From Edinburgh to India & Burmah Part 11

The lamplight conflict with daylight is to me as interesting here as at home. The best minutes in the day, I think, for colour, are when the shadows from figures pa.s.sing the lamps just become visible, when they still hold the blue of day in them, and so contrast pleasantly with the yellow lights of oil and electric lamps.

Outside many of the booths chandeliers of cut crystal are hung, and give, what I consider, a charming effect.

In the evening there was a dinner party at the Residency, to which Mrs Fraser very kindly invited us, and there was pleasant talk about Burmah and princely pageants, elephant kedar camps, and the right royal entertainments to be held at Mysore; and of how the twenty valets and the hundreds of guests are to be provided for; to quote the Tales of the Highlands, "there will be music in the place of hearing, meat in the place of eating, smooth drinks and rough drinks, and drinks for the laying down of slumber, mirth raised and lament laid down, and a right joyful hearty plying of the feast and Royal Company"--but how it is all to be done is past my comprehension! Noah, the Raven said, did them really well in the Ark; but a Royal Retinue must be much more difficult to provide for, must need a bigger "bunda-bust"--I believe I've used this word rightly again!

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The Maharajah of Mysore came after dinner. He was dressed in a pale turquoise silk coat, with dark blue and white and gold turban with diamond aigrette, and white trousers, patent leather shoes, and a long necklace of very large diamonds. He is twenty-one and good-looking, with pleasant expression and a quiet possessed manner. I am almost glad I did not know that he is building such a wonderful palace, or I would have felt oppressed. This palace at Mysore is to be the finest in the world, so people here say, but of it anon. We spoke of music; he plays a great number of instruments (I think thirteen). I asked which music he liked best, Eastern or Western, and he replied, "When I hear Western music, I think surely nothing could be better. Then when I hear our own Eastern music, again I think nothing could be better." He understands the various kinds of our Highland music, and argued that if you understand the folk music of one race you can understand that of others. To me it seems a loss to music that these early forms of various races are not more often studied by modern musicians. Writers and painters set an example in this way; painters and sculptors especially, for they study the art of all times and peoples, ancient Greek, Egyptian, j.a.panese, etc., but what does the ordinary musician know of these ancient Greek, Egyptian, or Celtic tunes that are fast being forgotten, or of j.a.panese, Indian, or Burmese intricacies? Sir Arthur Sullivan did study Burmese music, but was not that quite exceptional? Writers too, generally have a smattering of some dead languages, and even advocate the study to-day, of Sanskrit, and Gaelic.

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CHAPTER XVIII

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Before the phantom of false morning died, Our boy outside the carriage cried, When all the breakfast is prepared without, Why nods the drowsy Sahib still inside?

and

Wake for the sun has scattered into flight The stars before it from the field of night; Drives night along with it, and strikes The Rajah's palace with a shaft of light--

as above, but possibly it is just a Government building, a post office, perhaps! Our two carriages are in a siding at this Mysore station, and the servants are outside with breakfast. The robes of the natives coming towards the station in the twilight under said shaft of light are greenish in contrast; they are wrapped up in their white mantles to keep off what they appear to think dangerous morning air. Only a few of them are astir, and the dew runs steadily from the roof of our carriage and makes a hole in the sandy track, and an early crow is round for anything that may be going. The cook comes past with a comforting glow from charcoal in a frying pan, so we know our _chota hazri_ will be before us in no time, after which we intend to trolly back on the line to Seringapatam.

We came here yesterday afternoon from Bangalore, R. and D. with their carriage, and self and G. in one the Railway Co. let us have--for a consideration! A very good plan this--you pay for three fares and have your carriage overnight, so at places where there are no hotels you are more comfortable than if there were!

Coming here from Bangalore to Mysore, the line is interesting all the way, the scenes change constantly--I have very distinct recollections of at first "garden scenery," then jungle and bushy woods running into rocky gorges, barren sand wastes and rich rolling corn lands alternating in the few hours run, yet in my journal I have not a line of pen or sc.r.a.pe of pencil of these scenes; I daresay the reader has noticed this, that scenes taken unconsciously on the tablets of memory--unconscious impressions--are more lasting than those taken down consciously and deliberately.

Mysore town is a place of wide roads and trees, fields intended to be parks some day, and light and air. Many houses of European origin, somewhat suggestive of Italian or Spanish villas, are shuttered and closed in, so as to give a sense of their being deserted. You drive past these silent houses and their gardens and come to the native town, which is anything but silent or deserted, and then to the new palace; the modern sight of southern India. It is br.i.m.m.i.n.g with life; it looks like a Gothic cathedral in course of construction. Two towers, each at a guess, 150 feet high, with a wing between them, bristle with bamboo scaffolding so warped and twisted out of the perpendicular that the uprights are like old fishing rods. The extraordinary intricacy is quite fascinating, but at present it partially prevents one seeing the general proportions and effect of the building. As we see it, in the afternoon, the great ma.s.s of building is grey against the western light; thousands of men, women, boys, and children are scattered over its face on these fragile perches, and though not in sunlight, their many-coloured draperies reflect on the variously coloured stones at which they are carving. Around us, on the ground, are other thousands doing similar work, hewing, sawing, and carving marbles and granite--such intricate carving--in reddish and grey-green granite. As to the general architectural effect it would be unwise to venture an opinion at present; but the details are simply marvellous. I believe it is intended to be the finest palace in the world, and if a great many exquisite fancies put together, will form one great conception, then certainly this expression in architecture must be a magnificent work of art. The people to-day and the generations to come must owe this Prince great grat.i.tude for the encouragement of so many skilled craftsmen, and for the preservation of Indian arts and crafts. There were four hundred fine-wood carvers, and four hundred fine-stone carvers, carving filigree ornaments, chains, and foliage of the most astonishing realism in these materials. Fancy, actual chains in granite, pendants from elephants'

heads! Most of the skilled masons and joiners of India, I am told, have been collected here. The masons must be in thousands; they are wonderfully skilled in work at granite, their very lightness of hand seems to let them feel just the weight of iron needed to flake off the right amount from the granite blocks. A very much extended description of the Temple of Solomon might give to one who had time to read an idea of the richness of the materials employed, and the variety of the subjects of the decorations. There is marble--work and wood--work, silver doors, ivory doors, and rooms, halls, and pa.s.sages of these materials, all carved with Indian minuteness and delicacy, with telling scenes from the stories of Hindoo deities; and in the middle of these Eastern marvels are alas! cast-iron pillars from Glasgow. They form a central group from base to top of the great tower; between them at each flat they are encircled with cast-iron perforated balconies. They are made to imitate Hindoo pillars with all their taperings and swellings, and are painted vermilion and curry-colour. Opening on to these cast-iron balconies are the silver and ivory rooms and floors of exquisite marble inlay.

We saw inside on many floors, modellers with their clay, modelling groups for the stone-carvers, in high or low relief, with utmost rapidity, freedom, finish, and appreciation of light and shade. The different methods of craftsmen in different countries is always interesting. Here the modeller works on the floor seated on his heels; he runs up acanthus leaves, geometric designs, or groups of figures and animals with a rapidity that would give our niggling Academy teachers at home considerable food for thought--and yet the work is fine, and the figures are full of expression. The area of a workman's studio you might cover with a napkin, or say, a small table-cloth. The carver takes the model and whacks it out in _granite_ without any pointing or other help than his hand and eye and a pointed iron chisel and hammer, and he loses very little indeed of the character of the model, in fact, as little as some well paid Italian workers.

The wood-carving, as far as technical skill in cutting goes, was out and away beyond anything we could almost dream of at home, and all at 1s.

4d. a day, which is good pay here. One man cut with consummate skill geometrical ornaments on lintels to be supported by architraves covered with woodland scenes, with elephants foreshortened and ivory tusks looking out from amongst tree-trunks, and most naturalistic monkeys, peac.o.c.ks, fruit, and foliage. All this we saw rapidly dug out in the hard brown teak with delightful vigour, spontaneity, and finish. One might fear that a geometrically carved lintel would not be quite in keeping with a florid jamb, but why carp, we should look at the best side of things. I think these same craftsmen working to the design of one artist, or artist and architect in one, might make a record. The ability to carry out the design is here, and at such a price! But where is the thought, the conception for a Parthenon--a nation must first worship beauty before it can produce it.

I think the native town and streets here as good as can be for painting pictures; a man would have to come young and get up early to do the subjects you see in an hour or two. Here there is more style, wider surfaces, and character in the native houses than in Bombay.

We went to Seringapatam yesterday on trollies, nine miles back on the line by which we came from Bangalore to Mysore city. We had two trollies, R. and G. in front with workmen examining the line as we went, an extremely pleasant mode of procedure, with a certain dignity about it that is absent in a railway carriage. We sit in front on comfortable seats, a red flag on a bamboo overhead, a fat stationmaster and two natives behind, and two on the rails to shove, the shadow of the whole show running along beside us outlined on the ballast and sunny cactus hedge.

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The first miles were over somewhat sandy, gravelly ground, then through groves of palms, and mostly down hill. At this comfortable rate we had time to look at the field workers in the rice crops, the palms with their skirts of creepers, and flowering thornbrakes, and the "bits" of the yellow corn and hedges and flat fields, that one might have seen on any summer's day in England. The reapers were in groups and lines in the greenish corn, the men bronze and bare to the waistcloths, the women in many-coloured draperies, Ruths and reapers and Boazes by the dozen, with the women's bangles gleaming, and the men's sickles glittering in the cheerful sunlight.

Seringapatam is on an island three miles long, in the Cauvery River; outside it we were met by a victoria and drove about the island. It is a pleasant place to spend a day; the marks of our forefathers' gunnery on the walls gives quite a homely feeling. You see where they camped and the river they looked at--a gentle-running, sapphire stream with yellow-grey stones showing across it, not much more than a hundred yards across when we saw it--and the big double masonry wall beyond it which they battered and scaled. Barring the trees and bushes that have grown on the walls, the battering looks as if it had only been done yesterday.

We spent the morning going over the walls, without a guide or guide-book, trying to pick up the hang of the situation from what we had heard and read of the siege. There is pleasant park-land inside the walls, with beautiful tall trees, but the view that fascinates is from the walls across the river towards the points where the British guns were fired from, and from which the a.s.sault was made. Later in the day the stationmaster, Bubbaraya Moodeliar, gave us a copy of a guide he has written, such an excellent, concise description of the place and its history. It was pleasant to find so many of our countrymen's names on the first pages, and at the risk of being tedious, my friends, they are here; the names as they occur in this "Short History of the Siege and a.s.sault," by an Indian native--Wellesley, Kelly, Sir David Baird, Captain Prescott, Lt. C. Dunlop, Baillie, Bell, Lt.-Colonel Gardiner, Dalrymple, General Stuart, Wallace, Sherbrooke, Douse, Hart, Lalor--all well-known Scottish and Irish names, except two or perhaps three that may be English, but the Native puts them all, down as "English!" So does the editor of Murray's "Guide to India"--describes those who fought under Duff, Grant, and Ford as an "English Force." So foolish writers are filching our good name by ignoring the Terms of Union, and deliberately or unconsciously are working up another sc.r.a.p on the banks of the Bannock--well, so be it, the times are a little dull; and we need a little national stiffening north of Tweed.

The Water-gate, where Tippoo Sultan got his _coup de grace_ in the general flight of his people, is just the quiet and peaceful place in which to doze and dream for a summer day on the green sward under the park-like trees. The Gate is an arched pa.s.sage through thick walls leading to a walled-in s.p.a.ce with trees hanging over it; through a tumbled down bit of this wall you come on to the river. It was delightful there, no one about, excepting two or three women washing clothes on the stones in the clear running water, with the sunshine and flickering shadows from the trees falling over them. But it must have been bustling enough on the 4th of May, 1799, when Tippoo tried to pa.s.s, with Baird's troops behind! What would one not give to have seen that last tableau: the British soldier in the crowd of natives going for the wounded Sultan's jewelled sword belt, the jam and press, and the heat and danger! The Sultan objected and wounded the soldier, so the soldier put a bullet through the Sultan's head--and what became of our northern robber, and the belt? What heaps of jewels Tippoo had collected; he used to spend days in his treasure-house inventorying his stores of diamonds and pearls, and to-day you may see some of the strings of pearls if you dine out in Edinburgh. After the a.s.sault, during the night, a soldier found his way into the treasury, and by morning a handful of diamonds was the price offered and asked for a bottle of Arrack. These international looting scenes seem to me peculiarly fascinating; I think a little prize-money won that way must feel worth fortunes earned in business. How our soldier of to-day swears at being deprived of such perquisites, and how he wishes he had been "in the civil" at Mandalay or Pekin.

We drove through the native town and bazaar. It seemed half empty; a native villa there might be had for one line of an old song. The Plague had been knocking at many doors a little while ago, and now they swing loosely on the hinges and the roofs are fallen in, or have been pulled down rather, by the sahibs, to let the sun in and the evil plague spirit out.

We came to the high mosque, Allah Musjid one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen; its proportions are so big and simple. It was the favourite place of worship of Hyder Ali Khan and his son, Tippoo. You go up to it through porticoes, and up a rough white stair, with innumerable swallows in nests of feathers protruding from a level line of holes in, the hot, sun-lit wall just above your head on the right hand; and past little rest rooms for worshippers on the left, of plain whitewashed stone, and earth floors, all in shadow. Up the steps you come on a paved court with a balcony of white stone, and in front there is the moorish arcade of the mosque, and at either end a very high minaret, built possibly of stone white-washed, but much like weathered marble. The design is big and simple, finer in conception than anything we have seen so far. You have to lean your head very far back to follow up the minarets with your eyes to the top; each is octagonal and tapers slightly to two balconies. Pigeon-holes follow the slightly sloping sides in a spiral direction, and under each hole there is a little carved ledge, and on these and hovering near are many pigeons. There is colour--marble-white, weathered to yellow, dazzling in the sun and cool violet in shade, blue rock pigeons everywhere, and at the very top of each spire a golden ball burns against the unfathomable blue.

The hot air is slightly scented with incense and sandalwood, and there is a musical droning from a few worshippers who repeat verses from the Koran in the cool white interior mingled with the cooing of innumerable pigeons, and the faint "kiree, kiree" of a kite a mile above, in the blue zenith.

We may not enter the mosque with boots on, and will not enter with them off, so we admire from the outside the half Indian, half Saracenic plaster-work in the interior of the arcade--the stalact.i.te domes, diapers, groins, modellings _in situ_, and wish the authority on plaster work, Mr William Millar, was here to enjoy the skill and beauty of the work.

Next show--the summer palace of Tippoo Sultan. If you have been at Granada you can picture this as rather a thin Hindoo edition of Generalife Villa. It is moresque in style, but small in structural forms, smaller still in geometrical ornament, and without breadth or much harmony of colour schemes. Some small rooms were pa.s.sable in gold and silver and primary colours, but the princ.i.p.al halls and galleries were extremely crude. To be seen properly there should be people in proportion, little Hindoo beauties sitting primly at the balconies that open on to the inner court, and playing beside the long formal tanks that extend far amongst shrubs and trees of the surrounding gardens.

There are mural paintings on the verandah walls, which are spoken of as attractions and things to be seen; they are slightly funny. They represent the defeat of our troops by Hyder Ali and the French, but they are of no great count, except as records of costume. But enough about this place: our interest lay in the battered walls and the cells behind them where our Highland and Lowland soldiers were imprisoned so long.

We pa.s.sed the Water-gate on our way back, then under a grove of cocoa-nut palms, with many cocoa-nuts and monkeys in their tops; and we threw stones up, but never a cocoa-nut did the monkeys throw back at us!

So we bought some at a price, a very small price indeed, and I for one enjoyed seeing them in their green fresh state; when we got home to our railway carriages, that had come on for us from Mysore to Seringapatam, we had their tops slashed off with an axe: then put a long tumbler, mouth down over the hole and upset the two, and so got the tumbler filled with the water from the inside and drank it. We'd have drunk anything we were so thirsty: so I will not offer an opinion as to its quality, more than that it was distinctly refreshing. The sh.e.l.ls and husks were then split open, and we sc.r.a.ped the creamy white off the inside of the soft sh.e.l.l with a piece of the rough green husk and ate it and made believe it was delicious!

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As the sun is setting we cross the Cauvery River again, leaving Seringapatam because it is said to be so malarial that it is unwise to spend the night there.... The river is golden, the rocks violet, and the sky above purple and vermilion; herons' scraik and duck are on the move, almost invisible against the dark palms and bushes and shadowy banks--I am not superst.i.tious, but I think there were ghosts about, st.u.r.dy fellows in old-fashioned uniforms; I should like to have held converse with them.

MYSORE.--We got back to Mysore after dark.

Our two homes are gently shoved into a siding, and before you can say knife, our servants are spreading the table beside the carriage on the sand by lamplight; there are flowers on the table, silver, linen, and bra.s.s fingerbowls for four--the dinner prepared between Seringapatam and here _en route_! R. having made final arrangements with his people for a long hot day's work to-morrow, we fall to; needless to say we do not get into regulation evening kit, but the regulation warm bath before dinner was there all in order, even in such limited s.p.a.ce!

We left all windows open on the road here, so to-night hope we have got rid of all the malarial infecting mosquitoes of Seringapatam--those here are bad enough.

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... Work done, one sketch as above--catalogue misleader, "Dinner on the Line;" or would a "Meal on the Track" be less descriptive?--Mind stuffed with those "erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions,"

which, according to, and with the approval of Mr Aberich Mackay, the "Anglo-Indian" hastens to throw away; and which I, not being in the least Anglo-anything, wish most sincerely I could keep!

CHAPTER XIX

TO ARTISTS

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Channapatna.--This is the third station south of Bangalore. It is just the place for an artist to come to to paint, and a mere step from Bombay. There's a Dak bungalow where he could put up, a charming place in a compound, with a servant in attendance. He'd just have to pack his sticks, take a second or third-cla.s.s ticket on say the Ma.s.sagerie--for an artist to be honest must be frugal--pick up a _Boy_ in Bombay at twenty to thirty rupees a month, and once out here there's little to spend money on but the bare cost of living.

Almost no one comes this way to stop, so he could probably have the bungalow almost as long as he liked, personally I'd have a tent so as to be absolutely independent. Then for subjects, there's a wealth within arm's reach; village bazaar pictures every ten yards, and round about cattle and ruins, temples, moresque and Hindoo, palms and jungle trees, graceful figures of women and men. Not particularly nice people, I should say, but certainly picturesque and polite, with some lovely children. The little ones are nude, prettily shaped and brown and dusty as the bloom on fruit, and with such black eyes and wavy hair, the blackest black, with a polish, and very long eyelashes over dark eyes.

Their faces seem refined and well shaped till they laugh or shout, when the lizard throat and regular monkey teeth show a little.