 37 From Sydney, for Ceylon, Alaska crew, a fine ship, three cats and a basket of kittens, dinner conversations, veuve-clicquot wine, at anchor in King George's sound Albany harbour, four cats, a vulture on board, nearing the equator again, dressing for dinner, Ceylon, Hotel Bristol, Servant Brampy, a feminine man, Japanese Jean-Rickshaw or Cart, scenes in Ceylon, a missionary school, insincerity of clothes. To succeed in the other trades capacity must be shown. In the law concealment of it will do. Puddinhead Wilson's New Calendar. Monday, December 23, 1895, sailed from Sydney, for Ceylon, in the P&O steamer Oceana. Alaska crew, man's this ship, the first I have seen. White cotton petticoat and pants, barefoot, red shawl for belt, straw cap, brimless on head, with red scarf wound around it, complexion a rich dark brown, short, straight black hair, whiskers fine and silky, lustrous and intensely black, mild good faces, willing and obedient people, capable too, but are said to go into hopeless panics when there is danger. They are from Bombay and the coast thereabouts, left some of the trunks in Sydney to be shipped to South Africa by a vessel advertised to sail three months hence. The proverb says, separate not yourself from your baggage. This Oceana is a stately big ship, luxuriously appointed. She has spacious promenade decks, large rooms, a surpassingly comfortable ship. The officer's library is well selected. A ship's library is not usually that. For meals the bugle-call, man of war fashion, a pleasant change from the terrible gong. Three big cats, very friendly loafers. They wander all over the ship. The white one follows the chief steward around like a dog. There is also a basket of kittens. One of these cats goes ashore in port, in England, Australia and India, to see how his various families are getting along, and is seen no more till the ship is ready to sail. No one knows how he finds out the sailing date, but no doubt he comes down to the dock every day and takes a look, and when he sees baggage and passengers flocking in, recognizes that it's time to get aboard. This is what the sailors believe. The chief engineer has been in the China and India trade thirty-three years, and has had but three Christmases at home in that time. Conversational items at dinner? Mocha, sold all over the world, it is not true. In fact very few foreigners, except the Emperor of Russia, have ever seen a grain of it, or ever will while they live. Another man said, there is no sail in Australia for Australian wine, but it goes to France and comes back with a French label on it, and then they buy it. I have heard that the most of the French-labeled claret in New York is made in California, and I remember what Professor S. told me once about Verve Clicoe, if that was the wine, and I think it was. He was the guest of a great wine-merchant whose town was quite near that vineyard, and this merchant asked him if very much V.C. was drunk in America. Oh yes, said S., a great abundance of it. Is it easy to be had? Oh yes, easy as water. All first and second-class hotels have it. What do you pay for it? It depends on the style of the hotel, from fifteen to twenty-five francs a bottle. Oh, fortunate country! Why, it's worth one hundred francs right here on the ground. No. Yes. Do you mean that we are drinking a bogus Verve Clicoe over there? Yes, and there was never a bottle of the genuine in America since Columbus's time. That wine all comes from a little bit of a patch of ground, which isn't big enough to raise many bottles, and all of it that is produced goes every year to one person, the emperor of Russia. He takes the whole crop in advance, be it big or little. January 4, 1896. Christmas in Melbourne. New Year's Day in Adelaide. And saw most of the friends again in both places. Lying here at anchor all day, Albany, King George's Sound, Western Australia. It is a perfectly landlocked harbour, or roadstead, spacious to look at, but not deep water. Desolate-looking rocks and scarred hills. Plenty of ships arriving now, rushing to the new gold fields. The papers are full of wonderful tales of the sort always to be heard in connection with new gold diggings. A sample. A youth staked out a claim and tried to sell half or five pounds. No takers. He stuck to it fourteen days starving, then struck it rich and sold out for ten thousand pounds. About sunset strong breeze blowing got up the anchor. We were in a small deep puddle, with a narrow channel leading out of it, minutely buoyed, to the sea. I stayed on deck to see how we were going to manage it with such a big ship and such a strong wind. On the bridge our giant captain in uniform. At his side a little pilot in elaborately gold-laced uniform. On the folksal a white mate and quarter-master or two and a brilliant crowd of lascars standing by for business. Our stern was pointing straight at the head of the channel, so we must turn entirely around in the puddle and the wind blowing as described. It was done, and beautifully. It was done by help of a jib. We stirred up much mud, but did not touch the bottom. We turned right around in our tracks, a seeming impossibility. We had several casts of quarter-less, five, and one cast of half-four twenty-seven feet. We were drawing twenty-six a stern. By the time we were entirely around and pointed the first buoy was not more than a hundred yards in front of us. It was a fine piece of work, and I was the only passenger that saw it. However the others got their dinner. The P&O company got mine. More cats developed. Smythe says it is a British law that they must be carried, and he instanced a case of a ship not allowed to sail, till she sent for a couple. The bill came too. Debt her to two cats, twenty shillings. News comes that within this week Siam has acknowledged herself to be, in effect, a French province. It seems plain that all savage and semi-civilized countries are going to be grabbed. A vulture on board. Bald, red, queer-shaped head. Featherless red places here and there on his body. Intense, great black eyes set in featherless rims of inflamed flesh. Disappated look. A business-like style. A selfish, conscience-less, murderous aspect. The very look of a professional assassin. And yet a bird which does no murder. What was the use of getting him up in that tragic style for so innocent a trade as his? For this one isn't the sort that wars upon the living. His diet is awful, and the more out of date it is, the better he likes it. Nature should give him a suit of rusty black. Then he would be all right. For he would look like an undertaker and would harmonize with his business. Whereas the way he is now, he is horribly out of true. January 5. At nine this morning we passed Cape Lewin, Linus, and seized from our long due west course along the southern shore of Australia. Turning this extreme southwestern corner, we now take a long straight slant nearly north-west without a break for Ceylon. As we speed northward it will grow hotter very fast, but it isn't chilly now. The vulture is from the public menagerie at Adelaide, a great and interesting collection. It was there that we saw the baby tiger solemnly spreading its mouth and trying to roar like its majestic mother. It swaggered, scowling, back and forth on its short legs just as it had seen her do on her long ones, and now and then snarling viciously, exposing its teeth with a threatening lift of its upper lip and bristling mustache, and when it thought it was impressing the visitors, it would spread its mouth wide and do that screechy cry which it meant for a roar, but which did not sieve. It took itself quite seriously and was lovably comical, and there was a hyena, an ugly creature, as ugly as the tiger-kitty was pretty. It repeatedly arched its back and delivered itself of such a human cry, a startling resemblance, a cry which was just that of a grown person badly hurt. In the dark one would assuredly go to its assistance and be disappointed. Many friends of Australasian Federation on board. They feel sure that the good day is not far off now, but there seems to be a party that would go further, have Australasia cut loose from the British Empire and set up housekeeping on her own hook. It seems an unwise idea. They point to the United States, but it seems to me that the cases lack a good deal of being alike. Australasia governs herself wholly, there is no interference, and her commerce and manufactures are not oppressed in any way. If our case had been the same, we should not have gone out when we did. 8.13. Unspeakably hot. The equator is arriving again. We are within eight degrees of it. Salon present. Dear me, it is beautiful, and most sumptrously tropical as to character a foliage and opulence of it. What, though, the spicy breezes blow soft, or Salon's Isle? An eloquent line, an incomparable line. It says little, but conveys whole libraries of sentiment, and oriental charm and mystery and tropic deliciousness, a line that quivers and tingles with a thousand unexpressed and inexpressible things, things that haunt one, and find no articulate voice. Colombo, the capital, an oriental town, most manifestly, and fascinating. In this palatial ship the passengers dress for dinner. The ladies' toilettes make a fine display of colour, and this is in keeping with the elegance of the vessel's furnishings and the flooding brilliancies of the electric light. On the stormy Atlantic one never sees a man in evening dress except at the rarest intervals, and then there is only one, not two, and he shows up, but once on the voyage. The night before the ship makes port. The night when they have the concert and do the amateur wailings and recitations. He is the tenor as a rule. There has been a deal of cricket playing on board. It seems a queer game for a ship, but they enclose the promenade deck with nettings and keep the ball from flying overboard, and the sport goes very well and is properly violent and exciting. We must part from this vessel here. January 14 Hotel Bristol. Servant. Brumpy. Alert. Gentle. Smiling. Winning young brown creature as ever was. Beautiful shining black hair combed back like a woman's, and knotted at the back of his head. Tortoise shell comb in it, sign that he is a singleese. Slender, shapely form. Jacket, under it is a beltless and flowing white cotton gown, from neck straight to heel. He and his outfit quite unmasculine. It was an embarrassment to undress before him. We drove to the market, using the Japanese Jean-Rickshaw, our first acquaintanceship with it. It is a light cart with a native to draw it. He makes good speed for half an hour, but it is hard work for him. He is too slight for it. After the half hour there is no more pleasure for you. Your attention is all on the man, just as it would be on a tired horse, and necessarily your sympathy is there too. There's a plenty of these rickshaws, and the tariff is incredibly cheap. I was in Cairo years ago, that was oriental, but there was a lack. When you are in Florida or New Orleans you are in the South, that is granted, but you are not in the South, you are in a modified South, a tempered South. Cairo was a tempered Orient, an Orient with an indefinite something wanting. That feeling was not present in Ceylon. Ceylon was oriental in the last measure of completeness, utterly oriental, also utterly tropical, and, indeed, to one's unreasoning spiritual sense the two things belong together. All the requisites were present, the costumes were right, the black and brown exposures unconscious of immodesty were right, the juggler was there with his basket, his snakes, his mongoose, and his arrangements for growing a tree from seed to foliage and ripe frutage before one's eyes. In sight were plants and flowers familiar to one on books, but in no other way. Celebrated, desirable, strange, but in production restricted to the hot belt of the equator. And out a little way in the country were the proper deadly snakes and fierce beasts of prey, and the wild elephant and the monkey. And there was that swoon in the air which one associates with the tropics, and that smother of heat, heavy with odors of unknown flowers, and that sudden invasion of purple gloom fissured with lightnings, then the tumult of crashing thunder and the downpour and presently all sunny and smiling again. All these things were there, the conditions were complete, nothing was lacking. And away off in the deeps of the jungle and in the remoteness of the mountains were the ruined cities and mouldering temples, mysterious relics of the pumps of a forgotten time and a vanished race. And this was as it should be also, for nothing is quite satisfyingly oriental that lacks the somber and impressive qualities of mystery and antiquity. The drive through the town and out to the gall face by the seashore, what a dream it was of tropical splendours of bloom and blossom and oriental conflagrations of costume. The walking groups of men, women, boys, girls, babies, each individual was a flame, each group a house of fire for colour, and such stunning colours, such intensely vivid colours, such rich and exquisite minglings and fusing of rainbows and lightnings, and all harmonious, all in perfect taste. Never a discordant note, never a colour on any person swearing at another colour on him or failing to harmonise faultlessly with the colours of any group the wearer might join. The stuffs were silk, thin, soft, delicate, clinging. And as a rule, each piece a solid colour, a splendid green, a splendid blue, a splendid yellow, a splendid purple, a splendid ruby, deep and rich with smoldering fires. They swept continuously by in crowds and legions and multitudes, glowing, flashing, burning, radiant. In every five seconds came a burst of blinding red that made a body catch his breath and filled his heart with joy. And then the unimaginable grace of those costumes. Sometimes a woman's whole dress was but a scarf wound about her person and her head. Sometimes a man's was but a turban and a careless rag or two, in both cases generous areas of polished dark skin showing. But all was the arrangement compelled the homage of the eye and made the heart sing for gladness. I can see it to this day that radiant panorama, that wilderness of rich colour, that incomparable dissolving view of harmonious tints and lithe, half-covered forms and beautiful brown faces, and gracious and graceful gestures and attitudes and movements, free, unstudied, barren of stiffness and restraint, and, just then, into this dream of fairyland and paradise, a grating dissonance was injected. Out of a missionary school came marching, two and two, sixteen prim and pious little Christian black girls, Europeanly clothed, dressed to the last detail as they would have been dressed on a summer Sunday in an English or American village. Those clothes—oh, they were unspeakably ugly! Ugly, barbarous, destitute of taste, destitute of grace, repulsive as a shroud. I looked at my women-folk's clothes, just full-grown duplicates of the outrages disguising those poor little abused creatures, and was ashamed to be seen in the street with them. Then I looked at my own clothes, and was ashamed to be seen in the street with myself. However, we must put up with our clothes as they are. They have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us, to advertise what we wear them to a conceal. They are a sign, a sign of insincerity, a sign of suppressed vanity, a pretense that we despise gorgeous colors and the graces of harmony and form. And we put them on to propagate that lie and back it up. But we do not deceive our neighbor, and when we step into Ceylon we realize that we have not even deceived ourselves. We do love brilliant colors and graceful costumes, and at home we will turn out in a storm to see them, when the procession goes by, and envy the wearers. We go to the theatre to look at them and grieve that we can't be closed like that. We go to the king's ball, when we get a chance, and are glad of a sight of these splendid uniforms and the glittering orders. When we are granted permission to attend an imperial drawing-room, we shut ourselves up in private and parade around in the theatrical court dress by the hour, and admire ourselves in the glass, and are utterly happy, and every member of every governor's staff in Democratic America does the same with his grand new uniform, and if he is not watched he will get himself photographed in it, too. When I see the Lord Mayor's footmen I am dissatisfied with my lot. Yes, our clothes are a lie, and have been nothing short of that these hundred years. They are insincere, they are the ugly and appropriate outward exposure of an inward sham and a moral decay. The last little brown boy I chanced to notice in the crowds and swarms of Colombo had nothing on but a twine-string around his waist, but in my memory the frank honesty of his costume still stands out in pleasant contrast with the odious flummary in which the little Sunday-school dowdies were masquerading. CHAPTER XXXVIII Steamer Rosetta to Bombay. Limes, fourteen cents a barrel. Bombay, of a witching city. Descriptions of people and dress. Woman as a road-decoration. India, the land of dreams and romance. Fourteen porters to carry baggage. Correcting a servant. Killing a slave. Arranging a bedroom. Three hours' work and a terrible racket. The bird of birds, the Indian crow. Prosperity is the best protector of principle. Puddinhead Wilson's new calendar. Evening, fourteenth, sailed in the Rosetta. This is a poor old ship and ought to be insured and sunk. As in the Oceana, just so here, everybody dresses for dinner. They make it a sort of pious duty. These fine and formal costumes are a rather conspicuous contrast to the poverty and shabbiness of the surroundings. If you want a slice of a lime at four o'clock tea, you must sign an order on the bar. Limes cost fourteen cents a barrel. January eighteenth. We have been running up the Arabian Sea, latterly. Closing up on Bombay now, and due to arrive this evening. January twentieth. Bombay. A bewitching place. A bewildering place. An enchanting place. The Arabian nights come again. It is a vast city. Contains about a million inhabitants. Natives they are, with a slight sprinkling of white people. Not enough to have the slightest modifying effect upon the mass-dark complexion of the public. It is winter here. Yet the weather is the divine weather of June, and the foliage is the fresh and heavenly foliage of June. There is a rank of noble great shade trees across the way from the hotel, and under them sit groups of picturesque natives of both sexes, and the juggler in his turban is there with his snakes and his magic, and all day long the cabs and the multitudinous varieties of costumes flock by. It does not seem as if one could ever get tired of watching this moving show, this shining and shifting spectacle. In the great bazaar the pack and jam of natives was marvellous, the sea of rich-colored turbans and draperies and inspiring sight, and the quaint and showy Indian architecture was just the right setting for it. Towards sunset another show. This is the drive around the seashore to Malabar Point where Lord Santerst, the governor of the Bombay presidency, lives. Parsi palace is all along the first part of the drive, and past them all the world is driving. The private carriages of wealthy Englishmen and natives of rank are manned by a driver and three-foot men in stunning oriental liveries, two of these turban statues standing up behind as fine as monuments. Sometimes even the public carriages have this super-abundant crew, slightly modified, one to drive, one to sit by and see it done, and one to stand up behind and yell, yell when there is anybody in the way, and for practice when there isn't. It all helps to keep up the liveliness and augment the general sense of swiftness and energy and confusion and powwow. In the region of Scandal Point, felicitous name, where there are handy rocks to sit on and a noble view of the sea on the one hand, and on the other the passing and repassing whirl and tumult of gay carriages, are great groups of comfortably off-parsee women, perfect flower beds of brilliant colour, a fascinating spectacle. Tramp, tramp, tramping along the road in singles, couples, groups and gangs, you have the working man and the working woman, but not clothed like ours. Usually the man is a nobly-built great athlete with not a rag on but his loin handkerchief, his colour a deep dark brown, his skin satin, his rounded muscles knobbing it as if it had eggs under it. Usually the woman is a slender and shapely creature as erect as a lightning rod, and she has but one thing on, a bright-coloured piece of stuff which is wound about her head and her body down nearly half way to her knees, and which clings like her own skin. Her legs and feet are bare, and so are her arms, except for her fanciful bunches of loose silver rings on her ankles and on her arms. She has jewelry bunched on the side of her nose also, and showy clusterings on her toes. When she undresses for bed she takes off her jewelry, I suppose. If she took off anything more she would catch cold. As a rule she has a large, shiny brass water jar of graceful shape on her head, and one of her naked arms curves up and the hand holds it there. She is so straight, so erect, and she steps with such style and such easy grace and dignity, and her curved arm and her brazen jar are such a help to the picture. Indeed our working women cannot begin with her as a road decoration. It is all colour, bewitching colour, enchanting colour, everywhere all around, all the way around the curving great opaline bay clear to Government House, where the turbaned big native chuprassis stand grouped in state at the door in their robes of fiery red, and do most properly and stunningly finish up the splendid show and make it theatrically complete. I wish I were a chuprassi. This is indeed India, the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendour and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bare date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations, the one sole country under the sun, that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. Even now, after the lapse of a year, the delirium of those days in Bombay has not left me, and I hope never will. It was all new, no detail of it hackneyed. And India did not wait for mourning, it began at the hotel straight away. The lobbies and halls were full of turban and fezged and embroidered, capped and barefooted and cotton-clad dark natives, some of them rushing about, others at rest squatting or sitting on the ground, some of them chattering with energy, others still and dreamy. In the dining-room every man's own private native servant standing behind his chair and dressed for a part in the Arabian nights. Our rooms were high up on the front. A white man, he was a burly German, went up with us and brought three natives along to see two arranging things. About fourteen others followed in procession with a hand-baggage. Each carried an article and only one, a bag, in some cases, in other cases less. One strong native carried my overcoat, another a parasol, another a box of cigars, another a novel, and the last man in the procession had no load but a fan. It was all done with earnestness and sincerity. There was not a smile in the procession from the head of it to the tail of it. Each man waited patiently, tranquilly, in no sort of hurry, till one of us found time to give him a copper. Then he bent his head reverently, touched his forehead with his fingers and went his way. They seemed a soft and gentle race, and there was something both winning and touching about their demeanor. There was a vast glazed door which opened upon the balcony. It needed closing, or cleaning, or something, and a native got down on his knees and went to work at it. He seemed to be doing it well enough, but perhaps he wasn't, for the burly German put on a look that betrayed dissatisfaction. Then without explaining what was wrong gave the native a brisk cuff on the jaw and then told him where the defect was. It seemed such a shame to do that before us all. The native took it with meekness, saying nothing, and not showing in his face or manner any resentment. I had not seen the like of this for fifty years. It carried me back to my boyhood, and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the usual way of explaining one's desires to a slave. I was able to remember that the method seemed right and natural to me in those days, I being born to it and unaware that elsewhere there were other methods. But I was also able to remember that those unresented cuffings made me sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher. My father was a refined and kindly gentleman, very grave, rather austere, of rigid probity, a sternly just and upright man, albeit he attended no church and never spoke of religious matters, and had no part nor lot in the pious joys of his Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from this deprivation. He laid his hand upon me in punishment only twice in his life, and then not heavily, once for telling him a lie, which surprised me and showed me how unsuspicious he was, for that was not my maiden effort. He punished me those two times only, and never any other member of the family at all. Yet every now and then he cuffed our harmless slave boy, Louis, for trifling little blunders and awkwardnesses. My father had passed his life among the slaves from his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the custom of the time, not from his nature. When I was ten years old, I saw a man fling a lump of iron ore at a slave man in anger for merely doing something awkwardly, as if that were a crime. It bounded from the man's skull, and the man fell, and never spoke again. He was dead in an hour. I knew the man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was not deep enough to explain if I had been asked to do it. Nobody in the village approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about it. It is curious, the space-annihilating power of thought, for just one second all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missouri in village, on the other side of the globe, vividly seeing again these forgotten pictures of fifty years ago, and wholly unconscious of all things but just those, and in the next second I was back in Bombay, and that kneeling native smitten cheek was not done tingling yet. Back to boyhood fifty years, back to age again another fifty, and a flight equal to the circumference of the globe all in two seconds by the watch. Some natives, I don't remember how many, went into my bedroom now and put things to rights and arranged the mosquito-bar, and I went to bed to nurse my cough. It was about nine in the evening. What a state of things! For three hours the yelling and shouting of natives in the hall continued, along with the velvety patter of their swift bare feet. What a racket it was! They were yelling orders and messages down three flights. Why, in the matter of noise, it amounted to a riot, an insurrection, a revolution. And then there were other noises mixed up with these, and at intervals tremendously accenting them. Roofs falling in, I judged, windows smashing, persons being murdered, crows squawking and deriding and cursing, canaries screeching, monkeys jabbering, macaws blaspheming, and every now and then fiendish bursts of laughter and explosions of dynamite. By midnight I had suffered all the different kinds of shocks there are, and knew that I could never more be disturbed by them, either isolated or in combination. Then came peace, stillness deep and solemn, and lasted till five. Then it all broke loose again. And who restarted it? The bird of birds, the Indian crow. I came to know him well, by and by, and be infatuated with him. I suppose he is the hardest lot that wears feathers. Yes, and the cheerfulness, and the best satisfied with himself. He never arrived at what he is by any careless process, or any sudden one. He is a work of art, and art is long. He is the product of immemorial ages, and of deep calculation. One can't make a bird like that in a day. He has been reincarnated more times than Shiva, and he has kept a sample of each incarnation, and fused it into his constitution. In the course of his evolutionary promotions, his sublime march toward ultimate perfection, he has been a gambler, a locomedian, a dissolute priest, a fussy woman, a black guard, a scoffer, a liar, a thief, a spy, an informer, a trading politician, a swindler, a professional hypocrite, a patriot for cash, a reformer, a lecturer, a lawyer, a conspirator, a rebel, a royalist, a democrat, a practiser and propagator of irreverence, a meddler, an intruder, a busy body, an infidel, and a wallower in sin for the mere love of it. The strange result, the incredible result of this patient accumulation of all damnable traits, is that he does not know what care is. He does not know what sorrow is. He does not know what remorse is. His life is one long, thundering ecstasy of happiness, and he will go to his death untroubled, knowing that he will soon turn up again as an author or something, and be even more intolerably capable and comfortable than ever he was before. In his straddling, wide forward step, and his springy, sidewise series of hops, and his impudent air, and his cunning way of canting his head to one side upon occasion, he reminds one of the American Blackbird. But the sharp resemblances stop there. He is much bigger than the Blackbird, and he lacks the Blackbird's trim and slender and beautiful build and shapely beak. And, of course, his sober garb of gray and rusty black is a poor and humble thing compared with the splendid luster of the Blackbird's metallic sabers and shifting and flashing bronze glories. The Blackbird is a perfect gentleman, in deportment and attire, and is not noisy, I believe, except when holding religious services and political conventions in a tree. But this Indian sham Quaker is just a rowdy, and is always noisy when awake, always chafing, scolding, scoffing, laughing, ripping and cursing, and carrying on about something or other. I never saw such a bird for delivering opinions. Nothing escapes him. He notices everything that happens and brings out his opinion about it, particularly if it is a matter that is none of his business. And it is never a mild opinion but always violent, violent and profane. The presence of ladies does not affect him. His opinions are not the outcome of reflection, for he never thinks about anything, but heaves out the opinion that is on top in his mind, and which is often an opinion about some quite different thing and does not fit the case. But that is his way. His main idea is to get out an opinion, and if he stopped to think he would lose chances. I suppose he has no enemies among men, the Whites and Mohammedans never seemed to molest him, and the Hindus, because of their religion, never take the life of any creature, but spare even the snakes and tigers and fleas and rats. If I sat on one end of the balcony, the crows would gather on the railing at the other end and talk about me, an edge closer, little by little, till I could almost reach them, and they would sit there in the most unabashed way and talk about my clothes and my hair and my complexion and probable character and vocation and politics, and how I came to be in India, and what I had been doing, and how many days I had got for it, and how I had happened to go unhanged so long, and when would it probably come off, and might there be more of my sort where I came from, and when would they be hanged, and so on and so on, until I could not longer endure the embarrassment of it, then I would shoe them away, and they would circle around in the air a little while, laughing and deriding and mocking, and presently settle on the rail and do it all over again. They were very sociable when there was anything to eat, oppressively so. With a little encouragement they would come in and light on a table and help me eat my breakfast, and once when I was in the other room, and they found themselves alone, they carried off everything they could lift, and they were particular to choose things which they could make no use of after they got them. In India their number is beyond estimate, and their noise is in proportion. I suppose they cost the country more than the government does. Yet that is not a light matter. Still they pay. Their company pays. It would sadden the land to take their cheerful voice out of it. CHAPTER XXXIX God Vishnu, 108 names. Change of titles or hunting for an air. Bombay as a kaleidoscope. The native's man-servant. Servants' recommendations. How Manuel got his name and his English. Satan. A visit from God. By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean. Putin had Wilson's new calendar. You soon find your long ago dreams of India rising in a sort of vague and luscious moonlight above the horizon rim of your opaque consciousness and softly lighting up a thousand forgotten details which were parts of a vision that had once been vivid to you when you were a boy and steeped your spirit in tales of the East, the barbaric gorgeousnesses, for instance, and the princely titles, the sumptuous titles, the sounding titles, how good they taste in the mouth, the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Maharaja of Travancore, the Nabob of Jubilpur, the Begum of Bhopal, the Nabob of Mysore, the Rani of Gulnare, the Akund of Swats, the Rao of Rohilkund, the Gaikwar of Baroda. Indeed it is a country that runs richly to name. The great God Vishnu has a hundred and eight, a hundred and eight special ones, a hundred and eight peculiarly holy ones, names just for Sunday use only. I learned the whole of Vishnu's a hundred and eight by heart once, but they wouldn't stay. I don't remember any of them now, but John W. And the romances connected with those princely native houses, to this day they are always turning up, just as in the old, old times. They were sweating out a romance in an English court in Bombay a while before we were there. In this case a native prince, sixteen and a half years old, who has been enjoying his titles and dignities and estates, unmolested for fourteen years, is suddenly hailed into court on the charge that he is rightfully no prince at all, but a pauper peasant, that the real prince died when two and a half years old, that the death was concealed, and a peasant child smuggled into the royal cradle, and that this present incumbent was that smuggled substitute. This is the very material that so many Oriental tales have been made of. The case of that great prince, the Gaikwar of Baroda, is a reversal of the theme. When that throne fell vacant, no air could be found for some time, but at last one was found in the person of a peasant child who was making mud pies in a village street, and having an innocent good time. But his pedigree was straight, he was the true prince, and he has reigned ever since, with none to dispute his right. Lately there was another hunt for an heir to another princely house, and one was found, who was circumstanced about as the Gaikwar had been. His fathers were traced back in humble life along a branch of the ancestral tree to the point where it joined the stem fourteen generations ago, and his airship was thereby squarely established. The tracing was done by means of the records of one of the great Hindu shrines, where princes on pilgrimage record their names and the date of their visit. This is to keep the prince's religious account straight, and his spiritual person safe. But the record has the added value of keeping the pedigree authentic too. When I think of Bombay now, at this distance of time, I seem to have a kaleidoscope at my eye, and I hear the clash of the glass bits as these splendid figures change and fall apart and flash into new forms, figure after figure, and with the birth of each new form I feel my skin crinkle and my nerve web tingle with a new thrill of wonder and delight. These remembered pictures float past me in a sequence of contracts, following the same order always and always whirling by and disappearing with the swiftness of a dream, leaving me with the sense that the actuality was the experience of an hour at most, whereas it really covered days, I think. The series begins with the hiring of a bearer, native man-servant, a person who should be selected with some care, because as long as he is in your employ he will be about as near to you as your clothes. In India your day may be said to begin with the bearer's knock on the bedroom door, accompanied by a formula of words, a formula which is intended to mean that the bath is ready. It doesn't really seem to mean anything at all, but that is because you are not used to bearer English. You will presently understand. Where he gets his English is his own secret. There is nothing like it elsewhere in the earth, or even in paradise, perhaps, but the other place is probably full of it. You hire him as soon as you touch Indian soil, for no matter what your sex is you cannot do without him. He is messenger, valet, chambermaid, table-waiter, ladiesmaid, courier. He is everything. He carries a coarse linen clothes-bag and a quilt. He sleeps on the stone floor outside your chamber door and gets his meals you do not know where nor when. You only know that he is not fed on the premises, either when you are in a hotel or when you are a guest in a private house. His wages are large, from an Indian point of view, and he feeds and clothes himself out of them. We had three of him in two and a half months. The first one's rate was thirty rupees a month, and that is to say twenty-seven cents a day. The rate of the others are as forty, forty rupees a month, a princely sum, for the native switch man on a railway and the native servant in a private family get only Rs. seven per month, and the farmhand only four. The two former feed and clothe themselves and their families on their one dollar and ninety cents per month, but I cannot believe that the farmhand has to feed himself on his one dollar and eight cents. I think the farm probably feeds him and that the whole of his wages except a trifle for the priest go to the support of his family. That is, to the feeding of his family, for they live in a mud hut, handmade, and doubtless rent free, and they wear no clothes, at least nothing more than a rag, and not much of a rag at that, in the case of the males. However, these are handsome times for the farmhand. He was not always the child of luxury that he is now. The chief commissioner of the central provinces, in a recent official utterance wherein he was rebuking a native deputation for complaining of hard times, reminded them that they could easily remember when a farmhand's wages were only half a rupee, former value a month. That is to say less than a cent a day, nearly two dollars and ninety cents a year. If such a wage earner had a good deal of a family, and they all have that, for God is very good to these poor natives in some ways, he would save a profit of fifteen cents clean and clear out of his year's toil. I mean, a frugal, thrifty person would, not one given to display an ostentation. And if he owed thirteen dollars and fifty cents, and took good care of his health, he could pay it off in ninety years. Then he could hold up his head and look his creditors in the face again. Think of these facts and what they mean. India does not consist of cities, there are no cities in India to speak of. Its dependous population consists of farm labourers. India is one vast farm, one almost interminable stretch of fields with mud fences between. Think of the above facts, and consider what an incredible aggregate of poverty they place before you. The first bearer that applied waited below and sent up his recommendations. That was the first morning in Bombay. We read them over carefully, cautiously, thoughtfully. There was not a fault to find with them, except one. They were all from Americans. Is that a slur? If it is, it is a deserved one. In my experience, an American's recommendation of a servant is not usually valuable. We are too good-natured a race, we hate to say the unpleasant thing. We shrink from speaking the unkind truth about a poor fellow whose bread depends upon our verdict. So we speak of his good points only, thus not scrupling to tell a lie, a silent lie, for in not mentioning his bad ones we as good as say he hasn't any. The only difference that I know of between a silent lie and a spoken one is that the silent lie is a less respectable one than the other, and it can deceive, whereas the other can't, as a rule. We not only tell the silent lie as to a servant's fault, but we sin in another way. We overpraise his merits. For when it comes to writing recommendations of servants we are a nation of gushers. And we have not the Frenchman's excuse. In France you must give the departing servant a good recommendation, and you must conceal his faults, you have no choice. If you mention his faults for the protection of the next candidate for his services he can sue you for damages, and the court will award them too. And, moreover, the judge will give you a sharp dressing down from the bench for trying to destroy a poor man's character and rob him of his bread. I do not state this on my own authority. I got it from a French physician of fame and repute, a man who was born in Paris and had practiced there all his life, and he said that he spoke not merely from common knowledge, but from exasperating personal experience. As I was saying, the bearer's recommendations were all from American tourists, and St. Peter would have admitted him to the fields of the blessed on them. I mean if he is as unfamiliar with our people and our ways as I suppose he is. According to these recommendations Manuel X was supreme in all the arts connected with his complex trade, and these manifold arts were mentioned and praised in detail. His English was spoken of in terms of warm admiration verging upon rapture. I took pleased note of that, and hoped that some of it might be true. We had to have someone right away, so the family went downstairs and took him a week on trial, then sent him up to me and departed on their affairs. I was shut up in my quarters with a bronchial cough, and glad to have something fresh to look at, something new to play with. Manuel filled a bill. Manuel was very welcome. He was toward fifty years old, tall, slender, with a slight stoop, an artificial stoop, a deferential stoop, a stoop rigidified by long habit, with face of European mold, short hair intensely black, gentle black eyes, timid black eyes indeed, complexion very dark, nearly black in fact, face smooth-shaving. He was bareheaded and barefooted, and was never otherwise while his week with us lasted. His clothing was European, cheap, flimsy, and showed much wear. He stood before me and inclined his head and body in the pathetic Indian way, touching his forehead with the finger ends of his right hand in salute. I said, Manuel, you are evidently Indian, but you seem to have a Spanish name when you put it all together. How is that? A perplexed look gathered in his face. It was plain that he had not understood, but he didn't let on. He spoke back complacently. Name Manuel? Yes, master. I know. But how did you get the name? Oh, yes, I suppose. Think, happen so. Father same name, not mother. I saw that I must simplify my language and spread my words apart if I would be understood by this English scholar. Well, then, how did your father get his name? Oh, he, brightening a little, he, Christian, Portuguese, live in Goa. I born Goa, mother not Portuguese, mother native, High-caste Brahmin, Coulon Brahmin, highest caste, no other so High-caste. I High-caste Brahmin too, Christian too, same like father. High-caste Christian Brahmin, master, Salvation Army. All this haltingly and with difficulty. Then he had an inspiration and began to pour out a flood of words that I could make nothing of, so I said, There, don't do that. I can't understand Hindustani. Not Hindustani, master, English. Always I speaking English sometimes when I talking every day all the time at you. Very well, stick to that. That is intelligible. It is not up to my hopes. It is not up to the promise of the recommendations. Still it is English, and I understand it. Don't elaborate it. I don't like elaborations when they are crippled by uncertainty of touch. Master? Oh, never mind. It was only a random thought. I didn't expect you to understand it. How did you get your English? Is it an acquirement or just a gift of God? After some hesitation piously. Yes, he very good. Christian God very good. Hindu God very good too. Two million Hindu God. One Christian God. Make two million and one. All mine. Two million and one God. I got plenty. Sometime I pray all time at those. Keep it up. Go all time every day. Give something at Shrine. All good for me. Make me better man. Good for me. Good for my family. Damn good. Then he had another inspiration and went rambling off into fervent confusions and incoherencies and had to stop him again. I thought we had talked enough, so I told him to go to the bathroom and clean it up and remove the slops. This to get rid of him. He went away, seeming to understand, and got out some of my clothes and began to brush them. I repeated my desire several times, simplifying and re-simplifying it, and at last he got the idea. Then he went away and put a coolly at the work and explained that he would lose caste if he did it himself. It would be pollution by the law of his caste, and it would cost him a deal of fuss and trouble to purify himself and accomplish his rehabilitation. He said that that kind of work was strictly forbidden to persons of caste and as strictly restricted to the very bottom layer of Hindu society, the despised Sudra, the toiler, the laborer. He was right, and apparently the poor Sudra has been content with his strange lot, his insulting distinction for ages and ages, clear back to the beginning of things, so to speak. Buckle says that his name, laborer, is a term of contempt, that it is ordained by the Institutes of Menu, 900 B.C., that if a Sudra sit on a level with his superior, he shall be exiled or branded. Without going into particulars I will remark that as a rule they wear no clothing that would conceal the brand. M.T. If he speak contemptuously of his superior or insult him, he shall suffer death. If he listen to the reading of the sacred books, he shall have burning oil poured in his ears. If he memorize passages from them he shall be killed. If he marry his daughter to a Brahmin, the husband shall go to hell for defiling himself by contact with a woman so infinitely his inferior, and that it is forbidden to a Sudra to acquire wealth. The bulk of the population of India, says Buckle, population to-day, 300 million, is the Sudras, the workers, the farmers, the creators of wealth. Manwell was a failure, poor old fellow. His age was against him. He was desperately slow and phenomenally forgetful. When he went three blocks on an errand he would be gone two hours, and then forget what it was he went for. When he packed a trunk it took him for ever, and the trunk's contents were an unimaginable chaos when he got done. He couldn't wait satisfactorily at table, a prime defect, for if you haven't your own servant in an Indian hotel you are likely to have a slow time of it and go away hungry. We couldn't understand his English. He couldn't understand ours. And when we found that he couldn't understand his own it seemed time for us to part. I had to discharge him. There was no help for it. But I did it as kindly as I could, and as gently. We must part, said I, but I hoped we should meet again in a better world. It was not true. But it was only a little thing to say, and saved his feelings and cost me nothing. But now that he was gone and was off my mind and heart, my spirits began to rise at once, and I was soon feeling brisk and ready to go out and have adventures. Then his newly hired successor flitted in, touched his forehead, and began to fly around here, there and everywhere on his velvet feet, and in five minutes he had everything in the room, ship-shape and Bristol fashion, as the sailors say, and was standing at the salute waiting for orders. Dear me, what a rustler he was after the slumberous way of Manuel, poor old slug. All my heart, all my affection, all my admiration went out spontaneously to this frisky little forked-black thing, this compact and compressed incarnation of energy and force and promptness and celerity and confidence, this smart, smiley, engaging, shiny-eyed little devil, feraled on his upper end by a gleaming fire coal of afez with a red-hot tassel dangling from it. I said, with deep satisfaction, You'll suit. What is your name? He reeled it mellily off. Let me see if I can make a selection out of it, for business uses, I mean. We will keep the rest for Sundays. Give it to me in installments. He did it. But there did not seem to be any short ones, except Musa, which suggested Maus. It was out of character. It was too soft, too quiet, too conservative. It didn't fit his splendid style. I considered and said, Musa is short enough, but I don't quite like it. It seems colorless, inharmonious, inadequate, and I am sensitive to such things. How do you think Satan would do? Yes, master. Satan do wow good! It was his way of saying very good. There was a wrap at the door. Satan covered the ground with a single skip. There was a word or two of Hindustani, then he disappeared. Three minutes later he was before me again, militarily erect, and waiting for me to speak first. What is it, Satan? God want to see you. Who? God. I show him up, master. Why, this is so unusual that—that—well, you see, indeed, I am so unprepared. I don't quite know what I do mean. Dear me, can't you explain? Don't you see that this is the most ex—here, his card, master? Wasn't it curious, and amazing, and tremendous, and all that? Such a personage going around calling on such as I, and sending up his card like a mortal, sending it up by Satan. It was a bewildering collision of the impossibles. But this was the land of the Arabian Knights, this was India, and what is it that cannot happen in India? We had the interview. Satan was right. The visitor was indeed a God in the conviction of his multitudinous followers, and was worshipped by them in sincerity and humble adoration. They are troubled by no doubts as to his divine origin and office. They believe in him, they pray to him, they make offerings to him, they beg of him remission of sins. To them his person, together with everything connected with it, is sacred. From his barber they buy the pairings of his nails and set them in gold, and wear them as precious amulets. I tried to seem tranquilly conversational and at rest, but I was not. Would you have been? I was in a suppressed frenzy of excitement and curiosity and glad wonder. I could not keep my eyes off him. I was looking upon a God, an actual God, a recognized and accepted God, and every detail of his person and his dress had a consuming interest for me. And the thought went floating through my head, he is worshipped, think of it. He is not a recipient of the pale homage called compliment, wherewith the highest human clay must make shift to be satisfied, but of an infinitely richer spiritual food adoration, worship. Men and women lay their cares and their griefs and their broken hearts at his feet, and he gives them his peace, and they go away healed. And just then the awful visitor said, in the simplest way, There is a feature of the philosophy of Huck Finn, which, and went luminously on with the construction of a compact and nicely discriminated literary verdict. It is a land of surprises, India. I had had my ambitions. I had hoped and almost expected to be read by kings and presidents and emperors. But I had never looked so high as that. It would be false modesty to pretend that I was not inordinately pleased. I was. I was much more pleased than I should have been with a compliment from a man. He remained half an hour, and I found him a most courteous and charming gentleman. The Godship has been in his family a good while, but I do not know how long. He is a Mohammedan deity. By earthly rank he is a prince, not an Indian, but a Persian prince. He is a direct descendant of the prophet's line. He is comely, also young, for a god, not forty, perhaps, not above thirty-five years old. He wears his immense honors with tranquil grace, and with a dignity proper to his awful calling. He speaks English with ease and purity of a person born to it. I think I am not overstating this. He was the only god I had ever seen, and I was very favourably impressed. When he rose to say good-bye, the door swung open, and I caught the flash of a red fez and heard these words reverently said, Satan, see God out? Yes. And these mismated beings passed from view, Satan in the lead, and the other following after. End of Chapter 39 This is Chapter 40 of Following the Equator. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Following the Equator by Mark Twain, Chapter 40, The Government House at Malabar Point, Mansion of Kumar Sri Samadzin Ji Bahadur, The Indian Princess, A Difficult Game, Wardrobe and Jewels, Ceremonials, Decorations When Leaving, The Towers of Silence, A Funeral Few of us can stand prosperity, another man's, I mean, Putin had Wilson's new calendar. The next picture in my mind is Government House, on Malabar Point, with a wide sea view from the windows and broad balconies, a boat of his Excellency the Governor of the Bombay Presidency, a residence which is European in everything but the native guards and servants, and is a home and a palace of state harmoniously combined. That was England, the English power, the English civilization, the modern civilization, with the quiet elegancies and quiet colors and quiet tastes and quiet dignity that are the outcome of the modern cultivation. And following it came a picture of the ancient civilization of India, an hour in the mansion of a native's prince, Kumar Sri Samadzin Ji Bahadur of the Paletana State. The young lad, his heir, was with the prince, also the lad's sister, a wee brown sprite, very pretty, very serious, very winning, delicately molded, costumed like the daintiest butterfly, a dear little fairyland princess, gravely willing to be friendly with the strangers, but in the beginning preferring to hold her father's hand until she could take stock of them and determine how far they were to be trusted. She must have been eight years old, so in the natural Indian order of things she would be a bride in three or four years from now, and then this free contact with the son and the heir and the other belongings of outdoor nature and comradeship with visiting male folk would end, and she would shut herself up in the Zenana for life, like her mother, and by inherited habit of mind would be happy in that seclusion and not look upon it as an irksome restraint and a weary captivity. The game which the prince amuses his leisure with, however, never mind it, I should never be able to describe it intelligibly. I tried to get an idea of it while my wife and daughter visited the princess in the Zenana, a lady of charming graces and a fluent speaker of English, but I did not make it out. It is a complicated game, and I believe it is said that nobody can learn to play it well but an Indian, and I was not able to learn how to whine to Turban. It seemed a simple art and easy, but that was a deception. It is a piece of thin, delicate stuff, a foot wide or more, and forty or fifty feet long, and the exhibitor of the art takes one end of it in his two hands and winds it in and out intricately about his head, twisting it as he goes, and in a minute or two the thing is finished, and is neat and symmetrical and fits as snugly as a mold. We were interested in the wardrobe and the jewels and in the silverware and its grace of shape and beauty and delicacy of ornamentation. The silverware is kept locked up, except at mealtimes, and none but the chief butler and the prince have keys to the safe. I did not clearly understand why, but it was not for the protection of the silver. It was either to protect the prince from the contamination which his cast would suffer if the vessels were touched by low cast hands, or it was to protect his highness from poison. Possibly it was both. I believe a salaried taster has to taste everything before the prince ventures it, an ancient and judicious custom in the east, and has thinned out the taster is a good deal, for, of course, it is the cook that puts the poison in. If I were an Indian prince, I would not go to the expense of a taster, I would eat with the cook. Ceremonials are always interesting, and I noted that the Indian good morning is a ceremonial whereas ours doesn't amount to that. In salutation the sun reverently touches the father's forehead with a small silver implement tipped with vermilion paste which leaves a red spot there, and in return the sun receives the father's blessing. Our good morning is well enough for the rowdy west, perhaps, but would be too brusque for the soft and ceremonious east. After being properly necklessed, according to custom, with great garlands made of yellow flowers, and provided with beetle-nut to chew, this pleasant visit closed, and we passed thence to a scene of a different sort. From this glow of color and this sunny life to those grim receptacles of the Parsi dead, the towers of silence, there is something stately about that name, and an impressiveness which sinks deep, the hush of death is in it. We have the grave, the tomb, the mausoleum, God's acre, the cemetery, and association has made them eloquent with solemn meaning, but we have no name that is so majestic as that one, or lingers upon the ear with such deep and haunting pathos. On lofty ground, in the midst of a paradise of tropical foliage and flowers, remote from the world and its turmoil and noise, they stood, the towers of silence, and away below was spread the wide groves of cocoa-palms, then the city, mile on mile, then the ocean with its fleets of creeping ships all steeped in a stillness as deep as the hush that hallowed this high place of the dead. The vultures were there, they stood close together in a great circle all around the rim of a massive low tower, waiting, stood as motionless as sculptured ornaments, and indeed almost deceived one into the belief that that was what they were. Presently there was a slight stir among the score of persons present, and all moved reverently out of the path and ceased from talking. A funeral procession entered the great gate, marching two and two, and moved silently by toward the tower. The corpse lay in a shallow shell and was under cover of a white cloth, but was otherwise naked. The bears of the body were separated by an interval of thirty feet from the mourners. They and also the mourners were draped all in pure white, and each couple of mourners was figuratively bound together by a piece of white rope or a handkerchief, though they merely held the ends of it in their hands. Behind the procession followed a dog, which was led in a leash. When the mourners had reached the neighborhood of the tower, neither they nor any other human being but the bearers of the dead must approach within thirty feet of it, they turned and went back to one of the prayer houses within the gates to pray for the spirit of their dead. The bearers unlocked the tower's sole door and disappeared from view within. In a little while they came out, bringing the beer and the white covering-cloth, and locked the door again. Then the ring of vultures rose, flapping their wings, and swooped down into the tower to devour the body. Nothing was left of it but a clean-picked skeleton when they flocked out again a few minutes afterward. The principal, which underlies and orders everything connected with a parsee funeral, is purity. By the tenets of the Zoroastrian religion the elements, earth, fire, and water, are sacred and must not be contaminated by contact with a dead body. Hence corpses must not be burned, neither must they be buried. None may touch the dead or enter the towers where they repose except certain men who are officially appointed for that purpose. They receive high pay, but theirs is a dismal life, for they must live apart from their species because their commerce with the dead defiles them, and any who should associate with them would share their defilement. When they come out of the tower the clothes they are wearing are exchanged for others in a building within the grounds, and the ones which they have taken off are left behind, for they are contaminated and must never be used again or suffer to go outside the grounds. These bearers come to every funeral in new garments. So far as is known no human being other than an official corpse-bearer, save one, has ever entered a tower of silence after its consecration. Just a hundred years ago a European rushed in behind the bearers and fed his brutal curiosity with a glimpse of the forbidden mysteries of the place. This shabby savage's name is not given. His quality is also concealed. These two details, taken in connection with the fact that for his extraordinary offense the only punishment he got from the East India Company's government was a solemn official reprimand, suggest the suspicion that he was a European of consequence. The same public document which contained the reprimand gave warning that future offenders of his sort, if in the company's service, would be dismissed, and if merchants suffer revocation of license and exile to England. The towers are not tall, but are low in proportion to their circumference, like a gosometer. If you should fill a gosometer half way up with solid granite masonry, then drive a wide and deep well down through the centre of this mass of masonry, you would have the idea of a tower of silence. On the masonry surrounding the well the bodies lie in shallow trenches which radiate like wheelspokes from the well. The trenches slant toward the well and carry into it the rainfall. Underground drains, with charcoal filters in them, carry off this water from the bottom of the well. When a skeleton has lain in the tower exposed to the rain and the flaming sun a month, it is perfectly dry and clean. Then the same bearers that brought it there come gloved and take it up with tongs and throw it into the well. There it turns to dust. It is never seen again, never touched again in the world. Other peoples separate their dead and preserve and continue social distinctions in the grave, the skeletons of kings and statesmen and generals in temples and pantheons proper to skeletons of their degree, and the skeletons of the common place and the poor in places suited to their meaner estate. But the Parsees hold that all men rank alike in death, all are humble, all poor, all destitute. In sign of their poverty they are sent to their grave naked, in sign of their equality the bones of the rich, the poor, the illustrious and the obscure are flung into the common well together. At a Parsee funeral there are no vehicles, all concerned must walk both rich and poor, howsoever great the distance to be traversed may be. In the wells of the five towers of silence is mingled the dust of all the Parsee men and women and children who have died in Bombay and its vicinity during the two centuries which have elapsed since the Mohammedan conquerors drove the Parsees out of Persia and into that region of India. The earliest of the five towers was built by the Modi family, something more than two hundred years ago, and it is now reserved to the heirs of that house. None but the dead of that blood are carried thither. The origin of at least one of the details of the Parsee funeral is not now known, the presence of the dog. Before a corpse is born from the house of mourning it must be uncovered and exposed to the gaze of a dog. A dog must also be led in the rear of the funeral. Mr. Nusarwanji Baranji, secretary to the Parsee Punjayat, said that these formalities had once had a meaning and a reason for their institution, but that they were survivals whose origin none could now account for. Custom and tradition continue them in force, antiquity hallows him. It is thought that in ancient times in Persia the dog was a sacred animal and could guide souls to heaven. Also that his eye had the power of purifying objects which had been contaminated by the touch of the dead, and that hence his presence with the funeral cortege provides an ever-applicable remedy in case of need. The Parsees claim that their method of disposing of the dead is an effective protection of the living, that it disseminates no corruption, no impurities of any sort, no disease germs, that no wrap, no garment which has touched the dead is allowed to touch the living afterward, that from the towers of silence nothing proceeds which can carry harm to the outside world. These are just claims, I think. As a sanitary measure their system seems to be about the equivalent of cremation and a sure. We are drifting slowly but hopefully toward cremation in these days. It could not be expected that this progress should be swift, but if it be steady and continuous, even if slow, that will suffice. When cremation becomes the rule we shall cease to shudder at it. We should shudder at burial if we allowed ourselves to think what goes on in the grave. The dog was an impressive figure to me, representing as he did a mystery whose key is lost. He was humble and apparently depressed, and he let his head droop pensively and looked as if he might be trying to call back to his mind what it was that he had used to symbolize ages ago when he began his function. There was another impressive thing close at hand, but I was not privileged to see it. That was the sacred fire, a fire which is supposed to have been burning without interruption for more than two centuries, and so living by the same heat that was imparted to it so long ago. The Parsees are a remarkable community. There are only about sixty thousand in Bombay, and only about half as many as that in the rest of India, but they make up in importance what they lack in numbers. They are highly educated, energetic, enterprising, progressive, rich, and the Jew himself is not more lavish or Catholic in his charities and benevolences. The Parsees build and endow hospitals for both men and animals, and they and their womankind keep an open purse for all great and good objects. They are a political force, and a valued support to the government. They have a pure and lofty religion, and they preserve it in its integrity and order their lives by it. We took a final sweep of the wonderful view of plain and city and ocean, and so ended our visit to the garden and the towers of silence, and the last thing I noticed was another symbol, a voluntary symbol this one. It was a vulture standing on the sod off top of a tall and slender and branchless palm in an open space in the ground. He was perfectly motionless, and looked like a piece of sculpture on a pillar, and he had a mortuary look too, which was in keeping with the place. CHAPTER XXI A giant temple. Mr. Roychan's bungalow. A decorated six-gun prince. Human fireworks. European dress, past and present. Complexions. Advantages with the Zulu. Festivities at the bungalow. Nouched dancers. Entrance of the prince. Address to the prince. There is an old-time toast, which is golden for its beauty. When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend. Puddinhead Wilson's new calendar. The next picture that drifts across the field of my memory is one which is connected with religious things. We were taken by friends to see a giant temple. It was small and had many flags or streamers flying from poles standing above its roof, and its little battlements supported a great many small idols or images. Upstairs, inside, a solitary giant was praying or reciting aloud in the middle of the room. Our presence did not interrupt him, nor even incommode him or modify his fervor. Ten or twelve feet in front of him was the idol, a small figure in a sitting posture. It had the pinkish look of a wax doll, but lacked the doll's roundness of limb and approximation to correctness of form and justness of proportion. Mr. Gandhi explained everything to us. He was delicate to the Chicago Fair Congress of Religions. It was lucidly done in masterly English, but in time it faded from me, and now I have nothing left of that episode but an impression. A dim idea of a religious belief clothed in subtle intellectual forms, lofty and clean, barren of fleshly grossnesses, and with this another dim impression which connects that intellectual system somehow with that crude image, that inadequate idol, how I do not know. Properly they do not seem to belong together. Apparently the idol symbolized a person who had become a saint or a god through accessions of steadily augmenting holiness acquired through a series of reincarnations and promotions extending over many ages, and was now at last a saint and qualified to vicariously receive worship and transmit it to heaven's chancellery. Was that it? And thence we went to Mr. Premshan Roychan's bungalow in Lovelain, like Hula, where an Indian prince was to receive a deputation of the giant community who desired to congratulate him upon a high honour lately conferred upon him by his sovereign Victoria, Empress of India. She had made him a knight of the order of the Star of India. It would seem that even the grandest Indian prince is glad to add the modest title Sir to his ancient native grandeurs, and is willing to do valuable service to win it. He will remit taxes liberally and will spend money freely upon the betterment of the condition of his subjects if there is a knighthood to be gotten by it. And he will also do good work and a deal of it to get a gun added to the salute allowed him by the British government. Every year the Empress distributes knighthoods and adds guns for public services done by native princes. The salute of a small prince is three or four guns. Princes of greater consequence have salutes that run higher and higher, gun by gun, oh, clear away up to eleven, possibly more. But I did not hear of any above eleven gun-princes. I was told that when a four-gun prince gets a gun added he is pretty troublesome for a while, till the novelty wears off, for he likes the music and keeps hunting up pretexts to get himself saluted. It may be that supremely grand folk, like the Nisam of Hyderabad and the Gaikwar of Baroda, have more than eleven guns, but I don't know. When we arrived at the bungalow, the large hall on the ground floor was already about full, and carriages were still flowing into the grounds. The company present made a fine show, an exhibition of human fireworks, so to speak, in the matters of costume and comminglings of brilliant color. The variety of form noticeable in the display of turbans was remarkable. We were told that the explanation of this was that this Jain delegation was drawn from many parts of India, and that each man wore the turban that was in vogue in his own region. This diversity of turbans made a beautiful effect. I could have wished to start a rival exhibition there, of Christian hats and clothes. I would have cleared one side of the room of its Indian splendors, and repacked the space with Christians drawn from America, England, and the colonies, dressed in the hats and habits of now and of twenty and forty and fifty years ago. It would have been a hideous exhibition, a thoroughly devilish spectacle. Then there would have been the added disadvantage of the white complexion. It is not an unbearably unpleasant complexion when it keeps to itself. But when it comes into competition with masses of brown and black the fact is betrayed that it is indurable only because we are used to it. Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare. How rare one may learn by walking down a street in Paris, New York, or London on a weekday, particularly an unfashionable street, and keeping count of the satisfactory complexions encountered in the course of a mile. Where dark complexions are masked, they make the whites look bleached out, unwholesome and sometimes, frankly, ghastly. I could notice this as a boy down south in the slavery days before the war. The splendid black satin skin of the South African zulus of Durban seemed to me to come very close to perfection. I can see those zulus yet, rickshaw athletes waiting in front of the hotel for custom, handsome and intensely black creatures moderately closed in loose summer stuffs whose snowy whiteness made the black all the blacker by contrast. Keeping that group in my mind I can compare those complexions with the white ones which are streaming past this London window now. A lady, complexion, new parchment. Another lady, complexion, old parchment. Another, pink and white, very fine. Man, grayer skin with purple areas. Man, unwholesome, fish-belly skin. Girl, sallow face sprinkled with freckles. Old woman, face, whitey gray. Young butcher, face a general red flush. Jaundiced man, mustard yellow. Elderly lady, colorless skin with two conspicuous moles. Elderly man, a drinker, boiled cauliflower nose in a flabby face veined with purple crinklings. Healthy young gentleman, fine fresh complexion. Sick young man, his face a ghastly white. No end of people whose skins are dull and characterless modifications of the tint which we miscall white. Some of these faces are pimply, some exhibit other signs of diseased blood, some show scars of a tint out of a harmony with the surrounding shades of color. The white man's complexion makes no concealments. It can't. It seemed to have been designed as a catch-all for everything that can damage it. Ladies have to paint it, and powder it, and cosmetic it, and diet it with arsenic and enamel it, and be always enticing it, and persuading it, and pestering it, and fussing at it to make it beautiful. And they do not succeed. But these efforts show what they think of the natural complexion as distributed. As distributed it needs these helps. The complexion which they try to counterfeit is one which nature restricts to the few, to the very few. To ninety-nine persons she gives a bad complexion, to the hundredth a good one. The hundredth can keep it. How long? Ten years, perhaps. The advantage is with the Zulu, I think. He starts with a beautiful complexion, and it will last him through. And as for the Indian brown, firm, smooth, blemishless, pleasant, and restful to the eye, afraid of no color, harmonizing with all colors, and adding a grace to them all, I think there is no sort of chance for the average white complexion against that rich and perfect tint. To return to the bungalow, the most gorgeous costumes present were worn by some children. They seemed to blaze so bright were the colors, and so brilliant the jewels strung over the rich materials. These children were professional notch dancers, and looked like girls, but they were boys. They got up by ones and twos and fours, and danced and sang to an accompaniment of weird music. Their posturings and gesturings were elaborate and graceful, but their voices were stringently raspy and unpleasant, and there was a good deal of monotony about the tune. By and by there was a burst of shouts and cheers outside, and the prince with his train entered in fine, dramatic style. He was a stately man. He was ideally costumed and fairly festooned with ropes of gems. Some of the ropes were of pearls, some were of uncut, great emeralds. Emeralds renowned in Bombay for their quality and value. Their size was marvellous and enticing to the eye those rocks. A boy, a princeling, was with the prince, and he also was a radiant exhibition. The ceremonies were not tedious. The prince strode to his throne with the port and majesty and the sternness of a Julius Caesar coming to receive and recede for a back country kingdom and have it over and get out and no fooling. There was a throne for the young prince, too, and the two sat there side by side, with their officers grouped at either hand, and most accurately and credibly reproducing the pictures which one sees in the books, pictures which people in the prince's line of business have been furnishing ever since Solomon received the queen of Sheba and showed her his things. The chief of the giant delegation read his paper of congratulations, then pushed it into a beautifully engraved silver cylinder, which was delivered with ceremony into the prince's hands and at once delivered by him without ceremony into the hands of an officer. I will copy the address here. It is interesting as showing what an Indian prince's subject may have opportunity to thank him for in these days of modern English rule as contrasted with what his ancestor would have given them opportunity to thank him for a century and a half ago, the days of freedom unhampered by English interference. A century and a half ago an address of thanks could have been put into small space. It would have thanked the prince, one, for not slaughtering too many of his people upon mere caprice, two, for not stripping them bare by sudden and arbitrary tax levies and bringing famine upon them, three, for not upon empty pretext destroying the rich and seizing their property, four, for not killing, blinding, imprisoning, or banishing the relatives of the royal house to protect the throne from possible plots, five, for not betraying the subject secretly for a bribe into the hands of bans of professional thugs to be murdered and robbed in the prince's back lot. Those were rather common princely industries in the old times, but they and some others of a harsh sort ceased long ago under English rule. Better industries have taken their place, as this address from the Jain community will show. Your Highness, we, the underside members of the Jain community of Bombay, have the pleasure to approach Your Highness with the expression of our heartfelt congratulations on the recent conference on Your Highness of the Nighthood of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India. Ten years ago we had the pleasure and privilege of welcoming Your Highness to this city under circumstances which have made a memorable epic in the history of Your State. For had it not been for a generous and reasonable spirit that Your Highness displayed in the negotiations between the Palatina Durbar and the Jain community, the conciliatory spirit that animated our people could not have borne fruit. That was the first step in Your Highness's administration, and it fitly elicited the praise of the Jain community and of the Bombay government. A decade of Your Highness's administration, combined with the abilities, training, and acquirements that Your Highness brought to bear upon it, has justly earned for Your Highness the unique and honourable distinction, the Nighthood of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, which, we understand, Your Highness is the first to enjoy among chiefs of Your Highness's rank and standing. And we assure Your Highness that for this mark of honour that has been conferred on you by her most gracious Majesty, the Queen Empress, we feel no less proud than Your Highness. Establishment of commercial factories, schools, hospitals, etc., by Your Highness in Your State, has marked Your Highness's career during these ten years, and we trust that Your Highness will be spared to rule over your people with wisdom and foresight and foster the many reforms that Your Highness has been pleased to introduce in Your State. We again offer Your Highness our warmest felicitations for the honour that has been conferred on you. We beg to remain Your Highness's obedient servants. Factories, schools, hospitals, reforms. The Prince propagates that kind of things in the modern times, and gets Nighthood and guns for it. After the address, the Prince responded with snap and brevity, spoke a moment with half a dozen guests in English, and with an official or two in a native tongue, then the garlands were distributed as usual, and the function ended. CHAPTER 42 A Hindu betrothal, midnight, sleepers on the ground, home of the bride of twelve years dressed as a boy, illumination, notched girls, imitating snakes, later, illuminated porch filled with sleepers, the plague. Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others, his last breath. Puddin had Wilson's new calendar. Toward midnight that night there was another function. This was a Hindu wedding. No, I think it was a betrothal ceremony. Always before we had driven through streets that were multitudinous and tumultuous with picturesque native life, but now there was nothing of that. We seemed to move through a city of the dead. There was hardly a suggestion of life in those still and vacant streets. Even the crows were silent, but everywhere on the ground lay sleeping natives hundreds and hundreds. The lay stretched at full length, and tightly wrapped in blankets, heads and all. Their attitude and their rigidity counterfeited death. The plague was not in Bombay then, but it is devastating the city now. The shops are deserted now, half of the people have fled, and of the remainder the smitten parish by shoals every day. No doubt the city looks now in the daytime as it looked then at night. When we had pierced deep into the native quarter, and were threading its narrow, dim lanes, we had to go carefully, for men were stretched to sleep all about, and there was hardly room to drive between them. And every now and then a swarm of rats would scamper across past the horse's feet in the vague light, the forebears of the rats that are carrying the plague from house to house in Bombay now. The shops were but sheds, little booths open to the street, and the goods had been removed, and on the counters families were sleeping, usually with an oil-lamp present. Recurrent dead watches, it looked like. But at last we turned a corner and saw a great glare of light ahead. It was the home of the bride, wrapped in a perfect conflagration of illuminations, mainly gas-work designs, gotten up specially for the occasion. Within was abundance of brilliancy, flames, costumes, colors, decorations, mirrors. It was another Aladdin show. The bride was a trim and comely little thing of twelve years, dressed as we would dress a boy, though more expensively than we should do it, of course. She moved about very much at her ease, and stopped and talked with the guests and allowed her wedding-jewelry to be examined. It was very fine. Particularly a rope of great diamonds. A lovely thing to look at and handle. It had a great emerald hanging to it. The bridegroom was not present. He was having betrothal festivities of his own at his father's house. As I understood it, he and the bride were to entertain company every night and nearly all night, for a week or more, then get married, if alive. Both of the children were a little elderly as brides and grooms go, in India, twelve. They ought to have been married a year or two sooner. Still, to a stranger, twelve seems quite young enough. A while after midnight, a couple of celebrated and high-priced notch girls appeared in the gorgeous place and danced and sang. With them were men who played upon strange instruments which made uncanny noises of a sort to make one's flesh creep. One of these instruments was a pipe, and to its music the girls went through a performance which represented snake-charming. It seemed a doubtful sort of music to charm anything with, but a native gentleman assured me that snakes like it and will come out of their holes and listen to it with every evidence of refreshment and gratitude. He said that, at an entertainment in his grounds once, the pipe brought out half a dozen snakes, and the music had to be stopped before they would be persuaded to go. Nobody wanted their company for they were bold, familiar, and dangerous, but no one would kill them, of course, for it is sinful for a Hindu to kill any kind of a creature. We withdrew from the festivities at two in the morning. Another picture, then, but it has lodged itself in my memory rather as a stage scene than as a reality. It is of a porch, and short flight of steps crowded with dark faces and ghostly white draperies flooded with the strong glare from the dazzling concentration of illuminations. And midway, of the steps, one conspicuous figure for accent, a turban giant with a name according to his size, Rao Bahudur Basquirao Balincangil Pitale, vaquil to his highness, the guicar of Baroda. Without him the picture would not have been complete, and if his name had been merely Smith, he wouldn't have answered. Close at hand, on house fronts, on both sides of the narrow street, were illuminations of a kind commonly employed by the natives. Scores of glass tumblers containing tapers fastened a few inches apart all over great lattice frames, forming starry constellations which showed out vividly against their black backgrounds. As we drew away into the distance down the dim lanes, the illuminations gathered together into a single mass and glowed out of the enveloping darkness like a sun. Then again the deep silence, the scurrying rats, the dim forms stretched everywhere on the ground, and, on either hand, those open booths counterfeiting sepulchres with counterfeit corpses sleeping motionless in the flicker of the counterfeit death-lamps. And now, a year later, when I read the Cablegrams I seem to be reading of what I myself partly saw, saw before it happened, in a prophetic dream as it were. One Cablegram says, Business in the native town is about suspended, except the whaling and the tramp of the funerals. There is but little life or movement. The closed shops exceed in number those that remain open. Another says that three hundred and twenty-five thousand of the people have fled the city and are carrying the plague to the country. Three days later comes the news, The population is reduced by half. The refugees have carried the disease to Karachi. Two hundred and twenty cases, two hundred and fourteen deaths. A day or two later, fifty-two fresh cases, all of which proved fatal. The plague carries with it a terror which no other disease can excite, for of all diseases known to men it is the deadliest, by far the deadliest. Fifty-two fresh cases, all fatal. It is the black death alone that slays like that. We can all imagine after a fashion the desolation of a plague-stricken city and the stupor of stillness broken at intervals by distant bursts of whaling marking the passing of funerals here and there and yonder. But I suppose it is not possible for us to realize to ourselves the nightmare of dread and fear that possesses the living who are present in such a place and cannot get away. That half million fled from Bombay in a wild panic suggests to us something of what they were feeling. But perhaps not even they could realize what the half million were feeling whom they left stranded behind to face the stalking horror without chance of escape. King Lake was in Cairo many years ago, during an epidemic of the black death, and he has imagined the terrors that creep into a man's heart at such a time, and follow him until they themselves breathe the fatal sign in the armpit, and then the delirium with confused images and home-dreams and reeling billiard-tables, and then the sudden blank of death. To the contagionist, filled as he is with the dread of final causes, having no faith in destiny nor in the fixed will of God, and with none of the devil may care indifference which might stand him instead of creeds, to such one every rag that shivers in the breeze of a plague-stricken city has this sort of sublimity. If, by any terrible ordinance, he be forced to venture forth, he sees death dangling from every sleeve, and as he creeps forward he poises his shuddering limbs between the imminent jacket that is stabbing at his right elbow and the murderous pellies that threatens to mow him clean down as it sweeps along on his left. But most of all he dreads that which most of all he should love, the touch of a woman's dress. For mothers and wives hurrying forth on kindly errands from the bed-sides of the dying go slouching along through the streets more willfully and less courteously than the men. For a while it may be that the caution of the poor Levantine may enable him to avoid contact, but sooner or later perhaps the dreaded chance arrives. That bundle of linen, with the dark tearful eyes at the top of it, that labours along with the voluptuous clumsiness of greasy, she has touched the poor Levantine with the hem of her sleeve. From that dread moment his peace is gone. His mind, forever hanging upon the fatal touch, invites the blow which he fears. He watches for the symptoms of plague so carefully that sooner or later they come in truth. The parched mouth is a sign. His mouth is parched. The throbbing brain. His brain does throb. The rapid pulse. He touches his own wrist, for he dares not ask counsel of any man lest he be deserted. He touches his wrist and feels how his frighted blood goes galloping out of his heart. There is nothing but the fatal swelling that is wanting to make his sad conviction complete. Immediately he has an odd feel under the arm, no pain, but a little straining of the skin. He would, to God, it were his fancy that were strong enough to give him that sensation. This is the worst of all. It now seems to him that he could be happy and contented with his parched mouth and his throbbing brain and his rapid pulse, if only he could know that there were no swelling under the left arm. But, dares he try? In a moment of calmness and deliberation he dares not. But when for a while he has writhed under the torture of suspense, a sudden strength of will drives him to seek and know his fate. He touches the gland and finds the skin sane and sound, but under the cuticle there lies a small lump like a pistol-bullet that moves as he pushes it. Oh! but is this, for all certainty, is this the sentence of death? Feel the gland of the other arm. There is not the same lump exactly, yet something a little like it. Have not some people glands naturally enlarged? Would to heaven he were one. So he does for himself the work of the plague, and when the angel of death thus courted does indeed and in truth come, he has only to finish that which has been so well begun. He passes his fiery hand over the brain of the victim and lets him rave for a season but all chance-wise of people and things once dear, or of people and things indifferent. Once more the poor fellow is back at his home in fair Provence, and sees the sundial that stood in his childhood's garden, sees his mother and the long since forgotten face of that little dear sister. He sees her, he says, on a Sunday morning, for all the church bells are ringing. He looks up and down through the universe, and owns it well piled with bales upon bales of cotton, and cotton eternal, so much so that he feels, he knows, he swears he could make that winning hazard if the billiard table would not slant upwards, and if the cue were a cue worth playing with. But it is not. It's a cue that won't move. His own arm won't move. In short there's the devil to pay in the brain of the poor Levantine, and perhaps the next night but one he becomes the life and the soul of some squalling jackal family who fish him out by the foot from his shallow and sandy grave.