 This is chapter 53 of following the Equator. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Following the Equator by Mark Twain, chapter 53. Still in Benares. Another living God. Why things are wonderful. Sree 108. Utterly perfect. How he came so. Our visit to Sree. A friendly deity. Exchanging autographs and books. Sree's pupil. An interesting man. Reverence and irreverence. Dancing in a sepulcher. True irreverence is disrespect for another man's God, Putinhead Wilson's new calendar. It was in Benares that I saw another living God. That makes two. I believe I have seen most of the greater and lesser wonders of the world, but I do not remember that any of them interested me so overwhelmingly as did that pair of gods. When I try to account for this effect, I find no difficulty about it. I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us, it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get almost all our wonders at second hand. We are eager to see any celebrated thing, and we never fail of our reward. Just the deep privilege of gazing upon an object which has stirred the enthusiasm or evoked the reverence or affection or admiration of multitudes of our race is a thing which we value. We are profoundly glad that we have seen it. We are permanently enriched from having seen it. We would not part with the memory of that experience for a great price. And yet that very spectacle may be the taj. You cannot keep your enthusiasm down. You cannot keep your emotions within bounds when that soaring bubble of marble breaks upon your view. But these are not your enthusiasm and emotions. They are the accumulated emotions and enthusiasm of a thousand fervid writers who have been slowly and steadily storing them up in your heart day by day and year by year all your life, and now they burst out in a flood and overwhelm you, and you could not be a wit happier if they were your very own. By and by you sober down, and then you perceive that you have been drunk on the smell of somebody else's cork. Forever and ever the memory of my distant first glimpse of the taj will compensate me for creeping around the globe to have that great privilege. But the taj, with all your inflation of delusive emotions, acquired at second hand from people to whom, in the majority of cases, they were also delusions acquired at second hand. A thing which you fortunately did not think of, or it might have made you doubtful of what you imagined were your own. What is the taj as a marvel, a spectacle, and an uplifting and overpowering wonder compared with a living, breathing, speaking personage whom several millions of human beings devoutly and sincerely and unquestioningly believe to be a god, and humbly and gratefully worship as a god? He was sixty years old when I saw him. He is called Sree 108, Swami Bhaskarananda Saraswati. That is one form of it. I think that that is what you would call him in speaking to him, because it is short. But you would use more of his name in addressing a letter to him. Courtesy would require this. Even then you would not have to use all of it, but only this much. Sree 108, Madh Paramahansrapayrivra Jagacharya Swami Bhaskarananda Saraswati. You do not put Esquire after it, for that is not necessary. The word which opens the valley is itself a title of honor, Sree. The 108 stands for the rest of his names, I believe. Vishnu has 108 names which he does not use in business, and no doubt it is a custom of gods, and a privilege sacred to their order, to keep 108 extra ones in stock. Just the restricted name set down above is a handsome property without the 108. By my count it has 58 letters in it. This removes the long German words from competition. They are permanently out of the race. Sree 108, S. B. Saraswati, has attained to what among the Hindus is called the State of Perfection. It is a state which other Hindus reach by being born again and again, and over and over again into this world, through one reincarnation after another, attires some long job covering centuries and decades of centuries, and one that is full of risks too, like the accident of dying on the wrong side of the Ganges sometime or other, and waking up in the form of an ass, with a fresh start necessary, and the numerous trips to be made all over again. But in reaching perfection Sree 108, S. B. S., has escaped all that. He is no longer a part or a feature of this world. His substance has changed. All earthiness has departed out of it. He is utterly holy, utterly pure. Nothing can desecrate this holiness or stain this purity. He is no longer of the earth. Its concerns are matters foreign to him. Its pains and griefs and troubles cannot reach him. When he dies, Nirvana is his. He will be absorbed into the substance of the supreme deity and be at peace forever. The Hindu scriptures point out how this state is to be reached, but it is only once in a thousand years, perhaps, that a candidate accomplishes it. This one has traversed the course required, stage by stage, from the beginning to the end, and now has nothing left to do but wait for the call which shall release him from a world in which he has now no part, nor lot. First he passed through the student stage, and became learned in the holy books. Next he became citizen, householder, husband, and father. That was the required second stage. Then, like John Bunyan's Christian, he bade perpetual good-bye to his family, as required, and went wandering away. He went far into the desert and served a term as hermit. Next he became a beggar. In accordance with the rites laid down in the scriptures and wandered about India eating the bread of mendicancy. A quarter of a century ago he reached the stage of purity. This needs no garment. Its symbol is nudity. He discarded the waist-cloth which he had previously worn. He could resume it now, if he chose, for neither that nor any other contact can defile him. But he does not choose. There are several other stages, I believe, but I do not remember what they are. But he has been through them. Throughout the long course he was perfecting himself in holy learning and writing commentaries upon the sacred books. He was also meditating upon Brahma, and he does that now. White marble relief portraits of him are sold all about India. He lives in a good house in a noble great garden in Benares, all meat and proper to his dependous rank. Necessarily he does not go abroad in the streets. Deities would never be able to move about handily in any country, if one whom we recognized and adored as a God should go abroad in our streets. And the day it was to happen were known all traffic would be blocked and business would come to a standstill. This God is comfortably housed and yet modestly all things considered, for if he wanted to live in a palace he would only need to speak and his worshipers would gladly build it. Sometimes he sees devotees for a moment and comforts them and blesses them and they kiss his feet and go away happy. Rank is nothing to him, he being a God. To him all men are alike. He sees whom he pleases and denies himself to whom he pleases. Sometimes he sees a prince and denies himself to a pauper. At other times he receives the pauper and turns the prince away. However he does not receive many of either class. He has to husband his time for his meditations. I think he would receive Reverend Mr. Parker at any time. I think he is sorry for Mr. Parker and I think Mr. Parker is sorry for him, and no doubt this compassion is good for both of them. When we arrived we had to stand around in the garden a little while and wait, and the outlook was not good, for he had been turning away Maharajas that day and receiving only the riff-raff, and we belonged in between somewhere, but presently a servant came out saying it was all right he was coming. And sure enough he came, and I saw him, that object of the worship of millions. It was a strange sensation and thrilling. I wish I could feel it streamed through my veins again, and yet to me he was not a God. He was only a Taj. The thrill was not my thrill, but had come to me second hand from those invisible millions of believers. By a handshake with their God I had ground-circuited their wire and got their monster-batteries whole-charge. He was tall and slender, indeed, emaciated. He had a clean cut and conspicuously intellectual face, and a deep and kindly eye. He looked many years older than he really was, but much study and meditation and fasting and prayer, with the arid life he had led as Hermit and beggar, could account for that. He is wholly nude when he receives natives of whatever rank they may be, but he had white cloth around his loins now, a concession to Mr. Parker's European prejudices, no doubt. As soon as I had sobered down a little we got along very well together, and I found him a most pleasant and friendly deity. He had heard a deal about Chicago, and showed a quite remarkable interest in it for a God. It all came of the world's fair and the Congress of Religions. If India knows about nothing else American she knows about those, and will keep them in mind one while. He proposed an exchange of autographs, a delicate attention which made me believe in him, but I had been having my doubts before. He wrote his in his book, and I have a reverent regard for that book, though the words run from right to left, and so I can't read it. It was a mistake to print in that way. It contains his voluminous comments on the Hindu holy writings, and if I could make them out, I would try for perfection myself. I gave him a copy of Huckleberry Finn. I thought it might rest him up a little to mix it in along with his meditations on Brahma, for he looked tired, and I knew that if it didn't do him any good it wouldn't do him any harm. He has a scholar meditating under him, Meena Bahadur Rana, but we did not see him. He wears clothes and is very imperfect. He has written a little pamphlet about his master, and I have that. It contains a woodcut of the master and himself seated on a rug in the garden. The portrait of the master is very good indeed. The posture is exactly that which Brahma himself affects, and it requires long arms and limber legs, and can be accumulated only by gods and the India Rubberman. There is a life-size marble relief of three 108 SBS in the garden. It represents him in this same posture. Dear me, it is a strange world, particularly the Indian division of it. This pupil, Meena Bahadur Rana, is not a commonplace person, but a man of distinguished capacities and attainments, and, apparently, he had a fine, worldly career in front of him. He was serving the Nepal government in a high capacity at the court of the viceroy of India twenty years ago. He was an able man, educated, a thinker, a man of property. But the longing to devote himself to a religious life came upon him, and he resigned his place, turned his back upon the vanities and comforts of the world, and went away into the solitudes, to live in a hut, and study the sacred writings, and meditate upon virtue and holiness, and seek to attain them. This sort of religion resembles ours. Christ recommended the rich to give away all their property and follow him in poverty, not in worldly comfort. American and English millionaires do it every day, and thus verify and confirm to the world the tremendous forces that lie in religion. Yet many people scoff at them for this loyalty to duty, and many will scoff at Mina Bahadur Rana and call him a crank. Like many Christians of great character and intellect, he has made the study of his scriptures and the writing of books of commentaries upon them the loving labor of his life. Like them, he has believed that his was not an idle and foolish waste of his life, but a most worthy and honorable employment of it. Yet there are many people who will see in those others men worthy of homage and deep reverence, but in him merely a crank. But I shall not. He has my reverence, and I don't offer it as a common thing and poor, but as an unusual thing and of value. The ordinary reverence, the reverence defined and explained by the dictionary, cost nothing. Reverence for one's own sacred things, parents, religion, flag, laws, and respect for one's own beliefs. These are feelings which we cannot even help. They come natural to us. They are involuntary, like breathing. There is no personal merit in breathing, but the reverence which is difficult and which has personal merit in it is the respect which you pay, without compulsion to the political or religious attitude of a man whose beliefs are not yours. You can't revere his gods or his politics, and no one expects you to do that, but you could respect his belief in them, if you tried hard enough, and you could respect him too, if you tried hard enough. But it is very, very difficult. It is next to impossible, and so we hardly ever try. If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him. We are always canting about people's irreverence, always charging this offence upon somebody or other, and thereby intimating that we are better than that person and do not commit that offence ourselves. Whenever we do this, we are in a lying attitude, and our speech is can't. For none of us are reverent, in a meritorious way, deep down in our hearts, we are all irreverent. There is probably not a single exception to this rule in the earth. There is probably not one person whose reverence rises higher than respect for his own sacred things, and therefore it is not a thing to boast about and be proud of, since the most degraded savage has that, and, like the best of us, has nothing higher. To speak plainly we despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our own list of sacred things, and yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us. Suppose we should meet with a paragraph like the following in the newspapers. Yesterday a visiting party of the British nobility had a picnic at Mount Vernon, and in the tomb of Washington they ate their luncheon, sang popular songs, played games, and danced waltzes and pokas. Should we be shocked? Should we feel outraged? Should we be amazed? Should we call the performance a desecration? Yes, that would all happen. We should denounce those people in round terms and call them hard names, and suppose we found this paragraph in the newspapers. Yesterday a visiting party of American pork millionaires had a picnic in Westminster Abbey, and in that sacred place they ate their luncheon, sang popular songs, played games, and danced waltzes and pokas. Would the English be shocked? Would they feel outraged? Would they be amazed? Would they call the performance a desecration? That would all happen. The pork millionaires would be denounced in round terms. They would be called hard names. In the tomb at Mount Vernon lie the ashes of America's most honoured son. In the Abbey the ashes of England's greatest dead. The tomb of tombs, the costliest in the earth, the wonder of the world, the Taj, was built by a great emperor to honour the memory of a perfect wife and perfect mother, one in whom there was no spot or blemish, whose love was his stay and support, whose life was the light of the world to him. In it her ashes lie, and to the Mohammedan millions of India it is a holy place. To them it is what Mount Vernon is to Americans, it is what the Abbey is to the English. Major Sleiman wrote forty or fifty years ago, the italics are mine, I would here enter my humble protest against the quadrille and lunch parties, which are sometimes given to European ladies and gentlemen of the station at this imperial tomb. Drinking and dancing are no doubt very good things in their season, but they are sadly out of place in a sepulcher. Were there any Americans among those lunch parties? If they were invited, there were. If my imagined lunch parties in Westminster and the tomb of Washington should take place, the incident would cause a vast outbreak of bitter eloquence about barbarism and irreverence. And it would come from two sets of people who would go next day and dance in the Taj, if they had a chance. As we took our leave of the Benares God and started away, we noticed a group of natives waiting respectfully just within the gate, a Raja from somewhere in India and some people of lesser consequence. The God beckoned them to come, and as we passed out the Raja was kneeling and reverently kissing his sacred feet. If Barnum—but Barnum's ambitions are at rest—this God will remain in the holy peace and seclusion of his garden undisturbed. Barnum could not have gotten him anyway. Still he would have found a substitute that would answer. End of chapter 53 This is chapter 54 of Following the Equator. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, following the Equator by Mark Twain, chapter 54, by rail to Calcutta, population, the city of palaces, a fluted candlestick, octolony, newspaper correspondence, average knowledge of countries, a wrong idea of Chicago, Calcutta and the black hole, description of the horrors, those who lived, the botanical gardens, the afternoon turnout, grand review, military tournament, excursion on the Hoogley, the museum, what winter means in Calcutta. Do not undervalue the headache, while it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment, but when relief begins the unexpired remainder is worth four dollars a minute, put in head Wilson's new calendar. A comfortable railway journey of seventeen and a half hours brought us to the capital of India, which is likewise the capital of Bengal, Calcutta. Like Bombay it has a population of nearly a million natives and a small gathering of white people. It is a huge city and fine, and is called the city of palaces. It is rich in historical memories, rich in British achievement, military, political, commercial, rich in the results of the miracles done by that brace of mighty magicians, Clive and Hastings, and has a cloud-kissing monument to one octolony. It is a fluted candlestick two hundred and fifty feet high, this lingam is the only large monument in Calcutta, I believe. It is a fine ornament and will keep octolony in mind. Wherever you are in Calcutta and for miles around you can see it, and always when you see it you think of octolony. And so there is not an hour in the day that you do not think of octolony and wonder who he was. It is good that Clive cannot come back, for he would think it was for Plessy, and then that great spirit would be wounded when the revelation came that it was not. Clive would find out that it was for octolony, and he would think octolony was a battle, and he would think it was a great one too, and he would say, With three thousand I whipped sixty thousand and founded the empire, and there is no monument. This other soldier must have whipped a billion with a dozen and saved the world. But he would be mistaken. Octolony was a man, not a battle. And he did good and honourable service too, as good and honourable service as has been done in India by seventy-five or a hundred other Englishmen of courage, rectitude, and distinguished capacity. For India has been a fertile breeding ground of such men, and remains so. Great men, both in war and in the civil service, and as modest as great. But they have no monuments, and were not expecting any. Octolony could not have been expecting one, and it is not at all likely that he desired one, certainly not until Clive and Hastings should be supplied. Every day Clive and Hastings lean on the battlements of heaven and look down and wonder which of the two the monument is for, and they fret and worry because they cannot find out, and so the peace of heaven is spoiled for them and lost. But not for Octolony. Octolony is not troubled. He doesn't suspect that it is his monument. Heaven is sweet and peaceful to him. There is a sort of unfairness about it all. Indeed if monuments were always given in India for high achievements, duty straightly performed, and smirchless records, the landscape would be monotonous with them. The handful of English in India govern the Indian myriads with apparent ease, and without noticeable friction through tact, training, and distinguished administrative ability reinforced by just and liberal laws, and by keeping their word to the native whenever they give it. England is far from India, and knows little about the eminent services performed by her servants there, for it is the newspaper correspondent who makes fame, and he is not sent to India, but to the continent, to report the doings of the princelots and the duklits, and where they are visiting and whom they are marrying. Often a British official spends thirty or forty years in India climbing from grade to grade by services which would make him celebrated anywhere else, and finishes as a vice sovereign governing a great realm and millions of subjects, then he goes home to England, substantially unknown and unheard of, and settles down in some modest corner, and is, as one, extinguished. Ten years later there is a twenty-line obituary in the London papers, and the reader is paralysed by the splendours of a career which he is not sure that he had ever heard of before. But, meanwhile, he has learned all about the continental princelots and duklits. The average man is profoundly ignorant of countries that lie remote from his own. When they are mentioned in his presence one or two facts, and maybe a couple of names rise like torches in his mind, lighting up an inch or two of it, and leaving the rest all dark, the mention of Egypt suggests some biblical facts, and the pyramids—nothing more. The mention of South Africa suggests Kimberley, and the diamonds, and there an end. Formerly the mention, to a Hindu of America, suggested a name, George Washington. With that his familiarity with our country was exhausted. Laterally his familiarity with it has doubled in bulk, so that when America is mentioned now two torches flare up in the dark caverns of his mind, and he says, ah, the country of the great man Washington, and of the holy city Chicago, for he knows about the Congress of Religion, and this has enabled him to get an erroneous impression of Chicago. When India is mentioned to the citizen of a far country, it suggests Clive, Hastings, the Mutiny, Kipling, and a number of other great events, and the mention of Calcutta infallibly brings up the Black Hole, and so when that citizen finds himself in the capital of India he goes first of all to see the Black Hole of Calcutta and is disappointed. The Black Hole was not preserved, it is gone long, long ago. It is strange. Just as it stood it was itself a monument, a ready-made one. It was finished, it was complete. Its materials were strong and lasting, it needed no furbishing up, no repairs. It merely needed to be let alone. It was the first brick, the foundation stone upon which was reared a mighty empire, the Indian Empire of Great Britain. It was the ghastly episode of the Black Hole that maddened the British and brought Clive, that young military marvel raging up from Madras. It was the seed from which sprung Placie, and it was that extraordinary battle whose like had not been seen in the earth since Agincourt, that laid deep and strong the foundations of England's colossal Indian sovereignty. And yet within the time of men who still live the Black Hole was torn down and thrown away as carelessly as if its bricks were common clay, not ingots of historic gold. There is no accounting for human beings. The supposed site of the Black Hole is marked by an engraved plate. I saw that, and better that than nothing. The Black Hole was a prison, a cell is near the right word, eighteen feet square, the dimensions of an ordinary bed-chamber, and into this place the victorious Nabob of Bengal packed one hundred and forty-six of his English prisoners. There was hardly standing-room for them, sparsely a breath of air was to be got, the time was night, the weather sweltering hot. Before the dawn came the captives were all dead but twenty-three. Mr. Holwell's long account of the awful episode was familiar to the world a hundred years ago, but one seldom sees in print even an extract from it in our day. Among the striking things in it is this. Mr. Holwell, perishing with thirst, kept himself alive by sucking the perspiration from his sleeves. It gives one a vivid idea of the situation. He presently found that while he was busy drawing life from one of his sleeves, a young English gentleman was stealing supplies from the other one. Holwell was an unselfish man, a man of the most generous impulses. He lived and died famous for these fine and rare qualities. Yet, when he found out what was happening to that unwatched sleeve, he took the precaution to suck that one dry first. The miseries of the Black Hole were able to change even a nature like his. But that young gentleman was one of the twenty-three survivors, and he said it was the stolen perspiration that saved his life. From the middle of Mr. Holwell's narrative I will make a brief excerpt. Then a general prayer to heaven, to hasten the approach of the flames to the right and left of us, and put a period to our misery. But these failing, they whose strength and spirits were quite exhausted, laid themselves down and expired quietly upon their fellows. Others, who had yet some strength and vigor left, made a last effort at the windows. And several succeeded by leaping and scrambling over the backs and heads of those in the first rank, and got hold of the bars, from which there was no removing them. Many to the right and left sunk with the violent pressure, and were soon suffocated. For now a steam arose from the living and the dead, which affected us in all its circumstances, as if we were forcibly held with our heads over a bowl full of strong, volatile spirit of heartshorn, until suffocated. Nor could the effluvia of the one be distinguished from the other, and frequently, when I was forced by the load upon my head and shoulders to hold my face down, I was obliged, near as I was to the window, instantly to raise it again to avoid suffocation. I need not, my dear friend, ask your commiseration, when I tell you that in this plight, from half an hour past eleven till near two in the morning, I sustained the weight of a heavy man, with his knees in my back, and the pressure of his whole body on my head. A Dutch surgeon who had taken his seat upon my left shoulder, and a topaz, a black Christian soldier, bearing on my right, all which nothing could have enabled me to support but the props and pressure equally sustaining me all around. The two latter I frequently dislodged by shifting my hold on the bars and driving my knuckles into their ribs, but my friend above stuck fast, held immovable by two bars. I exerted anew my strength and fortitude, but the repeated trials and efforts I made to dislodge the insufferable encumbrances upon me at last quite exhausted me, and towards two o'clock, finding I must quit the window or sink where I was, I resolved on the former, having bore, truly for the sake of others, infinitely more for life than the best of it is worth. In the rank close behind me was an officer of one of the ships whose name was Cary, and who had behaved with much bravery during the siege. His wife, a fine woman, though countryborn, would not quit him, but accompanied him into the prison, and was one who survived. This poor wretch had been long raving for water and air. I told him I was determined to give up life, and recommended his gaining my station. On my quitting it, he made a fruitless attempt to get my place, but the Dutch surgeon, who sat on my shoulder, supplanted him. Poor Cary expressed his thankfulness and said he would give up life too. But it was with the utmost labour we forced our way from the window, several in the inner ranks appearing to me dead standing, unable to fall by the throng and equal pressure around. He laid himself down to die, and his death, I believe, was very sudden. For he was a short, full sanguine man, his strength was great. And, I imagine, had he not retired with me I should never have been able to force my way. I was, at this time, sensible of no pain and little uneasiness. I can give you no better idea of my situation than by repeating my simile of the bowl of spirit of Heartshorn. I found a stupor coming on apace, and laid myself down by that gallant old man, the Reverend Mr. Jervis Bellamy, who laid dead with his son, the Lieutenant, hand in hand, near the southernmost wall of the prison. When I had lain there some little time, I still had reflection enough to suffer some uneasiness in the thought that I should be trampled upon, when dead, as I myself had done to others. With some difficulty I raised myself and gained the platform a second time, where I presently lost all sensation. The last trace of sensibility that I have been able to recollect after my laying down was my sash being uneasy about my waste, which I untied and threw from me. Of what passed in this interval, to the time of my resurrection from this whole of horrors, I can give you no account. There was plenty to see in Calcutta, but there was not plenty of time for it. I saw the fort that Clive built, and the place where Warren Hastings and the author of the Junius letters fought their duel, and the great botanical gardens, and the fashionable afternoon turnouts in the Maidan, and a grand review of the garrison in a great plain at sunrise, and a military tournament in which great bodies of native soldiery exhibited the perfection of their drill at all arms, a spectacular and beautiful show occupying several nights, and closing with the mimic storming of a native fort which was as good as the reality for thrilling and accurate detail, and better than the reality for security and comfort. We had a pleasure excursion on the hoogly by courtesy of friends, and devoted the rest of the time to social life and the Indian Museum. One should spend a month in the Museum, an enchanted palace of Indian antiquities. Indeed, a person might spend half a year among the beautiful and wonderful things without exhausting their interest. It was winter. We were of Kipling's hosts of tourists who travel up and down India in the cold weather showing how things ought to be managed. It is a common expression there, the cold weather, and the people think there is such a thing. It is because they have lived there half a lifetime, and their perceptions have become blunted. When a person is accustomed to a hundred and thirty-eight in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable. I had read, in the histories, that the June marches made between Lucknow and Kanpur by the British forces in the time of the mutiny were made in that kind of weather, one hundred and thirty-eight in the shade, and had taken it for historical embroidery. I had read it again in Sergeant Major Forbes Mitchell's account of his military experiences in the mutiny, at least I thought I had, and in Calcutta I asked him if it was true, and he said it was. An officer of high rank who had been in the thick of the mutiny said the same. As long as those men were talking about what they knew, they were trustworthy, and I believed them. But when they said it was now cold weather, I saw that they had traveled outside of their sphere of knowledge and were floundering. I believe that in India, cold weather is merely a conventional phrase, and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door knob, and weather which will only make it mushy. It was observable that brass ones were in use while I was in Calcutta, showing that it was not yet time to change to porcelain. I was told the change to porcelain was not usually made until May. But this cold weather was too warm for us, so we started to Darjeeling, in the Himalayas, a twenty-four hour journey. End of Chapter 54 This is Chapter 55 of Following the Equator. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Following the Equator by Mark Twain Chapter 55, on the road again, flannels in order, across country, from Greenland's icy mountain, swapping civilization, no field women in India, how it is in other countries, canvas-covered cars, the tiger country, my first hunt, some wild elephants get away, the plains of India, the Gurkas, women for pack horses, a substitute for a cab, Darjeeling, the hotel, the highest thing in the Himalayas, the club, Kinchinjunga and Mount Everest, Tibetans, the prayer-wheel, people going to the bazaar. There are eight hundred and sixty-nine different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, Putin had Wilson's new calendar. From Diary, February 14, we left at 4.30 p.m., until dark we moved through rich vegetation, then changed to a boat and crossed the Ganges. February 15, up with the sun, a brilliant morning and frosty. A double suit of flannels is found necessary. The plain is perfectly level and seems to stretch away and away and away, dimming and softening to the uttermost bounds of nowhere. What a soaring, strenuous, gushing, fountain spray of delicate greenery a bunch of bamboo is. As far as the eye can reach, these grand vegetable geysers grace the view. Their spoutings refine to steam by distance. And there are fields of bananas, with the sunshine glancing from the varnished surface of their drooping vast leaves. And there are frequent groves of palm, and an effective accent is given to the landscape by isolated individuals of this picturesque family, towering, clean-stemmed, their plumes broken and hanging ragged, nature's imitation of an umbrella that has been out to see what a cyclone is like, and is trying not to look disappointed. And everywhere through the soft morning vistas we glimpse the villages, the countless villages, the myriad villages, thatched, built of clean new matting, snuggling among grouped palms and sheaves of bamboo, villages, villages, no end of villages, not three hundred yards apart, and dozens and dozens of them in sight all the time. A mighty city, hundreds of miles long, hundreds of miles broad, made all of villages, the biggest city in the earth, and as populous as a European kingdom. I have seen no such city as this before, and there is a continuously repeated and replenished multitude of naked men in view on both sides and ahead. We fly through it mile after mile, but still it is always there, on both sides and ahead, brown-bodied, naked men and boys, plowing in the fields. But not a woman, in these two hours I have not seen a woman or a girl working in the fields. From Greenland's icy mountains, from India's coral strand, where Africa's sunny fountains roll down their golden sand, from many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain, they call us to deliver their land from error's chain. Those are beautiful verses, and they have remained in my memory all my life. But if the closing lines are true, let us hope that when we come to answer the call and deliver the land from its errors, we shall secrete from it some of our high civilization ways, and, at the same time, borrow some of its pagan ways to enrich our high system with. We have a right to do this. If we lift those people up we have a right to lift ourselves up nine or ten grades or so at their expense. A few years ago I spent several weeks at Tolz in Bavaria. It is a Roman Catholic region, and not even Benares is more deeply or pervasively or intelligently devout. In my diary of those days I find this. We took a long drive yesterday around about the lovely country roads, but it was a drive whose pleasure was damaged in a couple of ways by the dreadful shrines and by the shameful spectacle of gray and venerable old grandmothers toiling in the fields. The shrines were frequent along the roads, figures of the Saviour nailed to the cross, and streaming with blood from the wounds of the nails and the thorns. When missionaries go from here do they find fault with the pagan idols? I saw many women seventy and even eighty years old mowing and binding in the fields and pitchforking the loads into the wagons. I was in Austria later and in Munich. In Munich I saw gray old women pushing trucks up hill and down, long distances, trucks laden with barrels of beer, incredible loads. In my Austrian diary I find this. In the fields I often see a woman and a cow harnessed to the plow and a man driving. In the public street of Marienbad today I saw an old, bent, gray-headed woman in harness with a dog, drawing a laden sled over bare dirt roads and bare pavements, and at his ease walked the driver, smoking his pipe, a hail fellow, not thirty years old. Five or six years ago I bought an open boat, made a kind of a canvas wagon roof over the stern of it to shelter me from sun and rain, hired a courier and a boatman, and made a twelve-day floating voyage down the Rhône from Lake Bourget to Marseille. In my diary of that trip I find this entry. I was far down the Rhône, then, passing Saint-Étienne to fifteen p.m. On a distant ridge inland a tall, open-work structure commandingly situated with a statue of the Virgin standing on it, a devout country. All down this river, wherever there is a crag, there is a statue of the Virgin on it. I believe I have seen a hundred of them, and yet in many respects the peasantry seemed to be mere pagans and destitute of any considerable degree of civilisation. We reached a not very promising looking village about four o'clock, and I concluded to tie up for the day, munching fruit and fogging the hood with pipe-smoke at grown monotonous. I could not have the hood furled because the floods of rain fell unceasingly. The tavern was on the river bank, as is the custom. It was dull there and melancholy, nothing to do but look out of the window into the drenching rain and shiver. One could do that, for it was bleak and cold and windy, and country France furnishes no fire. Winter overcoats did not help me much. They had to be supplemented with rugs. The raindrops were so large and struck the river with such force that they knocked up the water like pebble-splashes. With the exception of a very occasional wooden shod peasant, nobody was abroad in this bitter weather—I mean, nobody of our sex—but all weathers are alike to the women in these continental countries. To them and the other animals, life is serious. Nothing interrupts their slavery. Three of them were washing clothes in the river under the window when I arrived, and they continued at it as long as there was light to work by. One was apparently thirty, another, the mother, above fifty, the third, grandmother, so old and worn and gray she could have passed for eighty. I took her to be that old. They had no water-proofs nor rubbers, of course. Over their shoulders they wore gunny sacks, simply conductors for rivers of water. Some of the volume reached the ground, the rest soaked in on the way. At last a vigorous fellow of thirty-five arrived, dry and comfortable, smoking his pipe under his big umbrella in an open donkey-cart, husband, son, and grandson of those women. He stood up in the cart, sheltering himself, and began to superintend, issuing his orders in a masterly tone of command, and showing temper when they were not obeyed swiftly enough. Without complaint or murmur, the drowned women patiently carried out the orders, lifting the immense baskets of soggy, wrung-out clothing into the cart, and stowing them to the man's satisfaction. There were six of the great baskets, and a man of mere ordinary strength could not have lifted any one of them. The cart being full now, the Frenchman descended, still sheltered by his umbrella, entered the tavern, and the women went drooping homeward, trudging in the wake of the cart, and soon were blended with the deluge, and lost to sight. When I went down into the public room the Frenchman had his bottle of wine and plate of food on a bare table-black with grease, and was chomping like a horse. He had the little religious paper which is in everybody's hands on the Roan borders, and was enlightening himself with the histories of French saints who used to flee to the desert in the Middle Ages to escape the contamination of women. For two hundred years France has been sending missionaries to other savage lands. To spare to the needy from poverty like hers is fine and true generosity. But to get back to India, where, as my favourite poem says, every prospect pleases an only man is vile. It is because Bavaria and Austria and France have not introduced their civilisation to him yet. But Bavaria and Austria and France are on their way. They are coming. They will rescue him. They will refine the vileness out of him. Sometime during the forenoon approaching the mountains, we changed from the regular train to one composed of little canvas-sheltered cars that skimmed along within a foot of the ground, and seemed to be going fifty miles an hour when they were really making about twenty. Each car had seating capacity for half a dozen persons, and when the curtains were up one was substantially out of doors, and could see everywhere, and get all the breeze and be luxuriously comfortable. It was not a pleasure excursion in name only, but in fact. After a while we stopped at a little wooden coop of a station just within the curtain of the somber jungle, a place with a deep and dense forest of great trees and scrub and vines all about it. The Royal Bengal Tiger is in great force there, and is very bold and unconventional. From this lonely little station a message once went to the railway manager in Calcutta, Tiger Eating Station Master on front porch, telegraph instructions. It was there that I had my first Tiger Hunt. I killed thirteen. We were presently away again, and the train began to climb the mountains. In one place seven wild elephants crossed the track, but two of them got away before I could overtake them. The railway journey up the mountain is forty miles, and it takes eight hours to make it. It is so wild and interesting and exciting and enchanting that it ought to take a week. As for the vegetation, it is a museum. The jungle seemed to contain samples of every rare and curious tree and bush that we had ever seen or heard of. It is from that museum, I think, that the globe must have been supplied with the trees and vines and shrubs that it holds precious. The road is infinitely and charmingly crooked. It goes winding in and out under lofty cliffs that are smothered in vines and foliage, and around the edges of bottomless chasms, and all the way one glides by files of picturesque natives, some carrying burdens up, others going down from their work in the tea gardens, and once there was a gaudy wedding procession, all bright tinsel and color, and a bride, comely and girlish, who peeped out from the curtains of her palanquin, exposing her face with that pure delight which the young and happy take in sin for sin's own sake. By and by we were well up in the region of the clouds, and from that breezy height we looked down in a far over a wonderful picture, the plains of India, stretching to the horizon, soft and fair, level as a floor, shimmering with heat, mottled with cloud shadows, and cloven with shining rivers. Immediately below us and receding down, down, down toward the valley was a shaven confusion of hill-tops with ribbony roads and paths squirming and snaking cream-yellow all over them and about them, every curve and twist sharply distinct. At an elevation of six thousand feet we entered a thick cloud, and it shut out the world, and kept it shut out. We climbed one thousand feet higher, then began to descend, and presently got down to Darjeeling, which is six thousand feet above the level of the plains. We had passed many a mountain village on the way up, and seen some new kinds of natives, among them many samples of the fighting Gurkas. They are not large men, but they are strong and resolute. There are no better soldiers among Britain's native troops. And we had passed shoals of their women climbing the forty miles of steep road from the valley to their mountain homes, with tall baskets on their backs, hitched to their foreheads by a band, and containing a freightage weighing, I will not say how many hundreds of pounds, for the sum is unbelievable. These were young women, and they strode smartly along under these astonishing burdens with the air of people out for a holiday. I was told that a woman will carry a piano on her back all the way up the mountain, and that more than once a woman had done it. If these were old women I should regard the Gurkas as no more civilized than the Europeans. At the railway station at Darjeeling you find plenty of cab substitutes, open coffins in which you sit, and are then born on men's shoulders up the steep roads into the town. Up there we found a fairly comfortable hotel, the property of an indiscriminate and incoherent landlord, who looks after nothing, but leaves everything to his army of Indian servants. No, he does look after the bill to be just to him, and the tourist cannot do better than follow his example. I was told by a resident that the summit of Kinchinjunga is often hidden in the clouds, and that sometimes the tourist has waited twenty-two days and then been obliged to go away without a sight of it, and yet went not disappointed. For when he got his hotel bill he recognized that he was now seeing the highest thing in the Himalayas. But this is probably a lie. After lecturing I went to the club that night, and that was a comfortable place. It is loftily situated and looks out over a vast spread of scenery. From it you can see where the boundaries of three countries come together, some thirty miles away. Tibet is one of them, Nepal another, and I think Herzegovina was the other. Apparently in every town and city in India the gentlemen of the British civil and military service have a club. Sometimes it is a palatial one. Always it is pleasant and home-like. The hotels are not always as good as they might be, and the stranger who has access to the club is grateful for his privilege and knows how to value it. Next day was Sunday. Friends came in the grey dawn with horses, and my party rode away to a distant point where Kinjinjunga and Mount Everest show up west, but I stayed at home for a private view. For it was very cold, and I was not acquainted with the horses anyway. I got a pipe and a few blankets and sat for two hours at the window, and saw the sun drive away the veiling grey and touch up the snow-peaks one after another with pale pink splashes and delicate washes of gold, and finally flood the whole mighty convulsion of snow mountains with a deluge of rich splendours. Kinjinjunga's peak was but fitfully visible, but in the between times it was vividly clear against the sky, away up there in the blue dome more than twenty-eight thousand feet above sea level, the loftiest land I had ever seen by twelve thousand feet or more. It was forty-five miles away. Mount Everest is a thousand feet higher, but it was not a part of that sea of mountains piled up there before me, so I did not see it, but I did not care, because I think that mountains that are as high as that are disagreeable. I changed from the back to the front of the house, and spent the rest of the morning there watching the swarthy strange tribes flock by from their far homes in the Himalayas. All ages and both sexes were represented, and the breeds were quite new to me, though the costumes of the Tibetans made them look a good deal like Chinaman. The prayer-wheel was a frequent feature. It brought me nearer to these people, and made them seem kinfolk of mine. Through our preacher we do much of our praying by proxy. We do not whirl him around a stick as they do, but that is merely a detail. The swarm swung briskly by, hour after hour, a strange and striking pageant. It was wasted there, and it seemed a pity. It should have been sent streaming through the cities of Europe or America, to refresh eyes weary of the pale monotonies of the circus pageant. These people were bound for the bazaar with things to sell. We went down there later, and saw that novel Congress of the Wild Peoples, and plowed here and there through it, and concluded that it would be worth coming from Calcutta to see, even if there were no King Ching-Junga and Everest. This is Chapter 56 of Following the Equator. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Following the Equator, by Mark Twain, Chapter 56, on the road again, the hand-car, a thirty-five-mile slide, the banyan tree, a dramatic performance, the railroad loop, the halfway house, the brain-fever bird, the coppersmith bird, nightingales and cue owls. There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate, when he can't afford it, and when he can, put in head Wilson's new calendar. On Monday and Tuesday at sunrise we again had fair to middling views of the stupendous mountains. Then, being well cooled off and refreshed, we were ready to chance the weather of the lower world once more. We traveled uphill by the regular train five miles to the summit, then changed to a little canvas-canopied hand-car for the thirty-five-mile descent. It was the size of a slay. It had six seats, and was so low that it seemed to rest on the ground. It had no engine or other propelling power, and needed none to help it fly down those steep inclines. It only needed a strong break to modify its flight, and it had that. There was a story of a disastrous trip made down the mountain once in this little car by the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, when the car jumped the track and threw its passengers over a precipice. It was not true, but the story had value for me, for it made me nervous, and nervousness wakes the person up and makes him alive and alert, and heightens the thrill of a new and doubtful experience. The car could really jump the track, of course. A pebble on the track, placed there by either accident or malice at a sharp curve where one might strike it before the eye could discover it, could derail the car and fling it down into India. And the fact that the Lieutenant Governor had escaped was no proof that I would have the same luck. And standing there, looking down upon the Indian Empire from the airy altitude of seven thousand feet, it seemed unpleasantly far, dangerously far, to be flung from a handcar. But, after all, there was but small danger for me. What there was was for Mr. Pugh, Inspector of a Division of the Indian Police, in whose company and protection we had come from Calcutta. He had seen long service as an artillery officer, was less nervous than I was, and so he was to go ahead of us in a pilot handcar with a Gurkha and another native, and the plan was that when we should see his car jump over a precipice, we must put on our brake and send for another pilot. It was a good arrangement. Also, Mr. Bernard, Chief Engineer of the Mountain Division of the Road, was to take personal charge of our car, and he had been down the mountain in it many a time. Everything looked safe. Indeed, there was but one questionable detail left. The regular train was to follow us as soon as we should start, and it might run over us. Privately, I thought it would. The road fell sharply down in front of us and went corkscrewing in and out around the crags and precipices, down, down, forever down, suggesting nothing so exactly or so uncomfortably as a crooked toboggan slide with no end to it. Mr. Pugh waved his flag and started, like an arrow from a bow, and before I could get out of the car we were gone too. I had previously had but one sensation like the shock of that departure, and that was the gaspy shock that took my breath away the first time that I was discharged from the summit of a toboggan slide, but in both instances the sensation was pleasurable, intensely so. It was a sudden and immense exaltation, a mixed ecstasy of deadly fright and unimaginable joy. I believe that this combination makes the perfection of human delight. The pilot car's flight down the mountain suggested the swoop of a swallow that is skimming the ground. So swiftly and smoothly and gracefully it swept down the long straight reaches and soared in and out of the bends and around the corners. We raced after it and seemed to flash by the capes and crags with a speed of light, and now and then we almost overtook it and had hopes, but it was only playing with us. When we got near it released its break, made a spring around the corner, and the next time it spun into view a few seconds later it looked as small as a wheelbarrow it was so far away. We played with the train in the same way. We often got out to gather flowers or sit on a precipice and look at the scenery. Then presently we would hear a dull and growing roar, and the long coils of the train would come into sight behind and above us, but we did not need to start till the locomotive was close down upon us, then we soon left it far behind. It had to stop at every station, therefore it was not an embarrassment to us. Our break was a good piece of machinery. It could bring the car to a standstill on a slope as steep as a house-roof. The scenery was grand and varied and beautiful, and there was no hurry. We could always stop and examine it. There was abundance of time. We did not need to hamper the train. If it wanted the road we could switch off and let it go by, then overtake it and pass it later. We stopped at one place to see the Gladstone Cliff, a great crag which the ages and the weather have sculptured into a recognizable portrait of the venerable statesman. Mr. Gladstone is a stockholder in the road, and nature began this portrait ten thousand years ago with the idea of having the complement ready in time for the event. We saw a banyan tree which sent down supporting stems from branches which were sixty feet above the ground. That is, I suppose it was a banyan. Its bark resembled that of the great banyan in the botanical gardens at Calcutta, that spider-legged thing with its wilderness of vegetable columns. And there were frequent glimpses of a totally leafless tree upon whose innumerable twigs and branches a cloud of crimson butterflies had lighted apparently. In fact these brilliant red butterflies were flowers, but the illusion was good. Afterward in South Africa I saw another splendid effect made by red flowers. This flower was probably called the torch-plant, should have been named so anyway. It had a slender stem several feet high, and from its top stood up a single tongue of flame, an intensely red flower of the size and shape of a small corn cob. The stem stood three or four feet apart, all over a great hill slope that was a mile long, and make one think of what the place de la Concorde would be if its myriad lights were red, instead of white and yellow. A few miles down the mountain we stopped half an hour to see a Tibetan dramatic performance. It was in the open air on the hillside. The audience was composed of Tibetans, Gurkhas, and other unusual people. The costumes of the actors were in the last degree outlandish, and the performance was in keeping with the clothes. To an accompaniment of barbarous noises the actors stepped out one after another, and began to spin around with immense swiftness and vigor and violence, chanting the while, and soon the whole troupe would be spinning and chanting and raising the dust. They were performing an ancient and celebrated historical play, and a Chinaman explained it to me in pidgin English as it went along. The play was obscure enough without the explanation. With the explanation added, it was opaque. As a drama this ancient historical work of art was defective, I thought, but as a wild and barbarous spectacle the representation was beyond criticism. Far down the mountain we got out to look at a piece of remarkable loop engineering, a spiral where the road curves upon itself with such abruptness that when the regular train came down and entered the loop we stood over it and saw the locomotive disappear under our bridge, then in a few moments appear again chasing its own tail, and we saw it gain on it, overtake it, draw ahead past the rear cars, and run a race with that end of the train. It was like a snake swallowing itself. Halfway down the mountain we stopped about an hour at Mr. Barnard's house for refreshments, and while we were sitting on the veranda looking at the distant panorama of hills through a gap in the forest we came very near seeing a leopard kill a calf. It killed it the day before. It is a wild place and lovely. From the woods all about came the songs of birds, among them the contributions of a couple of birds which I was not then acquainted with, the brain-fever bird and the coppersmith. The song of the brain-fever demon starts on a low but steadily rising key and is a spiral twist which augments in intensity and severity with each added spiral, growing sharper and sharper and more and more painful, more and more agonizing, more and more maddening, intolerable, unendurable, as it bores deeper and deeper and deeper into the listener's brain, until at last the brain-fever comes as a relief and the man dies. I am bringing some of these birds home to America. They will be a great curiosity there, and it is believed that in our climate they will multiply like rabbits. The coppersmith bird's note at a certain distance away has the ring of a sledge on granite. At a certain other distance the hammering has a more metallic ring, and you might think that the bird was mending a copper kettle. At another distance it has a more wooden-y thump, but it is a thump that is full of energy and sounds just like starting a bung. So he is a hard bird to name with a single name. He is a stone-breaker, coppersmith, and bung-starter, and even then he is not completely named, for when he is close by you find that there is a soft deep melodious quality in his thump, and for that no satisfying name occurs to you. You will not mind his other notes, but when he camps near enough for you to hear that one you presently find that his measured and monotonous repetition of it is beginning to disturb you. Next it will weary you, soon it will distress you, and before long each thump will hurt your head. If this goes on you will lose your mind with the pain and misery of it, and go crazy. I am bringing some of these birds home to America. There is nothing like them there. They will be a great surprise, and it is said that in a climate like ours they will surpass expectation for fecundity. I am bringing some nightingales too, and some cue owls. I got them in Italy. The song of the nightingale is the deadliest known to ornithology. That demoniacal shriek can kill at thirty yards. The note of the cue owl is infinitely soft and sweet, soft and sweet as the whisper of a flute, but penetrating beyond belief it can bore through boiler iron. It is a lingering note and comes in triplets on the one unchanging key. Then a silence of fifteen seconds, then the triplet again, and so on, all night. At first it is divine, then less so, then trying, then distressing, then excruciating, then agonizing, and at the end of two hours the listener is a maniac. And so presently we took to the hand-car and went flying down the mountain again, flying and stopping, flying and stopping, till at last we were in the plane once more and stowed for Calcutta in the regular train. That was the most enjoyable day I have spent in the earth, for rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that approaches the bird flight down the Himalayas in a hand-car. It has no fault, no blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty-five miles of it instead of five hundred. End of Chapter 56 This is Chapter 57 of following the Equator. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Following the Equator by Mark Twain, Chapter 57 India, the most extraordinary country on earth. Nothing forgotten. The land of wonders. Annual statistics everywhere about violence. Tiger versus man. A handsome fight. Annual man-killing and tiger-killing. Other animals. Snakes. Insurance and snake-tables. The cobra-bite. Musa furpore. Dinepore. A train that stopped for gossip. Six hours for thirty-five miles. A rupee to the engineer. Ninety miles an hour. Again to Benaris, the piety-hive. To Lucknell. She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot. Put in head Wilson's new calendar. So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his round. Nothing seems to have been forgotten. Nothing overlooked. Always when you think you have come to the end of her tremendous specialties and have finished hanging tags upon her as the land of the thug, the land of the plague, the land of famine, the land of giant illusions, the land of stupendous mountains and so forth, another specialty crops up and another tag is required. I have been overlooking the fact that India is by an unapproachable supremacy the land of murderous wild creatures. Perhaps it will be simplest to throw away the tags and generalize her with one all comprehensive name as The Land of Wonders. For many years the British Indian government has been trying to destroy the murderous wild creatures and has spent a great deal of money in the effort. The annual official returns show that the undertaking is a difficult one. These returns exhibit a curious annual uniformity in results, the sort of uniformity which you find in the annual output of suicides in the world's capitals, and the proportions of deaths by this, that, and the other disease. You can always come close to foretelling how many suicides will occur in Paris, London, and New York next year, and also how many deaths will result from cancer, consumption, dog bite, falling out of the window, getting run over by cabs, etc., if you know the statistics of those matters for the present year. In the same way, with one year's Indian statistics before you, you can guess closely at how many people were killed in that empire by tigers during the previous year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and at how many were killed in each of those years by bears, how many by wolves, and how many by snakes, and you can also guess closely at how many people are going to be killed each year for the coming five years by each of those agencies. You can also guess closely at how many of each agency the government is going to kill each year for the next five years. I have before me statistics covering a period of six consecutive years. By these I know that in India the tiger kills something over 800 persons every year, and that the government responds by killing about double as many tigers every year. In four of the six years referred to, the tiger got 800 odd. In one of the remaining two years he got only 700, but in the other remaining year he made his average good by scoring 917. He is always sure of his average. Anyone who bets that the tiger will kill 2,400 people in India in any three consecutive years has invested his money in a certainty. Anyone who bets that he will kill 2,600 in any three consecutive years is absolutely sure to lose. As strikingly uniform as are the statistics of suicide, they are not any more so than are those of the tiger's annual output of slaughtered human beings in India. The government's work is quite uniform too. It about doubles the tiger's average. In six years the tiger killed 5,000 persons minus 50. In the same six years 10,000 tigers were killed minus 400. The wolf kills nearly as many people as the tiger, 700 a year to the tiger's 800 odd, but while he is doing it more than 5,000 of his tribe fall. The leopard kills an average of 230 people per year, but loses 3,300 of his own mess while he is doing it. The bear kills 100 people per year at a cost of 1,250 of his own tribe. The tiger, as the figures show, makes a very handsome fight against man, but it is nothing to the elephant's fight. The king of beasts, the lord of the jungle, loses four of his mess per year, but he kills 45 persons to make up for it. But when it comes to killing cattle, the lord of the jungle is not interested. He kills but 100 in six years. Horses of hunters, no doubt. But in the same six the tiger kills more than 84,000, the leopard 100,000, the bear 4,000, the wolf 70,000, the hyena more than 13,000, other wild beasts 27,000, and the snakes 19,000, a grand total of more than 300,000, an average of 50,000 head per year. In response the government kills in the six years a total of 3,201,232 wild beasts and snakes, ten for one. It will be perceived that the snakes are not much interested in cattle. They kill only 3,000 odd per year. The snakes are much more interested in man. India swarms with deadly snakes. At the head of the list is the cobra, the deadliest known to the world. A snake whose bite kills where the rattlesnakes bite merely entertains. In India the annual man killings by snakes are as uniform, as regular, and as forecastable as are the tiger average and the suicide average. Anyone who bets that in India in any three consecutive years the snakes will kill 49,500 persons will win his bet. And anyone who bets that in India in any three consecutive years the snakes will kill 53,500 persons will lose his bet. In India the snakes kill 17,000 people a year. They hardly ever fall short of it. They, as seldom exceeded. An insurance actuary could take the Indian census tables and the government's snake tables and tell you within six months how much it would be worth to ensure a man against death by snake bite there. If I had a dollar for every person killed per year in India I would rather have it than any other property, as it is the only property in the world not subject to shrinkage. I should like to have a royalty on the government end of the snake business too, and I'm in London now trying to get it. But when I get it it is not going to be as regular an income as the other will be if I get that. I have applied for it. The snakes transact their end of the business in a more orderly and systematic way than the government transacts its end of it because the snakes have had a long experience and know all about the traffic. You can make sure that the government will never kill fewer than 110,000 snakes in a year and that it will never quite reach 300,000. Too much room for oscillation. Good speculative stock, to bear or bull, and buy and sell long and short and all that kind of thing, but not eligible for investment like the other. The man that speculates in the government's snake crop wants to go carefully. I would not advise a man to buy a single crop at all. I mean a crop of futures for the possible wobble is something quite extraordinary. If he can buy six future crops in a bunch, seller to deliver one million five hundred thousand altogether, that is another matter. I do not know what snakes are worth now, but I know what they would be worth then, for the statistics show that the seller could not come within four hundred and twenty-seven thousand of carrying out his contract. However, I think that a person who speculates in snakes is a fool anyway. He always regrets it afterwards. To finish the statistics, in six years the wild beasts killed 20,000 persons and the snakes killed 103,000. In the same six the government kills one million seventy-three thousand five hundred and forty-six snakes. Plenty left. There are narrow escapes in India, in the very jungle where I killed sixteen tigers and all those elephants. A cobra bit me. But it got well. Everyone was surprised. This could not happen twice in ten years, perhaps. Usually death would result in fifteen minutes. We struck out westward or northwestward from Calcutta on an itinerary of a zigzag sort which would in the course of time carry us across India to its northwestern corner and the border of Afghanistan. The first part of the trip carried us through a great region which was an endless garden, miles and miles of the beautiful flower from whose juices comes the opium, and at Musafutpur we were in the midst of the Indigo culture, thence by a branch road to the Ganges at a point near Dinipur, and by a train which would have missed the connection by a week but for the thoughtfulness of some British officers who were along and who knew the ways of trains that are run by natives without white supervision. This train stopped at every village for no purpose connected with business apparently. We put out nothing, we took nothing aboard. The train-hands stepped ashore and gossiped with friends a quarter of an hour, then pulled out and repeated this at the succeeding villages. We had thirty-five miles to go, and six hours to do it in. But it was plain that we were not going to make it. It was then that the English officers said it was now necessary to turn this gravel train into an express, so they gave the engine driver a rupee and told him to fly. It was a simple remedy. After that we made ninety miles an hour. We crossed the Ganges just at dawn, made our connection, and went to Benares, where we stayed twenty-four hours and inspected that strange and fascinating piety hive again. Then left for Lucknow, a city which is perhaps the most conspicuous of the many monuments of British fortitude and valor that are scattered about the earth. The heat was pitiless. The flat plains were destitute of grass, and baked dry by the sun they were the color of pale dust, which was flying in clouds. But it was much hotter than this when the relieving forces marched to Lucknow in the time of the mutiny. Those were the days of one hundred and thirty-eight degrees in the shade. End of Chapter Fifty-seven This is Chapter Fifty-eight of Following the Equator. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Following the Equator by Mark Twain, Chapter Fifty-eight. The Great Mutiny. The Massacre in Kanpur. Terrible scenes in Lucknow. The Residency. The Siege. Make it a point to do something every day that you don't want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain. Putin had Wilson's new calendar. It seems to be settled now that among the many causes from which the Great Mutiny sprang, the main one was the annexation of the Kingdom of Ode by the East India Company, characterized by Sir Henry Lawrence as the most unrighteous act that was ever committed. In the spring of 1857 a mutiny spirit was observable in many of the native garrisons, and it grew day by day and spread wider and wider. The younger military men saw something very serious in it and would have liked to take hold of it vigorously and stamp it out promptly, but they were not in authority. Old men were in the high places of the army, men who should have been retired long before because of their great age, and they regarded the matter as a thing of no consequence. They loved their native soldiers and would not believe that anything could move them to revolt. Everywhere these obstinate veterans listened serenely to the rumbling of the volcanoes under them and said it was nothing. And so the propagators of mutiny had everything their own way. They moved from camp to camp undisturbed, and painted to the native soldier the wrongs his people were suffering at the hands of the English, and made his heart burn for revenge. They were able to point to two facts of formidable value as backers of their persuasions. In Clive's day native armies were incoherent mobs and without effective arms. Therefore they were weak against Clive's organized handful of well-armed men, but the thing was the other way now. The British forces were native. They had been trained by the British, organized by the British, armed by the British. All the power was in their hands. They were a club made by British hands to beat out British brains with. There was nothing to oppose their mass. Nothing but a few weak battalions of British soldiers scattered about India, a force not worth speaking of. This argument, taken alone, might not have succeeded, for the bravest and best Indian troops had a wholesome dread of the white soldier, whether he was weak or strong. But the agitators backed it with their second and best point, prophecy. A prophecy a hundred years old. The Indian is open to prophecy at all times. Argument may fail to convince him, but not prophecy. There was a prophecy that a hundred years from the year of that battle of Clive's, which founded the British Indian Empire, the British power would be overthrown and swept away by the natives. The mutiny broke out at Myrit on the 10th of May, 1857, and fired a train of tremendous historical explosions. Nana Sahib's massacre of the surrendered garrison of Konpur occurred in June, and a long siege of Lucknow began. The military history of England is old and great, but I think it must be granted that the crushing of the mutiny is the greatest chapter in it. The British were caught asleep and unprepared. They were a few thousands, swallowed up in an ocean of hostile populations. It would take months to inform England and get help, but they did not falter or stop to count the odds. But with English resolution and English devotion they took up their task, and went stubbornly on with it through good fortune and bad, and fought the most unpromising fight that one may read of, in fiction or out of it, and won it thoroughly. The mutiny broke out so suddenly and spread with such rapidity that there was but little time for occupants of weak outlying stations to escape to places of safety. Attempts were made, of course, but they were attended by hardships as bitter as death in the few cases which were successful. For the heat ranged between 120 and 138 in the shade. The way led through hostile peoples, and food and water were hardly to be had. For ladies and children accustomed to ease and comfort and plenty, such a journey must have been a cruel experience. Sir G. O. Trevelyan quotes an example. This is what befell Mrs. M., the wife of the surgeon, at a certain station on the southern confines of the insurrection. I heard, she says, a number of shots fired, and looking out, I saw my husband driving furiously from the mess-house, waving his whip. I ran to him, and, seeing a bearer with my child in his arms, I caught her up and got into the buggy. At the mess-house we found all the officers assembled, together with sixty seapoys, who had remained faithful. We went off in one large party amidst a general conflagration of our late homes. We reached the caravansary at Chattapur the next morning, and then started for Kalinger. At this point our seapoy escort deserted us. We were fired upon by match-lockmen, and one officer was shot dead. We heard, likewise, that the people had risen at Kalinger, so we returned and walked back ten miles that day. M. and I carried the child alternately. Presently Mrs. Smalley died of sunstroke. We had no food amongst us. An officer kindly lent us a horse. We were very faint. The major died, and was buried. Also the sergeant-major and some women. The band's men left us on the 19th of June. We were fired out again by match-lockmen, and changed direction for Allahabad. Our party consisted of nine gentlemen, two children, the sergeant, and his wife. On the morning of the twentieth Captain Scott took Lottie on to his horse. I was riding behind my husband, and she was so crushed between us. She was two years old on the first of the month. We were both weak through want of food and the effect of the sun. Lottie and I had no head-covering. M. had a seapoy's cap I found on the ground. Soon after sunrise we were followed by villagers armed with clubs and spears. One of them struck Captain Scott's horse on the leg. He galloped off with Lottie, and my poor husband never saw his child again. We rode on several miles, keeping away from villages, and then crossed the river. Our thirst was extreme. M. had dreadful cramps, so I had to hold him on the horse. I was very uneasy about him. The day before I saw the drummer's wife eating chapattis, and asked her to give a piece to the child, which she did. I now saw water in a ravine. The descent was steep, and our only drinking vessel was M's cap. Our horse got water, and I bathed my neck. I had no stockings, and my feet were torn and blistered. Two peasants came in sight, and we were frightened and rode off. The sergeant held our horse, and M put me up and mounted. I think he must have got suddenly faint for I fell, and he over me, on the road, when the horse started off. Some time before he said, and Bob or two, that he could not live many hours. I felt he was dying before we came to the ravine. He told me his wishes about his children and myself, and took leave. My brain seemed burnt up. No tears came. As soon as we fell, the sergeant let go the horse, and it went off, so that escape was cut off. We sat down on the ground, waiting for death. Poor fellow, he was very weak. His thirst was frightful, and I went to get him water. Some villagers came, and took my rupees and watch. I took off my wedding-ring, and twisted it in my hair, and replaced the guard. I tore off the skirt of my dress to bring water in, but was no use, for when I returned my beloved's eyes were fixed, and though I called and tried to restore him, and poured water into his mouth, it only rattled in his throat. He never spoke to me again. I held him in my arms till he sank gradually down. I felt frantic, but could not cry. I was alone. I bound his head and face in my dress, for there was no earth to bury him. The pain in my hands and feet was dreadful. I went down to the ravine and sat in the water on a stone, hoping to get off at night and look for Lottie. When I came back from the water, I saw that they had not taken her little watch, chain, and seals, so I tied them under my petticoat. In an hour about thirty villagers came. They dragged me out of the ravine, and took off my jacket, and found the little chain. They then dragged me to a village, mocking me all the way, and disputing as to whom I was to belong to. The whole population came to look at me. I asked for a bedstead, and lay down outside the door of a hut. They had a dozen of cows, and yet refused me milk. When night came, and the village was quiet, some old woman brought me a leaf full of rice. I was too parched to eat, and they gave me water. The morning after, a neighbouring raja sent a palanquin and a horseman to fetch me, who told me that a little child and three sahibs had come to his master's house. And so the poor mother found her last one, greatly blistered, poor little creature. It is not for Europeans in India to pray that their flight be not in the winter. In the first days of June the aged general Sir Hugh Wheeler, commanding the forces at Kanpur, was deserted by his native troops. Then he moved out of the fort, and into an exposed patch of open flat ground, and built a four-foot mud-wall around it. He had with him a few hundred white soldiers and officers, and apparently more women and children than soldiers. He was short of provisions, short of arms, short of ammunition, short of military wisdom, short of everything but courage and devotion to duty. The defence of that open lot through twenty-one days and nights of hunger, thirst, Indian heat, and a never-ceasing storm of bullets, bombs, and cannon-balls—a defence conducted not by the aged and infirm general, but by a young officer named Moore—is one of the most heroic episodes in history. When at last the nana found it impossible to conquer these starving men and women with powder and ball, he resorted to treachery, and that succeeded. He agreed to supply them with food, and send them to Allahabad in boats. Their mud-wall and their barracks were in ruins. Their provisions were at the point of exhaustion. They had done all that the brave could do. They had conquered an honourable compromise. Their forces had been fearfully reduced by casualties and by disease. They were not able to continue the contest longer. They came forth helpless but suspecting no treachery. The nana's host closed round them, and at a signal from a trumpet the massacre began. About two hundred women and children were spared for the present, but all the men except three or four were killed. Among the incidents of the massacre, quoted by Sir G. O. Trevelyan, is this. When, after the lapse of some twenty minutes, the dead began to outnumber the living, when the fire slackened, as the marks grew few and far between, then the troopers who had been drawn up to the right of the temple plunged into the river, sabre between teeth, and pistol in hand. Thereupon, to half-cast Christian women, the wives of musicians in the band of the fifty-sixth, witnessed a scene which should not be related at second hand. In the boat where I was to have gone, says Mrs. Bradshaw, confirmed throughout by Mrs. Sats, was the schoolmistress and twenty-two misses. General Wheeler came lost in a palky. They carried him into the water near the boat. I stood close by. He said, Carry me a little further towards the boat. But a trooper said, No, get out here. As the general got out of the palky, head foremost, the trooper gave him a cut with his sword into the neck, and he fell into the water. My son was killed near him. I saw it. Alas! Alas! Some were stabbed with bayonets, others cut down. Little infants were torn in pieces. We saw it. We did. And tell you only what we saw. Other children were stabbed and thrown into the river. The schoolgirls were burnt to death. I saw their clothes and hair catch fire. In the water, a few paces off by the next boat, we saw the youngest daughter of Colonel Williams. A sepoy was going to kill her with his bayonet. She said, My father was always kind to sepoys. He turned away, and just then a villager struck her on the head with a club, and she fell into the water. These people likewise saw good Mr. Moncrief, the clergyman, take a book from his pocket that he never had leisure to open, and heard him commence a prayer for mercy which he was not permitted to conclude. Another deponent observed an European making for a drain like a scared water-rat, when some boatmen armed with cudgels cut off his retreat and beat him down dead into the mud. The women and children who had been reserved from the massacre were imprisoned during a fortnight in a small building, one story high, a cramped place, a slightly modified black hole of Calcutta. They were waiting in suspense. There was none who could forecast their fate. Meantime the news of the massacre had travelled far, and an army of rescuers with Havlock at its head was on its way, at least an army which hoped to be rescuers. It was crossing the country by forced marches, and strewing its way with its own dead. Men struck down by cholera, and by a heat which reached 135 degrees. It was in a vengeful fury, and it stopped for nothing, neither heat nor fatigue, nor disease, nor human opposition. It tore its impetuous way through hostile forces, winning victory after victory, but still striding on and on, not halting to count results. And at last, after this extraordinary march, it arrived before the walls of Conpoor, met the Nanna's mass strength, delivered a crushing defeat, and entered. But too late, only a few hours too late. For at the last moment the Nanna had decided upon the massacre of the captive women and children, and had commissioned three Mohammedans and two Hindus to do the work. Sir G. O. Trevalian says, Thereupon the five men entered. It was the short gloaming of Hindustan, the hour when ladies take their evening drive. She who had accosted the officer was standing in the doorway. With her were the native doctor and two Hindu menials. That much of the business might be seen from the veranda, but all else was concealed amidst the interior gloom. Shrieks and scuffling, acquainted those without, that the journeymen were earning their hire. Sir Vurghan soon emerged with his sword broken off at the hilt. He procured another from the Nanna's house. And a few minutes after, appeared again on the same errand. The third blade was of better temper, or perhaps the thick of the work was already over. By the time darkness had closed in, the men came forth and locked up the house for the night. Then the screams ceased, but the groans lasted till morning. The sun rose as usual. When he had been up nearly three hours, the five repaired to the scene of their labours overnight. They were attended by a few sweepers, who proceeded to transfer the contents of the house to a dry well situated behind some trees which grew hard by. The bodies, says one who was present throughout, were dragged out, most of them by the hair of the head. Those who had clothing, worth taking, were stripped. Some of the women were alive, I cannot say how many, but three could speak. They prayed for the sake of God that an end might be put to their sufferings. I remarked one very stout woman, a half-caste, who was severely wounded in both arms, who entreated to be killed. She and two or three others were placed against the bank of the cut by which bullocks go down in drawing water. The dead were first thrown in. Yes, there was a great crowd looking on. They were standing along the walls of the compound. They were principally city people and villagers. Yes, there were also sepoys. Three boys were alive. They were fair children. The eldest, I think, must have been six or seven and the youngest five years. They were running around the well. Where else could they go to? And there was none to save them. No, none said a word or tried to save them. At length, the smallest of them made an infantile attempt to get away. The little thing had been frightened past, bearing by the murder of one of the surviving ladies. He thus attracted the observation of a native who flung him and his companions down the well. The soldiers had made a march of eighteen days almost without rest to save the women and the children, and now they were too late. All were dead, and the assassin had flown. What happened then, Trevelyan hesitated to put into words? Of what took place, the less said is the better. Then he continues. But there was a spectacle to witness which might excuse much. Those who, straight from the contested field, wandered sobbing through the rooms of the lady's house, saw what it were well could the outraged earth have straight away hidden. The inner apartment was ankle deep in blood. The plaster was scored with sword-cuts, not high up as where men have fought, but low down, and about the corners, as if a creature had crouched to avoid the blow. Strips of dresses, vainly tied around the handles of the doors, signified the contrivance to which feminine despair had resorted as a means of keeping out the murderers. Broken combs were there, and the frills of children's trousers, and torn cuffs and pinafores, and little round hats, and one or two shoes with burst latchets, and one or two daguerreotype cases with cracked glasses. An officer picked up a few curls, preserved in a bit of cardboard, and marked Ned's hair with love. But a round were strewn locks, some near a yard in length, dissevered not as a keepsake by quite other scissors. The battle of Waterloo was fought on the 18th of June, 1815. I do not state this fact as a reminder to the reader, but as news to him, for a forgotten fact is news when it comes again. Writers of books have the fashion of whizzing by vast and renowned historical events with a remark. The details of this tremendous episode are too familiar to the reader to need repeating here. They know that that is not true. It is a low kind of flattery. They know that the reader has forgotten every detail of it, and that nothing of the tremendous event is left in his mind but a vague and formless luminous smudge. Aside from the desire to flatter the reader, they have another reason for making the remark, two reasons indeed. They do not remember the details themselves, and do not want the trouble of hunting them up and copying them out. Also, they are afraid that if they search them out and print them, they will be scoffed at by the book-reviewers for retelling those warn old things which are familiar to everybody. They should not mind the reviewer's jeer. He doesn't remember any of the warn old things until the book which he is reviewing has retold them to him. I have made the quoted remark myself at one time and another, but I was not doing it to flatter the reader. I was merely doing it to save work. If I had known the details without brushing up, I would have put them in. But I didn't, and I did not want the labour of posting myself. So I said, The details of this tremendous episode are too familiar to the reader to need repeating here. I do not like that kind of a lie. Still, it does save work. I am not trying to get out of repeating the details of the siege of Lucknow in fear of the reviewer. I am not leaving them out in fear that they would not interest the reader. I am leaving them out partly to save work, mainly for lack of room. It is a pity, too, for there is not a dull place anywhere in the great story. Ten days before the outbreak, May 10th, of the mutiny, all was serene at Lucknow, the huge capital of Ud, the kingdom which had recently been seized by the India Company. There was a great garrison composed of about seven thousand native troops, and between seven hundred and eight hundred whites. These white soldiers and their families were probably the only people of their race there. At their elbow was that swarming population of war-like natives, a race of born soldiers, brave, daring, and fond of fighting. On high ground just outside the city stood the palace of that great personage, the resident, the representative of British power and authority. It stood in the midst of spacious grounds with its due complement of outbuildings, and the grounds were enclosed by a wall, a wall not for defence, but for privacy. The mutinous spirit was in the air, but the whites were not afraid, and did not feel much troubled. Then came the outbreak at Mirut, then the capture of Delhi by the mutineers. In June came the three-weeks-leaguer of Sir Hugh Wheeler in his open lot at Kanpur, forty miles distant from Lucknow. Then the treacherous massacre of that gallant little garrison, and now the great revolt was in full flower and the comfortable condition of things at Lucknow was instantly changed. There was an outbreak there, and Sir Henry Lawrence marched out of the residency on the thirtieth of June to put it down, but was defeated with heavy loss, and had difficulty in getting back again. That night the memorable siege of the residency, called the Siege of Lucknow, began. Sir Henry was killed three days later, and Brigadier Inglis succeeded him in command. Outside of the residency fence was an immense host of hostile and confident native besiegers. Inside it were four hundred and eighty loyal native soldiers, seven hundred and thirty white ones, and five hundred women and children. In those days the English garrisons always managed to hamper themselves sufficiently with women and children. The natives established themselves in houses close at hand, and began to rain bullets and cannonballs into the residency, and this they kept up night and day during four months and a half, the little garrison industriously, replying all the time. The women and children soon became so used to the roar of the guns that it ceased to disturb their sleep. The children imitated siege and defense in their play. The women, with any pretext or with none, would sally out into the storm-swept grounds. The defense was kept up week after week, with stubborn fortitude, in the midst of death, which came in many forms, by bullet, smallpox, cholera, and by various diseases induced by unpalatable and insufficient food, by the long hours of wearying and exhausting overwork in the daily and nightly battle in the oppressive Indian heat, and by the broken rest caused by the intolerable pest of mosquitoes, flies, mice, rats, and fleas. Six weeks after the beginning of the siege, more than one-half of the original force of white soldiers was dead, and close upon three-fifths of the original native force. But the fighting went on just the same. The enemy mined, the English counter-mined, and, turn about, they blew up each other's posts. The residency grounds were honeycombed with the enemy's tunnels. Deadly courtesies were constantly exchanged, sorties by the English in the night, rushes by the enemy in the night, rushes whose purpose was to breach the walls or scale them, rushes which cost heavily and always failed. The ladies got used to all the horrors of war, the shrieks of mutilated men, the sight of blood and death. Lady English makes this mention in her diary. Mrs. Brewer's nurse was carried past our door today, wounded in the eye. To extract the bullet it was found necessary to take out the eye, a fearful operation. Her mistress held her while it was performed. The first relieving force failed to relieve. It was under Havlock and Outram, and arrived when the siege had been going on for three months. It fought its desperate way to Lucknow, then fought its way through the city against odds of a hundred to one and entered the residency. But there was not enough left of it then to do any good. It lost more men in its last fight than it found in the residency when it got in. It became captive itself. The fighting and starving and dying by bullets and disease went steadily on. Both sides fought with energy and industry. Captain Birch puts this striking incident in evidence. He is speaking of the third month of the siege. As an instance of the heavy firing brought to bear on our position this month may be mentioned the cutting down of the upper story of a brick building simply by musketry firing. This building was in a most exposed position. All the shots which just missed the top of the rampart cut into the dead wall pretty much in a straight line, and at length cut right through and brought the upper story tumbling down. The upper structure on the top of the brigade mass also fell in. The residency house was a wreck. Captain Anderson's post had long ago been knocked down, and Innis's post also fell in. These two were riddled with round shot. As many as two hundred were picked up by Colonel Masters. The exhausted garrison fought doggedly on all through the next month, October. Then, November 2, news came Sir Colin Campbell's relieving force would soon be on its way from Cornpore. On the twelfth the boom of his guns was heard. On the thirteenth the sounds came nearer. He was slowly but steadily cutting his way through, storming one stronghold after another. On the fourteenth he captured the Martinier College and ran up the British flag there. It was seen from the residency. Next he took the Dilcusha. On the seventeenth he took the former mess-house of the thirty-second regiment, a fortified building and very strong. A most exciting, anxious day, writes Lady Inglis in her diary. About four p.m., two strange officers walked through our yard, leading their horses. And by that sign she knew that communication was established between the forces, that the relief was real this time, and that the long siege of Lucknow was ended. The last eight or ten miles of Sir Colin Campbell's march was through seas of blood. The weapon mainly used was the bayonet. The fighting was desperate. The way was milestoneed with detached strong buildings of stone fortified and heavily garrisoned, and these had to be taken by assault. Neither side asked for quarter, and neither gave it. At the Sekundrabag, where nearly two thousand of the enemy occupied a great stone house in a garden, the work of slaughter was continued until every man was killed. That is a sample of the character of that devastating march. There were but few trees in the plain at that time, and from the residency, the progress of the march, step by step victory by victory could be noted. The ascending clouds of battle-smoke marked the way to the eye, and the thunder of the guns marked it to the ear. Sir Colin Campbell had not come to Lucknow to hold it, but to save the occupants of the residency and bring them away. Four or five days after his arrival, the secret evacuation by the troops took place in the middle of a dark night by the principal gate, the baili-guard. The two hundred women and two hundred and fifty children had been previously removed. Captain Birch says, and now commenced a movement of the most perfect arrangement and successful generalship, the withdrawal of the whole of the various forces, a combined movement requiring the greatest care and skill. First, the garrison in immediate contact with the enemy at the furthest extremity of the residency position was marched out. Every other garrison, in turn, fell in behind it, and so passed out through the baili-guard gate, till the whole of our position was evacuated. Then Havlock's force was similarly withdrawn, post by post, marching in rear of our garrison. After them, in turn, came the forces of the commander-in-chief, which joined on in the rear of Havlock's force. Regiment by regiment was withdrawn with the utmost order and regularity. The whole operation resembled the movement of a telescope. Stern's silence was kept, and the enemy took no alarm. Lady Inglis, referring to her husband and to general Sir James Outram, sets down the closing detail of this impressive midnight retreat in darkness and by stealth of this shadowy host through the gate which it had defended so long and so well. At twelve precisely they marched out, John and Sir James Outram remaining till all had passed, and then they took off their hats to the baili-guard, the scene of as noble a defence as I think history will ever have to relate.