do so. Instead of a helter-skelterworship, we then have a definite starting-place, and a march whichcarries the pilgrim steadily forward by reasoned and logical progressionto a definite goal. Thus, his Ganges bath in the early morning gives himan appetite; he kisses the cow-tails, and that removes it. It is nowbusiness hours, and longings for material prosperity rise in his mind, and be goes and pours water over Shiva's symbol; this insures theprosperity, but also brings on a rain, which gives him a fever. Then hedrinks the sewage at the Kedar Ghat to cure the fever; it cures the feverbut gives him the smallpox. He wishes to know how it is going to turnout; he goes to the Dandpan Temple and looks down the well. A cloudedsun shows him that death is near. Logically his best course for thepresent, since he cannot tell at what moment he may die, is to secure ahappy hereafter; this he does, through the agency of the Great Fate. Heis safe, now, for heaven; his next move will naturally be to keep out ofit as long as he can. Therefore he goes to the Briddhkal Temple andsecures Youth and long life by bathing in a puddle of leper-pus whichwould kill a microbe. Logically, Youth has re-equipped him for sin andwith the disposition to commit it; he will naturally go to the fane whichis consecrated to the Fulfillment of Desires, and make arrangements. Logically, he will now go to the Well of the Earring from time to time tounload and freshen up for further banned enjoyments. But first and lastand all the time he is human, and therefore in his reflective intervalshe will always be speculating in "futures. " He will make the GreatPilgrimage around the city and so make his salvation absolutely sure; hewill also have record made of it, so that it may remain absolutely sureand not be forgotten or repudiated in the confusion of the FinalSettlement. Logically, also, he will wish to have satisfying andtranquilizing personal knowledge that that salvation is secure; thereforehe goes to the Well of the Knowledge of Salvation, adds that completingdetail, and then goes about his affairs serene and content; serene andcontent, for he is now royally endowed with an advantage which noreligion in this world could give him but his own; for henceforth he maycommit as many million sins as he wants to and nothing can come of it. 

Thus the system, properly and logically ordered, is neat, compact, clearly defined, and covers the whole ground. I desire to recommend itto such as find the other systems too difficult, exacting, and irksomefor the uses of this fretful brief life of ours. 

However, let me not deceive any one. My Itinerary lacks a detail. Imust put it in. The truth is, that after the pilgrim has faithfullyfollowed the requirements of the Itinerary through to the end and hassecured his salvation and also the personal knowledge of that fact, thereis still an accident possible to him which can annul the whole thing. Ifhe should ever cross to the other side of the Ganges and get caught outand die there he would at once come to life again in the form of an ass. Think of that, after all this trouble and expense. You see howcapricious and uncertain salvation is there. The Hindoo has a childishand unreasoning aversion to being turned into an ass. It is hard to tellwhy. One could properly expect an ass to have an aversion to beingturned into a Hindoo. One could understand that he could lose dignity byit; also self-respect, and nine-tenths of his intelligence. But theHindoo changed into an ass wouldn't lose anything, unless you count hisreligion. And he would gain much--release from his slavery to twomillion gods and twenty million priests, fakeers, holy mendicants, andother sacred bacilli; he would escape the Hindoo hell; he would alsoescape the Hindoo heaven. These are advantages which the Hindoo ought toconsider; then he would go over and die on the other side. 

Benares is a religious Vesuvius. In its bowels the theological forceshave been heaving and tossing, rumbling, thundering and quaking, boiling, and weltering and flaming and smoking for ages. But a little group ofmissionaries have taken post at its base, and they have hopes. There arethe Baptist Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, the LondonMissionary Society, the Wesleyan Missionary Society, and the Zenana Bibleand Medical Mission. They have schools, and the principal work seems tobe among the children. And no doubt that part of the work prospers best, for grown people everywhere are always likely to cling to the religionthey were brought up in. 

CHAPTER LII. 

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been. --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar. 

In one of those Benares temples we saw a devotee working for salvation ina curious way. He had a huge wad of clay beside him and was making it upinto little wee gods no bigger than carpet tacks. He stuck a grain ofrice into each--to represent the lingam, I think. He turned them outnimbly, for he had had long practice and had acquired great facility. Every day he made 2, 000 gods, then threw them into the holy Ganges. Thisact of homage brought him the profound homage of the pious--also theircoppers. He had a sure living here, and was earning a high place in thehereafter. 

The Ganges front is the supreme show-place of Benares. Its tall bluffsare solidly caked from water to summit, along a stretch of three miles, with a splendid jumble of massive and picturesque masonry, a bewilderingand beautiful confusion of stone platforms, temples, stair-flights, richand stately palaces--nowhere a break, nowhere a glimpse of the bluffitself; all the long face of it is compactly walled from sight by thiscrammed perspective of platforms, soaring stairways, sculptured temples, majestic palaces, softening away into the distances; and there ismovement, motion, human life everywhere, and brilliantly costumed--streaming in rainbows up and down the lofty stairways, and massed inmetaphorical flower-gardens on the miles of great platforms at theriver's edge. 

All this masonry, all this architecture represents piety. The palaceswere built by native princes whose homes, as a rule, are far fromBenares, but who go there from time to time to refresh their souls withthe sight and touch of the Ganges, the river of their idolatry. Thestairways are records of acts of piety; the crowd of costly littletemples are tokens of money spent by rich men for present credit and hopeof future reward. Apparently, the rich Christian who spends large sumsupon his religion is conspicuous with us, by his rarity, but the richHindoo who doesn't spend large sums upon his religion is seeminglynon-existent. With us the poor spend money on their religion, but theykeep back some to live on. Apparently, in India, the poor bankruptthemselves daily for their religion. The rich Hindoo can afford hispious outlays; he gets much glory for his spendings, yet keeps back asufficiency of his income for temporal purposes; but the poor Hindoo isentitled to compassion, for his spendings keep him poor, yet get him noglory. 

We made the usual trip up and down the river, seated in chairs under anawning on the deck of the usual commodious hand-propelled ark; made ittwo or three times, and could have made it with increasing interest andenjoyment many times more; for, of course, the palaces and temples wouldgrow more and more beautiful every time one saw them, for that happenswith all such things; also, I think one would not get tired of thebathers, nor their costumes, nor of their ingenuities in getting out ofthem and into them again without exposing too much bronze, nor of theirdevotional gesticulations and absorbed bead-tellings. 

But I should get tired of seeing them wash their mouths with thatdreadful water and drink it. In fact, I did get tired of it, and veryearly, too. At one place where we halted for a while, the foul gush froma sewer was making the water turbid and murky all around, and there was arandom corpse slopping around in it that had floated down from upcountry. Ten steps below that place stood a crowd of men, women, andcomely young maidens waist deep in the water-and they were scooping it upin their hands and drinking it. Faith can certainly do wonders, and thisis an instance of it. Those people were not drinking that fearful stuffto assuage thirst, but in order to purify their souls and the interior oftheir bodies. According to their creed, the Ganges water makeseverything pure that it touches--instantly and utterly pure. The sewerwater was not an offence to them, the corpse did not revolt them; thesacred water had touched both, and both were now snow-pure, and coulddefile no one. The memory of that sight will always stay by me; but notby request. 

A word further concerning the nasty but all-purifying Ganges water. Whenwe went to Agra, by and by, we happened there just in time to be in atthe birth of a marvel--a memorable scientific discovery--the discoverythat in certain ways the foul and derided Ganges water is the mostpuissant purifier in the world! This curious fact, as I have said, hadjust been added to the treasury of modern science. It had long beennoted as a strange thing that while Benares is often afflicted with thecholera she does not spread it beyond her borders. This could not beaccounted for. Mr. Henkin, the scientist in the employ of the governmentof Agra, concluded to examine the water. He went to Benares and made histests. He got water at the mouths of the sewers where they empty intothe river at the bathing ghats; a cubic centimetre of it containedmillions of germs; at the end of six hours they were all dead. He caughta floating corpse, towed it to the shore, and from beside it he dipped upwater that was swarming with cholera germs; at the end of six hours theywere all dead. He added swarm after swarm of cholera germs to thiswater; within the six hours they always died, to the last sample. Repeatedly, he took pure well water which was bare of animal life, andput into it a few cholera germs; they always began to propagate at once, and always within six hours they swarmed--and were numberable by millionsupon millions. 

For ages and ages the Hindoos have had absolute faith that the water ofthe Ganges was absolutely pure, could not be defiled by any contactwhatsoever, and infallibly made pure and clean whatsoever thing touchedit. They still believe it, and that is why they bathe in it and drinkit, caring nothing for its seeming filthiness and the floating corpses. The Hindoos have been laughed at, these many generations, but thelaughter will need to modify itself a little from now on. How didthey find out the water's secret in those ancient ages? Had theygerm-scientists then? We do not know. We only know that they had acivilization long before we emerged from savagery. But to return towhere I was before; I was about to speak of the burning-ghat. 

They do not burn fakeers--those revered mendicants. They are so holythat they can get to their place without that sacrament, provided they beconsigned to the consecrating river. We saw one carried to mid-streamand thrown overboard. He was sandwiched between two great slabs ofstone. 

We lay off the cremation-ghat half an hour and saw nine corpses burned. I should not wish to see any more of it, unless I might select theparties. The mourners follow the bier through the town and down to theghat; then the bier-bearers deliver the body to some low-caste natives--Doms--and the mourners turn about and go back home. I heard no cryingand saw no tears, there was no ceremony of parting. Apparently, theseexpressions of grief and affection are reserved for the privacy of thehome. The dead women came draped in red, the men in white. They arelaid in the water at the river's edge while the pyre is being prepared. 

The first subject was a man. When the Doms unswathed him to wash him, heproved to be a sturdily built, well-nourished and handsome old gentleman, with not a sign about him to suggest that he had ever been ill. Dry woodwas brought and built up into a loose pile; the corpse was laid upon itand covered over with fuel. Then a naked holy man who was sitting onhigh ground a little distance away began to talk and shout with greatenergy, and he kept up this noise right along. It may have been thefuneral sermon, and probably was. I forgot to say that one of themourners remained behind when the others went away. This was the deadman's son, a boy of ten or twelve, brown and handsome, grave andself-possessed, and clothed in flowing white. He was there to burn hisfather. He was given a torch, and while he slowly walked seven timesaround the pyre the naked black man on the high ground poured out hissermon more clamorously than ever. The seventh circuit completed, theboy applied the torch at his father's head, then at his feet; the flamessprang briskly up with a sharp crackling noise, and the lad went away. Hindoos do not want daughters, because their weddings make such a ruinousexpense; but they want sons, so that at death they may have honorableexit from the world; and there is no honor equal to the honor of havingone's pyre lighted by one's son. The father who dies sonless is in agrievous situation indeed, and is pitied. Life being uncertain, theHindoo marries while he is still a boy, in the hope that he will have ason ready when the day of his need shall come. But if he have no son, hewill adopt one. This answers every purpose. 

Meantime the corpse is burning, also several others. It is a dismalbusiness. The stokers did not sit down in idleness, but moved brisklyabout, punching up the fires with long poles, and now and then addingfuel. Sometimes they hoisted the half of a skeleton into the air, thenslammed it down and beat it with the pole, breaking it up so that itwould burn better. They hoisted skulls up in the same way and banged andbattered them. The sight was hard to bear; it would have been harder ifthe mourners had stayed to witness it. I had but a moderate desire tosee a cremation, so it was soon satisfied. For sanitary reasons it wouldbe well if cremation were universal; but this form is revolting, and notto be recommended. 

The fire used is sacred, of course--for there is money in it. Ordinaryfire is forbidden; there is no money in it. I was told that this sacredfire is all furnished by one person, and that he has a monopoly of it andcharges a good price for it. Sometimes a rich mourner pays a thousandrupees for it. To get to paradise from India is an expensive thing. Every detail connected with the matter costs something, and helps tofatten a priest. I suppose it is quite safe to conclude that thatfire-bug is in holy orders. 

Close to the cremation-ground stand a few time-worn stones which areremembrances of the suttee. Each has a rough carving upon it, representing a man and a woman standing or walking hand in hand, andmarks the spot where a widow went to her death by fire in the days whenthe suttee flourished. Mr. Parker said that widows would burn themselvesnow if the government would allow it. The family that can point to oneof these little memorials and say: "She who burned herself there was anancestress of ours, " is envied. 

It is a curious people. With them, all life seems to be sacred excepthuman life. Even the life of vermin is sacred, and must not be taken. The good Jain wipes off a seat before using it, lest he cause the deathof-some valueless insect by sitting down on it. It grieves him to haveto drink water, because the provisions in his stomach may not agree withthe microbes. Yet India invented Thuggery and the Suttee. India is ahard country to understand. We went to the temple of the Thug goddess, Bhowanee, or Kali, or Durga. She has these names and others. She is theonly god to whom living sacrifices are made. Goats are sacrificed toher. Monkeys would be cheaper. There are plenty of them about theplace. Being sacred, they make themselves very free, and scramble aroundwherever they please. The temple and its porch are beautifully carved, but this is not the case with the idol. Bhowanee is not pleasant to lookat. She has a silver face, and a projecting swollen tongue painted adeep red. She wears a necklace of skulls. 

In fact, none of the idols in Benares are handsome or attractive. Andwhat a swarm of them there is! The town is a vast museum of idols--andall of them crude, misshapen, and ugly. They flock through one's dreamsat night, a wild mob of nightmares. When you get tired of them in thetemples and take a trip on the river, you find idol giants, flashilypainted, stretched out side by side on the shore. And apparentlywherever there is room for one more lingam, a lingam is there. If Vishnuhad foreseen what his town was going to be, he would have called itIdolville or Lingamburg. 

The most conspicuous feature of Benares is the pair of slender whiteminarets which tower like masts from the great Mosque of Aurangzeb. Theyseem to be always in sight, from everywhere, those airy, graceful, inspiring things. But masts is not the right word, for masts have aperceptible taper, while these minarets have not. They are 142 feethigh, and only 8 1/2 feet in diameter at the base, and 7 1/2 at thesummit--scarcely any taper at all. These are the proportions of acandle; and fair and fairylike candles these are. Will be, anyway, someday, when the Christians inherit them and top them with the electriclight. There is a great view from up there--a wonderful view. A largegray monkey was part of it, and damaged it. A monkey has no judgment. This one was skipping about the upper great heights of the mosque--skipping across empty yawning intervals which were almost too wide forhim, and which he only just barely cleared, each time, by the skin of histeeth. He got me so nervous that I couldn't look at the view. Icouldn't look at anything but him. Every time he went sailing over oneof those abysses my breath stood still, and when he grabbed for the perchhe was going for, I grabbed too, in sympathy. And he was perfectlyindifferent, perfectly unconcerned, and I did all the panting myself. He came within an ace of losing his life a dozen times, and I was sotroubled about him that I would have shot him if I had had anything to doit with. But I strongly recommend the view. There is more monkey thanview, and there is always going to be more monkey while that idiotsurvives, but what view you get is superb. All Benares, the river, andthe region round about are spread before you. Take a gun, and look atthe view. 

The next thing I saw was more reposeful. It was a new kind of art. Itwas a picture painted on water. It was done by a native. He sprinkledfine dust of various colors on the still surface of a basin of water, andout of these sprinklings a dainty and pretty picture gradually grew, apicture which a breath could destroy. Somehow it was impressive, afterso much browsing among massive and battered and decaying fanes that restupon ruins, and those ruins upon still other ruins, and those upon stillothers again. It was a sermon, an allegory, a symbol of Instability. Those creations in stone were only a kind of water pictures, after all. 

A prominent episode in the Indian career of Warren Hastings had Benaresfor its theater. Wherever that extraordinary man set his foot, he lefthis mark. He came to Benares in 1781 to collect a fine of L500, 000 whichhe had levied upon its Rajah, Cheit Singly on behalf of the East IndiaCompany. Hastings was a long way from home and help. There were, probably, not a dozen Englishmen within reach; the Rajah was in his fortwith his myriads around him. But no matter. From his little camp in aneighboring garden, Hastings sent a party to arrest the sovereign. Hesent on this daring mission a couple of hundred native soldiers sepoys--under command of three young English lieutenants. The Rajah submittedwithout a word. The incident lights up the Indian situationelectrically, and gives one a vivid sense of the strides which theEnglish had made and the mastership they had acquired in the land sincethe date of Clive's great victory. In a quarter of a century, from beingnobodies, and feared by none, they were become confessed lords andmasters, feared by all, sovereigns included, and served by all, sovereigns included. It makes the fairy tales sound true. The Englishhad not been afraid to enlist native soldiers to fight against their ownpeople and keep them obedient. And now Hastings was not afraid to comeaway out to this remote place with a handful of such soldiers and sendthem to arrest a native sovereign. 

The lieutenants imprisoned the Rajah in his own fort. It was beautiful, the pluckiness of it, the impudence of it. The arrest enraged theRajah's people, and all Benares came storming about the place andthreatening vengeance. And yet, but for an accident, nothing importantwould have resulted, perhaps. The mob found out a most strange thing, analmost incredible thing--that this handful of soldiers had come on thishardy errand with empty guns and no ammunition. This has been attributedto thoughtlessness, but it could hardly have been that, for in such largeemergencies as this, intelligent people do think. It must have beenindifference, an over-confidence born of the proved submissiveness of thenative character, when confronted by even one or two stern Britons intheir war paint. But, however that may be, it was a fatal discovery thatthe mob had made. They were full of courage, now, and they broke intothe fort and massacred the helpless soldiers and their officers. Hastings escaped from Benares by night and got safely away, leaving theprincipality in a state of wild insurrection; but he was back againwithin the month, and quieted it down in his prompt and virile way, andtook the Rajah's throne away from him and gave it to another man. He wasa capable kind of person was Warren Hastings. This was the only time hewas ever out of ammunition. Some of his acts have left stains upon hisname which can never be washed away, but he saved to England the IndianEmpire, and that was the best service that was ever done to the Indiansthemselves, those wretched heirs of a hundred centuries of pitilessoppression and abuse. 

CHAPTER LIII. 

True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god. --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar. 

It was in Benares that I saw another living god. That makes two. I believe I have seen most of the greater and lesser wonders of theworld, but I do not remember that any of them interested me sooverwhelmingly as did that pair of gods. 

When I try to account for this effect I find no difficulty about it. I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not becauseof what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We getalmost all our wonders at second hand. We are eager to see anycelebrated thing--and we never fail of our reward; just the deepprivilege of gazing upon an object which has stirred the enthusiasm orevoked the reverence or affection or admiration of multitudes of our raceis a thing which we value; we are profoundly glad that we have seen it, we are permanently enriched from having seen it, we would not part withthe memory of that experience for a great price. And yet that veryspectacle may be the Taj. You cannot keep your enthusiasms down, youcannot keep your emotions within bounds when that soaring bubble ofmarble breaks upon your view. But these are not your enthusiasms andemotions--they are the accumulated emotions and enthusiasms of a thousandfervid writers, who have been slowly and steadily storing them up in yourheart day by day and year by year all your life; and now they burst outin a flood and overwhelm you; and you could not be a whit happier if theywere your very own. By and by you sober down, and then you perceive thatyou have been drunk on the smell of somebody else's cork. For ever andever the memory of my distant first glimpse of the Taj will compensate mefor creeping around the globe to have that great privilege. 

But the Taj--with all your inflation of delusive emotions, acquired atsecond-hand from people to whom in the majority of cases they were alsodelusions acquired at second-hand--a thing which you fortunately did notthink of or it might have made you doubtful of what you imagined wereyour own what is the Taj as a marvel, a spectacle and an uplifting andoverpowering wonder, compared with a living, breathing, speakingpersonage whom several millions of human beings devoutly and sincerelyand unquestioningly believe to be a God, and humbly and gratefullyworship as a God?

He was sixty years old when I saw him. He is called Sri 108 SwamiBhaskarananda Saraswati. That is one form of it. I think that that iswhat you would call him in speaking to him--because it is short. But youwould use more of his name in addressing a letter to him; courtesy wouldrequire this. Even then you would not have to use all of it, but onlythis much:

Sri 108 Matparamahansrzpairivrajakacharyaswamibhaskaranandasaraswati. 

You do not put "Esq. " after it, for that is not necessary. The wordwhich opens the volley is itself a title of honor "Sri. " The "108"stands for the rest of his names, I believe. Vishnu has 108 names whichhe does not use in business, and no doubt it is a custom of gods and aprivilege sacred to their order to keep 108 extra ones in stock. Justthe restricted name set down above is a handsome property, without the108. By my count it has 58 letters in it. This removes the long Germanwords from competition; they are permanently out of the race. 

Sri 108 S. B. Saraswati has attained to what among the Hindoos is calledthe "state of perfection. " It is a state which other Hindoos reach bybeing born again and again, and over and over again into this world, through one re-incarnation after another--a tiresome long job coveringcenturies and decades of centuries, and one that is full of risks, too, like the accident of dying on the wrong side of the Ganges some time orother and waking up in the form of an ass, with a fresh start necessaryand the numerous trips to be made all over again. But in reachingperfection, Sri 108 S. B. S. Has escaped all that. He is no longer apart or a feature of this world; his substance has changed, allearthiness has departed out of it; he is utterly holy, utterly pure;nothing can desecrate this holiness or stain this purity; he is no longerof the earth, its concerns are matters foreign to him, its pains andgriefs and troubles cannot reach him. When he dies, Nirvana is his; hewill be absorbed into the substance of the Supreme Deity and be at peaceforever. 

The Hindoo Scriptures point out how this state is to be reached, but itis only once in a thousand years, perhaps, that candidate accomplishesit. This one has traversed the course required, stage by stage, from thebeginning to the end, and now has nothing left to do but wait for thecall which shall release him from a world in which he has now no part norlot. First, he passed through the student stage, and became learned inthe holy books. Next he became citizen, householder, husband, andfather. That was the required second stage. Then--like John Bunyan'sChristian he bade perpetual good-bye to his family, as required, and wentwandering away. He went far into the desert and served a term as hermit. Next, he became a beggar, "in accordance with the rites laid down in theScriptures, " and wandered about India eating the bread of mendicancy. Aquarter of a century ago he reached the stage of purity. This needs nogarment; its symbol is nudity; he discarded the waist-cloth which he hadpreviously worn. He could resume it now if he chose, for neither thatnor any other contact can defile him; but he does not choose. 

There are several other stages, I believe, but I do not remember whatthey are. But he has been through them. Throughout the long course hewas perfecting himself in holy learning, and writing commentaries uponthe sacred books. He was also meditating upon Brahma, and he does thatnow. 

White marble relief-portraits of him are sold all about India. He livesin a good house in a noble great garden in Benares, all meet and properto his stupendous rank. Necessarily he does not go abroad in thestreets. Deities would never be able to move about handily in anycountry. If one whom we recognized and adored as a god should go abroadin our streets, and the day it was to happen were known, all trafficwould be blocked and business would come to a standstill. 

This god is comfortably housed, and yet modestly, all things considered, for if he wanted to live in a palace he would only need to speak and hisworshipers would gladly build it. Sometimes he sees devotees for amoment, and comforts them and blesses them, and they kiss his feet and goaway happy. Rank is nothing to him, he being a god. To him all men arealike. He sees whom he pleases and denies himself to whom he pleases. Sometimes he sees a prince and denies himself to a pauper; at other timeshe receives the pauper and turns the prince away. However, he does notreceive many of either class. He has to husband his time for hismeditations. I think he would receive Rev. Mr. Parker at any time. Ithink he is sorry for Mr. Parker, and I think Mr. Parker is sorry forhim; and no doubt this compassion is good for both of them. 

When we arrived we had to stand around in the garden a little while andwait, and the outlook was not good, for he had been turning awayMaharajas that day and receiving only the riff-raff, and we belonged inbetween, somewhere. But presently, a servant came out saying it was allright, he was coming. 

And sure enough, he came, and I saw him--that object of the worship ofmillions. It was a strange sensation, and thrilling. I wish I couldfeel it stream through my veins again. And yet, to me he was not a god, he was only a Taj. The thrill was not my thrill, but had come to mesecondhand from those invisible millions of believers. By a hand-shakewith their god I had ground-circuited their wire and got their monsterbattery's whole charge. 

He was tall and slender, indeed emaciated. He had a clean cut andconspicuously intellectual face, and a deep and kindly eye. He lookedmany years older than he really was, but much study and meditation andfasting and prayer, with the arid life he had led as hermit and beggar, could account for that. He is wholly nude when he receives natives, ofwhatever rank they may be, but he had white cloth around his loins now, aconcession to Mr. Parker's Europe prejudices, no doubt. 

As soon as I had sobered down a little we got along very well together, and I found him a most pleasant and friendly deity. He had heard a dealabout Chicago, and showed a quite remarkable interest in it, for a god. It all came of the World's Fair and the Congress of Religions. If Indiaknows about nothing else American, she knows about those, and will keepthem in mind one while. 

He proposed an exchange of autographs, a delicate attention which made mebelieve in him, but I had been having my doubts before. He wrote his inhis book, and I have a reverent regard for that book, though the wordsrun from right to left, and so I can't read it. It was a mistake toprint in that way. It contains his voluminous comments on the Hindooholy writings, and if I could make them out I would try for perfectionmyself. I gave him a copy of Huckleberry Finn. I thought it might resthim up a little to mix it in along with his meditations on Brahma, for helooked tired, and I knew that if it didn't do him any good it wouldn't dohim any harm. 

He has a scholar meditating under him--Mina Bahadur Rana--but we did notsee him. He wears clothes and is very imperfect. He has written alittle pamphlet about his master, and I have that. It contains awood-cut of the master and himself seated on a rug in the garden. Theportrait of the master is very good indeed. The posture is exactly thatwhich Brahma himself affects, and it requires long arms and limber legs, and can be accumulated only by gods and the india-rubber man. There is alife-size marble relief of Shri 108, S. B. S. In the garden. Itrepresents him in this same posture. 

Dear me! It is a strange world. Particularly the Indian division of it. This pupil, Mina Bahadur Rana, is not a commonplace person, but a man ofdistinguished capacities and attainments, and, apparently, he had a fineworldly career in front of him. He was serving the Nepal Government in ahigh capacity at the Court of the Viceroy of India, twenty years ago. Hewas an able man, educated, a thinker, a man of property. But the longingto devote himself to a religious life came upon him, and he resigned hisplace, turned his back upon the vanities and comforts of the world, andwent away into the solitudes to live in a hut and study the sacredwritings and meditate upon virtue and holiness and seek to attain them. This sort of religion resembles ours. Christ recommended the rich togive away all their property and follow Him in poverty, not in worldlycomfort. American and English millionaires do it every day, and thusverify and confirm to the world the tremendous forces that lie inreligion. Yet many people scoff at them for this loyalty to duty, andmany will scoff at Mina Bahadur Rana and call him a crank. Like manyChristians of great character and intellect, he has made the study of hisScriptures and the writing of books of commentaries upon them the lovinglabor of his life. Like them, he has believed that his was not an idleand foolish waste of his life, but a most worthy and honorable employmentof it. Yet, there are many people who will see in those others, menworthy of homage and deep reverence, but in him merely a crank. But Ishall not. He has my reverence. And I don't offer it as a common thingand poor, but as an unusual thing and of value. The ordinary reverence, the reverence defined and explained by the dictionary costs nothing. Reverence for one's own sacred things--parents, religion, flag, laws, andrespect for one's own beliefs--these are feelings which we cannot evenhelp. They come natural to us; they are involuntary, like breathing. There is no personal merit in breathing. But the reverence which isdifficult, and which has personal merit in it, is the respect which youpay, without compulsion, to the political or religious attitude of a manwhose beliefs are not yours. You can't revere his gods or his politics, and no one expects you to do that, but you could respect his belief inthem if you tried hard enough; and you could respect him, too, if youtried hard enough. But it is very, very difficult; it is next toimpossible, and so we hardly ever try. If the man doesn't believe as wedo, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him. 

We are always canting about people's "irreverence, " always charging thisoffense upon somebody or other, and thereby intimating that we are betterthan that person and do not commit that offense ourselves. Whenever wedo this we are in a lying attitude, and our speech is cant; for none ofus are reverent--in a meritorious way; deep down in our hearts we are allirreverent. There is probably not a single exception to this rule in theearth. There is probably not one person whose reverence rises higherthan respect for his own sacred things; and therefore, it is not a thingto boast about and be proud of, since the most degraded savage has that--and, like the best of us, has nothing higher. To speak plainly, wedespise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside thepale of our own list of sacred things. And yet, with strangeinconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile thethings which are holy to us. Suppose we should meet with a paragraphlike the following, in the newspapers:

"Yesterday a visiting party of the British nobility had a picnic at MountVernon, and in the tomb of Washington they ate their luncheon, sangpopular songs, played games, and danced waltzes and polkas. "

Should we be shocked? Should we feel outraged? Should we be amazed?Should we call the performance a desecration? Yes, that would allhappen. We should denounce those people in round terms, and call themhard names. 

And suppose we found this paragraph in the newspapers:

"Yesterday a visiting party of American pork-millionaires had a picnic inWestminster Abbey, and in that sacred place they ate their luncheon, sangpopular songs, played games, and danced waltzes and polkas. "

Would the English be shocked? Would they feel outraged? Would they beamazed? Would they call the performance a desecration? That would allhappen. The pork-millionaires would be denounced in round terms; theywould be called hard names. 

In the tomb at Mount Vernon lie the ashes of America's most honored son;in the Abbey, the ashes of England's greatest dead; the tomb of tombs, the costliest in the earth, the wonder of the world, the Taj, was builtby a great Emperor to honor the memory of a perfect wife and perfectmother, one in whom there was no spot or blemish, whose love was his stayand support, whose life was the light of the world to him; in it herashes lie, and to the Mohammedan millions of India it is a holy place; tothem it is what Mount Vernon is to Americans, it is what the Abbey is tothe English. 

Major Sleeman wrote forty or fifty years ago (the italics are mine):

 "I would here enter my humble protest against the quadrille and lunch parties which are sometimes given to European ladies and gentlemen of the station at this imperial tomb; drinking and dancing are no doubt very good things in their season, but they are sadly out of place in a sepulchre. "

Were there any Americans among those lunch parties? If they wereinvited, there were. 

If my imagined lunch-parties in Westminster and the tomb of Washingtonshould take place, the incident would cause a vast outbreak of bittereloquence about Barbarism and Irreverence; and it would come from twosets of people who would go next day and dance in the Taj if they had achance. 

As we took our leave of the Benares god and started away we noticed agroup of natives waiting respectfully just within the gate--a Rajah fromsomewhere in India, and some people of lesser consequence. The godbeckoned them to come, and as we passed out the Rajah was kneeling andreverently kissing his sacred feet. 

If Barnum--but Barnum's ambitions are at rest. This god will remain inthe holy peace and seclusion of his garden, undisturbed. Barnum couldnot have gotten him, anyway. Still, he would have found a substitutethat would answer. 

CHAPTER LIV. 

Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems abad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth$4 a minute. --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar. 

A comfortable railway journey of seventeen and a half hours brought us tothe capital of India, which is likewise the capital of Bengal--Calcutta. Like Bombay, it has a population of nearly a million natives and a smallgathering of white people. It is a huge city and fine, and is called theCity of Palaces. It is rich in historical memories; rich in Britishachievement--military, political, commercial; rich in the results of themiracles done by that brace of mighty magicians, Clive and Hastings. Andhas a cloud kissing monument to one Ochterlony. 

It is a fluted candlestick 250 feet high. This lingam is the only largemonument in Calcutta, I believe. It is a fine ornament, and will keepOchterlony in mind. 

Wherever you are, in Calcutta, and for miles around, you can see it; andalways when you see it you think of Ochterlony. And so there is not anhour in the day that you do not think of Ochterlony and wonder who hewas. It is good that Clive cannot come back, for he would think it wasfor Plassey; and then that great spirit would be wounded when therevelation came that it was not. Clive would find out that it was forOchterlony; and he would think Ochterlony was a battle. And he wouldthink it was a great one, too, and he would say, "With three thousand Iwhipped sixty thousand and founded the Empire--and there is no monument;this other soldier must have whipped a billion with a dozen and saved theworld. "

But he would be mistaken. Ochterlony was a man, not a battle. And hedid good and honorable service, too; as good and honorable service as hasbeen done in India by seventy-five or a hundred other Englishmen ofcourage, rectitude, and distinguished capacity. For India has been afertile breeding-ground of such men, and remains so; great men, both inwar and in the civil service, and as modest as great. But they have nomonuments, and were not expecting any. Ochterlony could not have beenexpecting one, and it is not at all likely that he desired one--certainlynot until Clive and Hastings should be supplied. Every day Clive andHastings lean on the battlements of heaven and look down and wonder whichof the two the monument is for; and they fret and worry because theycannot find out, and so the peace of heaven is spoiled for them and lost. But not for Ochterlony. Ochterlony is not troubled. He doesn't suspectthat it is his monument. Heaven is sweet and peaceful to him. There isa sort of unfairness about it all. 

Indeed, if monuments were always given in India for high achievements, duty straitly performed, and smirchless records, the landscape would bemonotonous with them. The handful of English in India govern the Indianmyriads with apparent ease, and without noticeable friction, throughtact, training, and distinguished administrative ability, reinforced byjust and liberal laws--and by keeping their word to the native wheneverthey give it. 

England is far from India and knows little about the eminent servicesperformed by her servants there, for it is the newspaper correspondentwho makes fame, and he is not sent to India but to the continent, toreport the doings of the princelets and the dukelets, and where they arevisiting and whom they are marrying. Often a British official spendsthirty or forty years in India, climbing from grade to grade by serviceswhich would make him celebrated anywhere else, and finishes as avice-sovereign, governing a great realm and millions of subjects; then hegoes home to England substantially unknown and unheard of, and settlesdown in some modest corner, and is as one extinguished. Ten years laterthere is a twenty-line obituary in the London papers, and the reader isparalyzed by the splendors of a career which he is not sure that he hadever heard of before. But meanwhile he has learned all about thecontinental princelets and dukelets. 

The average man is profoundly ignorant of countries that lie remote fromhis own. When they are mentioned in his presence one or two facts andmaybe a couple of names rise like torches in his mind, lighting up aninch or two of it and leaving the rest all dark. The mention of Egyptsuggests some Biblical facts and the Pyramids-nothing more. The mentionof South Africa suggests Kimberly and the diamonds and there an end. Formerly the mention, to a Hindoo, of America suggested a name--GeorgeWashington--with that his familiarity with our country was exhausted. Latterly his familiarity with it has doubled in bulk; so that whenAmerica is mentioned now, two torches flare up in the dark caverns of hismind and he says, "Ah, the country of the great man Washington; and ofthe Holy City--Chicago. " For he knows about the Congress of Religion, andthis has enabled him to get an erroneous impression of Chicago. 

When India is mentioned to the citizen of a far country it suggestsClive, Hastings, the Mutiny, Kipling, and a number of other great events;and the mention of Calcutta infallibly brings up the Black Hole. And so, when that citizen finds himself in the capital of India he goes first ofall to see the Black Hole of Calcutta--and is disappointed. 

The Black Hole was not preserved; it is gone, long, long ago. It isstrange. Just as it stood, it was itself a monument; a ready-made one. It was finished, it was complete, its materials were strong and lasting, it needed no furbishing up, no repairs; it merely needed to be let alone. It was the first brick, the Foundation Stone, upon which was reared amighty Empire--the Indian Empire of Great Britain. It was the ghastlyepisode of the Black Hole that maddened the British and brought Clive, that young military marvel, raging up from Madras; it was the seed fromwhich sprung Plassey; and it was that extraordinary battle, whose likehad not been seen in the earth since Agincourt, that laid deep and strongthe foundations of England's colossal Indian sovereignty. 

And yet within the time of men who still live, the Black Hole was torndown and thrown away as carelessly as if its bricks were common clay, notingots of historic gold. There is no accounting for human beings. 

The supposed site of the Black Hole is marked by an engraved plate. Isaw that; and better that than nothing. The Black Hole was a prison--acell is nearer the right word--eighteen feet square, the dimensions of anordinary bedchamber; and into this place the victorious Nabob of Bengalpacked 146 of his English prisoners. There was hardly standing room forthem; scarcely a breath of air was to be got; the time was night, theweather sweltering hot. Before the dawn came, the captives were all deadbut twenty-three. Mr. Holwell's long account of the awful episode wasfamiliar to the world a hundred years ago, but one seldom sees in printeven an extract from it in our day. Among the striking things in it isthis. Mr. Holwell, perishing with thirst, kept himself alive by suckingthe perspiration from his sleeves. It gives one a vivid idea of thesituation. He presently found that while he was busy drawing life fromone of his sleeves a young English gentleman was stealing supplies fromthe other one. Holwell was an unselfish man, a man of the most generousimpulses; he lived and died famous for these fine and rare qualities; yetwhen he found out what was happening to that unwatched sleeve, he tookthe precaution to suck that one dry first. The miseries of the BlackHole were able to change even a nature like his. But that younggentleman was one of the twenty-three survivors, and he said it was thestolen perspiration that saved his life. From the middle of Mr. Holwell's narrative I will make a brief excerpt:

 "Then a general prayer to Heaven, to hasten the approach of the flames to the right and left of us, and put a period to our misery. But these failing, they whose strength and spirits were quite exhausted laid themselves down and expired quietly upon their fellows: others who had yet some strength and vigor left made a last effort at the windows, and several succeeded by leaping and scrambling over the backs and heads of those in the first rank, and got hold of the bars, from which there was no removing them. Many to the right and left sunk with the violent pressure, and were soon suffocated; for now a steam arose from the living and the dead, which affected us in all its circumstances as if we were forcibly held with our heads over a bowl full of strong volatile spirit of hartshorn, until suffocated; nor could the effluvia of the one be distinguished from the other, and frequently, when I was forced by the load upon my head and shoulders to hold my face down, I was obliged, near as I was to the window, instantly to raise it again to avoid suffocation. I need not, my dear friend, ask your commiseration, when I tell you, that in this plight, from half an hour past eleven till near two in the morning, I sustained the weight of a heavy man, with his knees in my back, and the pressure of his whole body on my head. A Dutch surgeon who had taken his seat upon my left shoulder, and a Topaz (a black Christian soldier) bearing on my right; all which nothing could have enabled me to support but the props and pressure equally sustaining me all around. The two latter I frequently dislodged by shifting my hold on the bars and driving my knuckles into their ribs; but my friend above stuck fast, held immovable by two bars. 

 "I exerted anew my strength and fortitude; but the repeated trials and efforts I made to dislodge the insufferable incumbrances upon me at last quite exhausted me; and towards two o'clock, finding I must quit the window or sink where I was, I resolved on the former, having bore, truly for the sake of others, infinitely more for life than the best of it is worth. In the rank close behind me was an officer of one of the ships, whose name was Cary, and who had behaved with much bravery during the siege (his wife, a fine woman, though country born, would not quit him, but accompanied him into the prison, and was one who survived). This poor wretch had been long raving for water and air; I told him I was determined to give up life, and recommended his gaining my station. On my quitting it he made a fruitless attempt to get my place; but the Dutch surgeon, who sat on my shoulder, supplanted him. Poor Cary expressed his thankfulness, and said he would give up life too; but it was with the utmost labor we forced our way from the window (several in the inner ranks appearing to me dead standing, unable to fall by the throng and equal pressure around). He laid himself down to die; and his death, I believe, was very sudden; for he was a short, full, sanguine man. His strength was great; and, I imagine, had he not retired with me, I should never have been able to force my way. I was at this time sensible of no pain, and little uneasiness; I can give you no better idea of my situation than by repeating my simile of the bowl of spirit of hartshorn. I found a stupor coming on apace, and laid myself down by that gallant old man, the Rev. Mr. Jervas Bellamy, who laid dead with his son, the lieutenant, hand in hand, near the southernmost wall of the prison. When I had lain there some little time, I still had reflection enough to suffer some uneasiness in the thought that I should be trampled upon, when dead, as I myself had done to others. With some difficulty I raised myself, and gained the platform a second time, where I presently lost all sensation; the last trace of sensibility that I have been able to recollect after my laying down, was my sash being uneasy about my waist, which I untied, and threw from me. Of what passed in this interval, to the time of my resurrection from this hole of horrors, I can give you no account. "

There was plenty to see in Calcutta, but there was not plenty of time forit. I saw the fort that Clive built; and the place where Warren Hastingsand the author of the Junius Letters fought their duel; and the greatbotanical gardens; and the fashionable afternoon turnout in the Maidan;and a grand review of the garrison in a great plain at sunrise; and amilitary tournament in which great bodies of native soldiery exhibitedthe perfection of their drill at all arms, a spectacular and beautifulshow occupying several nights and closing with the mimic storming of anative fort which was as good as the reality for thrilling and accuratedetail, and better than the reality for security and comfort; we had apleasure excursion on the 'Hoogly' by courtesy of friends, and devotedthe rest of the time to social life and the Indian museum. One shouldspend a month in the museum, an enchanted palace of Indian antiquities. Indeed, a person might spend half a year among the beautiful andwonderful things without exhausting their interest. 

It was winter. We were of Kipling's "hosts of tourists who travel up anddown India in the cold weather showing how things ought to be managed. "It is a common expression there, "the cold weather, " and the people thinkthere is such a thing. It is because they have lived there half alifetime, and their perceptions have become blunted. When a person isaccustomed to 138 in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are notvaluable. I had read, in the histories, that the June marches madebetween Lucknow and Cawnpore by the British forces in the time of theMutiny were made weather--138 in the shade and had taken it forhistorical embroidery. I had read it again in Serjeant-MajorForbes-Mitchell's account of his military experiences in the Mutiny--at least I thought I had--and in Calcutta I asked him if it was true, and he said it was. An officer of high rank who had been in the thick ofthe Mutiny said the same. As long as those men were talking about whatthey knew, they were trustworthy, and I believed them; but when they saidit was now "cold weather, " I saw that they had traveled outside of theirsphere of knowledge and were floundering. I believe that in India "coldweather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use throughthe necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather whichwill melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy. It was observable that brass ones were in use while I was in Calcutta, showing that it was not yet time to change to porcelain; I was told thechange to porcelain was not usually made until May. But this coldweather was too warm for us; so we started to Darjeeling, in theHimalayas--a twenty-four hour journey. 

CHAPTER LV. 

There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has beensquarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thyneighbor. --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar. 

FROM DIARY:

February 14. We left at 4:30 P. M. Until dark we moved through richvegetation, then changed to a boat and crossed the Ganges. 

February 15. Up with the sun. A brilliant morning, and frosty. Adouble suit of flannels is found necessary. The plain is perfectlylevel, and seems to stretch away and away and away, dimming andsoftening, to the uttermost bounds of nowhere. What a soaring, strenuous, gushing fountain spray of delicate greenery a bunch of bamboois! As far as the eye can reach, these grand vegetable geysers grace theview, their spoutings refined to steam by distance. And there are fieldsof bananas, with the sunshine glancing from the varnished surface oftheir drooping vast leaves. And there are frequent groves of palm; andan effective accent is given to the landscape by isolated individuals ofthis picturesque family, towering, clean-stemmed, their plumes broken andhanging ragged, Nature's imitation of an umbrella that has been out tosee what a cyclone is like and is trying not to look disappointed. Andeverywhere through the soft morning vistas we glimpse the villages, thecountless villages, the myriad villages, thatched, built of clean newmatting, snuggling among grouped palms and sheaves of bamboo; villages, villages, no end of villages, not three hundred yards apart, and dozensand dozens of them in sight all the time; a mighty City, hundreds ofmiles long, hundreds of miles broad, made all of villages, the biggestcity in the earth, and as populous as a European kingdom. I have seen nosuch city as this before. And there is a continuously repeated andreplenished multitude of naked men in view on both sides and ahead. Wefly through it mile after mile, but still it is always there, on bothsides and ahead--brown-bodied, naked men and boys, plowing in the fields. But not woman. In these two hours I have not seen a woman or a girlworking in the fields. 

 "From Greenland's icy mountains, From India's coral strand, Where Afric's sunny fountains Roll down their golden sand. From many an ancient river, From many a palmy plain, They call us to deliver Their land from error's chain. "

Those are beautiful verses, and they have remained in my memory all mylife. But if the closing lines are true, let us hope that when we cometo answer the call and deliver the land from its errors, we shall secretefrom it some of our high-civilization ways, and at the same time borrowsome of its pagan ways to enrich our high system with. We have a rightto do this. If we lift those people up, we have a right to liftourselves up nine or ten grades or so, at their expense. A few years agoI spent several weeks at Tolz, in Bavaria. It is a Roman Catholicregion, and not even Benares is more deeply or pervasively orintelligently devout. In my diary of those days I find this:

 "We took a long drive yesterday around about the lovely country roads. But it was a drive whose pleasure was damaged in a couple of ways: by the dreadful shrines and by the shameful spectacle of gray and venerable old grandmothers toiling in the fields. The shrines were frequent along the roads--figures of the Saviour nailed to the cross and streaming with blood from the wounds of the nails and the thorns. 

 "When missionaries go from here do they find fault with the pagan idols? I saw many women seventy and even eighty years old mowing and binding in the fields, and pitchforking the loads into the wagons. "

I was in Austria later, and in Munich. In Munich I saw gray old womenpushing trucks up hill and down, long distances, trucks laden withbarrels of beer, incredible loads. In my Austrian diary I find this:

 "In the fields I often see a woman and a cow harnessed to the plow, and a man driving. 

 "In the public street of Marienbad to-day, I saw an old, bent, gray-headed woman, in harness with a dog, drawing a laden sled over bare dirt roads and bare pavements; and at his ease walked the driver, smoking his pipe, a hale fellow not thirty years old. "

Five or six years ago I bought an open boat, made a kind of a canvaswagon-roof over the stern of it to shelter me from sun and rain; hired acourier and a boatman, and made a twelve-day floating voyage down theRhone from Lake Bourget to Marseilles. In my diary of that trip I findthis entry. I was far down the Rhone then:

 "Passing St. Etienne, 2:15 P. M. On a distant ridge inland, a tall openwork structure commandingly situated, with a statue of the Virgin standing on it. A devout country. All down this river, wherever there is a crag there is a statue of the Virgin on it. I believe I have seen a hundred of them. And yet, in many respects, the peasantry seem to be mere pagans, and destitute of any considerable degree of civilization. 

 " . . . . We reached a not very promising looking village about 4 o'clock, and I concluded to tie up for the day; munching fruit and fogging the hood with pipe-smoke had grown monotonous; I could not have the hood furled, because the floods of rain fell unceasingly. The tavern was on the river bank, as is the custom. It was dull there, and melancholy--nothing to do but look out of the window into the drenching rain, and shiver; one could do that, for it was bleak and cold and windy, and country France furnishes no fire. Winter overcoats did not help me much; they had to be supplemented with rugs. The raindrops were so large and struck the river with such force that they knocked up the water like pebble-splashes. 

 "With the exception of a very occasional woodenshod peasant, nobody was abroad in this bitter weather--I mean nobody of our sex. But all weathers are alike to the women in these continental countries. To them and the other animals, life is serious; nothing interrupts their slavery. Three of them were washing clothes in the river under the window when I arrived, and they continued at it as long as there was light to work by. One was apparently thirty; another--the mother!--above fifty; the third--grandmother!--so old and worn and gray she could have passed for eighty; I took her to be that old. They had no waterproofs nor rubbers, of course; over their shoulders they wore gunnysacks--simply conductors for rivers of water; some of the volume reached the ground; the rest soaked in on the way. 

 "At last a vigorous fellow of thirty-five arrived, dry and comfortable, smoking his pipe under his big umbrella in an open donkey-cart-husband, son, and grandson of those women! He stood up in the cart, sheltering himself, and began to superintend, issuing his orders in a masterly tone of command, and showing temper when they were not obeyed swiftly enough. 

 "Without complaint or murmur the drowned women patiently carried out the orders, lifting the immense baskets of soggy, wrung-out clothing into the cart and stowing them to the man's satisfaction. There were six of the great baskets, and a man of mere ordinary strength could not have lifted any one of them. The cart being full now, the Frenchman descended, still sheltered by his umbrella, entered the tavern, and the women went drooping homeward, trudging in the wake of the cart, and soon were blended with the deluge and lost to sight. 

 "When I went down into the public room, the Frenchman had his bottle of wine and plate of food on a bare table black with grease, and was "chomping" like a horse. He had the little religious paper which is in everybody's hands on the Rhone borders, and was enlightening himself with the histories of French saints who used to flee to the desert in the Middle Ages to escape the contamination of woman. For two hundred years France has been sending missionaries to other savage lands. To spare to the needy from poverty like hers is fine and true generosity. "

But to get back to India--where, as my favorite poem says--

 "Every prospect pleases, And only man is vile. "

It is because Bavaria and Austria and France have not introduced theircivilization to him yet. But Bavaria and Austria and France are on theirway. They are coming. They will rescue him; they will refine thevileness out of him. 

Some time during the forenoon, approaching the mountains, we changed fromthe regular train to one composed of little canvas-sheltered cars thatskimmed along within a foot of the ground and seemed to be going fiftymiles an hour when they were really making about twenty. Each car hadseating capacity for half-a-dozen persons; and when the curtains were upone was substantially out of doors, and could see everywhere, and get allthe breeze, and be luxuriously comfortable. It was not a pleasureexcursion in name only, but in fact. 

After a while the stopped at a little wooden coop of a station justwithin the curtain of the sombre jungle, a place with a deep and denseforest of great trees and scrub and vines all about it. The royal Bengaltiger is in great force there, and is very bold and unconventional. Fromthis lonely little station a message once went to the railway manager inCalcutta: "Tiger eating station-master on front porch; telegraphinstructions. "

It was there that I had my first tiger hunt. I killed thirteen. We werepresently away again, and the train began to climb the mountains. In oneplace seven wild elephants crossed the track, but two of them got awaybefore I could overtake them. The railway journey up the mountain isforty miles, and it takes eight hours to make it. It is so wild andinteresting and exciting and enchanting that it ought to take a week. Asfor the vegetation, it is a museum. The jungle seemed to contain samplesof every rare and curious tree and bush that we had ever seen or heardof. It is from that museum, I think, that the globe must have beensupplied with the trees and vines and shrubs that it holds precious. 

The road is infinitely and charmingly crooked. It goes winding in andout under lofty cliffs that are smothered in vines and foliage, andaround the edges of bottomless chasms; and all the way one glides byfiles of picturesque natives, some carrying burdens up, others going downfrom their work in the tea-gardens; and once there was a gaudy weddingprocession, all bright tinsel and color, and a bride, comely and girlish, who peeped out from the curtains of her palanquin, exposing her face withthat pure delight which the young and happy take in sin for sin's ownsake. 

By and by we were well up in the region of the clouds, and from thatbreezy height we looked down and afar over a wonderful picture--thePlains of India, stretching to the horizon, soft and fair, level as afloor, shimmering with heat, mottled with cloud-shadows, and cloven withshining rivers. Immediately below us, and receding down, down, down, toward the valley, was a shaven confusion of hilltops, with ribbony roadsand paths squirming and snaking cream-yellow all over them and aboutthem, every curve and twist sharply distinct. 

At an elevation of 6, 000 feet we entered a thick cloud, and it shut outthe world and kept it shut out. We climbed 1, 000 feet higher, then beganto descend, and presently got down to Darjeeling, which is 6, 000 feetabove the level of the Plains. 

We had passed many a mountain village on the way up, and seen some newkinds of natives, among them many samples of the fighting Ghurkas. Theyare not large men, but they are strong and resolute. There are no bettersoldiers among Britain's native troops. And we had passed shoals oftheir women climbing the forty miles of steep road from the valley totheir mountain homes, with tall baskets on their backs hitched to theirforeheads by a band, and containing a freightage weighing--I will not sayhow many hundreds of pounds, for the sum is unbelievable. These wereyoung women, and they strode smartly along under these astonishingburdens with the air of people out for a holiday. I was told that awoman will carry a piano on her back all the way up the mountain; andthat more than once a woman had done it. If these were old women Ishould regard the Ghurkas as no more civilized than the Europeans. At the railway station at Darjeeling you find plenty of cab-substitutes--open coffins, in which you sit, and are then borne on men's shoulders upthe steep roads into the town. 

Up there we found a fairly comfortable hotel, the property of anindiscriminate and incoherent landlord, who looks after nothing, butleaves everything to his army of Indian servants. No, he does look afterthe bill--to be just to him--and the tourist cannot do better than followhis example. I was told by a resident that the summit of Kinchinjunga isoften hidden in the clouds, and that sometimes a tourist has waitedtwenty-two days and then been obliged to go away without a sight of it. And yet went not disappointed; for when he got his hotel bill herecognized that he was now seeing the highest thing in the Himalayas. But this is probably a lie. 

After lecturing I went to the Club that night, and that was a comfortableplace. It is loftily situated, and looks out over a vast spread ofscenery; from it you can see where the boundaries of three countries cometogether, some thirty miles away; Thibet is one of them, Nepaul another, and I think Herzegovina was the other. Apparently, in every town andcity in India the gentlemen of the British civil and military servicehave a club; sometimes it is a palatial one, always it is pleasant andhomelike. The hotels are not always as good as they might be, and thestranger who has access to the Club is grateful for his privilege andknows how to value it. 

Next day was Sunday. Friends came in the gray dawn with horses, and myparty rode away to a distant point where Kinchinjunga and Mount Everestshow up best, but I stayed at home for a private view; for it was veryold, and I was not acquainted with the horses, any way. I got a pipe anda few blankets and sat for two hours at the window, and saw the sun driveaway the veiling gray and touch up the snow-peaks one after another withpale pink splashes and delicate washes of gold, and finally flood thewhole mighty convulsion of snow-mountains with a deluge of richsplendors. 

Kinchinjunga's peak was but fitfully visible, but in the between times itwas vividly clear against the sky--away up there in the blue dome morethan 28, 000 feet above sea level--the loftiest land I had ever seen, by12, 000 feet or more. It was 45 miles away. Mount Everest is a thousandfeet higher, but it was not a part of that sea of mountains piled upthere before me, so I did not see it; but I did not care, because I thinkthat mountains that are as high as that are disagreeable. 

I changed from the back to the front of the house and spent the rest ofthe morning there, watching the swarthy strange tribes flock by fromtheir far homes in the Himalayas. All ages and both sexes wererepresented, and the breeds were quite new to me, though the costumes ofthe Thibetans made them look a good deal like Chinamen. The prayer-wheelwas a frequent feature. It brought me near to these people, and madethem seem kinfolk of mine. Through our preacher we do much of ourpraying by proxy. We do not whirl him around a stick, as they do, butthat is merely a detail. The swarm swung briskly by, hour after hour, astrange and striking pageant. It was wasted there, and it seemed a pity. It should have been sent streaming through the cities of Europe orAmerica, to refresh eyes weary of the pale monotonies of thecircus-pageant. These people were bound for the bazar, with things tosell. We went down there, later, and saw that novel congress of the wildpeoples, and plowed here and there through it, and concluded that itwould be worth coming from Calcutta to see, even if there were noKinchinjunga and Everest. 

CHAPTER LVI. 

There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when hecan't afford it, and when he can. --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar. 

On Monday and Tuesday at sunrise we again had fair-to-middling views ofthe stupendous mountains; then, being well cooled off and refreshed, wewere ready to chance the weather of the lower world once more. 

We traveled up hill by the regular train five miles to the summit, thenchanged to a little canvas-canopied hand-car for the 35-mile descent. Itwas the size of a sleigh, it had six seats and was so low that it seemedto rest on the ground. It had no engine or other propelling power, andneeded none to help it fly down those steep inclines. It only needed astrong brake, to modify its flight, and it had that. There was a storyof a disastrous trip made down the mountain once in this little car bythe Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, when the car jumped the track andthrew its passengers over a precipice. It was not true, but the storyhad value for me, for it made me nervous, and nervousness wakes a personup and makes him alive and alert, and heightens the thrill of a new anddoubtful experience. The car could really jump the track, of course; apebble on the track, placed there by either accident or malice, at asharp curve where one might strike it before the eye could discover it, could derail the car and fling it down into India; and the fact that thelieutenant-governor had escaped was no proof that I would have the sameluck. And standing there, looking down upon the Indian Empire from theairy altitude of 7, 000 feet, it seemed unpleasantly far, dangerously far, to be flung from a handcar. 

But after all, there was but small danger-for me. What there was, wasfor Mr. Pugh, inspector of a division of the Indian police, in whosecompany and protection we had come from Calcutta. He had seen longservice as an artillery officer, was less nervous than I was, and so hewas to go ahead of us in a pilot hand-car, with a Ghurka and anothernative; and the plan was that when we should see his car jump over aprecipice we must put on our break [sp. ] and send for another pilot. It was a good arrangement. Also Mr. Barnard, chief engineer of themountain-division of the road, was to take personal charge of our car, and he had been down the mountain in it many a time. 

Everything looked safe. Indeed, there was but one questionable detailleft: the regular train was to follow us as soon as we should start, andit might run over us. Privately, I thought it would. 

The road fell sharply down in front of us and went corkscrewing in andout around the crags and precipices, down, down, forever down, suggestingnothing so exactly or so uncomfortably as a croaked toboggan slide withno end to it. Mr. Pugh waved his flag and started, like an arrow from abow, and before I could get out of the car we were gone too. I hadpreviously had but one sensation like the shock of that departure, andthat was the gaspy shock that took my breath away the first time that Iwas discharged from the summit of a toboggan slide. But in bothinstances the sensation was pleasurable--intensely so; it was a suddenand immense exaltation, a mixed ecstasy of deadly fright and unimaginablejoy. I believe that this combination makes the perfection of humandelight. 

The pilot car's flight down the mountain suggested the swoop of a swallowthat is skimming the ground, so swiftly and smoothly and gracefully itswept down the long straight reaches and soared in and out of the bendsand around the corners. We raced after it, and seemed to flash by thecapes and crags with the speed of light; and now and then we almostovertook it--and had hopes; but it was only playing with us; when we gotnear, it released its brake, make a spring around a corner, and the nexttime it spun into view, a few seconds later, it looked as small as awheelbarrow, it was so far away. We played with the train in the sameway. We often got out to gather flowers or sit on a precipice and lookat the scenery, then presently we would hear a dull and growing roar, andthe long coils of the train would come into sight behind and above us;but we did not need to start till the locomotive was close down upon us--then we soon left it far behind. It had to stop at every station, therefore it was not an embarrassment to us. Our brake was a good pieceof machinery; it could bring the car to a standstill on a slope as steepas a house-roof. 

The scenery was grand and varied and beautiful, and there was no hurry;we could always stop and examine it. There was abundance of time. Wedid not need to hamper the train; if it wanted the road, we could switchoff and let it go by, then overtake it and pass it later. We stopped atone place to see the Gladstone Cliff, a great crag which the ages and theweather have sculptured into a recognizable portrait of the venerablestatesman. Mr. Gladstone is a stockholder in the road, and Nature beganthis portrait ten thousand years ago, with the idea of having thecompliment ready in time for the event. 

We saw a banyan tree which sent down supporting stems from branches whichwere sixty feet above the ground. That is, I suppose it was a banyan;its bark resembled that of the great banyan in the botanical gardens atCalcutta, that spider-legged thing with its wilderness of vegetablecolumns. And there were frequent glimpses of a totally leafless treeupon whose innumerable twigs and branches a cloud of crimson butterflieshad lighted--apparently. In fact these brilliant red butterflies wereflowers, but the illusion was good. Afterward in South Africa, I sawanother splendid effect made by red flowers. This flower was probablycalled the torch-plant--should have been so named, anyway. It had aslender stem several feet high, and from its top stood up a single tongueof flame, an intensely red flower of the size and shape of a smallcorn-cob. The stems stood three or four feet apart all over a greathill-slope that was a mile long, and make one think of what the Placede la Concorde would be if its myriad lights were red instead of whiteand yellow. 

A few miles down the mountain we stopped half an hour to see a Thibetandramatic performance. It was in the open air on the hillside. Theaudience was composed of Thibetans, Ghurkas, and other unusual people. The costumes of the actors were in the last degree outlandish, and theperformance was in keeping with the clothes. To an accompaniment ofbarbarous noises the actors stepped out one after another and began tospin around with immense swiftness and vigor and violence, chanting thewhile, and soon the whole troupe would be spinning and chanting andraising the dust. They were performing an ancient and celebratedhistorical play, and a Chinaman explained it to me in pidjin English asit went along. The play was obscure enough without the explanation; withthe explanation added, it was (opake). As a drama this ancienthistorical work of art was defective, I thought, but as a wild andbarbarous spectacle the representation was beyond criticism. Far down the mountain we got out to look at a piece of remarkableloop-engineering--a spiral where the road curves upon itself with suchabruptness that when the regular train came down and entered the loop, westood over it and saw the locomotive disappear under our bridge, then ina few moments appear again, chasing its own tail; and we saw it gain onit, overtake it, draw ahead past the rear cars, and run a race with thatend of the train. It was like a snake swallowing itself. 

Half-way down the mountain we stopped about an hour at Mr. Barnard'shouse for refreshments, and while we were sitting on the veranda lookingat the distant panorama of hills through a gap in the forest, we camevery near seeing a leopard kill a calf. --[It killed it the day before. ]--It is a wild place and lovely. From the woods all about came the songsof birds, --among them the contributions of a couple of birds which I wasnot then acquainted with: the brain-fever bird and the coppersmith. Thesong of the brain-fever demon starts on a low but steadily rising key, and is a spiral twist which augments in intensity and severity with eachadded spiral, growing sharper and sharper, and more and more painful, more and more agonizing, more and more maddening, intolerable, unendurable, as it bores deeper and deeper and deeper into the listener'sbrain, until at last the brain fever comes as a relief and the man dies. I am bringing some of these birds home to America. They will be a greatcuriosity there, and it is believed that in our climate they willmultiply like rabbits. 

The coppersmith bird's note at a certain distance away has the ring of asledge on granite; at a certain other distance the hammering has a moremetallic ring, and you might think that the bird was mending a copperkettle; at another distance it has a more woodeny thump, but it is athump that is full of energy, and sounds just like starting a bung. Sohe is a hard bird to name with a single name; he is a stone-breaker, coppersmith, and bung-starter, and even then he is not completely named, for when he is close by you find that there is a soft, deep, melodiousquality in his thump, and for that no satisfying name occurs to you. Youwill not mind his other notes, but when he camps near enough for you tohear that one, you presently find that his measured and monotonousrepetition of it is beginning to disturb you; next it will weary you, soon it will distress you, and before long each thump will hurt yourhead; if this goes on, you will lose your mind with the pain and miseryof it, and go crazy. I am bringing some of these birds home to America. There is nothing like them there. They will be a great surprise, and itis said that in a climate like ours they will surpass expectation forfecundity. 

I am bringing some nightingales, too, and some cue-owls. I got them inItaly. The song of the nightingale is the deadliest known toornithology. That demoniacal shriek can kill at thirty yards. The noteof the cue-owl is infinitely soft and sweet--soft and sweet as thewhisper of a flute. But penetrating--oh, beyond belief; it can borethrough boiler-iron. It is a lingering note, and comes in triplets, onthe one unchanging key: hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o; then a silence offifteen seconds, then the triplet again; and so on, all night. At firstit is divine; then less so; then trying; then distressing; thenexcruciating; then agonizing, and at the end of two hours the listener isa maniac. 

And so, presently we took to the hand-car and went flying down themountain again; flying and stopping, flying and stopping, till at last wewere in the plain once more and stowed for Calcutta in the regular train. That was the most enjoyable day I have spent in the earth. For rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that approaches thebird-flight down the Himalayas in a hand-car. It has no fault, noblemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty-five miles of itinstead of five hundred. 

CHAPTER LVII. 

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite whatyou would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps aparrot. --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar. 

So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by manor Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sunvisits on his round. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked. Always, when you think you have come to the end of hertremendous specialties and have finished banging tags upon her as theLand of the Thug, the Land of the Plague, the Land of Famine, the Land ofGiant Illusions, the Land of Stupendous Mountains, and so forth, anotherspecialty crops up and another tag is required. I have been overlookingthe fact that India is by an unapproachable supremacy--the Land ofMurderous Wild Creatures. Perhaps it will be simplest to throw away thetags and generalize her with one all-comprehensive name, as the Land ofWonders. 

For many years the British Indian Government has been trying to destroythe murderous wild creatures, and has spent a great deal of money in theeffort. The annual official returns show that the undertaking is adifficult one. 

These returns exhibit a curious annual uniformity in results; the sort ofuniformity which you find in the annual output of suicides in the world'scapitals, and the proportions of deaths by this, that, and the otherdisease. You can always come close to foretelling how many suicides willoccur in Paris, London, and New York, next year, and also how many deathswill result from cancer, consumption, dog-bite, falling out of thewindow, getting run over by cabs, etc. , if you know the statistics ofthose matters for the present year. In the same way, with one year'sIndian statistics before you, you can guess closely at how many peoplewere killed in that Empire by tigers during the previous year, and theyear before that, and the year before that, and at how many were killedin each of those years by bears, how many by wolves, and how many bysnakes; and you can also guess closely at how many people are going to bekilled each year for the coming five years by each of those agencies. You can also guess closely at how many of each agency the government isgoing to kill each year for the next five years. 

I have before me statistics covering a period of six consecutive years. By these, I know that in India the tiger kills something over 800 personsevery year, and that the government responds by killing about double asmany tigers every year. In four of the six years referred to, the tigergot 800 odd; in one of the remaining two years he got only 700, but inthe other remaining year he made his average good by scoring 917. He isalways sure of his average. Anyone who bets that the tiger will kill2, 400 people in India in any three consecutive years has invested hismoney in a certainty; anyone who bets that he will kill 2, 600 in anythree consecutive years, is absolutely sure to lose. 

As strikingly uniform as are the statistics of suicide, they are not anymore so than are those of the tiger's annual output of slaughtered humanbeings in India. The government's work is quite uniform, too; it aboutdoubles the tiger's average. In six years the tiger killed 5, 000persons, minus 50; in the same six years 10, 000 tigers were killed, minus400. 

The wolf kills nearly as many people as the tiger--700 a year to thetiger's 800 odd--but while he is doing it, more than 5, 000 of his tribefall. 

The leopard kills an average of 230 people per year, but loses 3, 300 ofhis own mess while he is doing it. 

The bear kills 100 people per year at a cost of 1, 250 of his own tribe. 

The tiger, as the figures show, makes a very handsome fight against man. But it is nothing to the elephant's fight. The king of beasts, the lordof the jungle, loses four of his mess per year, but he kills forty--fivepersons to make up for it. 

But when it comes to killing cattle, the lord of the jungle is notinterested. He kills but 100 in six years--horses of hunters, no doubt--but in the same six the tiger kills more than 84, 000, the leopard100, 000, the bear 4, 000, the wolf 70, 000, the hyena more than 13, 000, other wild beasts 27, 000, and the snakes 19, 000, a grand total of morethan 300, 000; an average of 50, 000 head per year. 

In response, the government kills, in the six years, a total of 3, 201, 232wild beasts and snakes. Ten for one. 

It will be perceived that the snakes are not much interested in cattle;they kill only 3, 000 odd per year. The snakes are much more interestedin man. India swarms with deadly snakes. At the head of the list is thecobra, the deadliest known to the world, a snake whose bite kills wherethe rattlesnake's bite merely entertains. 

In India, the annual man-killings by snakes are as uniform, as regular, and as forecastable as are the tiger-average and the suicide-average. Anyone who bets that in India, in any three consecutive years the snakeswill kill 49, 500 persons, will win his bet; and anyone who bets that inIndia in any three consecutive years, the snakes will kill 53, 500persons, will lose his bet. In India the snakes kill 17, 000 people ayear; they hardly ever fall short of it; they as seldom exceed it. Aninsurance actuary could take the Indian census tables and thegovernment's snake tables and tell you within sixpence how much it wouldbe worth to insure a man against death by snake-bite there. If I had adollar for every person killed per year in India, I would rather have itthan any other property, as it is the only property in the world notsubject to shrinkage. 

I should like to have a royalty on the government-end of the snakebusiness, too, and am in London now trying to get it; but when I get itit is not going to be as regular an income as the other will be if I getthat; I have applied for it. The snakes transact their end of thebusiness in a more orderly and systematic way than the governmenttransacts its end of it, because the snakes have had a long experienceand know all about the traffic. You can make sure that the governmentwill never kill fewer than 110, 000 snakes in a year, and that it willnewer quite reach 300, 000 too much room for oscillation; good speculativestock, to bear or bull, and buy and sell long and short, and all thatkind of thing, but not eligible for investment like the other. The manthat speculates in the government's snake crop wants to go carefully. Iwould not advise a man to buy a single crop at all--I mean a crop offutures for the possible wobble is something quite extraordinary. If hecan buy six future crops in a bunch, seller to deliver 1, 500, 000altogether, that is another matter. I do not know what snakes are worthnow, but I know what they would be worth then, for the statistics showthat the seller could not come within 427, 000 of carrying out hiscontract. However, I think that a person who speculates in snakes is afool, anyway. He always regrets it afterwards. 

To finish the statistics. In six years the wild beasts kill 20, 000persons, and the snakes kill 103, 000. In the same six the governmentkills 1, 073, 546 snakes. Plenty left. 

There are narrow escapes in India. In the very jungle where I killedsixteen tigers and all those elephants, a cobra bit me but it got well;everyone was surprised. This could not happen twice in ten years, perhaps. Usually death would result in fifteen minutes. 

We struck out westward or northwestward from Calcutta on an itinerary ofa zig-zag sort, which would in the course of time carry us across Indiato its northwestern corner and the border of Afghanistan. The first partof the trip carried us through a great region which was an endlessgarden--miles and miles of the beautiful flower from whose juices comesthe opium, and at Muzaffurpore we were in the midst of the indigoculture; thence by a branch road to the Ganges at a point near Dinapore, and by a train which would have missed the connection by a week but forthe thoughtfulness of some British officers who were along, and who knewthe ways of trains that are run by natives without white supervision. This train stopped at every village; for no purpose connected withbusiness, apparently. We put out nothing, we took nothing aboard. Thetrain bands stepped ashore and gossiped with friends a quarter of anhour, then pulled out and repeated this at the succeeding villages. Wehad thirty-five miles to go and six hours to do it in, but it was plainthat we were not going to make it. It was then that the English officerssaid it was now necessary to turn this gravel train into an express. Sothey gave the engine-driver a rupee and told him to fly. It was a simpleremedy. After that we made ninety miles an hour. We crossed the Gangesjust at dawn, made our connection, and went to Benares, where we stayedtwenty-four hours and inspected that strange and fascinating piety-hiveagain; then left for Lucknow, a city which is perhaps the mostconspicuous of the many monuments of British fortitude and valor that arescattered about the earth. 

The heat was pitiless, the flat plains were destitute of grass, and bakeddry by the sun they were the color of pale dust, which was flying inclouds. But it was much hotter than this when the relieving forcesmarched to Lucknow in the time of the Mutiny. Those were the days of 138deg. In the shade. 

CHAPTER, LVIII. 

Make it a point to do something every day that you don't want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your dutywithout pain. --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar. 

It seems to be settled, now, that among the many causes from which theGreat Mutiny sprang, the main one was the annexation of the kingdom ofOudh by the East India Company--characterized by Sir Henry Lawrence as"the most unrighteous act that was ever committed. " In the spring of1857, a mutinous spirit was observable in many of the native garrisons, and it grew day by day and spread wider and wider. The younger militarymen saw something very serious in it, and would have liked to take holdof it vigorously and stamp it out promptly; but they were not inauthority. Old-men were in the high places of the army--men who shouldhave been retired long before, because of their great age--and theyregarded the matter as a thing of no consequence. They loved theirnative soldiers, and would not believe that anything could move them torevolt. Everywhere these obstinate veterans listened serenely to therumbling of the volcanoes under them, and said it was nothing. 

And so the propagators of mutiny had everything their own way. Theymoved from camp to camp undisturbed, and painted to the native soldierthe wrongs his people were suffering at the hands of the English, andmade his heart burn for revenge. They were able to point to two facts offormidable value as backers of their persuasions: In Clive's day, nativearmies were incoherent mobs, and without effective arms; therefore, theywere weak against Clive's organized handful of well-armed men, but thething was the other way, now. The British forces were native; they hadbeen trained by the British, organized by the British, armed by theBritish, all the power was in their hands--they were a club made byBritish hands to beat out British brains with. There was nothing tooppose their mass, nothing but a few weak battalions of British soldiersscattered about India, a force not worth speaking of. This argument, taken alone, might not have succeeded, for the bravest and best Indiantroops had a wholesome dread of the white soldier, whether he was weak orstrong; but the agitators backed it with their second and best pointprophecy--a prophecy a hundred years old. The Indian is open to prophecyat all times; argument may fail to convince him, but not prophecy. Therewas a prophecy that a hundred years from the year of that battle ofClive's which founded the British Indian Empire, the British power wouldbe overthrown and swept away by the natives. 

The Mutiny broke out at Meerut on the 10th of May, 1857, and fired atrain of tremendous historical explosions. Nana Sahib's massacre of thesurrendered garrison of Cawnpore occurred in June, and the long siege ofLucknow began. The military history of England is old and great, but Ithink it must be granted that the crushing of the Mutiny is the greatestchapter in it. The British were caught asleep and unprepared. They werea few thousands, swallowed up in an ocean of hostile populations. Itwould take months to inform England and get help, but they did not falteror stop to count the odds, but with English resolution and Englishdevotion they took up their task, and went stubbornly on with it, throughgood fortune and bad, and fought the most unpromising fight that one mayread of in fiction or out of it, and won it thoroughly. 

The Mutiny broke out so suddenly, and spread with such rapidity thatthere was but little time for occupants of weak outlying stations toescape to places of safety. Attempts were made, of course, but they wereattended by hardships as bitter as death in the few cases which weresuccessful; for the heat ranged between 120 and 138 in the shade; the wayled through hostile peoples, and food and water were hardly to be had. For ladies and children accustomed to ease and comfort and plenty, such ajourney must have been a cruel experience. Sir G. O. Trevelyan quotesan example:

 "This is what befell Mrs. M----, the wife of the surgeon at a certain station on the southern confines of the insurrection. 'I heard, ' she says, 'a number of shots fired, and, looking out, I saw my husband driving furiously from the mess-house, waving his whip. I ran to him, and, seeing a bearer with my child in his arms, I caught her up, and got into the buggy. At the mess-house we found all the officers assembled, together with sixty sepoys, who had remained faithful. We went off in one large party, amidst a general conflagration of our late homes. We reached the caravanserai at Chattapore the next morning, and thence started for Callinger. At this point our sepoy escort deserted us. We were fired upon by match-lockmen, and one officer was shot dead. We heard, likewise, that the people had risen at Callinger, so we returned and walked back ten miles that day. M---- and I carried the child alternately. Presently Mrs. Smalley died of sunstroke. We had no food amongst us. An officer kindly lent us a horse. We were very faint. The Major died, and was buried; also the Sergeant-major and some women. The bandsmen left us on the nineteenth of June. We were fired at again by match-lockmen, and changed direction for Allahabad. Our party consisted of nine gentlemen, two children, the sergeant and his wife. On the morning of the twentieth, Captain Scott took Lottie on to his horse. I was riding behind my husband, and she was so crushed between us. She was two years old on the first of the month. We were both weak through want of food and the effect of the sun. Lottie and I had no head covering. M---- had a sepoy's cap I found on the ground. Soon after sunrise we were followed by villagers armed with clubs and spears. One of them struck Captain Scott's horse on the leg. He galloped off with Lottie, and my poor husband never saw his child again. We rode on several miles, keeping away from villages, and then crossed the river. Our thirst was extreme. M---- had dreadful cramps, so that I had to hold him on the horse. I was very uneasy about him. The day before I saw the drummer's wife eating chupatties, and asked her to give a piece to the child, which she did. I now saw water in a ravine. The descent was steep, and our only drinkingvessel was M----'s cap. Our horse got water, and I bathed my neck. I had no stockings, and my feet were torn and blistered. Two peasants came in sight, and we were frightened and rode off. The sergeant held our horse, and M---- put me up and mounted. I think he must have got suddenly faint, for I fell and he over me, on the road, when the horse started off. Some time before he said, and Barber, too, that he could not live many hours. I felt he was dying before we came to the ravine. He told me his wishes about his children and myself, and took leave. My brain seemed burnt up. No tears came. As soon as we fell, the sergeant let go the horse, and it went off; so that escape was cut off. We sat down on the ground waiting for death. Poor fellow! he was very weak; his thirst was frightful, and I went to get him water. Some villagers came, and took my rupees and watch. I took off my wedding-ring, and twisted it in my hair, and replaced the guard. I tore off the skirt of my dress to bring water in, but was no use, for when I returned my beloved's eyes were fixed, and, though I called and tried to restore him, and poured water into his mouth, it only rattled in his throat. He never spoke to me again. I held him in my arms till he sank gradually down. I felt frantic, but could not cry. I was alone. I bound his head and face in my dress, for there was no earth to buy him. The pain in my hands and feet was dreadful. I went down to the ravine, and sat in the water on a stone, hoping to get off at night and look for Lottie. When I came back from the water, I saw that they had not taken her little watch, chain, and seals, so I tied them under my petticoat. In an hour, about thirty villagers came, they dragged me out of the ravine, and took off my jacket, and found the little chain. They then dragged me to a village, mocking me all the way, and disputing as to whom I was to belong to. The whole population came to look at me. I asked for a bedstead, and lay down outside the door of a hut. They had a dozen of cows, and yet refused me milk. When night came, and the village was quiet, some old woman brought me a leafful of rice. I was too parched to eat, and they gave me water. The morning after a neighboring Rajah sent a palanquin and a horseman to fetch me, who told me that a little child and three Sahibs had come to his master's house. And so the poor mother found her lost one, 'greatly blistered, ' poor little creature. It is not for Europeans in India to pray that their flight be not in the winter. "

In the first days of June the aged general, Sir Hugh Wheeler commandingthe forces at Cawnpore, was deserted by his native troops; then he movedout of the fort and into an exposed patch of open flat ground and built afour-foot mud wall around it. He had with him a few hundred whitesoldiers and officers, and apparently more women and children thansoldiers. He was short of provisions, short of arms, short ofammunition, short of military wisdom, short of everything but courage anddevotion to duty. The defense of that open lot through twenty-one daysand nights of hunger, thirst, Indian heat, and a never-ceasing storm ofbullets, bombs, and cannon-balls--a defense conducted, not by the agedand infirm general, but by a young officer named Moore--is one of themost heroic episodes in history. When at last the Nana found itimpossible to conquer these starving men and women with powder and ball, he resorted to treachery, and that succeeded. He agreed to supply themwith food and send them to Allahabad in boats. Their mud wall and theirbarracks were in ruins, their provisions were at the point of exhaustion, they had done all that the brave could do, they had conquered anhonorable compromise, --their forces had been fearfully reduced bycasualties and by disease, they were not able to continue the contestlonger. They came forth helpless but suspecting no treachery, the Nana'shost closed around them, and at a signal from a trumpet the massacrebegan. About two hundred women and children were spared--for thepresent--but all the men except three or four were killed. Among theincidents of the massacre quoted by Sir G. O. Trevelyan, is this:

 "When, after the lapse of some twenty minutes, the dead began to outnumber the living;--when the fire slackened, as the marks grew few and far between; then the troopers who had been drawn up to the right of the temple plunged into the river, sabre between teeth, and pistol in hand. Thereupon two half-caste Christian women, the wives of musicians in the band of the Fifty-sixth, witnessed a scene which should not be related at second-hand. 'In the boat where I was to have gone, ' says Mrs. Bradshaw, confirmed throughout by Mrs. Betts, 'was the school-mistress and twenty-two misses. General Wheeler came last in a palkee. They carried him into the water near the boat. I stood close by. He said, 'Carry me a little further towards the boat. ' But a trooper said, 'No, get out here. ' As the General got out of the palkee, head-foremost, the trooper gave him a cut with his sword into the neck, and he fell into the water. My son was killed near him. I saw it; alas! alas! Some were stabbed with bayonets; others cut down. Little infants were torn in pieces. We saw it; we did; and tell you only what we saw. Other children were stabbed and thrown into the river. The schoolgirls were burnt to death. I saw their clothes and hair catch fire. In the water, a few paces off, by the next boat, we saw the youngest daughter of Colonel Williams. A sepoy was going to kill her with his bayonet. She said, 'My father was always kind to sepoys. ' He turned away, and just then a villager struck her on the head with a club, and she fell into the water. These people likewise saw good Mr. Moncrieff, the clergyman, take a book from his pocket that he never had leisure to open, and heard him commence a prayer for mercy which he was not permitted to conclude. Another deponent observed an European making for a drain like a scared water-rat, when some boatmen, armed with cudgels, cut off his retreat, and beat him down dead into the mud. "

The women and children who had been reserved from the massacre wereimprisoned during a fortnight in a small building, one story high--acramped place, a slightly modified Black Hole of Calcutta. They werewaiting in suspense; there was none who could foretaste their fate. Meantime the news of the massacre had traveled far and an army ofrescuers with Havelock at its head was on its way--at least an army whichhoped to be rescuers. It was crossing the country by forced marches, andstrewing its way with its own dead men struck down by cholera, and by aheat which reached 135 deg. It was in a vengeful fury, and it stoppedfor nothing neither heat, nor fatigue, nor disease, nor human opposition. It tore its impetuous way through hostile forces, winning victory aftervictory, but still striding on and on, not halting to count results. Andat last, after this extraordinary march, it arrived before the walls ofCawnpore, met the Nana's massed strength, delivered a crushing defeat, and entered. 

But too late--only a few hours too late. For at the last moment the Nanahad decided upon the massacre of the captive women and children, and hadcommissioned three Mohammedans and two Hindoos to do the work. Sir G. O. Trevelyan says:

 "Thereupon the five men entered. It was the short gloaming of Hindostan--the hour when ladies take their evening drive. She who had accosted the officer was standing in the doorway. With her were the native doctor and two Hindoo menials. That much of the business might be seen from the veranda, but all else was concealed amidst the interior gloom. Shrieks and scuffing acquainted those without that the journeymen were earning their hire. Survur Khan soon emerged with his sword broken off at the hilt. He procured another from the Nana's house, and a few minutes after appeared again on the same errand. The third blade was of better temper; or perhaps the thick of the work was already over. By the time darkness had closed in, the men came forth and locked up the house for the night. Then the screams ceased, but the groans lasted till morning. 

 "The sun rose as usual. When he had been up nearly three hours the five repaired to the scene of their labors over night. They were attended by a few sweepers, who proceeded to transfer the contents of the house to a dry well situated behind some trees which grew hard by. 'The bodies, ' says one who was present throughout, 'were dragged out, most of them by the hair of the head. Those who had clothing worth taking were stripped. Some of the women were alive. I cannot say how many; but three could speak. They prayed for the sake of God that an end might be put to their sufferings. I remarked one very stout woman, a half-caste, who was severely wounded in both arms, who entreated to be killed. She and two or three others were placed against the bank of the cut by which bullocks go down in drawing water. The dead were first thrown in. Yes: there was a great crowd looking on; they were standing along the walls of the compound. They were principally city people and villagers. Yes: there were also sepoys. Three boys were alive. They were fair children. The eldest, I think, must have been six or seven, and the youngest five years. They were running around the well (where else could they go to?), and there was none to save them. No one said a word or tried to save them. '

 "At length the smallest of them made an infantile attempt to get away. The little thing had been frightened past bearing by the murder of one of the surviving ladies. He thus attracted the observation of a native who flung him and his companions down the well. "

The soldiers had made a march of eighteen days, almost without rest, tosave the women and the children, and now they were too late--all weredead and the assassin had flown. What happened then, Trevelyan hesitatedto put into words. "Of what took place, the less said is the better. "

Then he continues:

 "But there was a spectacle to witness which might excuse much. Those who, straight from the contested field, wandered sobbing through the rooms of the ladies' house, saw what it were well could the outraged earth have straightway hidden. The inner apartment was ankle-deep in blood. The plaster was scored with sword-cuts; not high up as where men have fought, but low down, and about the corners, as if a creature had crouched to avoid the blow. Strips of dresses, vainly tied around the handles of the doors, signified the contrivance to which feminine despair had resorted as a means of keeping out the murderers. Broken combs were there, and the frills of children's trousers, and torn cuffs and pinafores, and little round hats, and one or two shoes with burst latchets, and one or two daguerreotype cases with cracked glasses. An officer picked up a few curls, preserved in a bit of cardboard, and marked 'Ned's hair, with love'; but around were strewn locks, some near a yard in length, dissevered, not as a keepsake, by quite other scissors. "

The battle of Waterloo was fought on the 18th of June, 1815. I do notstate this fact as a reminder to the reader, but as news to him. For aforgotten fact is news when it comes again. Writers of books have thefashion of whizzing by vast and renowned historical events with theremark, "The details of this tremendous episode are too familiar to thereader to need repeating here. " They know that that is not true. It isa low kind of flattery. They know that the reader has forgotten everydetail of it, and that nothing of the tremendous event is left in hismind but a vague and formless luminous smudge. Aside from the desire toflatter the reader, they have another reason for making the remark-tworeasons, indeed. They do not remember the details themselves, and do notwant the trouble of hunting them up and copying them out; also, they areafraid that if they search them out and print them they will be scoffedat by the book-reviewers for retelling those worn old things which arefamiliar to everybody. They should not mind the reviewer's jeer; hedoesn't remember any of the worn old things until the book which he isreviewing has retold them to him. 

I have made the quoted remark myself, at one time and another, but I wasnot doing it to flatter the reader; I was merely doing it to save work. If I had known the details without brushing up, I would have put them in;but I didn't, and I did not want the labor of posting myself; so I said, "The details of this tremendous episode are too familiar to the reader toneed repeating here. " I do not like that kind of a lie; still, it doessave work. 

I am not trying to get out of repeating the details of the Siege ofLucknow in fear of the reviewer; I am not leaving them out in fear thatthey would not interest the reader; I am leaving them out partly to savework; mainly for lack of room. It is a pity, too; for there is not adull place anywhere in the great story. 

Ten days before the outbreak (May 10th) of the Mutiny, all was serene atLucknow, the huge capital of Oudh, the kingdom which had recently beenseized by the India Company. There was a great garrison, composed ofabout 7, 000 native troops and between 700 and 800 whites. These whitesoldiers and their families were probably the only people of their racethere; at their elbow was that swarming population of warlike natives, arace of born soldiers, brave, daring, and fond of fighting. On highground just outside the city stood the palace of that great personage, the Resident, the representative of British power and authority. Itstood in the midst of spacious grounds, with its due complement ofoutbuildings, and the grounds were enclosed by a wall--a wall not fordefense, but for privacy. The mutinous spirit was in the air, but thewhites were not afraid, and did not feel much troubled. 

Then came the outbreak at Meerut, then the capture of Delhi by themutineers; in June came the three-weeks leaguer of Sir Hugh Wheeler inhis open lot at Cawnpore--40 miles distant from Lucknow--then thetreacherous massacre of that gallant little garrison; and now the greatrevolt was in full flower, and the comfortable condition of things atLucknow was instantly changed. 

There was an outbreak there, and Sir Henry Lawrence marched out of theResidency on the 30th of June to put it down, but was defeated with heavyloss, and had difficulty in getting back again. That night the memorablesiege of the Residency--called the siege of Lucknow--began. Sir Henrywas killed three days later, and Brigadier Inglis succeeded him incommand. 

Outside of the Residency fence was an immense host of hostile andconfident native besiegers; inside it were 480 loyal native soldiers, 730white ones, and 500 women and children. 

In those days the English garrisons always managed to hamper themselvessufficiently with women and children. 

The natives established themselves in houses close at hand and began torain bullets and cannon-balls into the Residency; and this they kept up, night and day, during four months and a half, the little garrisonindustriously replying all the time. The women and children soon becameso used to the roar of the guns that it ceased to disturb their sleep. The children imitated siege and defense in their play. The women--withany pretext, or with none--would sally out into the storm-swept grounds. The defense was kept up week after week, with stubborn fortitude, in themidst of death, which came in many forms--by bullet, small-pox, cholera, and by various diseases induced by unpalatable and insufficient food, bythe long hours of wearying and exhausting overwork in the daily andnightly battle in the oppressive Indian heat, and by the broken restcaused by the intolerable pest of mosquitoes, flies, mice, rats, andfleas. 

Six weeks after the beginning of the siege more than one-half of theoriginal force of white soldiers was dead, and close upon three-fifths ofthe original native force. 

But the fighting went on just the same. The enemy mined, the Englishcounter-mined, and, turn about, they blew up each other's posts. TheResidency grounds were honey-combed with the enemy's tunnels. Deadlycourtesies were constantly exchanged--sorties by the English in thenight; rushes by the enemy in the night--rushes whose purpose was tobreach the walls or scale them; rushes which cost heavily, and alwaysfailed. 

The ladies got used to all the horrors of war--the shrieks of mutilatedmen, the sight of blood and death. Lady Inglis makes this mention in herdiary:

 "Mrs. Bruere's nurse was carried past our door to-day, wounded in the eye. To extract the bullet it was found necessary to take out the eye--a fearful operation. Her mistress held her while it was performed. "

The first relieving force failed to relieve. It was under Havelock andOutram; and arrived when the siege had been going on for three months. It fought its desperate way to Lucknow, then fought its way through thecity against odds of a hundred to one, and entered the Residency; butthere was not enough left of it, then, to do any good. It lost more menin its last fight than it found in the Residency when it got in. Itbecame captive itself. 

The fighting and starving and dying by bullets and disease went steadilyon. Both sides fought with energy and industry. Captain Birch puts thisstriking incident in evidence. He is speaking of the third month of thesiege:

 "As an instance of the heavy firing brought to bear on our position this month may be mentioned the cutting down of the upper story of a brick building simply by musketry firring. This building was in a most exposed position. All the shots which just missed the top of the rampart cut into the dead wall pretty much in a straight line, and at length cut right through and brought the upper story tumbling down. The upper structure on the top of the brigade-mess also fell in. The Residency house was a wreck. Captain Anderson's post had long ago been knocked down, and Innes' post also fell in. These two were riddled with round shot. As many as 200 were picked up by Colonel Masters. "

The exhausted garrison fought doggedly on all through the next monthOctober. Then, November 2d, news came Sir Colin Campbell's relievingforce would soon be on its way from Cawnpore. 

On the 12th the boom of his guns was heard. 

On the 13th the sounds came nearer--he was slowly, but steadily, cuttinghis way through, storming one stronghold after another. 

On the 14th he captured the Martiniere College, and ran up the Britishflag there. It was seen from the Residency. 

Next he took the Dilkoosha. 

On the 17th he took the former mess-house of the 32d regiment--afortified building, and very strong. "A most exciting, anxious day, "writes Lady Inglis in her diary. "About 4 P. M. , two strange officerswalked through our yard, leading their horses"--and by that sign she knewthat communication was established between the forces, that the reliefwas real, this time, and that the long siege of Lucknow was ended. 

The last eight or ten miles of Sir Colin Campbell's march was throughseas of, blood. The weapon mainly used was the bayonet, the fighting wasdesperate. The way was mile-stoned with detached strong buildings ofstone, fortified, and heavily garrisoned, and these had to be taken byassault. Neither side asked for quarter, and neither gave it. At theSecundrabagh, where nearly two thousand of the enemy occupied a greatstone house in a garden, the work of slaughter was continued until everyman was killed. That is a sample of the character of that devastatingmarch. 

There were but few trees in the plain at that time, and from theResidency the progress of the march, step by step, victory by victory, could be noted; the ascending clouds of battle-smoke marked the way tothe eye, and the thunder of the guns marked it to the ear. 

Sir Colin Campbell had not come to Lucknow to hold it, but to save theoccupants of the Residency, and bring them away. Four or five days afterhis arrival the secret evacuation by the troops took place, in the middleof a dark night, by the principal gate, (the Bailie Guard). The twohundred women and two hundred and fifty children had been previouslyremoved. Captain Birch says:

 "And now commenced a movement of the most perfect arrangement and successful generalship--the withdrawal of the whole of the various forces, a combined movement requiring the greatest care and skill. First, the garrison in immediate contact with the enemy at the furthest extremity of the Residency position was marched out. Every other garrison in turn fell in behind it, and so passed out through the Bailie Guard gate, till the whole of our position was evacuated. Then Havelock's force was similarly withdrawn, post by post, marching in rear of our garrison. After them in turn came the forces of the Commander-in-Chief, which joined on in the rear of Havelock's force. Regiment by regiment was withdrawn with--the utmost order and regularity. The whole operation resembled the movement of a telescope. Stern silence was kept, and the enemy took no alarm. "

Lady Inglis, referring to her husband and to General Sir James Outram, sets down the closing detail of this impressive midnight retreat, indarkness and by stealth, of this shadowy host through the gate which ithad defended so long and so well:

 "At twelve precisely they marched out, John and Sir James Outram remaining till all had passed, and then they took off their hats to the Bailie Guard, the scene of as noble a defense as I think history will ever have to relate. "

CHAPTER LIX. 

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still existbut you have ceased to live. --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar. 

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the stricttruth. --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar. 

We were driven over Sir Colin Campbell's route by a British officer, andwhen I arrived at the Residency I was so familiar with the road that Icould have led a retreat over it myself; but the compass in my head hasbeen out of order from my birth, and so, as soon as I was within thebattered Bailie Guard and turned about to review the march and imaginethe relieving forces storming their way along it, everything was upsidedown and wrong end first in a moment, and I was never able to getstraightened out again. And now, when I look at the battle-plan, theconfusion remains. In me the east was born west, the battle-plans whichhave the east on the right-hand side are of no use to me. 

The Residency ruins are draped with flowering vines, and are impressiveand beautiful. They and the grounds are sacred now, and will suffer noneglect nor be profaned by any sordid or commercial use while the Britishremain masters of India. Within the grounds are buried the dead who gaveup their lives there in the long siege. 

After a fashion, I was able to imagine the fiery storm that raged nightand day over the place during so many months, and after a fashion I couldimagine the men moving through it, but I could not satisfactorily placethe 200 women, and I could do nothing at all with the 250 children. Iknew by Lady Inglis' diary that the children carried on their smallaffairs very much as if blood and carnage and the crash and thunder of asiege were natural and proper features of nursery life, and I tried torealize it; but when her little Johnny came rushing, all excitement, through the din and smoke, shouting, "Oh, mamma, the white hen has laidan egg!" I saw that I could not do it. Johnny's place was under thebed. I could imagine him there, because I could imagine myself there;and I think I should not have been interested in a hen that was laying anegg; my interest would have been with the parties that were laying thebombshells. I sat at dinner with one of those children in the Club'sIndian palace, and I knew that all through the siege he was perfectinghis teething and learning to talk; and while to me he was the mostimpressive object in Lucknow after the Residency ruins, I was not able toimagine what his life had been during that tempestuous infancy of his, nor what sort of a curious surprise it must have been to him to bemarched suddenly out into a strange dumb world where there wasn't anynoise, and nothing going on. He was only forty-one when I saw him, astrangely youthful link to connect the present with so ancient an episodeas the Great Mutiny. 

By and by we saw Cawnpore, and the open lot which was the scene ofMoore's memorable defense, and the spot on the shore of the Ganges wherethe massacre of the betrayed garrison occurred, and the small Indiantemple whence the bugle-signal notified the assassins to fall on. Thislatter was a lonely spot, and silent. The sluggish river drifted by, almost currentless. It was dead low water, narrow channels with vastsandbars between, all the way across the wide bed; and the only livingthing in sight was that grotesque and solemn bald-headed bird, theAdjutant, standing on his six-foot stilts, solitary on a distant bar, with his head sunk between his shoulders, thinking; thinking of hisprize, I suppose--the dead Hindoo that lay awash at his feet, and whetherto eat him alone or invite friends. He and his prey were a proper accentto that mournful place. They were in keeping with it, they emphasizedits loneliness and its solemnity. 

And we saw the scene of the slaughter of the helpless women and children, and also the costly memorial that is built over the well which containstheir remains. The Black Hole of Calcutta is gone, but a more reverentage is come, and whatever remembrancer still exists of the moving andheroic sufferings and achievements of the garrisons of Lucknow andCawnpore will be guarded and preserved. 

In Agra and its neighborhood, and afterwards at Delhi, we saw forts, mosques, and tombs, which were built in the great days of the Mohammedanemperors, and which are marvels of cost, magnitude, and richness ofmaterials and ornamentation, creations of surpassing grandeur, wonderswhich do indeed make the like things in the rest of the world seem tameand inconsequential by comparison. I am not purposing to describe them. By good fortune I had not read too much about them, and therefore wasable to get a natural and rational focus upon them, with the result thatthey thrilled, blessed, and exalted me. But if I had previouslyoverheated my imagination by drinking too much pestilential literary hotScotch, I should have suffered disappointment and sorrow. 

I mean to speak of only one of these many world-renowned buildings, theTaj Mahal, the most celebrated construction in the earth. I had read agreat deal too much about it. I saw it in the daytime, I saw it in themoonlight, I saw it near at hand, I saw it from a distance; and I knewall the time, that of its kind it was the wonder of the world, with nocompetitor now and no possible future competitor; and yet, it was not myTaj. My Taj had been built by excitable literary people; it was solidlylodged in my head, and I could not blast it out. 

I wish to place before the reader some of the usual descriptions of theTaj, and ask him to take note of the impressions left in his mind. Thesedescriptions do really state the truth--as nearly as the limitations oflanguage will allow. But language is a treacherous thing, a most unsurevehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way thatthey will not inflate the facts--by help of the reader's imagination, which is always ready to take a hand, and work for nothing, and do thebulk of it at that. 

I will begin with a few sentences from the excellent little localguide-book of Mr. Satya Chandra Mukerji. I take them from here and therein his description:

 "The inlaid work of the Taj and the flowers and petals that are to be found on all sides on the surface of the marble evince a most delicate touch. "

That is true. 

 "The inlaid work, the marble, the flowers, the buds, the leaves, the petals, and the lotus stems are almost without a rival in the whole of the civilized world. "

 "The work of inlaying with stones and gems is found in the highest perfection in the Taj. "

Gems, inlaid flowers, buds, and leaves to be found on all sides. What doyou see before you? Is the fairy structure growing? Is it becoming ajewel casket?

 "The whole of the Taj produces a wonderful effect that is equally sublime and beautiful. "

Then Sir William Wilson Hunter:

 "The Taj Mahal with its beautiful domes, 'a dream of marble, ' rises on the river bank. "

 "The materials are white marble and red sandstone. "

 "The complexity of its design and the delicate intricacy of the workmanship baffle description. "

Sir William continues. I will italicize some of his words:

 "The mausoleum stands on a raised marble platform at each of whose corners rises a tall and slender minaret of graceful proportions and of exquisite beauty. Beyond the platform stretch the two wings, one of which is itself a mosque of great architectural merit. In the center of the whole design the mausoleum occupies a square of 186 feet, with the angles deeply truncated so also form an unequal octagon. The main feature in this central pile is the great dome, which swells upward to nearly two-thirds of a sphere and tapers at its extremity into a pointed spire crowned by a crescent. Beneath it an enclosure of marble trellis-work surrounds the tomb of the princess and of her husband, the Emperor. Each corner of the mausoleum is covered by a similar though much smaller dome erected on a pediment pierced with graceful Saracenic arches. Light is admitted into the interior through a double screen of pierced marble, which tempers the glare of an Indian sky while its whiteness prevents the mellow effect from degenerating into gloom. The internal decorations consist of inlaid work in precious stones, such as agate, jasper, etc. , with which every squandril or salient point in the architecture is richly fretted. Brown and violet marble is also freely employed in wreaths, scrolls, and lintels to relieve the monotony of white wall. In regard to color and design, the interior of the Taj may rank first in the world for purely decorative workmanship; while the perfect symmetry of its exterior, once seen can never be forgotten, nor the aerial grace of its domes, rising like marble bubbles into the clear sky. The Taj represents the most highly elaborated stage of ornamentation reached by the Indo-Mohammedan builders, the stage in which the architect ends and the jeweler begins. In its magnificent gateway the diagonal ornamentation at the corners, which satisfied the designers of the gateways of Itimad-ud-doulah and Sikandra mausoleums is superseded by fine marble cables, in bold twists, strong and handsome. The triangular insertions of white marble and large flowers have in like manner given place to fine inlaid work. Firm perpendicular lines in black marble with well proportioned panels of the same material are effectively used in the interior of the gateway. On its top the Hindu brackets and monolithic architraves of Sikandra are replaced by Moorish carped arches, usually single blocks of red sandstone, in the Kiosks and pavilions which adorn the roof. From the pillared pavilions a magnificent view is obtained of the Taj gardens below, with the noble Jumna river at their farther end, and the city and fort of Agra in the distance. From this beautiful and splendid gateway one passes up a straight alley shaded by evergreen trees cooled by a broad shallow piece of water running along the middle of the path to the Taj itself. The Taj is entirely of marble and gems. The red sandstone of the other Mohammedan buildings has entirely disappeared, or rather the red sandstone which used to form the thickness of the walls, is in the Taj itself overlaid completely with white marble, and the white marble is itself inlaid with precious stones arranged in lovely patterns of flowers. A feeling of purity impresses itself on the eye and the mind from the absence of the coarser material which forms so invariable a material in Agra architecture. The lower wall and panels are covered with tulips, oleanders, and fullblown lilies, in flat carving on the white marble; and although the inlaid work of flowers done in gems is very brilliant when looked at closely, there is on the whole but little color, and the all-prevailing sentiment is one of whiteness, silence, and calm. The whiteness is broken only by the fine color of the inlaid gems, by lines in black marble, and by delicately written inscriptions, also in black, from the Koran. Under the dome of the vast mausoleum a high and beautiful screen of open tracery in white marble rises around the two tombs, or rather cenotaphs of the emperor and his princess; and in this marvel of marble the carving has advanced from the old geometrical patterns to a trellis-work of flowers and foliage, handled with great freedom and spirit. The two cenotaphs in the center of the exquisite enclosure have no carving except the plain Kalamdan or oblong pen-box on the tomb of Emperor Shah Jehan. But both cenotaphs are inlaid with flowers made of costly gems, and with the ever graceful oleander scroll. "

Bayard Taylor, after describing the details of the Taj, goes on to say:

 "On both sides the palm, the banyan, and the feathery bamboo mingle their foliage; the song of birds meets your ears, and the odor of roses and lemon flowers sweetens the air. Down such a vista and over such a foreground rises the Taj. There is no mystery, no sense of partial failure about the Taj. A thing of perfect beauty and of absolute finish in every detail, it might pass for the work of genii who knew naught of the weaknesses and ills with which mankind are beset. "

All of these details are true. But, taken together, they state afalsehood--to you. You cannot add them up correctly. Those writers knowthe values of their words and phrases, but to you the words and phrasesconvey other and uncertain values. To those writers their phrases havevalues which I think I am now acquainted with; and for the help of thereader I will here repeat certain of those words and phrases, and followthem with numerals which shall represent those values--then we shall seethe difference between a writer's ciphering and a mistaken reader's--

Precious stones, such as agate, jasper, etc. --5. 

With which every salient point is richly fretted--5. 

First in the world for purely decorative workmanship--9. 

The Taj represents the stage where the architect ends and the jewelerbegins--5. 

The Taj is entirely of marble and gems--7. 

Inlaid with precious stones in lovely patterns of flowers--5. 

The inlaid work of flowers done in gems is very brilliant(followed by a most important modification which the reader is sure toread too carelessly)--2. 

The vast mausoleum--5. 

This marvel of marble--5. 

The exquisite enclosure--5. 

Inlaid with flowers made of costly gems--5. 

A thing of perfect beauty and absolute finish--5. 

Those details are correct; the figures which I have placed after themrepresent quite fairly their individual, values. Then why, as a whole, do they convey a false impression to the reader? It is because thereader--beguiled by, his heated imagination--masses them in the wrongway. The writer would mass the first three figures in the following way, and they would speak the truth

Total--19

But the reader masses them thus--and then they tell a lie--559. 

The writer would add all of his twelve numerals together, and then thesum would express the whole truth about the Taj, and the truth only--63. 

But the reader--always helped by his imagination--would put the figuresin a row one after the other, and get this sum, which would tell him anoble big lie:

559575255555. 

You must put in the commas yourself; I have to go on with my work. 

The reader will always be sure to put the figures together in that wrongway, and then as surely before him will stand, sparkling in the sun, agem-crusted Taj tall as the Matterhorn. 

I had to visit Niagara fifteen times before I succeeded in getting myimaginary Falls gauged to the actuality and could begin to sanely andwholesomely wonder at them for what they were, not what I had expectedthem to be. When I first approached them it was with my face liftedtoward the sky, for I thought I was going to see an Atlantic oceanpouring down thence over cloud-vexed Himalayan heights, a sea-green wallof water sixty miles front and six miles high, and so, when the toyreality came suddenly into view--that beruiled little wet apron hangingout to dry--the shock was too much for me, and I fell with a dull thud. 

Yet slowly, surely, steadily, in the course of my fifteen visits, theproportions adjusted themselves to the facts, and I came at last torealize that a waterfall a hundred and sixty-five feet high and a quarterof a mile wide was an impressive thing. It was not a dipperful to myvanished great vision, but it would answer. 

I know that I ought to do with the Taj as I was obliged to do withNiagara--see it fifteen times, and let my mind gradually get rid of theTaj built in it by its describers, by help of my imagination, andsubstitute for it the Taj of fact. It would be noble and fine, then, anda marvel; not the marvel which it replaced, but still a marvel, and fineenough. I am a careless reader, I suppose--an impressionist reader; animpressionist reader of what is not an impressionist picture; a readerwho overlooks the informing details or masses their sum improperly, andgets only a large splashy, general effect--an effect which is notcorrect, and which is not warranted by the particulars placed before meparticulars which I did not examine, and whose meanings I did notcautiously and carefully estimate. It is an effect which is somethirty-five or forty times finer than the reality, and is therefore agreat deal better and more valuable than the reality; and so, I oughtnever to hunt up the reality, but stay miles away from it, and thuspreserve undamaged my own private mighty Niagara tumbling out of thevault of heaven, and my own ineffable Taj, built of tinted mists uponjeweled arches of rainbows supported by colonnades of moonlight. It is amistake for a person with an unregulated imagination to go and look at anillustrious world's wonder. 

I suppose that many, many years ago I gathered the idea that the Taj'splace in the achievements of man was exactly the place of the ice-stormin the achievements of Nature; that the Taj represented man's supremestpossibility in the creation of grace and beauty and exquisiteness andsplendor, just as the ice-storm represents Nature's supremest possibilityin the combination of those same qualities. I do not know how long agothat idea was bred in me, but I know that I cannot remember back to atime when the thought of either of these symbols of gracious andunapproachable perfection did not at once suggest the other. If Ithought of the ice-storm, the Taj rose before me divinely beautiful; if Ithought of the Taj, with its encrustings and inlayings of jewels, thevision of the ice-storm rose. And so, to me, all these years, the Tajhas had no rival among the temples and palaces of men, none that evenremotely approached it it was man's architectural ice-storm. 

Here in London the other night I was talking with some Scotch and Englishfriends, and I mentioned the ice-storm, using it as a figure--a figurewhich failed, for none of them had heard of the ice-storm. Onegentleman, who was very familiar with American literature, said he hadnever seen it mentioned in any book. That is strange. And I, myself, was not able to say that I had seen it mentioned in a book; and yet theautumn foliage, with all other American scenery, has received full andcompetent attention. 

The oversight is strange, for in America the ice-storm is an event. Andit is not an event which one is careless about. When it comes, the newsflies from room to room in the house, there are bangings on the doors, and shoutings, "The ice-storm! the ice-storm!" and even the laziestsleepers throw off the covers and join the rush for the windows. Theice-storm occurs in midwinter, and usually its enchantments are wroughtin the silence and the darkness of the night. A fine drizzling rainfalls hour after hour upon the naked twigs and branches of the trees, andas it falls it freezes. In time the trunk and every branch and twig areincased in hard pure ice; so that the tree looks like a skeleton treemade all of glass--glass that is crystal-clear. All along the undersideof every branch and twig is a comb of little icicles--the frozen drip. Sometimes these pendants do not quite amount to icicles, but are roundbeads--frozen tears. 

The weather clears, toward dawn, and leaves a brisk pure atmosphere and asky without a shred of cloud in it--and everything is still, there is nota breath of wind. The dawn breaks and spreads, the news of the stormgoes about the house, and the little and the big, in wraps and blankets, flock to the window and press together there, and gaze intently out uponthe great white ghost in the grounds, and nobody says a word, nobodystirs. All are waiting; they know what is coming, and they are waitingwaiting for the miracle. The minutes drift on and on and on, with not asound but the ticking of the clock; at last the sun fires a sudden sheafof rays into the ghostly tree and turns it into a white splendor ofglittering diamonds. Everybody catches his breath, and feels a swellingin his throat and a moisture in his eyes-but waits again; for he knowswhat is coming; there is more yet. The sun climbs higher, and stillhigher, flooding the tree from its loftiest spread of branches to itslowest, turning it to a glory of white fire; then in a moment, withoutwarning, comes the great miracle, the supreme miracle, the miraclewithout its fellow in the earth; a gust of wind sets every branch andtwig to swaying, and in an instant turns the whole white tree into aspouting and spraying explosion of flashing gems of every conceivablecolor; and there it stands and sways this way and that, flash! flash!flash! a dancing and glancing world of rubies, emeralds, diamonds, sapphires, the most radiant spectacle, the most blinding spectacle, thedivinest, the most exquisite, the most intoxicating vision of fire andcolor and intolerable and unimaginable splendor that ever any eye hasrested upon in this world, or will ever rest upon outside of the gates ofheaven. 

By, all my senses, all my faculties, I know that the icestorm is Nature'ssupremest achievement in the domain of the superb and the beautiful; andby my reason, at least, I know that the Taj is man's ice-storm. 

In the ice-storm every one of the myriad ice-beads pendant from twig andbranch is an individual gem, and changes color with every motion causedby the wind; each tree carries a million, and a forest-front exhibits thesplendors of the single tree multiplied by a thousand. 

It occurs to me now that I have never seen the ice-storm put upon canvas, and have not heard that any painter has tried to do it. I wonder whythat is. Is it that paint cannot counterfeit the intense blaze of asun-flooded jewel? There should be, and must be, a reason, and a good one, why the most enchanting sight that Nature has created has been neglectedby the brush. 

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the stricttruth. The describers of the Taj have used the word gem in its strictestsense--its scientific sense. In that sense it is a mild word, andpromises but little to the eye-nothing bright, nothing brilliant, nothingsparkling, nothing splendid in the way of color. It accurately describesthe sober and unobtrusive gem-work of the Taj; that is, to the veryhighly-educated one person in a thousand; but it most falsely describesit to the 999. But the 999 are the people who ought to be especiallytaken care of, and to them it does not mean quiet-colored designs wroughtin carnelians, or agates, or such things; they know the word in its wideand ordinary sense only, and so to them it means diamonds and rubies andopals and their kindred, and the moment their eyes fall upon it in printthey see a vision of glorious colors clothed in fire. 

These describers are writing for the "general, " and so, in order to makesure of being understood, they ought to use words in their ordinarysense, or else explain. The word fountain means one thing in Syria, where there is but a handful of people; it means quite another thing inNorth America, where there are 75, 000, 000. If I were describing someSyrian scenery, and should exclaim, "Within the narrow space of a quarterof a mile square I saw, in the glory of the flooding moonlight, twohundred noble fountains--imagine the spectacle!" the North American wouldhave a vision of clustering columns of water soaring aloft, bending overin graceful arches, bursting in beaded spray and raining white fire inthe moonlight-and he would be deceived. But the Syrian would not bedeceived; he would merely see two hundred fresh-water springs--twohundred drowsing puddles, as level and unpretentious and unexcited as somany door-mats, and even with the help of the moonlight he would not losehis grip in the presence of the exhibition. My word "fountain" would becorrect; it would speak the strict truth; and it would convey the stricttruth to the handful of Syrians, and the strictest misinformation to theNorth American millions. With their gems--and gems--and more gems--andgems again--and still other gems--the describers of the Taj are withintheir legal but not their moral rights; they are dealing in the strictestscientific truth; and in doing it they succeed to admiration in telling"what ain't so. "

CHAPTER LX. 

SATAN (impatiently) to NEW-COMER. The trouble with you Chicago peopleis, that you think you are the best people down here; whereas you aremerely the most numerous. --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar. 

We wandered contentedly around here and there in India; to Lahore, amongother places, where the Lieutenant-Governor lent me an elephant. Thishospitality stands out in my experiences in a stately isolation. It wasa fine elephant, affable, gentlemanly, educated, and I was not afraid ofit. I even rode it with confidence through the crowded lanes of thenative city, where it scared all the horses out of their senses, andwhere children were always just escaping its feet. It took the middle ofthe road in a fine independent way, and left it to the world to get outof the way or take the consequences. I am used to being afraid ofcollisions when I ride or drive, but when one is on top of an elephantthat feeling is absent. I could have ridden in comfort through aregiment of runaway teams. I could easily learn to prefer an elephant toany other vehicle, partly because of that immunity from collisions, andpartly because of the fine view one has from up there, and partly becauseof the dignity one feels in that high place, and partly because one canlook in at the windows and see what is going on privately among thefamily. The Lahore horses were used to elephants, but they wererapturously afraid of them just the same. It seemed curious. Perhapsthe better they know the elephant the more they respect him in thatpeculiar way. In our own case--we are not afraid of dynamite till we getacquainted with it. 

We drifted as far as Rawal Pindi, away up on the Afghan frontier--I thinkit was the Afghan frontier, but it may have been Hertzegovina--it wasaround there somewhere--and down again to Delhi, to see the ancientarchitectural wonders there and in Old Delhi and not describe them, andalso to see the scene of the illustrious assault, in the Mutiny days, when the British carried Delhi by storm, one of the marvels of historyfor impudent daring and immortal valor. 

We had a refreshing rest, there in Delhi, in a great old mansion whichpossessed historical interest. It was built by a rich Englishman who hadbecome orientalized--so much so that he had a zenana. But he was abroadminded man, and remained so. To please his harem he built a mosque;to please himself he built an English church. That kind of a man willarrive, somewhere. In the Mutiny days the mansion was the Britishgeneral's headquarters. It stands in a great garden--oriental fashion--and about it are many noble trees. The trees harbor monkeys; and theyare monkeys of a watchful and enterprising sort, and not much troubledwith fear. They invade the house whenever they get a chance, and carryoff everything they don't want. One morning the master of the house wasin his bath, and the window was open. Near it stood a pot of yellowpaint and a brush. Some monkeys appeared in the window; to scare themaway, the gentleman threw his sponge at them. They did not scare at all;they jumped into the room and threw yellow paint all over him from thebrush, and drove him out; then they painted the walls and the floor andthe tank and the windows and the furniture yellow, and were in thedressing-room painting that when help arrived and routed them. 

Two of these creatures came into my room in the early morning, through awindow whose shutters I had left open, and when I woke one of them wasbefore the glass brushing his hair, and the other one had my note-book, and was reading a page of humorous notes and crying. I did not mind theone with the hair-brush, but the conduct of the other one hurt me; ithurts me yet. I threw something at him, and that was wrong, for my hosthad told me that the monkeys were best left alone. They threw everythingat me that they could lift, and then went into the bathroom to get somemore things, and I shut the door on them. 

At Jeypore, in Rajputana, we made a considerable stay. We were not inthe native city, but several miles from it, in the small Europeanofficial suburb. There were but few Europeans--only fourteen but theywere all kind and hospitable, and it amounted to being at home. InJeypore we found again what we had found all about India--that while theIndian servant is in his way a very real treasure, he will sometimes bearwatching, and the Englishman watches him. If he sends him on an errand, he wants more than the man's word for it that he did the errand. Whenfruit and vegetables were sent to us, a "chit" came with them--a receiptfor us to sign; otherwise the things might not arrive. If a gentlemansent up his carriage, the chit stated "from" such-and-such an hour "to"such-and-such an hour--which made it unhandy for the coachman and his twoor three subordinates to put us off with a part of the allotted time anddevote the rest of it to a lark of their own. 

We were pleasantly situated in a small two-storied inn, in an empty largecompound which was surrounded by a mud wall as high as a man's head. Theinn was kept by nine Hindoo brothers, its owners. They lived, with theirfamilies, in a one-storied building within the compound, but off to oneside, and there was always a long pile of their little comely brownchildren loosely stacked in its veranda, and a detachment of the parentswedged among them, smoking the hookah or the howdah, or whatever theycall it. By the veranda stood a palm, and a monkey lived in it, and leda lonesome life, and always looked sad and weary, and the crows botheredhim a good deal. 

The inn cow poked about the compound and emphasized the secluded andcountry air of the place, and there was a dog of no particular breed, whowas always present in the compound, and always asleep, always stretchedout baking in the sun and adding to the deep tranquility andreposefulness of the place, when the crows were away on business. White-draperied servants were coming and going all the time, but theyseemed only spirits, for their feet were bare and made no sound. Downthe lane a piece lived an elephant in the shade of a noble tree, androcked and rocked, and reached about with his trunk, begging of his brownmistress or fumbling the children playing at his feet. And there werecamels about, but they go on velvet feet, and were proper to the silenceand serenity of the surroundings. 

The Satan mentioned at the head of this chapter was not our Satan, butthe other one. Our Satan was lost to us. In these later days he hadpassed out of our life--lamented by me, and sincerely. I was missinghim; I am missing him yet, after all these months. He was an astonishingcreature to fly around and do things. He didn't always do them quiteright, but he did them, and did them suddenly. There was no time wasted. You would say:

"Pack the trunks and bags, Satan. "

"Wair good" (very good). 

Then there would be a brief sound of thrashing and slashing and hummingand buzzing, and a spectacle as of a whirlwind spinning gowns and jacketsand coats and boots and things through the air, and then with bow andtouch--

"Awready, master. "

It was wonderful. It made one dizzy. He crumpled dresses a good deal, and he had no particular plan about the work--at first--except to puteach article into the trunk it didn't belong in. But he soon reformed, in this matter. Not entirely; for, to the last, he would cram into thesatchel sacred to literature any odds and ends of rubbish that hecouldn't find a handy place for elsewhere. When threatened with deathfor this, it did not trouble him; he only looked pleasant, saluted withsoldierly grace, said "Wair good, " and did it again next day. 

He was always busy; kept the rooms tidied up, the boots polished, theclothes brushed, the wash-basin full of clean water, my dress clotheslaid out and ready for the lecture-hall an hour ahead of time; and hedressed me from head to heel in spite of my determination to do itmyself, according to my lifelong custom. 

He was a born boss, and loved to command, and to jaw and dispute withinferiors and harry them and bullyrag them. He was fine at the railwaystation--yes, he was at his finest there. He would shoulder and plungeand paw his violent way through the packed multitude of natives withnineteen coolies at his tail, each bearing a trifle of luggage--one atrunk, another a parasol, another a shawl, another a fan, and so on; onearticle to each, and the longer the procession, the better he was suited--and he was sure to make for some engaged sleeper and begin to hurl theowner's things out of it, swearing that it was ours and that there hadbeen a mistake. Arrived at our own sleeper, he would undo thebedding-bundles and make the beds and put everything to rights andshipshape in two minutes; then put his head out at, a window and have arestful good time abusing his gang of coolies and disputing their billuntil we arrived and made him pay them and stop his noise. 

Speaking of noise, he certainly was the noisest little devil in India--and that is saying much, very much, indeed. I loved him for his noise, but the family detested him for it. They could not abide it; they couldnot get reconciled to it. It humiliated them. As a rule, when we gotwithin six hundred yards of one of those big railway stations, a mightyracket of screaming and shrieking and shouting and storming would breakupon us, and I would be happy to myself, and the family would say, withshame:

"There--that's Satan. Why do you keep him?"

And, sure enough, there in the whirling midst of fifteen hundredwondering people we would find that little scrap of a creaturegesticulating like a spider with the colic, his black eyes snapping, hisfez-tassel dancing, his jaws pouring out floods of billingsgate upon hisgang of beseeching and astonished coolies. 

I loved him; I couldn't help it; but the family--why, they could hardlyspeak of him with patience. To this day I regret his loss, and wish Ihad him back; but they--it is different with them. He was a native, andcame from Surat. Twenty degrees of latitude lay between his birthplaceand Manuel's, and fifteen hundred between their ways and characters anddispositions. I only liked Manuel, but I loved Satan. This latter'sreal name was intensely Indian. I could not quite get the hang of it, but it sounded like Bunder Rao Ram Chunder Clam Chowder. It was too longfor handy use, anyway; so I reduced it. 

When he had been with us two or three weeks, he began to make mistakeswhich I had difficulty in patching up for him. Approaching Benares oneday, he got out of the train to see if he could get up a misunderstandingwith somebody, for it had been a weary, long journey and he wanted tofreshen up. He found what he was after, but kept up his pow-wow a shadetoo long and got left. So there we were in a strange city and nochambermaid. It was awkward for us, and we told him he must not do soany more. He saluted and said in his dear, pleasant way, "Wair good. "Then at Lucknow he got drunk. I said it was a fever, and got thefamily's compassion, and solicitude aroused; so they gave him ateaspoonful of liquid quinine and it set his vitals on fire. He madeseveral grimaces which gave me a better idea of the Lisbon earthquakethan any I have ever got of it from paintings and descriptions. Hisdrunk was still portentously solid next morning, but I could have pulledhim through with the family if he would only have taken another spoonfulof that remedy; but no, although he was stupefied, his memory still hadflickerings of life; so he smiled a divinely dull smile and said, fumblingly saluting:

"Scoose me, mem Saheb, scoose me, Missy Saheb; Satan not prefer it, please. "

Then some instinct revealed to them that he was drunk. They gave himprompt notice that next time this happened he must go. He got out amaudlin and most gentle "Wair good, " and saluted indefinitely. 

Only one short week later he fell again. And oh, sorrow! not in a hotelthis time, but in an English gentleman's private house. And in Agra, ofall places. So he had to go. When I told him, he said patiently, "Wairgood, " and made his parting salute, and went out from us to return nomore forever. Dear me! I would rather have lost a hundred angels thanthat one poor lovely devil. What style he used to put on, in a swellhotel or in a private house--snow-white muslin from his chin to his barefeet, a crimson sash embroidered with gold thread around his waist, andon his head a great sea-green turban like to the turban of the GrandTurk. 

He was not a liar; but he will become one if he keeps on. He told meonce that he used to crack cocoanuts with his teeth when he was a boy;and when I asked how he got them into his mouth, he said he was upward ofsix feet high at that time, and had an unusual mouth. And when Ifollowed him up and asked him what had become of that other foot, he saida house fell on him and he was never able to get his stature back again. Swervings like these from the strict line of fact often beguile atruthful man on and on until he eventually becomes a liar. 

His successor was a Mohammedan, Sahadat Mohammed Khan; very dark, verytall, very grave. He went always in flowing masses of white, from thetop of his big turban down to his bare feet. His voice was low. Heglided about in a noiseless way, and looked like a ghost. He wascompetent and satisfactory. But where he was, it seemed always Sunday. It was not so in Satan's time. 

Jeypore is intensely Indian, but it has two or three features whichindicate the presence of European science and European interest in theweal of the common public, such as the liberal water-supply furnished bygreat works built at the State's expense; good sanitation, resulting in adegree of healthfulness unusually high for India; a noble pleasuregarden, with privileged days for women; schools for the instruction ofnative youth in advanced art, both ornamental and utilitarian; and a newand beautiful palace stocked with a museum of extraordinary interest andvalue. Without the Maharaja's sympathy and purse these beneficencescould not have been created; but he is a man of wide views and largegenerosities, and all such matters find hospitality with him. 

We drove often to the city from the hotel Kaiser-i-Hind, a journey whichwas always full of interest, both night and day, for that country roadwas never quiet, never empty, but was always India in motion, always astreaming flood of brown people clothed in smouchings from the rainbow, atossing and moiling flood, happy, noisy, a charming and satisfyingconfusion of strange human and strange animal life and equally strangeand outlandish vehicles. 

And the city itself is a curiosity. Any Indian city is that, but thisone is not like any other that we saw. It is shut up in a lofty turretedwall; the main body of it is divided into six parts by perfectly straightstreets that are more than a hundred feet wide; the blocks of housesexhibit a long frontage of the most taking architectural quaintnesses, the straight lines being broken everywhere by pretty little balconies, pillared and highly ornamented, and other cunning and cozy and invitingperches and projections, and many of the fronts are curiously pictured bythe brush, and the whole of them have the soft rich tint of strawberryice-cream. One cannot look down the far stretch of the chief street andpersuade himself that these are real houses, and that it is all out ofdoors--the impression that it is an unreality, a picture, a scene in atheater, is the only one that will take hold. 

Then there came a great day when this illusion was more pronounced thanever. A rich Hindoo had been spending a fortune upon the manufacture ofa crowd of idols and accompanying paraphernalia whose purpose was toillustrate scenes in the life of his especial god or saint, and this fineshow was to be brought through the town in processional state at ten inthe morning. As we passed through the great public pleasure garden onour way to the city we found it crowded with natives. That was onesight. Then there was another. In the midst of the spacious lawnsstands the palace which contains the museum--a beautiful construction ofstone which shows arched colonnades, one above another, and receding, terrace-fashion, toward the sky. Every one of these terraces, all theway to the top one, was packed and jammed with natives. One must try toimagine those solid masses of splendid color, one above another, up andup, against the blue sky, and the Indian sun turning them all to beds offire and flame. 

Later, when we reached the city, and glanced down the chief avenue, smouldering in its crushed-strawberry tint, those splendid effects wererepeated; for every balcony, and every fanciful bird-cage of a snuggerycountersunk in the house-fronts, and all the long lines of roofs werecrowded with people, and each crowd was an explosion of brilliant color. 

Then the wide street itself, away down and down and down into thedistance, was alive with gorgeously-clothed people not still, but moving, swaying, drifting, eddying, a delirious display of all colors and allshades of color, delicate, lovely, pale, soft, strong, stunning, vivid, brilliant, a sort of storm of sweetpea blossoms passing on the wings of ahurricane; and presently, through this storm of color, came swaying andswinging the majestic elephants, clothed in their Sunday best ofgaudinesses, and the long procession of fanciful trucks freighted withtheir groups of curious and costly images, and then the long rearguard ofstately camels, with their picturesque riders. 

For color, and picturesqueness, and novelty, and outlandishness, andsustained interest and fascination, it was the most satisfying show I hadever seen, and I suppose I shall not have the privilege of looking uponits like again.