IT can hardly be said with literalness that one enjoys India. I had not expected to enjoy it, and it proved itself, despite its color and picturesqueness, quite as melancholy and depressing a country as I had thought it would be; but so absorbingly interesting, so packed with problems, so replete with miracles accomplished by alien rule, so ripe with possibilities, that one soon overlooked the unnecessary hardships and discomforts of travel—travel as plain and primitive as in the Klondike, or as if the country had been conquered only within this decade.
The surprises, the contrasts, and the contradictions administer perpetual shock and mental stimulus, and the unexpected continually confronts one. Never have I suffered with cold as in India. Not a snake did I see or hear of in the cold-weather, tourist season, save in zoölogical gardens or snake-charmers' baskets, and the tigers were likewise caged.
There are so many Indias that no one person can know them all, and the Winter India which the tourist sees during the cold-weather weeks is not the real one which the Anglo-Indian knows the year around. The military man, the civilian officer, the missionary, planter, and merchant has each his own India and view-point; and the British visitor, who is passed from home to home by the endless chain of Anglo-Indian hospitality, sees and thinks differently from the other tourists who suffer the drear hotels, the dak banglas, and the railway-station rooms.
The worst hotels in the world are those of India, and a British traveler has truthfully written: "You will enjoy your traveling in India if you have so many friends there that you need never put foot in a hotel. If you have not, you had better go somewhere else." Each winter the peninsula holds a growing number of surprised and resentful tourists, who, whether they land at Bombay or Calcutta, usually conclude that the shortest route across India is the best one. One month or six weeks is the average stay; and very few tourists ever go to the hills for the summer and come back to the plains for a second cold-weather season of travel. The average tourist sacrifices itineraries without compunction, and lives to warn away aged and invalid tourists and to convince those with weak lungs and impaired digestions that death waits in Indian hotels.
The glamour of the East does not often or for long enthrall one while touring Hindustan. Later it asserts itself, reveals its haunting charm; and then, be it months or years afterward, he "hears the East a-callin'." He forgets the ice in the bath-tubs at Agra and Delhi, the bitterly cold nights in drafty, dusty, springless cars, and in visions he sees only "the sunshine an' the palm-trees an' the tinkly temple bells," the brilliantly costumed people, and the miracles of architecture scattered so lavishly from end to end of the empire.
A new India for the tourist will date from the great durbar at Delhi in 1903, and India, which has been a winter preserve for visiting English, will be virtually discovered and opened to a wider clientele, made as possible and fit for luxurious travel as Egypt. Equally this day of cheap travel and cheap living will vanish as completely as on the Nile.
For one to announce that he will spend a winter in India is hardly more definite or precise than to say that he will winter in Europe. India is a very large country,—several large countries,—since it equals in area and population all of Europe outside of Russia; and one travels the nineteen hundred miles of its extent from south to north through as many political divisions as there are great divisions of Europe, and differing as greatly in climate, physical features, and inhabitants. The Spaniard does not differ more from the Laplander than the sooty Tamil from the blue-eyed Afridi, the weak Bengali from the fighting Rajput or the fierce Sikh. Besides the thirteen provinces under British rule, there are six hundred and fifty native states; but only two hundred of them are of great importance, since native states range in size from Hyderabad, the size of Italy, to single villages in Kathiawar and tiny valleys in the Himalayan foot-hills, empires two miles square.
The census of 1901 gave a total of 294,360,356 inhabitants—five times as many Hindus as Mohammedans, and one hundred and nine times as many natives as English. The fourteen distinct races follow eight forms of religious belief, and speak some two hundred and forty languages and three hundred dialects; all legislative acts are published in English, Persian, Bengali, and Hindustani—and then only one man in ten can read. The permanence of British rule and the safety of British interests lie in this diversity of race, language, government, and religion. In division is strength, in discord is stability, since their race hatreds, jealousies, animosities, and antipathies would never permit a native leader to be acceptable to all the native malcontents, and patriotism or any national spirit is as lacking as the sense of those words, and of even the word for gratitude. With no common language or religion, no national feeling, in this congress of nations, one may paraphrase a certain interrogative and exclaim: "The Indians! Who are they?"
One fifth of the human race dwells between the Himalayas and the ocean; the records of their civilization go back for three thousand years, and history has been written upon history on those plains. Rice—two hundred and ninety-five kinds of rice, called by as many names in as many tongues—and pulse are the staple food of this great agricultural people, drought and famine the lot of some state or province each year, with plague and cholera seldom absent. Two great famines and the continual ravages of the bubonic pest greatly reduced the population during the last decade of the past century, the decrease in the native states being many times greater than in the British provinces. Increased areas of irrigation and cultivation have made it possible for the increasing millions to live—to half live, according to European standards, for the Indian coolie or agricultural worker is lowest in the scale of living and wages and in standard of comfort of any Asiatic. Great calamities and scourges afford the only relief from over-population,—a population in which the women are in deficit to the number of six millions, and their illiteracy so great that only one woman in one hundred and sixty can read.
All these diverse races and peoples are picturesque to look upon, with their graceful draperies of brilliant colors and the myriad forms of turbans; but they are not an attractive, a winning, a sympathetic, or a lovable people. They are as antipathetic and devoid of charm as the Chinese, as callous, as deficient in sympathy and the sense of pity as those next neighbors of theirs in Asia, and as impossible for the Occidental to fathom or comprehend,—an irresistible, inexplicable, unintelligible repulsion controlling one. India vexes one sadly because of the irrational, illogical turns of the Indian mind and character, the strange impasses in the Indian brain, the contradictions of traits; and, because of the many things he cannot account for or reach solution of, he quits the country baffled and in irritation—forever the great gulf yawning between the Occidental and the Asiatic. "East is East, and West is West."
Not one of the innumerable tongues that he hears spoken by the common people in the bazaars falls musically on the ear, and beyond the numerals and a few utility words he is little tempted to dabble even with Urdu, the camp language, the lingua franca of the upper part of the peninsula. Jao! (Begone!) is the first word he learns and most constantly uses, the last syllable uttered on leaving.
From the babel of tongues, with no common alphabet, has come a confusion of spelling, and the modern or Hunterian method, although officially adopted by the government in 1880, does not enjoy general acceptance and use in India. Sir William Hunter gave years to investigating and recording local usages, to transliterating from Sanskrit and the vernacular the geographic names of the peninsula, and the publication of his great Gazetteer should have ended the confusion of nomenclature. Many of his departures were too radical for the older Anglo-Indians to accept—banglawas not the same as bungalow to them, kuli did not represent coolie, nor pankha the cooling punka; and five, eleven, and seventy-two ways of spelling a single place-name continue in common use—three distinct systems of spelling and local usage still prevailing, often in determined opposition to the Hunterian method. The first American authority, which is followed in this volume, does not wholly accept Sir William Hunter's decisions. The new method will ultimately prevail, but with another generation.
HE monkeys built a bridge for Rama to cross to Ceylon, and sections of the causeway by which Adam traversed the Palk Strait remain as evidence of his good fortune on tour; but for us there was the worst of many bad "B. I." boats, and a night of never to be forgotten misery, disgust, and discomfort on the Gulf of Manaar's deceptive waters. Of all dream nights in the tropics, none matched that night on which we coursed slowly along the south shore of Ceylon, from Colombo westward. Enormous stars pulsed in an intense indigo sky, the moon rose and, streaming across a summer sea, made a heaven above, beneath, and far around us. In the midst of this silvery world floated the odorous, untidy coasting steamer, from whose decks we instinctively lifted our skirts by day, and across which by dark sped myriads of enormous brown roaches. The dark boxes of cabins rustled with these fleeing insects when a light was brought, and we retreated to spend the night in deck chairs.
Some cross current in that pent-up pocket of Manaar makes it a rival of the English Channel for nausea; but at daylight the ship anchored in shallow, gray-green waters seven miles off the low-lying coast of the Indian peninsula—"India's coral strand"—and for two hours it rocked there more fully to complete the misery of two hundred coolie passengers, heaped together on the forward deck like so much cargo. It was slow work disembarking these limp folk, who fell prone in every stage and attitude of misery fore and aft on the reeling tender. A greasy bench was reserved for us amidships, fairly touching the boilers, and, after inhaling steam and engine grease for an hour, we reached the snow-white beach. Inky-black cargo coolies in red and white draperies filed up and down the sandy shore and the narrow pier of Tuticorin, and there was local color to spare; color, too, in the Custom-house, where an aldermanic black official, with an exaggerated sausage of a turban linked around his caste-marked brow, received us with unctuous gravity, listened to our declaration that we had neither spirits, ammunition, nor firearms, and let us go with our unopened luggage, free to wander at will from that furthest end of the empire to the uttermost mountain wall, without official interference or question, welcome without passport or permit, free from espionage and annoyance: a liberty of entrance, a courteously opened door, that covers the American tourist with chagrin as he contrasts it with the landing at any of his own ports.
TAMIL CHILDREN
The Tamil people, ebony black, inky black, sooty black, tall and spare to emaciation, lilted past us on the thin, spindle legs of storks. A mountain of red peppers was heaped in one white square, and scores of the blackest Tamil women, in pepper-red draperies and much silver jewelry, slowly walked and worked around its edges. It was too theatrical, too barefacedly a color tableau set to catch the tourist eye, and I was convinced that it lasted only for that half-hour. The primitive hotel facing the railway station was but a loge looking upon the white roadway of a stage, where a specially engaged troupe of tall Tamils and noble white sacred bullocks paraded for our delight. When the train came in there was bedlam drama at the station's street door; then all the black troupe made exit and melted away to distance and shade; there was an interval, an entr'acte, and we went over and behind the scenes for a while.
The station-master was black, the telegraph operator was shades blacker, and an uncut emerald, swinging from the upper rim of one ear, held me with a great fascination while he skimmed the handful of despatches. First and last, and all of the time, in Indian travel, one telegraphs, and then sends more telegrams ahead, to any and every person connected with his future movements. One telegraphs to dak banglas, to station rooms and hotels, that he is coming; to station-masters that he shall want sleeping accommodation on certain trains; to local guides to secure their services; to high priests, magistrates, commissioners, and commandants that he wishes to see certain temples or sacred treasuries of jewels; and—the government telegraphs being moderate in price—one may "wire" away as recklessly as an American railway president for a comparative trifle.
The Tuticorin station walls were hung with notices and framed regulations, and there was posted a formidable black list of fines and punishments judicially awarded; the offender and his offense paraded to all who travel. Pattu This and Moolie That were fined "for letting their cattle stray and be killed on the track"; another had been caught "riding on the trucks without a ticket"—presumably some passengers, having tickets, do ride on the trucks. They run the Indian railways for the good of the stock-holders evidently, and receivers of unhappy railways in America might learn lessons of economy in this land of want, for this is only a periodical advertisement which I cut from a Calcutta paper:
EAST INDIAN RAILWAY
Tenders for the right of picking cinders from ashpits and pumping engines during the twelve months ending 31st March ——
Tenders will be received at the office of the Controller of Stores, East Indian Railway, Calcutta, up to noon of Thursday, the 14th February ——, for the right of picking cinders from ashes removed from ashpits and pumping engines throughout the line during the twelve months from 1st April to 31st March ——.
Form of tender, embodying full particulars, can be had on payment of Re. 1 to the Company's Chief Paymaster, Calcutta, or to the Storekeepers at Asansol, Jamalpur, Dinajpur, Allahabad and Cawnpore, to whom applications, with remittance, should be addressed. Applicants are also referred to the hand-bills posted at railway stations.
All other payments, including a deposit of Rs. 100 as earnest money, will have to be made direct to the Company's Chief Paymaster in Calcutta, whose receipt alone will be recognized, and no payment in respect thereof will be received in the Store Department. Hoondees and stamps will not be accepted.
The Company will not be bound to accept the highest, or any, tender, and reserves the right to accept any tender in part only.
By order,
J. OATES,
Controller of Stores.
Calcutta.
We had heard much of the luxury of Indian railway travel, of the roomy compartment and dressing-room that came to the holder of a first-class ticket without extra charge. We found that the roomy compartment was destined for four people, and contained two long leather-covered seats, or couches, along the side of the ear, with two hanging berths that could be dropped at night. The seats had no springs and no backs, unless one chose to lean against the single, rattling window-pane, that lifted by a strap like a carriage window. The cast-iron fittings in the dressing-room were ruder and more primitive than those of any American emigrant car, and when the train began its deliberate progress, we found that the body of the car swung so low, so nearly rested on the trucks, that we were jolted and shaken and deafened, as if in a coal-car, and covered with the dust of the road-bed. Nothing different or better was found, save once, in any part of India, When night came, a feeble oil-lamp was introduced through the roof, that made it possible to distinguish outlines and large objects, but not to read.
The train jogged along northward through a flat, cultivated country, with aloe and thorn hedges inclosing the tracks. After the rank greenness of Ceylon, these dusty fields of the dry season seemed poor and sterile. The train halted near mud villages, and the station platforms were covered with lean and leisurely black folks in red and white cotton draperies, standing at ease, their foreheads so dotted and striped with red, white, and ocher caste-marks, those ciphers, crests, and hall-marks of their creed, that they looked like so many painted red Indians of our West on the war-path. There was the usual station bedlam when the train drew up in darkness at Madura, and we followed a Tamil leader out to blacker darkness across the tracks to the dak bangla. The coolie who carried the bearer's tin trunk on his head stumbled over tree roots and finally struck a branch overhead. There was a crash, a bang, and a wreck of Tamil property, and then a flood of Tamil language, as David, our venerable traveling servant, poured out his wrath on the whining offender, who had been bruised and dented a little himself.
The dak bangla was Spartan in its simplicity, the government providing only beds, chairs, tables, and bath-tubs, the stern necessities of comfort in a hot climate. The stillness was as intense as the darkness all night, and after the chota hazri (little breakfast) of the Indian dawn we drove three miles across awakening Madura—a city of low, white houses, with green cocoa-palms and broad banana leaves the only strong color notes. The white houses were dusted and clouded with the red earth surrounding them, all dilapidated and in need of repair, of fall cleaning and whitewash. All Madura was awakening at that dewy hour,—tousled folks who came to the doors, yawned like alligators, stretched their leans arms in air, and scratched their heads vigorously. Men lounged face down on charpoys, or string-beds, or lolled on the high shelves built in the alcoves beside the house doors, and chatted with neighbors who had also spent the night in the open; babies sprawled on the warm red earth, and pious women traced religious symbols in white chalk on the red thresholds. Every door had its sect-mark, its religious symbol and monogram, as much as the foreheads of the people. Every blank wall, too, was plastered over with flat manure cakes, the common and universal fuel of the country, which one sees in process of manufacture and use from end to end of the empire; a fuel whose rank smoke can be detected in everything one eats and drinks in India, from the earliest tea and toast of the morning to the final rice pudding and coffee at night; a fuel whose use deprives the fields of their natural enrichment and adds to the general poverty; a fuel whose manufacture—the gathering, kneading, and shaping into flat cakes to be slapped against a wall to dry—is such ignoble work that rarely any but women are employed in the unending task.
After these early morning sights in the streets, the fantastic Teppa Kulam was a bit of fairyland, a great tank inclosed in a striped red and white stone parapet, with a dazzling marble platform in its center upholding the most fanciful little white coroneted temple, the glorified pavilion of a confectioner's dreams, four mites of lesser pavilions reflected from each corner of the platform. We drove down shady lanes, past the elephant stables, to the garden of the English judge to see the great banian tree, whose main trunk, over seventy feet in circumference, is surrounded by a hundred lesser trunks and newly rooted filaments—a leafy hall of columns, measuring one hundred and eighty feet across.
THE GREAT GOPURA MADURA TEMPLE
These gopuras loom and dwindle away toward the sky in such a way as to make all things seem toys, and the people pygmies. One such monument would be architectural fame for any city, but Madura's rich shrine is protected by nine such soaring, pyramidal sky-scrapers, the four in the outer wall nine stories in height. These most ornamental of defensive constructions begin with door-posts of single stones, sixty feet in height, and rise, course upon course, carved with rows of gods and goddesses, peacocks, Hulls, elephants, horses, lions, and a bewildering entanglement of symbolical ornament all colored and gilded, diminishing with distance until the stone trisul at the top, two hundred and fifty feet in air, looks like the finest jeweler's work. This great shrine of Shiva and his fish-eyed consort is a labyrinth where one easily wanders a whole morning. The anteroom or vestibule of the temple is a long hall or choltry, an open pavilion divided by four rows of most elaborately carved columns, where the king used to receive the annual visits of Shiva—a miserable little black image. Neither kings nor idols occupied it then, but a legion of shopkeepers were gathered there, who vaunted their goods and pushed their wares upon us with fury and zeal—cloth, cotton, lace, brass, glass, perfumes, incense, and fruits. One spectacled merchant was casting up his accounts in a ledger made of strips of talipot palm leaves, an orthodox fashion as old as writing. Others pressed upon us pieces of filmy, gold-bordered Madras muslins, eight yards of which are required for a turban or a woman's sari. There were none of the ancient India muslins, those "floating mists," or "webs of the air," of which one has heard but never sees in this day of Manchester piece goods, steam-mills, and spindles.
Our Tamil servant, being a Christian, would not enter the heathen temple, so consigned us to a high-caste Brahman draped superbly in a white sheet, and striped between his eyebrows with the frowning mark of Shiva. Inside the temple compound, every forehead was freshly painted, breasts and arms striped and smeared with other hall-marks of piety. The black images were streaming with oil and butter, garlanded with chains of marigolds, and surrounded by abject worshipers. In that temple one may fully realize what heathenism and idolatry really are. One meets there the India of the Sunday-school books, and is appalled with the seeming hopelessness of the missionary's task, of the impossibility of ever making any impression upon such a people, of coping with such superstition. Yet the American Mission in Madura is one of the largest and most successful in India, and in this southern presidency one fifth of the people are Christians. Whole villages even are Christian, Syrian, Nestorian, and early Jesuit missionaries having labored there since the third and fourth centuries.
We could look down dark temple corridors to darker shrines, where faint lights glimmered and the highest-caste Brahmans were tending the images of Shiva and Minakshi. Every May these idols are paraded in state to another part of the temple, and the gold and silver chariots and palanquins, the jeweled elephant trappings, and all the treasury of gems belonging to the shrine are brought to light. The Madura temple jewels are among the finest in southern India, and one sees them by special permit, and afterward pays a fee for the cleansing of the jewels. Despite the rupees and rupees that pour in during the cold-weather season of tourists' defilement, no one has ever seen the famous sapphires and big pearls when they were not greasy and gummed over from much tourist and Brahman handling. Other famous treasures are a ruby-covered scepter, three feet long; several pairs of golden shoes and gauntlets coated with rubies; and a head-dress fringed with tallow-drop emeralds.
The famous Hall of a Thousand Columns does not contain nearly that many columns or carved pillars, and, despite the miracle of stone- worker's art lavished on them, and Fergusson's praises, it was disappointing. The tank in the heart of the labyrinth, a water court or quadrangle, was most picturesque with the crowds descending the steps to purify themselves in the water, where broken reflections of the great gopuras wavered across the thick and oily liquid. Sacred elephants came shuffling across sunny courts, their bells, swinging by long ropes over their embroidered trappings, clanging an alarum. Having returned from the river with the gold lotas filled with water for the daily bath of the goddess, they stood at ease in a shady hall, swinging their painted trunks and shifting their weight from one foot to the other. At the word of command, the hugest of them tossed his trunk in salute, made a court courtesy, and, nosing the ground, picked up the tiniest silver three-anna piece. The elephants flicked their flanks with fly-brushes of green twigs as they stood guard benignly over the hall where jewelers were hammering, welding, and carving gold and silver ornaments. Veiled women sat around a merchant of cheaper gauds, who, with a small prentice boy, cracked or filed off the old bracelets and soldered on the new.
DETAIL OF GOPURA MADURA TEMPLE
E rumbled and jolted along all that hot afternoon over a monotonous, dry brown plain of parched fields and thorn hedges. There was uproar in the forward part of the train as it left Dindigal station, a hundred voices clamored and shrieked, and a hundred heads hung from the windows of the third-class cars. The train halted, men leaped from it and ran back, while all on the station platform ran up the track toward a small object beside the rails. The station-master came on toward the train, holding fast to a lean little black imp, who was struggling to release himself and fairly bursting with wrath. An excited woman, wailing and declaiming with uncovered face, leaned from a forward car window, talking to an excited group on the ground. At last, an oily babu came to tell us that the small boy had "had a dispute with his mother," and, not wishing to leave Dindigal, had jumped out of the window. "His fearful mother had thought him killed," said the babu, but at sight of the lost heir her fear gave way to fury. She raved and ranted like an Indian Bernhardt as she leaned from the window, unveiled, talking to the station officers; and the small boy talked back to everybody, until he was suddenly lifted by the back, like a kitten, and handed through the window to "his fearful mother's" arms. "Because of his youth they will not arrest him," said the babu; and, from the shrieks that came from that compartment, there was no need for the law to add aught to the chastisement of the barefaced, nose-ringed mother.
We were in the heart of the tobacco country, and Trichinopoli in these modern days is as much a synonym for cheroots as Dindigal. Samuel Daniel, the local guide, who claimed us in the darkness of Trichinopoli station, had the advertisement of his own cigar factory on the back of his card, and everywhere we saw and smelled the local cheroot. We slept in the travelers' rooms in the Trichinopoli station, after dining at a table trailed over with bougainvillea vines and set with glasses of great double hibiscus. Trains rumbled by all night, the mosquitos sang a deafening chorus, and at sunrise we sped across another city of dirty white houses, whose inhabitants were just waking and scratching, and whose Brahman families were marking the door-sills and themselves for the day, the houses' toilet as necessary as their own.
The rock of Trichinopoli, exactly as it looked in old geography pictures, loomed ahead; and after a few turns in the narrow streets we came to the carved entrance of the staircase, tunneled up through the solid rock to temples on the side and summit. Two elephants went past on their way to the river to fill the sacred water-vessels, and we started to climb the two hundred and ninety steps worn slippery with the tread of generations of barefooted worshipers and painted with the perpendicular red and white stripes of Shiva, Our elderly, pompous guide was voluble, measured, and minute, and permitted no trifling nor omissions. Samuel Daniel talked like Samuel Johnson, using the grandiloquent, polysyllabic literary language of the eighteenth century. We had engaged him to show us the sights, and he did it thoroughly. "Here is the place where many hundreds of people were crushed to death in the dark of the afternoon of a festival in 1849," he said. Since then, the British government has cut windows in the rock, placed lamps, and forbidden climbing after four o'clock. At one landing we found a group of little boys sitting before a greasy, black image of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, receiving instruction from a Brahman teacher; at another landing a high priest stood statuesque in yellow robes, the sacred white Brahman thread and bead on his neck, his forehead smeared with ashes; and at last we came out to the air at a small shrine on an outer shelf of the rock, where we had a far-reaching view of the level plain. After one more tunnel staircase we gained the open summit, climbed a last pinnacle, and found ourselves two hundred and thirty-six feet above the city, that lay like a relief-map at our feet, the fortress-like gopuras of the Srirangam temples rising from green groves southward, A little temple to Ganesha crowns the rock, the goal of the breathless pilgrimage. Halfway down the staircase, we were deafened by the flutes and flageolets of the priests and flag-bearers toiling up with water-jars just brought from the river. The sacred elephants at the foot of the stairs saluted us with lifted fore feet and waving trunks, rubbing their foreheads as they begged, plainly demanding a "prissint," after the custom of the country.
It was a short drive of three miles down to the temple of Vishnu at Srirangam, on an island in the dry bed of the Kaveri. This, the largest temple in southern India, is on a magnificent scale, its fifteen gopuras so many marvels of architecture; the greatest of them falling short of its intended three hundred feet by the interruption of building during the French and English wars of the eighteenth century, when the French intrenched themselves at Srirangam and mounted cannon on the gopuras. The outer, inclosing wall of the temple measures three thousand feet each way, and within that lies a first quadrangle of bazaars. A second gopura admits to a quadrangle where the three thousand high-caste Brahmans of the temple dwell. We drove on through a third and a fourth gopura, in one passage disputing right of way with a temple elephant, who backed out before our brougham, and, with the courtesy of a well-bred creature, swept his trunk and lifted a fore foot in apology. The last gateway had great teak doors, and the doctor of the temple and director of the Srirangam government hospital met us there; also the council of priests and five huge elephants, their foreheads striped with the same yellow and white tridents of Vishnu as their piously frescoed keepers. We saw the famous Hall of the Horse Columns, where single blocks of granite are as intricately carved as wood or ivory, and we saw the other curiosities of the stone-cutter's art, serried columns displaying the many incarnations of Vishnu. We saw, too, the Hall of a Thousand Columns—nine hundred odd shabby, whitewashed pillars only—and from the roof we were given a glimpse of the golden cupola covering the shrine of the sacred image— the identical image brought by Rama in the age of fable, and which grew fast to the ground when left for a moment. They were then preparing for the great mela or festival of early December, when forty thousand pilgrims assemble, crowds spending day and night in the temple for three weeks.
We were shown to a last pavilion, given armchairs before a table, the five elephants were stationed in line across the entrance, and fierce-foreheaded Brahmans multiplied. Strings of keys clanged on the table, five clumsy wooden chests were lugged in, five padlocks yielded to blows and wrenches, and the table was heaped with riches; the feast of jewels was spread, and a flood of color and light illuminated the shadowy, pavilion. Gold armor and ornaments and utensils incrusted with jewels were heaped on the table and handed us to examine, until one wondered if any more rubies, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds, or pearls were left in southern India. Gold helmets, crowns, breastplates, gauntlets, brassards, belts, necklaces, bracelets, anklets, were sown with rubies of thumb-nail size, with sapphires and diamonds seeded between, and fringed with pearls and uncut emeralds. Plain gold salvers, water-bottles, gourds, and bowls had neither value nor interest in our eyes after the play of gems. Even the Prince of Wales's gold salver, inscribed "Dec. 11th, 1875, "to commemorate his visit to the temple, seemed dull and commonplace. Far better was the gold breastplate fringed with tallow-drop emeralds, which he also gave as a souvenir of his visit to this great shrine of Vishnu. There were several Vishnu tridents in diamonds, and jeweled feathers trembling with diamond fringes; turban ornaments in which jeweled birds held great drops of rubies and emeralds in their beaks; a jeweled umbrella-stick with an inch-long sapphire for its ferrule, a crust of rubies for its handle, and a fringe of tinkling bo-leaves edged with pearls. Four great wings of head-ornaments covered with jewels had been given by a pious beggar, who had gathered more than fifty thousand rupees in alms to spend for such gifts to the gods and gauds for the temple, his stones better cut and set and of better quality than any others in the treasury. Strings and strings of pearls— pearls strung alone or alternating with balls of emerald, ruby, or carved gold—slipped through our hands to weariness. Our eyes were sated with splendor and color when, as a climax, they produced a fine bit of gold carving, representing a religious procession, the idol in the state chair cut from a large ruby, the tiny face, the drapery, and the many ornaments most cleverly done.
INDIAN LOTAS
Samuel Daniel, our guide with the tobacco factory attached, was radiant with the success of the whole morning. Elated from his converse with Brahmans, doctors, and tahsildar, he dropped so much architectural and historical information about Chidambram, Conjeveram, and Mahabalipur, that we said: "Why, you must have read Fergusson?"
"Yes, your ladyship. I have the book. Ten rupees."
"Then you had better go with us as guide."
"Yes, your ladyship," and he went and made our way so plain, so smooth and interesting, that we compared all other guides in India with him to their detriment.
A Catholic priest in cool white robes tiffined also at the station, and told of some of the great successes in mission work in the south; how whole villages have become Christian when the priest permits them to retain their caste. "It is among our converts, or in places where we have worked before them, that your Protestant missionaries have most success," he said.
From the rock of Trichinopoli we had seen the great pagoda tower of Tanjore on the horizon, and as we rumbled the thirty miles across the Kaveri plain in the early, showery afternoon it rose in height as we advanced, and the train stopped fairly in its shadow. Leaving David to watch the luggage at the station, Samuel Daniel hurried us to the temple gate and under the two gopuras to the striped inner court, where the thirteen-story vimana, or tower, of Shiva tapers away until its great trisul seems to touch the very sky.
"Ah! you see here the cleverosity of the Old World builders and the numerosity of their carvings," said Daniel, proudly.
After the French occupied the temple as a fortress in 1777, it was never purified or sanctified again, and the deserted court was a contrast to the other temples we had seen. Two barefooted priests slipped silently across an angle of the cloisters, the colossal stone bull crouched under its grease and garlands, and only the fluttering parrakeets gave any sign or sound of life to the vast inclosure. We gazed in wonderment at the court, the tower, and the exquisite little temple of Subrahmanya, the martial son of Shiva, on whose steps we met two glib, sightseeing babus, who began at once to upbraid us for the proselytizing work of the missionaries. The one with the largest Vishnu mark on his brow had graduated as a civil engineer at Calcutta University, but the exact sciences had not taught him to disbelieve in greasy images, or opened his eyes to any absurdities in his creed, and his torrent of words came like the flow of a phonograph. "Why do you come here to destroy our religion?" he pattered. I denied the charge. "Why do you wish us to give up our gods for your gods?" I denied the plural, and after the twittering parrakeet had followed us awhile, we left him shouting the rest of his set speech to the empty court.
It was a rest to find one heathen temple deserted, to be spared the oily Brahman guide, and to trace in peace the details of this most beautiful of Dravidian temples, the purest example of that style. The great vimana, or pagoda, thirteen stories in height, mounts like the gopuras of Madura, course upon course, carved over with figures and ornaments, two hundred feet to the ball at the peak—a granite mass weighing more than twelve tons, and which could have been placed there only by rolling it up an inclined plane more than a mile in length. In repairing the tower a few centuries ago, the sculptors introduced a face in one floral medallion that was not of any Hindu type. The local prophets said that it wore the features of the people who would conquer India, and it is easily recognized now as an admirable portrait of John Bright. We found Flaxman's beautiful tablet to the memory of Schwartz in the church where the great missionary preached. The church faces a tank where picturesque files of women with brass jars on their heads went up and down four separate flights of terrace steps, each for a special caste.
The elephants, which are kept "for the honor and glory of the palace," now that rajas ride in landaus and automobiles, were swaying uneasily at their posts in the palace courtyard, trumpeting and tossing trunk-loads of leaves and straw on their backs. We were shown the black and white marble durbar hall of the palace, and the library full of illuminated Persian books, and of precious Tamil manuscripts written on strips of palm leaves. When we had wandered through all the inner courts, such a train of guides, lackeys, ushers, keepers, sweepers, porters, and gardeners fawned with extended palms that even Samuel Daniel was dismayed, laid the coins on the flagstones, and walked away from the ensuing scene of combat. We were just in time to see the mahouts scramble to the elephants' necks as a fanfare of trumpets and two scarlet lancers heralded a landau holding two pale yellow, heavily jeweled grandchildren of the raja returning from a drive. A bearer with a red umbrella ran after them, the elephants saluted with trunk and foot, and the sad-faced princelings disappeared in the palace.
The railway station was as deserted as the temple court in the late afternoon, and we had the table brought out to the platform and enjoyed tea in the open air. A white tramp, a pure specimen of the genus hobo, the only one of his kind encountered in India, appeared silently with: "You are a European like myself, lady. Please give me a few rupees to get to Tuticorin." David and Daniel came running in alarm, and hastily swept table, books, chairs, and ourselves inside the refreshment-room and banged the doors, and the beery beggar slunk away to the native bazaar. The butler was decorating his white dinner-cloth with interlacing arabesques of black seeds dropped from a funnel, after which he arranged finger-bowls filled with black-eyed marigolds among his traceries and stood off to admire the effect. Again and again we marveled that the Hindu, with his gross stupidities and incompetencies, had yet been able so thoroughly to master the intricacies of an English dinner, the decoration of the table, the procession of the courses, the ceremony and decorum of it all, with little of the incongruity and inequalities, the mixed splendor and shabbiness, that mark everything of the Hindu's own.
T was our fine old Tamil Turveydrop, Samuel Daniel, who induced us to visit Chidambram after we had abandoned it in favor of Conjeveram, where the temple was said to be richer, the jewels more splendid. This artful one pictured "the cleverosity and numerosity of the sculptures," also "the numberlesses of the goddesses and the beauteousness of the temple's dancers, which makes it so popular for visitors," and our interest revived.
As necessary precedent to every move one makes in India, enough telegrams were sent to negotiate a treaty. We wired the Chidambram station-master to have conveyances ready the next midnight to take us the three miles to the dak bangla. We wired the bangla-keeper that we were coming, two beds strong. We informed the local magistrate and the high priest that we wished to make an offering to the temple and to celebrate in honor of the goddess with a great dance in the Hall of a Thousand Columns and to see the famous temple jewels. Last, we besought the section superintendent of the railway to reserve a compartment in the next midnight train that would bear us away from Chidambram.
With the remoteness and seeming isolation among the black faces one has no fear or concern in these Hindu communities, trusting implicitly to that safety and order guaranteed one wherever the British flag floats and Kaiser-i-Hind's initial letters grace official property. Else, when we stepped out on the lonely platform at Chidambram that rainy midnight, we would have thought twice before picking our way through sleeping pilgrims in the open waiting-room, and stowing ourselves away with every joint bent in a tiny box of a native cart, or "lie-down-bandy," for the ride into unknown blackness beyond. Daniel compressed himself with David and the larger luggage bundles into another small box on wheels, and the ponies spattered down a muddy road in the black shadows of overarching trees. Our driver had no turban, his hair was long and snaky, and the jerky motion of the bandy, and the driver's frequent flights out over the shafts to lead the pony by the bridle over bridges and around corners, sent those locks rippling down his back—and my back, too, as I sat hatless, crouched flat on the bandy floor behind him. After what seemed a long race through the reek and blackness, past sodden fields and through dreary mud hamlets, we came in under the shadows of the great trees surrounding the dak bangla.