From Edinburgh to India & Burmah Part 7

We swing round a curve south-westerly and into a tunnel and out again and up from the plain--up and up--high rocky hills on either side with bushes and trees growing amongst rocks; another Pa.s.s of Lennie, I'd like to call it, on a larger scale. Out of the tunnel, we look down a long valley to our right with little dried up fields all over the bottom of it, fading into distant haze. Then another black tunnel opening into grey rock, and on coming slowly out--we are climbing all the time one foot in forty-two--we again look down a valley miles away to our left, and we can see the station Karjat, from which we began this climb up the Bore Ghat.

The aspect of this country makes me think of sport; the rocky hills, dry gra.s.s, pools, and cover suggest stalking or waiting for game, but perhaps there is still too much evidence of people--however, I must get the gla.s.ses out and see what they will show up.

Kandala station--a white spot, the guard points out to us far above us--then into a tunnel, and out, and we are there. To our right are ridge beyond ridge of hill tops, stretching away into the sunset.

Reader, please draw a breath before this next paragraph.

"The length of the ascent is nearly 16 miles over which there are 26 tunnels with a length of 2,500 yards, eight viaducts, many smaller bridges. The actual height accomplished by the ascent is 1,850 feet, and the cost of constructing the line was nearly __600,000."

Fairly concentrated mental food, is it not? and only eight lines from one page of "Murray," and there are one hundred and six lines in a page, and six hundred and thirty nine pages in the book!!

The sun sets on our right beyond a plain of stubble fields and young crops and distant hills, and in the sky a rich band of gold, veined with vermillion, lies above a belt of violet, and higher still a star or two begin to glitter in the cold blue. To us newcomers, this first sunset we have seen in India in the open over the high plains filled us with new and almost solemn interest. But why the feeling was new or strange would be hard to say; sunsets the world over are alike in many ways, but the feelings stirred are as different as the lands and the people over which they set.

A little later we (I should say I, in this case) had quite an adventure at a dusky siding in this tableland of the Dekkan. As I hastened to our carriage a beautiful lady bowed to me, a stranger in a far land! And I bowed too, and said, "How do you do, we met on the _Egypt_ of course!"

and she said, "You are not Mr Browning!" When I agreed it was only "me"--she expressed some surprise, for she is shortly to visit my brother down the line at Dharwar, and her chaperone had just been staying there. One of us possibly remarked the world is small. Later we all foregathered in an excellent little dining-car on the S. M. R.[9]

line, and discussed family histories, and the incident made us feel quite at home. Everyone seems to know everyone else out here, and if they don't they very soon do, and all seem sworn to make the best of each other, and make things "go." It is so admirable; even though you may feel as a newcomer, a little uncomfortable crawling out of the sh.e.l.l of reserve you have brought all the way from home.

[9] Southern Maharatta Railway.

The air is much lighter up here than down in Bombay; even after a bustling day getting into train, travelling, and seeing a hundred miles of utterly new sights, we feel far less tired than after doing nothing in particular all day on the coast. We stop at a station, Kirkee, three and a half miles from Poona. Here, there is a glove left on the line by the editor of "Murray's Guide," to be picked up by some Scot or Irishman; I have not time just now. He says that Kirkee is interesting as being the scene of a splendid victory over Baji Rao II; his account is concentrated and interesting. The names of the officers mentioned in the paragraph referring to the victory are Scottish and Irish, and he calls it English, instead of British--a little more sand in the machinery of the great Imperial idea.[10]

[10] First condition Treaty of Union 1707:--

"I. That the two Kingdoms of England and Scotland shall, upon the first of May next ensuing the date hereof and for ever after, be united into one Kingdom by the name of Great Britain...."

_Mais en voiture!_--This narrow gauge on which we now are, is not half bad. We have a fore and aft carriage, the seats on either side we can turn into beds, and there is a third folding up berth above one of these. After the custom of the country, we have brought razais or thin mattresses, and blankets--an excellent custom, for it is much nicer turning into your own bedclothes at night in a train or hotel than into unfamiliar properties.

... How pleasant it is in this morning light after the night journey to look out on the rolling country. There are low trees, twelve to twenty feet high, with scrub between, and the varied foliage shows an autumnal touch of the dry season. Now we pa.s.s an open s.p.a.ce with a small whitewashed temple in the middle of a green patch of corn; a goatherd walks on the sand between us and it with his black and white flock; he is well wrapped up, head and all in cotton draperies, as if there was a chill in the morning air, but it looks and feels very comfortable to us in our carriage: the sky is dove coloured, streaked with pale blue. Now some women show in the crops, the corn stands high over them, and from this distance they are things of beauty. Their draperies are purple or deep blue, and their skins rich brown, set off by white teeth and the glint of silver bangles and bra.s.s pots. They have pretty naked children beside them. Every hundred yards or so there is something fascinatingly beautiful, so the early morning hours go past quickly.

Just before Belgaum Station, our delight in watching these new scenes is brought to a fine point by the arrival of a boy with tea and toast, all hot! Positively it is difficult to take it, for here comes a fort we must look at--miles of sloping coppery-coloured crenellated stone wall of moresque design. Graceful trees grow inside, and over its walls you see an occasional turbaned native's head, one is vivid yellow another rose; we pa.s.s so close we almost cross the moat, and the women stop washing clothes and look up. More park scenes follow, then market gardens and native cottages of dried mud, and we can see right into their simple domestic arrangements.

At Belgaum our friends of last night get off with their camp equipment, and I make a dive into a brand new suit in haste to bid them good-bye and _au revoir_, and as I make finishing touches, we steam away and the farewell is unsaid! These three lone ladies have gone to see jungle life; the eldest only recently lost her husband in the jungle--killed and eaten, by a tiger.

The soil in the railway cuttings gets gradually a deeper bronze colour as we go south, about Bombay it was grey or light yellow. Now it is from yellow ochre to red ochre, with a coppery sheen where it is weather-worn. The trees become higher and the glades more like Watteau or Corot scenes, but neither Watteau nor Corot ever saw more naturally beautiful tinted figures; their many coloured draperies are so faded and blended in the strong sun that it is difficult to tell where one coloured cloth begins and another ends.

At Londa we stop half-an-hour or so, and our Boy rolls up our blankets, and rugs, and we endeavour to concentrate attention on a dainty breakfast in a neat little restaurant car of which we are sole occupants. The car is made for two tables, each for four people, and a man and a boy, both very neatly dressed, cook and serve, so you see the line is not yet overrun, and it is still cheap, and comfortable. If I might be so bold as to criticise what you, my Elder Brother, may be responsible for, I'd suggest that the place to sleep on might be made a shade softer.--Yes, we are becoming effeminate, I know--we were becoming so alas, as far back as "the 45," when The M'Lean found his son with a s...o...b..ll for a pillow; still, we must go with the times, and even if the berths must be hard, at least let them be level. Please note, all soldier men who run railways in India, and receive my blessing in advance.

Our little waiter is a delightful study with his big turban and red band across it with the Southern Maharatta Railway initials in gold, white tunic, and trousers, and red sash and bare feet; and can't he wait neatly and quickly! We have figures to draw everywhere.--Here, within arm's length, at a station, are women porteresses, each a fascinating study of pose and drapery, and from a third cla.s.s carriage just pulled up, out gushes a whole family, the kids naked from the waist up, and the men almost the same from the waist down. The women are in waspish yellow and deep reds, and they group and chatter in the sun, then heave their baggage, great soft baskets, on their heads--the women do this, the men have turbans, so they can't, and away they all go smiling. But better still, in the shade, there's a group of men and women seated, putting in time eating from heaps of emerald green bananas and sanguine pomegranates--how I wish I could stay for hours to paint!

Out of Londa the trees get finer and taller, and you see real live bamboos in great ma.s.ses of soft grey-green, their foliage a little like willows at a distance. One cannot but think of big game; surely this is the place for sambhur if not for tiger: and there are trees like Spanish chestnuts with larger leaves and elms, and between the tall trunks are breaks of under cover, over which we get a glimpse now and then of rolling distant jungle and indigo blue hills against a soft grey sky.

Nacargali--Tavargatti--little stations one after the other all the way, a station about every six miles--still through bamboo forest--I think the bamboos must be 70 to 90 feet high. Now and then we pa.s.s glades with water. At one pool little naked boys and girls are herding cattle, white and cream coloured cows, and black hairless buffaloes, whose skins reflect the blue sky. The mud banks are brown and the water yellow, and there's bright green gra.s.s between the red mud and the soft green of the bamboos. Put in the little brown-skinned herds, one with a pink rag on his black hair, and that is as near as I can get it with the A.B.C., and there is not time nor sufficient stillness for paint.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

With pencil in my journal I have little hasty scribbles--one half done and the other begun. There is a group of women, with waistcloths only, standing on a half-submerged tree trunk in greenish water washing clothes, one stands the others squat, and beyond are cattle and bamboos.

Along the side of the track there are wild flowers, creepers, and thorns with little violet flowers, and others of orange vermilion, and every here and there are ant hills, three or four feet high, of reddish soil shaped like rugged Gothic spires or Norman towers. On the telegraph wire are butcher birds, hoopoos, kingfishers, and a vivid blue bird a little like a jay, the roller bird I believe. The king crow I am sure of--I saw and read about him in Bombay; he is the most independent and plucky little bird in India, fears nothing with wings! He is black, between the size of a swift and a blackbird, with a long drooping tail turned out like a black c.o.c.k's at the end. I don't think he troubles anyone unless they trouble him and his wife, then he goes for them head first, and the wife isn't very far behind and gets a dig in too. There are doves and pigeons galore, and just before we came to Dharwar across a clear s.p.a.ce there cantered a whole family circle of large monkeys! What a lovely action they have, between a thoroughbred's and a man's. They wore yellowish beards and black faces and black ends to their tails, which they carry high with a droop at the end.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Alnaver.--We pa.s.s iron trucks with native occupants--not bad looking--paler in colour I think than the natives at Bombay. Acres of cut dry timber, long bits and short bits, are here for the engine's fuel. The smoke of it makes a pleasant scent in the hot dry air. The country becomes a little more open and not quite so interesting perhaps.

Kambarganvi--flatter and less picturesque--nullahs, open ground and cattle, thin jungle on rolling ground extending to a distant edge of table land. We pa.s.s a pool full of buffalo, only their heads are visible above the muddy green water; on the sh.o.r.es and on their backs are little brown nude girls with yellow flowers round their necks; then Dharwar and the Elder Brother on the platform, and we heave a sigh of relief at the end of the first chapter of our Pilgrimage in India.

CHAPTER XIII

DHARWAR

Dharwar Station is not so unlike one we know within two and a half miles of the centre of Scotland. It is almost the same size but there is no village. Though not imposing, I understand it is the nerve centre of some 1,500 miles of The Southern Maharatta Railway.

As we pull up my brother, Colonel and Agent on the platform, remarks, "Well, here you are, you're looking well--have you any luggage?" and in a twinkling we are driving away, leaving the "little pick" of luggage to the boy to bring up leisurely. G.'s maid drives off in a princely padded ox cart or dumbie, and we get into a new modern victoria. I am not sure which is the most distinguished, perhaps the dumbie; it is at any rate more Oriental, and its bright red and blue linings, white hood, and two thoroughbred white oxen make a very gay turn-out.

The Agent's bungalow is wide-spreading, flat-roofed, with deep verandah supported on white-washed cla.s.sic pillars, and surrounded by a park.

There are borders of blooming chrysanthemums and China asters, and trees with quaint foliage, and flowering creepers about the house. The flower borders seem to tail away into dry gra.s.s and bushes and trees of the park, and that changes imperceptibly into dry rolling country with scattered trees and bushes.

Lunch is served by waiters in white clothes and bare feet, "velvet footed waiters" to be conventional, and there is a blessed peace and quietness about our new surroundings. For weeks past we have ever heard our fellows' voices all the day long; what a contrast is this quiet and elbow room to the crowd on the P. & O. and the gun firing and babel of Bombay.

... It is overcast and still; away to the east over the rolling bushy country are heavy showers, but at this spot trees and crops faint for water. We doze in the verandah and wake and doze again, and wonder how this silence--can be real, even the birds seem subdued. We notice E.H.A.'s friends are here in numbers, Mina birds, the Seven Sisters, King Crows, and one of his (E.H.A.'s) enemies comes in as I write, a yellow-eyed frog; he hops in on the matting and looks and looks--I like the unfathomable philosophy in its golden eye. And my brother stops reading Indian politics and calls me outside to see a Horn Bill--all beak, and little head or body to speak of, he sways on a leafless tree and scraiks anxiously for his friends; they are generally in companies of three or four. A little later, as I write beside a reading lamp in G.'s room, a lizard takes a position on the window, and out of the outer darkness comes a moth and lights on to the outside of the pane, and the lizard pecks at it--neither the moth nor the lizard understand gla.s.s--peck, peck, every now and then--trying to get through to the moth--how delightfully human--the perpetual endeavour to get Beyond, without the will or power to see the infinite reflections of the Inside.

As we speculate to-night as to where some of our neighbours on the "Egypt" may have got to by this time, the post comes in with letters from this one and the other. One is from Mrs Deputy-Commissioner. A few days ago we were altogether in Bombay, melting in the heat, and now we are towards the south of this Peninsula, and she writes from its farthest north: we are in a hot parched country, whilst she and the D.-C. are in camp, sitting over a huge fire of logs in a pine forest.

She writes, "To-morrow we enter a valley where five bears have recently been seen and pheasants abound," and the day after "we shall be at the top of the pa.s.s, 9,000 feet. Rosy snows and golden mists far below us melt into purple depths."... So this day's journal closes with pleasant thoughts of relatives and pleasant friends in many distant parts of this wide land.

... Sunday.--We arrived here on Friday--the silence is almost oppressive. Great grey clouds roll up from the east all day till evening, when they form solid bluish ranks; each cloud threatens rain which never falls. The stillness in the bungalow is only broken by the occasional cheep, cheep, cheep of the house lizard, a tiny little fellow that lives behind picture frames and in unused jugs and corners. His body is only about an inch and a half long, but his clear voice fills the large rooms and emphasies the silence. Outside it is as quiet; there is the c.h.i.n.k--c.h.i.n.k of the copper-smith bird, like a drop of water at regular intervals into a metal bowl.

The Colonel and G. rode at 8 A.M., and I biked. It is not such interesting country here as what we came through in the train--rolling, stoney, with friable red soil, and hard to ride on. Many dusty roads meet at all angles; along these you meet herds of buffalo and cows driven leisurely by boys or men. Some cows, of errant natures, have logs dangling by a rope from their necks amongst their feet; they can't go off very fast or far with the enc.u.mbrance. They stir up the dust as they go along, and it falls and lies on the children till their dark skins have a bloom like sloe-berries. There are all sorts of birds to look at--kites, crows, vultures, hawks, eagles; with these you can't expect to see game birds, though it looks an ideal country, though perhaps a little waterless, for pheasants and partridges. When I stop I see the side of the road swarms with insect life, ants of various, kinds, black and red, small and big, pegging along the level, and up and down trees, as if the world depended on each individual's particular bustling. There are white ant hills like ragged heaps of raw chocolate--very hard and strong. I don't know what they are built for--I must consider the matter like the sluggard some day, if I have time, or read about them if that is not a bigger order. What strikes you at first about the white ant is that you never see it unless you lay its works open. His hard-sun-baked protections run up the tree stems or wherever he goes and conceals and protects his soft, white, fleshy body, and if you prise this casing open you may see him getting away as fast as his little legs will take him; really he is a termite you know, like a "wood louse or worm," and not an ant. A wonder of the world is how he gets the liquid secretion to fasten the grains of sand together to make his earthen tunnels. If he goes to the top of a house to remove furniture or the like, he builds his tunnel all the way up; and in a thirsty land the top storey of a sun-bitten house does not seem the place to get water: but I must leave this subject to the disquisitions of men of more leisure and greater abilities, and proceed to make some observations on, and jottings of, the figures on the road. Here are women bringing up great round earthenware vases on their heads and little round bra.s.s bowls in their hands, going and coming from a muddy pool in the centre of a waste of dried mud. They go slowly, the walking is rough for bare feet, for the clay is hard and baked and pitted with cows' feet marks. They drink and wash their bowls in the dregs in the pond, the water already so dirty that a self-respecting duck would not swim in it, and wade about stirring up the mud, then fill their bowls and march away with it for domestic uses--this sounds bad, but it looks a great deal worse. The figures though are charming, with balanced bowl on head, and draperies blown into such folds as a Greek would have loved to model.... But their faces!--Phew! when you see them closely, are frightful!

It is difficult to catch their movement; they are so restless. All people who wear loose draperies seem to be so; witness Spanish women, and the Spanish type of women in our Highlands and Ireland, how they keep constantly shifting their shawls.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

... The Club in evening--a tiny club, quite nice after a quiet day in the bungalow. I was introduced to the five men there, who put me through my paces very gently; I just pa.s.sed I think, and no more. "Play bridge?--No. Billiards?--Not much." I began to feel anxious and feared they'd try cricket. "Tennis?--Yes, dote on tennis!" That smoothed things, and then we got on to shooting, and all went off at a canter.

One of my inquisitors, Mr Huddleston, had been in Lumsden's Horse (the Indian contingent in S. Africa), and said he had helped a young brother of mine out of action at Thaban' Chu.[11] Lumsden's Horse got left there and lost heavily. I knew this brother had been ridden off the stricken field on Captain P. Chamney's back under heavy fire, one of these V.C.

doings that were discounted in S. Africa, and knew that two other fellows rode on either side to steady the sanguinary burden. So here was one of the two, and I asked who the other was, and he said, "Trooper Ducat, but Powell mended your brother's head; didn't you meet him in the Taj Hotel in Bombay?" And I laughed, for I remembered the doctor of the Taj, a rather retiring man, who generally sat alone at a table in the middle of the great dining-room; and that whenever he had friends dining with him, and I looked up, I was safe to find either he or his friends looking across in my direction, why I couldn't make out. Now it was explained! He remembered mending a man's forehead that had been broken by a piece of sh.e.l.l, and concluded from the surname in the Hotel Book, and possibly family likeness, that I was the man, and naturally he would say to his friends, "Look you at that man over there--wouldn't think he had lost half his head with a pom-pom sh.e.l.l would you? but he did, and I mended it!--It's pretty well done, isn't it? You can hardly see a mark."

[11] At Battle of Houtneck.

... Then evening service in a tiny church, a quiet, monotonous, gently murmured lesson, and a few verses from the Old Testament about sanguinary battles long ago and exemplary Hebrew warriors--how soothing!

Doors and windows are wide open, and moths fly in and round the lamps from the blue night outside. The air is full of the rattle of the cicada, which is like the sound of a loud cricket, or the 'r--r' of a corncraik's note going on for ever and ever; and the house lizard in the church goes cheep--cheep--cheep every now and then. No one pays any attention to its loud sweet note. Rather pretty Eurasian girls play the organ and sing, and look through their fingers as they pray.

Then we are dismissed, and find ourselves out in the dark, and the longed for rain falling very lightly. The white dressed native servants are there with lamps and bring up the bullock carts, and ladies go off in them with the harness bells aringing. We have "The Victoria" of the station--and faith, barring the exercise, I'd as soon not walk! Did not Mr H. kill a great Russell viper at the club steps last night, and was not bitten, and so is alive to tell the tale to-day and to-morrow, and to show the skin, three feet long with a chain pattern down the back; the beast!--it won't get out of your path; lies to be trodden on, then turns and bites you, and you're dead in three minutes by the clock.

... To-day, Tuesday--could read a little--temperature down. Found it an entertainment listening to the voices of various callers in the centre hall of the bungalow, of which one half forms the drawing-room, the other half the dining-room. The bedroom doors open into this, and these doors are a foot off the ground, and fail to meet the top of the arches above them by about other two feet. The advantage of this I fail to see, further than that a convalescent or any other person who can't be bothered talking, can if he pleases, listen to others conversing; if, however, he prefers to sleep, he can't!

I got a glimpse of the gaily dressed callers through the transparent purdahs that separate my room on the outside from the verandah. They drove in white dumbies with white bullocks; the carts and harness glistened with vermilion, sky blue, and gold details; the driver, black of course, in livery, with a boy carrying a white yak's tail in black-buck's horn to brush away flies. I was sorry to miss seeing these kind people, but hope to get over the effect of sun, plus cold baths, and return their calls, and so increase my stock of first impressions of Indian life. "Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions," Mr Aberich Mackay calls them in his "Twenty-one days in India," that most amusing Indian cla.s.sic. "What is it these travelling people put on paper?" he adds. "Let me put it in the form of a conundrum. Q. What is it that the travelling M.P. treasures up and what the Anglo-Indian hastens to throw away? A. Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions. Before the eyes of the griffin, India steams in poetical mists, illusive, fantastic, and subjective." Crushing to the new comer, is it not. And he adds that his victim, the M.P., "is an object at once pitiable and ludicrous, and this ludicrous old Shrovetide c.o.c.k, whose ignorance and information leave two broad streaks of laughter in his wake, is turned loose upon the reading public." This is as funny as Crosland at his best, say his round arm hit at Burns, the "incontinent and libidinous ploughman with a turn for verse"--a sublime bladder whack! But listen also to the poor victim, Mr Wilfred Blunt, M.P., and what he has to say in the "Contemporary Review."