 This is Chapter 59 of Following the Equator. A visit to the Residency, Konpoor, the Adjutant Bird and the Hindu Corpse, the Taj Mahal, the True Conception, the Ice-Storm, True Gems, Syrian Fountains, and Exaggerated Niagara. Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live," put in Head Wilson's new calendar. Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth, put in Head Wilson's new calendar. We were driven over Sir Colin Campbell's route by a British officer, and when I arrived at the Residency, I was so familiar with the road that I could have led a retreat over it myself. But the compass in my head has been out of order from my birth, and so, as soon as I was within the battered Bailey Guard and turned about to review the march and imagine the relieving forces storming their way along it, everything was upside down and wrong end first in a moment, and I was never able to get straightened out again. And now, when I look at the battle-plan, the confusion remains. In me the East was born West. The battle-plans which have the East on the right-hand side are of no use to me. The Residency ruins are draped with flowering vines, and are impressive and beautiful. They and the grounds are sacred now, and will suffer no neglect nor be profaned by any sordid or commercial use while the British remain masters of India. Within the grounds are buried the dead who gave up their lives there in the long siege. After a fashion I was able to imagine the fiery storm that raged night and day over the place during so many months, and after a fashion I could imagine the men moving through it, but I could not satisfactorily place the two hundred women, and I could do nothing at all with the two hundred and fifty children. I knew by Lady English's diary that the children carried on their small affairs very much as if blood and carnage and the crash and thunder of a siege were natural and proper features of nursery life, and I tried to realize it. But when her little Johnny came rushing all excitement through the din and smoke, shouting, "'Oh, Mama, the white hen has laid an egg!' I saw that I could not do it. Johnny's place was under the bed. I could imagine him there, because I could imagine myself there, and I think I should not have been interested in a hen that was laying an egg. My interest would have been with the parties that were laying the bombshells. I sat at dinner with one of those children in the club's Indian palace, and I knew that all through the siege he was perfecting his teething and learning to talk, and while to me he was the most impressive object in Lucknow after the residency ruins, I was not able to imagine what his life had been during that tempestuous infancy of his, nor what sort of a curious surprise it must have been to him to be marched suddenly out into a strange dumb world where there wasn't any noise and nothing going on. He was only forty-one when I saw him, a strangely youthful link to connect the present with so ancient an episode as the Great Mutiny. By and by we saw Kanpur, and the open lot which was the scene of Moore's memorable defence, and the spot on the shore of the Ganges where the massacre of the betrayed garrison occurred, and the small Indian temple whence the bugle signal notified the assassins to fall on. This latter was a lonely spot and silent. The sluggish river drifted by almost currentless. It was dead low water, narrow channels with vast sandbars between, all the way across the wide bed, and the only living thing in sight was that grotesque and solemn bald-headed bird, the adjutant, standing on his six-foot stilts, solitary on a distant bar, with his head sunk between his shoulders, thinking, thinking of his prize, I suppose, the dead Hindu that lay awash at his feet, and whether to eat him alone or invite friends. He and his prey were a proper accent to that mournful place. They were in keeping with it. They emphasised its loneliness and its solemnity. And we saw the scene of the slaughter of the helpless women and children, and also the costly memorial that is built over the well which contains their remains. The black hole of Calcutta is gone, but a more reverent age has come, and whatever remembrancer still exists of the moving and heroic sufferings and achievements of the garrisons of Lucknow and Konpoor will be guarded and preserved. In Agra and its neighbourhood, and afterwards at Delhi, we saw forts, mosques, and tombs which were built in the great days of the Mohabitan emperors, and which are marvels of cost, magnitude, and richness of materials and ornamentation, creations of surpassing grandeur, wonders which do indeed make the like things in the rest of the world seem tame and inconsequential by comparison. I am not purposing to describe them. By good fortune I had not read too much about them, and therefore was able to get a natural and rational focus upon them with the result that they thrilled, blessed, and exalted me. But if I had previously overheated my imagination by drinking too much pestilential literary hot scotch, I should have suffered disappointment and sorrow. I mean to speak of only one of these many world-renowned buildings, the Taj Mahal, the most celebrated construction in the earth. I had read a great deal too much about it. I saw it in the daytime. I saw it in the moonlight. I saw it near at hand. I saw it from a distance. And I knew all the time that of its kind it was the wonder of the world, with no competitor now and no possible future competitor. And yet it was not my Taj. My Taj had been built by excitable literary people. It was solidly lodged in my head and I could not blast it out. I wished to place before the reader some of the usual descriptions of the Taj and ask him to take note of the impressions left in his mind. These descriptions do really state the truth, as nearly as the limitations of language will allow. But language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure vehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that they will not inflate the facts by help of the reader's imagination, which is always ready to take a hand and work for nothing, and do the bulk of it at that. I will begin with a few sentences from the excellent little local guide-book of Mr. Satya Chandrachamukherji. I take them from here and there in his description. The inlaid work of the Taj and the flowers and petals that are to be found on all sides on the surface of the marble events a most delicate touch. That is true. The inlaid work, the marble, the flowers, the buds, the leaves, the petals, and the lotus stems are almost without arrival in the whole of the civilized world. The work of inlaying with stones and gems is found in the highest perfection in the Taj. Gems, inlaid flowers, buds, and leaves to be found on all sides, what do you see before you? Is the fairy structure growing? Is it becoming a jewel casket? The whole of the Taj produces a wonderful effect that is equally sublime and beautiful. Then, Sir William Wilson Hunter, the Taj Mahal with its beautiful domes, a dream of marble, rises on the river bank. The material petals are white marble and red sandstone. The complexity of its design and the delicate intricacy of the workmanship baffle description. Sir William continues. I will italicize for some of his words. The mausoleum stands on a raised marble platform at each of whose corners rises a tall and slender minaret of graceful proportions and of exquisite beauty. Beyond the platform stretch the two wings, one of which is itself a mosque of great architectural merit. In the center of the whole design the mausoleum occupies a square of 186 feet, with the angles deeply truncated so as to form an unequal octagon. The main feature in this central pile is the great dome, which swells upward to nearly two-thirds of a sphere and tapers at its extremity into a pointed spire crowned by a crescent. Beneath it an enclosure of marble trellis work surrounds the tomb of the princess and of her husband the emperor. Each corner of the mausoleum is covered by a similar, though much smaller dome, erected on a pediment pierced with graceful Saracenic arches. Light is admitted into the interior through a double screen of pierced marble which tempers the glare of an Indian sky while its whiteness prevents the mellow effect from degenerating into gloom. The internal decorations consist of inlaid work in precious stones such as agate, jasper, with which every squadril or salient point in the architecture is richly fretted. Brown and violet marble is also freely employed in wreaths, scrolls, and lintels to relieve the monotony of white wall. In regard to color and design the interior of the Taj may rank first in the world for purely decorative workmanship. While the perfect symmetry of its exterior, once seen can never be forgotten, nor the aerial grace of its domes rising like marble bubbles into the clear sky. The Taj represents the most highly elaborated stage of ornamentation reached by the Indo-Mohamedan builders, the stage in which the architect ends, and the jeweler begins. In its magnificent gateway the diagonal ornamentation at the corners, which satisfied the designers of the gateways of the Itimad-Ud-Dula and Sikar-Mdrah-Mosoleums, is superseded by fine marble cables in bold twists, strong and handsome. The triangular insertions of white marble and large flowers have in like manner given place to fine inlaid work. Firm, perpendicular lines in black marble with well-proportioned panels of the same material are effectively used in the interior of the gateway. On its top the Hindu brackets and monolithic architraves of Sikar-Mdrah are replaced by Moorish-carped arches, usually single blocks of red sandstone, in the kiosks and pavilions which adorn the roof. From the pillared pavilions a magnificent view is obtained of the Taj gardens below, with the noble Jumna River at their farther end, and the city and fort of Agra in the distance. From this beautiful and splendid gateway one passes up a straight alley shaded by evergreen trees, cooled by a broad shallow piece of water running along the middle of the path to the Taj itself. The Taj is entirely of marble and gems. The red sandstone of the other Mohammedan buildings has entirely disappeared, or rather the red sandstone which used to form the thickness of the walls, is in the Taj itself overlaid completely with white marble, and the white marble is itself inlaid with precious stones arranged in lovely patterns of flowers. A feeling of purity impresses itself on the eye and the mind from the absence of the coarser material which forms so invariable a material in Agra architecture. The lower wall and panels are covered with tulips, oleanders, and full-blown lilies in flat carving on the white marble, and although the inlaid work of flowers done in gems is very brilliant when looked at closely, there is on the whole but little color, and the all-prevailing sentiment is one of whiteness, silence, and calm. The whiteness is broken only by the fine color of the inlaid gems by lines in black marble and by delicately written inscriptions also in black from the Koran. Under the dome of the vast mausoleum a high and beautiful screen of open tracery in white marble rises around the two tombs, or rather cenotaphs of the emperor and his princess, and in this marvel of marble the carving has advanced from the old geometrical patterns to a trellis work of flowers and foliage handled with great freedom and spirit. The two cenotaphs in the center of the exquisite enclosure have no carving except the plain kalamdan or oblong pen-box on the tomb of Emperor Shah Jahan, but both cenotaphs are inlaid with flowers made of costly gems and with the ever-graceful oleander scroll. Bayard Taylor, after describing the details of the Taj, goes on to say, on both sides, the palm, the banyan, and the feathery bamboo mingle their foliage, the song of birds meets your ears, and the odor of roses and lemon-flowers sweetens the air. Down such a vista and over such a foreground rises the Taj. There is no mystery, no sense of partial failure about the Taj, a thing of perfect beauty and of absolute finish, in every detail it might pass for the work of Jiniy, who knew not of the weaknesses and ills with which mankind are beset. All of these details are true, but, taken together, they state a falsehood to you. You cannot add them up correctly. Those writers know the values of their words and phrases, but to you the words and phrases convey other and uncertain values. To those writers their phrases have values which I think I am now acquainted with, and for the help of the reader I will hear repeat certain of those words and phrases, and follow them with numerals which shall represent those values. Then we shall see the difference between a writer's ciphering and a mistaken reader's. Precious stones such as agate, jasper, etc., five. With which every salient point is richly fretted, five. First in the world for purely decorative workmanship, nine. The Taj represents the stage where the architect ends and the jeweler begins, five. The Taj is entirely of marble and gems, seven. Inlaid with precious stones in lovely patterns of flowers, five. The inlaid work of flowers done in gems is very brilliant, followed by a most important modification which the reader is sure to read too carelessly, two. The vast mausoleum, five. This marvel of marble, five. The exquisite enclosure, five. Inlaid with flowers made of costly gems, five. A thing of perfect beauty and absolute finish, five. Those details are correct. The figures which I have placed after them represent quite fairly their individual values. Then why, as a whole, do they convey a false impression to the reader? It is because the reader, beguiled by his heated imagination, masses them in the wrong way. The writer would mass the first three figures in the following way, and they would speak the truth. Five plus five plus nine, total nineteen. But the reader masses them thus, and then they tell a lie. Five hundred and fifty-nine. The writer would add all of his twelve numerals together, and then the sum would express the whole truth about the Taj, and the truth only, sixty-three. But the reader, always helped by his imagination, would put the figures in a row one after the other, and get this sum, which would tell him a noble, big lie. Five five nine five seven five two five five five five five. You must put in the commas yourself. I have to go on with my work. The reader will always be sure to put the figures together in that wrong way, and then, as surely before him will stand, sparkling in the sun, a gem-crusted Taj, tall as the Matterhorn. I had to visit Niagara fifteen times before I succeeded in getting my imaginary falls gauged to the actuality, and could begin to, sanely and wholesomely wonder at them for what they were, not what I had expected them to be. When I first approached them, it was with my face lifted toward the sky, for I thought I was going to see an Atlantic ocean pouring down thence over cloud-vext Himalayan Heights, a sea-green wall of water sixty miles front and six miles high, and so, when the toy reality came suddenly into view, that beruffled little wet apron hanging out to dry. The shock was too much for me, and I fell with a dull thud. Yet slowly, surely, steadily, in the course of my fifteen visits, the proportions adjusted themselves to the facts, and I came at last to realize that a waterfall a hundred and sixty-five feet high, and a quarter of a mile wide, was an impressive thing. It was not a dipper-full to my vanished great vision, but it would answer. I know that I ought to do with the Taj, as I was obliged to do with Niagara, see it fifteen times and let my mind gradually get rid of the Taj built in it by its describers, by help of my imagination, and substitute for it the Taj of fact. It would be noble and fine, then, and a marvel, not the marvel which it replaced, but still a marvel and fine enough. I am a careless reader, I suppose, an impressionist reader, an impressionist reader of what is not an impressionist picture, a reader who overlooks the informing details or masses there some improperly, and gets only a large splashy general effect, an effect which is not correct, and which is not warranted by the particulars placed before me, particulars which I did not examine, and whose meanings I did not cautiously and carefully estimate. It is an effect which is some thirty-five or forty times finer than the reality, and is therefore a great deal better and more valuable than the reality. And so I ought never to hunt up the reality, but stay miles away from it, and thus preserve undamaged my own private mighty Niagara tumbling out of the vault of heaven, and my own ineffable Taj, built of tinted mists, upon jeweled arches of rainbows, supported by colonnades of moonlight. It is a mistake for a person with an unregulated imagination to go and look at an illustrious world's wonder. I suppose that many, many years ago I gathered the idea that the Taj's place in the achievements of man was exactly the place of the ice-storm in the achievements of nature, that the Taj represented man's supremous possibility in the creation of grace and beauty and exquisiteness and splendor, just as the ice-storm represents nature's supremous possibility in the combination of those same qualities. I do not know how long ago that idea was bred in me, but I know that I cannot remember back to a time when the thought of either of these symbols of gracious and unapproachable perfection did not at once suggest the other. If I thought of the ice-storm, the Taj rose before me divinely beautiful. If I thought of the Taj, with its encrustings and inlayings of jewels, the vision of the ice-storm rose. And so, to me, all these years, the Taj had had no rival among the temples and palaces of men, none that even remotely approached it. It was man's architectural ice-storm. Here in London the other night I was talking with some Scotch and English friends, and I mentioned the ice-storm using it as a figure, a figure which failed for none of them had heard of the ice-storm. One gentleman, who was very familiar with American literature, said he had never seen it mentioned in any book. That is strange, and I myself was not able to say that I had seen it mentioned in a book, and yet the autumn foliage, with all other American scenery, has received full and competent attention. The oversight is strange, for in America the ice-storm is an event, and it is not an event which one is careless about. When it comes, the news flies from room to room in the house, there are bangings on the doors and shoutings, the ice-storm, the ice-storm, and even the laziest sleepers throw off the covers and join the rush for the windows. The ice-storm occurs in midwinter, and usually its enchantments are wrought in the silence and the darkness of the night. A fine drizzling rain falls hour after hour upon the naked twigs and branches of the trees, and as it falls it freezes. In time the trunk and every branch and twig are encased in hard, pure ice. So that the tree looks like a skeleton tree made all of glass, glass that is crystal clear. All along the underside of every branch and twig is a comb of little icicles, the frozen drip. Sometimes these pendants do not quite amount to icicles, but are round beads, frozen tears. The weather clears toward dawn, and leaves a brisk pure atmosphere and a sky without a shred of cloud in it, and everything is still. There is not a breath of wind. The dawn breaks and spreads. The news of the storm goes about the house, and the little and the big in wraps and blankets flock to the window and press together there and gaze intently out upon the great white ghost in the grounds, and—nobody says a word—nobody stirs. All are waiting. They know what is coming, and they are waiting, waiting for the miracle. The minutes drift on and on and on, with not a sound but the ticking of the clock. At last the sun fires a sudden sheaf of rays into the ghostly tree and turns it into a white splendor of glittering diamonds. Everybody catches his breath and feels a swelling in his throat and a moisture in his eyes, but waits again, for he knows what is coming. There is more yet. The sun climbs higher and still higher, flooding the tree from its loftiest spread of branches to its lowest, turning it to a glory of white fire. Then in a moment, without warning, comes the great miracle, the supreme miracle, the miracle without its fellow in the earth. A gust of wind sets every branch and twig to swaying, and in an instant turns the whole white tree into a spouting and spraying explosion of flashing gems of every conceivable colour. And there it stands and sways this way and that, flash, flash, flash. A dancing and glancing world of rubies, emeralds, diamonds, sapphires, the most radiant spectacle, the most blinding spectacle, the divinest, the most exquisite, the most intoxicating vision of fire and colour, an intolerable and unimaginable splendour that ever any eye has rested upon in this world, or will ever rest upon outside of the gates of heaven. By all my senses, all my faculties, I know that the ice-storm is nature's supremus achievement in the domain of the superb and the beautiful, and by my reason, at least, I know that the Taj is man's ice-storm. In the ice-storm every one of the myriad ice-beads pendant from twig and branch is an individual gem, and changes colour with every motion caused by the wind. Each tree carries a million, and a forest-front exhibits the splendours of the single tree multiplied by a thousand. It occurs to me now that I have never seen the ice-storm put upon canvas, and have not heard that any painter has tried to do it. I wonder why that is? Is it that paint cannot counterfeit the intense blaze of a sun-flooded jewel? There should be and must be a reason, and a good one, why the most enchanting sight that nature has created has been neglected by the brush. Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth. The describers of the Taj have used the word gem in its strictest sense, its scientific sense. In that sense it is a mild word, and promises but little to the eye, nothing bright, nothing brilliant, nothing sparkling, nothing splendid in the way of colour. It accurately describes the sober and unobtrusive gemwork of the Taj, that is, to the very highly educated one person in a thousand, but it most falsely describes it to the 999. But the 999 are the people who ought to be especially taken care of, and to them it does not mean quiet-coloured designs wrought in carnelians or agates or such things. They know the word in its wide and ordinary sense only, and so to them it means diamonds and rubies and opals and their kindred, and the moment their eyes fall upon it in print they see a vision of glorious colours closed in fire. These describers are writing for the general, and so in order to make sure of being understood they ought to use words in their ordinary sense or else explain. The word fountain means one thing in Syria where there is but a handful of people. It means quite another thing in North America where there are seventy-five million. If I were describing some Syrian scenery and should exclaim, Within the narrow space of a quarter of a mile square I saw in the glory of the flooding moonlight two hundred noble fountains, imagine the spectacle! The North American would have a vision of clustering columns of water soaring aloft, bending over in graceful arches, bursting in beaded spray and raining white fire in the moonlight, and he would be deceived. But the Syrian would not be deceived. He would merely see two hundred freshwater springs, two hundred drowsing puddles as level and unpretentious and unexcited as so many doormats, and even with the help of the moonlight he would not lose his grip in the presence of the exhibition. My word fountain would be correct. It would speak the strict truth, and it would convey the strict truth to the handful of Syrians, and the strictest misinformation to the North American millions. With their gems, and gems, and more gems, and gems again, and still other gems, the describers of the Taj are within their legal, but not their moral, rights. They are dealing in the strictest scientific truth, and in doing it they succeed to admiration in telling what ain't so. CHAPTER 60 To Lahore, the Governor's Elephant, taking a ride, no danger from collision, Raul Pindi, back to Delhi, an Orientalized Englishman, Louise and the paint-pot, monkey crying over my notebook, arrival at Jaipur, in Rajputana, watching servants, the Jaipur Hotel, our old and new Satan, Satan as a liar, the museum, a street show, blocks of houses, a religious procession. Satan, impatiently, to newcomer. The trouble with you, Chicago people, is that you think you are the best people down here, whereas you are merely the most numerous." Puddinhead Wilson's New Calendar. We wandered contentedly around here and there in India, to Lahore, among other places, where the Lieutenant Governor lent me an elephant. This hospitality stands out in my experiences in a stately isolation. It was a fine elephant, affable, gentlemanly, educated, and I was not afraid of it. I even rode it with confidence through the crowded lanes of the native city, where it scared all the horses out of their senses, and where children were always just escaping its feet. It took the middle of the road in a fine, independent way, and left it to the world to get out of the way or take the consequences. I am used to being afraid of collisions when I ride or drive, but when one is on top of an elephant, that feeling is absent. I could have ridden in comfort through a regimen of runaway teams. I could easily learn to prefer an elephant to any other vehicle, partly because of that immunity from collisions, and partly because of the fine view one has from up there, and partly because of the dignity one feels in that high place, and partly because one can look in at the windows and see what is going on privately among the family. The Lahore horses were used to elephants, but they were rapturously afraid of them just the same. It seemed curious. Perhaps the better they know the elephant, the more they respect him in that peculiar way. In our own case we are not afraid of dynamite, till we get acquainted with it. We drifted as far as Rawalpindi, a way up on the Afghan frontier. I think it was the Afghan frontier, but it may have been Herzegovina. It was around there somewhere, and down again to Delhi to see the ancient architectural wonders there, and in Old Delhi and not describe them, and also to see the scene of the illustrious assault in the mutiny days when the British carried Delhi by storm, one of the marvels of history for impudent daring and immortal valor. We had a refreshing rest there in Delhi in a great old mansion which possessed historical interest. It was built by a rich Englishman who had become orientalised, so much so that he had a zinana. But he was a broad-minded man, and remained so. To please his harem he built a mosque. To please himself he built an English church. That kind of a man will arrive somewhere. In the mutiny days the mansion was the British General's headquarters. It stands in a great garden, oriental fashion, and about it are many noble trees. The trees harbour monkeys, and they are monkeys of a watchful and enterprising sort, and not much troubled with fear. They invade the house whenever they get a chance, and carry off everything they don't want. One morning the master of the house was in his bath, and the window was open. Near it stood a pot of yellow paint and a brush. Some monkeys appeared in the window. To scare them away the gentleman threw his sponge at them. They did not scare at all. They jumped into the room and threw yellow paint all over him from the brush, and drove him out. Then they painted the walls and the floor and the tank and the windows and the furniture yellow, and were in the dressing-room painting that when help arrived and routed them. Two of these creatures came into my room in the early morning, through a window whose shutters I had left open, and when I woke one of them was before the glass brushing his hair, and the other one had my notebook, and was reading a page of humorous notes and crying. I did not mind the one with a hair-brush, but the conduct of the other one hurt me. It hurts me yet. I threw something at him, and that was wrong, for my host had told me that the monkeys were best left alone. They threw everything at me that they could lift, and then went into the bathroom to get some more things, and I shut the door on them. At Jaipur, in Rajputana, we made a considerable stay. We were not in the native city, but several miles from it, in the small European official suburb. There were but few Europeans, only fourteen, but they were all kind and hospitable, and it amounted to being at home. In Jaipur we found again what we had found all about India, that while the Indian servant is in his way a very real treasure, he will sometimes bear watching, and the Englishman watches him. If he sends him on an errand, he wants more than the man's word for it that he did the errand. When fruit and vegetables were sent to us, a chit came with them, a receipt for us to sign, otherwise the things might not arrive. If a gentleman sent up his carriage, the chit stated, from such and such an hour to such and such an hour, which made it unhandy for the coachman and his two or three subordinates to put us off with a part of the allotted time and devote the rest of it to a lark of their own. We were pleasantly situated in a small, two-storied inn in an empty large compound which was surrounded by a mud-wall as high as a man's head. The inn was kept by nine Hindu brothers, its owners. They lived, with their families, in a one-storied building within the compound, but off to one side, and there was always a long pile of their little comely brown children loosely stacked in its veranda, and a detachment of the parents wedged among them, smoking the hookah or the houda, or whatever they call it. By the veranda stood a palm, and a monkey lived in it, and led a lonesome life, and always looked sad and weary, and the crows bothered him a good deal. The inn cow poked about the compound and emphasized the secluded and country air of the place, and there was a dog of no particular breed who was always present in the compound, and always asleep, always stretched out, baking in the sun, and adding to the deep tranquillity and reposfulness of the place when the crows were away on business. White drapery'd servants were coming and going all the time, but they seemed only spirits, for their feet were bare and made no sound. Down the lane apiece lived an elephant in the shade of a noble tree, and rocked and rocked, and reached about with his trunk, begging of his brown mistress or fumbling the children playing at his feet. And there were camels about, but they go on velvet feet, and were proper to the silence and serenity of the surroundings. The Satan mentioned at the head of this chapter was not our Satan, but the other one. Our Satan was lost to us. In these later days he had passed out of our life, lamented by me and sincerely. I was missing him. I am missing him yet, after all these months. He was an astonishing creature to fly around and do things. He didn't always do them quite right, but he did them, and did them suddenly. There was no time wasted. You would say, pack the trunks and bags, Satan. Where good! Very good. Then there would be a brief sound of thrashing and slashing and humming and buzzing and a spectacle as of a whirlwind spinning gowns and jackets and coats and boots and things through the air, and then with a bow and touch. All righty, musta! It was wonderful. It made one dizzy. He crumpled dresses a good deal, and he had no particular plan about the work at first, except to put each article into the trunk it didn't belong in. But he soon reformed in this matter. Not entirely, for to the last he would cram into the satchel sacred to literature any odds and ends of rubbish that he couldn't find a handy place for elsewhere. When threatened with death for this it did not trouble him. He only looked pleasant, saluted with soldierly grace, said, Where good! and did it again next day. He was always busy, kept the rooms tidied up, the boots polished, the clothes brushed, the wash basin full of clean water, my dress-clothes laid out and ready for the lecture-hall an hour ahead of time, and he dressed me from head to heel in spite of my determination to do it myself, according to my life-long custom. He was a born boss and love to command, and to jaw and dispute with inferiors and harry them and bully-rag them. He was fine at the railway station, yes, he was at his finest there. He would shoulder and plunge and paw his violent way through the packed multitude of natives with nineteen coulis at his tail, each bearing a trifle of luggage, one a trunk, another a parasol, another a shawl, another a fan, and so on. One article to each, and the longer the procession, the better he was suited, and he was sure to make for some engaged sleeper and begin to hurl the owner's things out of it, swearing that it was ours and that there had been a mistake. Arrived at our own sleeper he would undo the bedding bundles and make the beds, and put everything to rights and ship-shape in two minutes. One put his head out, had a window, and have a restful good time abusing his gang of coulis and disputing their bill, until we arrived and made him pay them and stop his noise. Speaking of noise, he certainly was the noisiest little devil in India, and that is saying much, very much indeed. I loved him for his noise, but the family detested him for it. They could not abide it. They could not get reconciled to it. If he humiliated them, as a rule when we got within six hundred yards of one of those big railway stations, a mighty racket of screaming and shrieking and shouting and storming would break upon us. And I would be happy to myself, and the family would say, with shame, There! that's Satan! Why do you keep him? And sure enough, there in the whirling midst of fifteen hundred wondering people, we would find that little scrap of a creature gesticulating like a spider with a colic, his black eyes snapping, his fazz tassel dancing, his jaws pouring out floods of billings-gate upon his gang of beseeching and astonished coulis. I loved him. I couldn't help it. But the family—why, they could hardly speak of him with patience. To this day I regret his loss, and wish I had him back. But they—it is different with them. He was a native and came from Surat. Twenty degrees of latitude lay between his birthplace and Manuel's, and fifteen hundred between their ways and characters and dispositions. I only liked Manuel, but I loved Satan. This latter's real name was intensely Indian. I could not quite get the hang of it, but it sounded like Bundur Rao Ram Chundur Klam Chowder. It was too long for handy use, anyway, so I reduced it. When he had been with us two or three weeks, he began to make mistakes which I had difficulty in patching up for him. Approaching Benares, one day, he got out of the train to see if he could get up a misunderstanding with somebody, for it had been a weary long journey, and he wanted to freshen up. He found what he was after, but kept up his pow-wow a shade too long, and got left. So there we were, in a strange city and no chambermaid. It was awkward for us, and we told him he must not do so any more. He saluted and said in his dear, pleasant way, Where good? Then at luck now he got drunk. I said it was a fever, and got the family's compassion and solicitude aroused, so they gave him a teaspoonful of liquid quinine, and it set his vitals on fire. He made several grimaces, which gave me a better idea of the Lisbon earthquake than any I have ever got of it from paintings and descriptions. His drunk was still portentiously solid next morning, but I could have pulled him through with the family if he would only have taken another spoonful of that remedy. He would know, although he was stupefied, his memory still had flickerings of life, so he smiled a divinely dull smile and said, fumblingly, saluting, Scuse me, ma'am saheb, scuse me, misi saheb, Satan, not prefer it, please. Then some instinct revealed to them that he was drunk. They gave him prompt notice that next time this happened he must go. He got out a mordlin and most gentle, Where good? and saluted indefinitely. Only one short week later he fell again, and, oh, sorrow not in a hotel this time, but in an English gentleman's private house, and in Agra of all places, so he had to go. When I told him he said patiently, Where good? and made his parting salute, and went out from us to return no more for ever. Dear me! I would rather have lost a hundred angels than that one poor lovely devil. What style he used to put on in a swell hotel or in a private house, snow-white Muslim from his chin to his bare feet, a crimson sash embroidered with gold thread around his waist, and on his head a great sea-green turban like to the turban of the Grand Turk. He was not a liar, but he will become one if he keeps on. He told me once that he used to crack coconuts with his teeth when he was a boy, and when I asked how he got them into his mouth, he said he was upward of six feet high at that time, and had an unusual mouth. And when I followed him up and asked him what had become of that other foot, he said a house fell on him, and he was never able to get his stature back again. Swervings like these from the strict line of fact often beguile a truthful man on and on until he eventually becomes a liar. His successor was a Mohammedan, Sahadat Mohammed Khan, very dark, very tall, very grave. He went always in flowing masses of white from the top of his big turban down to his bare feet. His voice was low. He glided about in a noiseless way and looked like a ghost. He was competent and satisfactory. But where he was it seemed always Sunday. It was not so in Satan's time. Jaipur is intensely Indian, but it has two or three features which indicate the presence of European science and European interest in the wheel of the common public, such as the liberal water supply furnished by great works built at the state's expense, good sanitation resulting in a degree of healthfulness unusually high for India, a noble pleasure garden with privileged days for women, schools for the instruction of native youth in advanced art both ornamental and utilitarian, and a new and beautiful palace stocked with a museum of extraordinary interest and value. Without the Maharaja's sympathy and purse these beneficences could not have been created. But he is a man of wide views and large generalities, and all such matters find hospitality with him. We drove often to the city from the hotel Kaiseri Hind, a journey which was always full of interest both night and day, for that country road was never quiet, never empty, but was always India in motion, always a streaming flood of brown people closed in smoochings from the rainbow, a tossing and moiling flood, happy, noisy, a charming and satisfying confusion of strange human and strange animal life and equally strange and outlandish vehicles. And the city itself is a curiosity. Any Indian city is that, but this one is not like any other that we saw. It is shut up in a lofty, turreted wall. The main body of it is divided into six parts by perfectly straight streets that are more than a hundred feet wide. The blocks of houses exhibit a long frontage of the most taking architectural quaintances, the straight lines being broken everywhere by pretty little balconies, pillared and highly ornamented, and other cunning and cosy and inviting perches and projections, and many of the fronts are curiously pictured by the brush, and the whole of them have the soft, rich tint of strawberry ice-cream. One cannot look down the far stretch of the chief street and persuade himself that these are real houses and that it is all out of doors. The impression that it is an unreality, a picture, a scene in a theatre is the only one that will take hold. Then there came a great day when this illusion was more pronounced than ever. A rich Hindu had been spending a fortune upon the manufacture of a crowd of idols and accompanying paraphernalia whose purpose was to illustrate scenes in the life of his a special god or saint, and this fine show was to be brought through the town in processional state at ten in the morning. As we passed through the great public pleasure-garden on our way to the city, we found it crowded with natives. That was one sight. Then there was another. In the midst of the spacious lawn stands the palace which contains the museum, a beautiful construction of stone which shows arched colonnades, one above another, and receding, terrace fashion toward the sky. Every one of these terraces, all the way to the top one, was packed and jammed with natives. One must try to imagine those solid masses of splendid colour, one above another, up and up against the blue sky, and the Indian sun turning them all to beds of fire and flame. Later, when we reached the city, and glanced down the chief avenue, smoldering in its crushed strawberry tint, those splendid effects were repeated. For every balcony and every fanciful birdcage of a snuggery countersunk in the house fronts, and all the long lines of roofs were crowded with people, and each crowd was an explosion of brilliant colour. Then the wide street itself, away down and down and down into the distance, was alive with gorgeously clothed people, not still but moving, swaying, drifting, eddying, a delirious display of all colours and all shades of colour, delicate, lovely, pale, soft, strong, stunning, vivid, brilliant, a sort of storm of sweet pea blossoms passing on the wings of a hurricane. And presently, through this storm of colour came swaying and swinging the majestic elephants, clothed in their Sunday best of gaudinesses, and the long procession of fanciful trucks freighted with their groups of curious and costly images, and then the long rearguard of stately camels with their picturesque riders. For colour and picturesqueness, and novelty and outlandishness, and sustained interest and fascination, it was the most satisfying show I had ever seen, and I suppose I shall not have the privilege of looking upon its like again. CHAPTER 61 METHODS in American deaf and dumb asylums, methods in the public schools, a letter from a youth in Punjab, highly educated service, a damage to the country, a little book from Calcutta, writing poor English, embarrassed by a beggar girl, a specimen letter, an application for employment, a Calcutta school examination, two samples of literature. In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards. Puddinhead Wilson's New Calendar. Suppose we applied no more ingenuity to the instruction of deaf and dumb and blind children, then we sometimes apply in our American public schools to the instruction of children who are in possession of all their faculties. The result would be that the deaf and dumb and blind would acquire nothing. They would live and die as ignorant as bricks and stones. The methods used in the asylums are rational. The teacher exactly measures the child's capacity to begin with, and from thence onwards the tasks imposed are nicely gauged to the gradual development of that capacity. The tasks keep pace with the steps of the child's progress. They don't jump miles and leagues ahead of it by irrational caprice and land in vacancy, according to the average public school plan. In the public school, apparently, they teach the child to spell cat, then ask it to calculate an eclipse. When it can read words of two syllables, they require it to explain the circulation of the blood. When it reaches the head of the infant class, they bully it with conundrums that cover the domain of universal knowledge. This sounds extravagant, and is. Yet it goes no great way beyond the facts. I received a curious letter one day from the pun-job. You must pronounce it pun-job. The handwriting was excellent, and the wording was English—English and yet not exactly English. The style was easy and smooth and flowing, yet there was something subtly foreign about it, something tropically ornate and sentimental and rhetorical. It turned out to be the work of a Hindu youth, the holder of a humble clerical billet in a railway office. He had been educated in one of the numerous colleges of India. Upon inquiry I was told that the country was full of young fellows of his like. They had been educated away up to the snow summits of learning, and the market for all this elaborate cultivation was minutely out of proportion to the vastness of the product. This market consisted of some thousands of small clerical posts under the government. The supply of material for it was multitudinous. If this youth, with the flowing style and the blossoming English was occupying a small railway clerkship, it meant that there were hundreds, and hundreds as capable as he, or he would be in a high place. And it certainly meant that there were thousands whose education and capacity had fallen a little short, and that they would have to go without places. Apparently, then, the colleges of India were doing what our high schools have long been doing, richly oversupplying the market for highly educated service, and thereby doing a damage to the scholar and through him to the country. At home I once made a speech deploring the injuries inflicted by the high school in making handicrafts distasteful to boys who would have been willing to make a living at trades and agriculture if they had but had the good luck to stop with the common school. But I made no converts, not one, in a community overrun with educated idlers who were above following their father's mechanical trades, yet could find no market for their book knowledge. The same mail that brought me the letter from the Punjab brought also a little book published by Messer's Thacker Spink and Company of Calcutta, which interested me for both its preface and its contents treated of this matter of overeducation. In the preface occurs this paragraph from the Calcutta review, for Government Office read Dry Good's Clerkship, and it will fit more than one region of America. The education that we give makes the boys a little less clownish in their manners, and more intelligent when spoken to by strangers. On the other hand it has made them less contented with their lot in life, and less willing to work with their hands. The form which discontent takes in this country is not of a healthy kind. For the natives of India consider that the only occupation worthy of an educated man is that of a ridership in some office, and especially in a Government Office. The village schoolboy goes back to the plow with the greatest reluctance, and the town schoolboy carries the same discontent and inefficiency into his father's workshop. Sometimes these ex-students positively refuse at first to work, and more than once parents have openly expressed their regret that they ever allowed their sons to be invagled to school. The little book which I am quoting from is called Indo-Anglian Literature, and is well-stocked with Babu English, clearly English, booky English acquired in the schools. Some of it is very funny, almost as funny perhaps as what you and I produce when we try to write in a language not our own. But much of it is surprisingly correct and free, if I were going to quote good English, but I am not. India is well-stocked with natives who speak it and write it as well as the best of us. I merely wish to show some of the quaint imperfect attempts at the use of our tongue. There are many letters in the book, poverty, imploring help, bread, money, kindness, office, generally an office, a clerkship, some way to get food and a rag out of the applicant's unmarketable education, and food not for himself alone, but sometimes for a dozen helpless relations in addition to his own family, for those people are astonishingly unselfish and admirably faithful to their ties of kinship. Among us I think there is nothing approaching it. Strange as some of these wailing and supplicating letters are, humble and even groveling as some of them are, and quaintly funny and confused as a goodly number of them are, there is still a pathos about them as a rule that checks the rising laugh and reproaches it. In the following letter, Father is not to be read literally. In Ceylon, a little native beggar-girl embarrassed me by calling me Father, although I knew she was mistaken. I was so new that I did not know that she was merely following the custom of the dependent and the supplicant. Sir, I pray please to give me some action, work, for I am very poor boy. I have no one to help me even so, Father, for it so it seemed. In thy good sight you give the telegraph office. And another work, what is your wish? I am very poor, boy. This understand what is your wish? You, my father, I am your son. This understand what is your wish? Your servant, P.C.B. Through ages of debasing oppression suffered by these people at the hands of their native rulers, they come legitimately by the attitude and language of fawning and flattery, and one must remember this in mitigation when passing judgment upon the native character. It is common in these letters to find the petitioner furtively trying to get at the white man's soft religious side, even this poor boy baits his hook with a macerated Bible text in the hope that it may catch something if all else fail. Here is an application for the post of instructor in English to some children. My dear sir or gentleman, that your petitioner has much qualification in the language of English to instruct the young boys, I was given to understand that your of suitable children has to acquire the knowledge of English language. As a sample of the flowery eastern style I will take a sentence or two from a long letter written by a young native to the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, an application for employment. Honored and much respected sir, I hope your honour will condescend to hear the tale of this poor creature. I shall overflow with gratitude at this mark of your royal condescension. The bird-like happiness has flown away from my nest-like heart and has not hitherto returned from the period whence the rose of my father's life suffered the abdominal breath of death. In plain English he passed through the gates of grave, and from that hour the phantom of delight has never danced before me. It is all school English, book English, you see, and good enough too all things considered. If the native boy had but that one study he would shine, he would dazzle no doubt, but that is not the case. He is situated, as are our public school children, loaded down with an over-fratage of other studies, and frequently they are as far beyond the actual point of progress reached by him and suited to the stage of development attained, as could be imagined by the insaneest fancy. Apparently, like our public school boy, he must work, work, work in school and out and play but little. Similarly, like our public school boy, his education consists in learning things, not the meaning of them. He is fed upon the husks, not the corn. From several essays written by native school boys in answer to the question of how they spend their day I select one, the one which goes most into detail. 66. At the break of day I rises from my own bed and finish my daily duty, then I employ myself till eight o'clock, after which I employ myself to bathe, then take for my body some sweetmeat, and just at nine-and-a-half I came to school to attend my class duty, then at two-and-a-half p.m. I return from school and engage myself to do my natural duty, then I engage for a quarter to take my tiffin, then I study till five p.m., after which I began to play anything which comes in my head. After eight-and-a-half, half-past to eight, we are began to sleep. Before sleeping I told a constable just eleven o'clock. He came and rose us from half-past eleven. We began to read, still morning. It is not perfectly clear now that I come to cipher upon it. He gets up at about five in the morning, or along there somewhere, and goes to bed about fifteen or sixteen hours afterward. That much of it seems straight. But why he should rise again three hours later and resume his studies till morning is puzzling. I think it is because he is studying history. History requires a world of time and bitter hard work when your education is no further advanced than the cat's. When you are merely stuffing yourself with a mixed-up mess of empty names and random incidents and elusive dates, which no one teaches you how to interpret, and which, uninterpreted, pay you not a farling's value for your waste of time. Yes, I think he had to get up at half-past eleven p.m. in order to be sure to be perfect with his history lesson by noon, with results as follows from a Calcutta school examination. Q. Who was Cardinal Woolsey? Cardinal Woolsey was an editor of a paper named North Britain. Number forty-five of his publication he charged the king of uttering a lie from the throne. He was arrested and cast into prison, and after releasing went to France. III. As Bishop of York but died in dysentery in a church on his way to be blockheaded. VIII. Cardinal Woolsey was the son of Edward IV. After his father's death he himself ascended the throne at the age of ten. Ten only. But when he surpassed or when he was fallen in his twenty years of age, at that time, he wished to make a journey in his countries under him. But he was opposed by his mother to do journey, and according to his mother's example he remained in the home, and then became king. After many times obstacles and many confusion he become king and afterwards his brother. There's probably not a word of truth in that. Q. What is the meaning of Ich Dean? X. An honor conferred on the first or eldest sons of English sovereigns. It is nothing more than some feathers. XI. Ich Dean was the word which was written on the feathers of the blind king who came to fight, being interlaced with the bridles of the horse. XIII. Ich Dean is a title given to Henry VII by the Pope of Rome when he forwarded the reformation of Cardinal Woolsey to Rome, and for this reason he was called Commander of the Faith. A dozen or so of this kind of insane answers are quoted in the book from that examination. Each answer is sweeping proof all by itself that the person uttering it was pushed ahead of where he belonged when he was put into history, proof that he had been put to the task of acquiring history before he had had a single lesson in the art of acquiring it, which is the equivalent of dumping a pupil into geometry before he has learned the progressive steps which lead up to it and make its acquirement possible. Those Calcutta novices had no business with history. There was no excuse for examining them in it, no excuse for exposing them and their teachers. They were totally empty. There was nothing to examine. Helen Keller has been dumb, stone-deaf and stone-blind ever since she was a little baby a year and a half old, and now at sixteen years of age this miraculous creature, this wonder of all the ages, passes the Harvard University examination in Latin, German, French history, bellettres and such things, and does it brilliantly too, not in a common place fashion. She doesn't know merely things, she is splendidly familiar with the meanings of them. When she writes an essay on a Shakespearean character her English is fine and strong, her grasp of the subject is the grasp of one who knows, and her page is electric with light. Has Miss Sullivan taught her by the methods of India and the American public school? No. Oh, no. For then she would be deffer and dumber and blinder than she was before. It is a pity that we can't educate all the children in the Asylums. To continue the Calcutta exposure. What is the meaning of a sheriff? Twenty-five. Sheriff is a post opened in the time of John, the duty of sheriff here in Calcutta to look out and catch those carriages which is rashly driven out by the coachman, but it is a high post in England. Twenty-six. Sheriff was the English Bill of Common Prayer. Twenty-seven. The man with whom the accusative persons are placed is called Sheriff. Twenty-eight. Sheriff. Latin term for shrub. We called Broom, worn by the first Earl of Enjoo, as an emblem of humility when they went to the pilgrimage, and from this their hairs took their crest and surname. Twenty-nine. Sheriff is a kind of tight-less sect of people, as barons, nobles, etc. Thirty. Sheriff. A title given on those persons who were respective and pious in England. The students were examined in the following bulky matters. Geometry, the solar spectrum, the habeas corpus act, the British Parliament, and in metaphysics they were asked to trace the progress of skepticism from Descartes to Hume. It is within bounds to say that some of the results were astonishing. Without doubt there were students present who justified their teacher's wisdom in introducing them to these studies. But the fact is, also evident, that others had been pushed into these studies to waste their time over them when they could have been profitably employed in hunting smaller game. Under the head of geometry, one of the answers is this. Forty-nine. The whole B.D. equals the whole C.A. and so, so, so, so, so, so, so. To me this is cloudy, but I was never well up in geometry. That was the only effort made among the five students who appeared for examination in geometry. The other four wailed and surrendered without a fight. They are piteous wails, too, wails of despair, and one of them is an eloquent reproach. It comes from a poor fellow who has been laden beyond his strength by a stupid teacher and is eloquent in spite of the poverty of its English. The poor chap finds himself required to explain riddles which even Sir Isaac Newton was not able to understand. Fifty. Oh, my dear father-examiner, you, my father, and you kindly give a number of pass, you, my great father. Fifty-one. I am a poor boy, and have no means to support my mother and two brothers who are suffering much for want of food. I get four rupees monthly from Charity Fund of this place, from which I send two rupees for their support, and keep two for my own support. Father, if I relate the unlucky circumstance under which we are placed, then I think you will not be able to suppress the tender tier. Fifty-two. Sir, which Sir Isaac Newton and other experienced mathematicians cannot understand, I being third of entrance class, can understand these which is too impossible to imagine, and my examiner also has put very tiresome and very heavy propositions to prove. We must remember that these pupils had to do their thinking in one language and express themselves in another and alien one. It was a heavy handicap. I have by me English as she is taught, a collection of American examinations made in the public schools of Brooklyn by one of the teachers, Miss Caroline B. LaRoe. An extract or two from its pages will show that when the American pupil is using but one language, and that one his own, his performance is no it better than his Indian brothers. Christopher Columbus was called the father of his country. Queen Isabella of Spain sold her watch and chain and other millinery so that Columbus could discover America. The Indian wars were very desecrating to the country. The Indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes and then scalping them. Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country. His life was saved by his daughter Pocahontas. The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America. The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so they should be null and void. Washington died in Spain almost broken hearted. His remains were taken to the cathedral in Havana. Guerrilla warfare was where men rode on guerrillas. In Brooklyn, as in India, they examine a pupil and when they find out he doesn't know anything, they put him into literature, or geometry, or astronomy, or government, or something like that, so that he can properly display the acidification of the whole system. On literature Bracebridge Hall was written by Henry Irving. Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer. Bay Wolf wrote the scriptures. Ben Johnson survived Shakespeare in some respects. In the Canterbury tale it gives account of King Alfred on his way to the Shrine of Thomas Bucket. Chaucer was the father of English pottery. Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads Longfellow. We will finish with a couple of samples of literature, one from America, the other from India. The first is a Brooklyn public schoolboy's attempt to turn a few verses of the Lady of the Lake into prose. You will have to concede that he did it. The man who rode on the horse performed the whip, and an instrument made of steel alone, with strong ardor not diminishing, for being tired from the time passed with hard labour overworked with anger and ignorant with weariness, while every breath for labour he drew with cries full of sorrow, the young deer made imperfect who worked hard filtered in sight. The following paragraph is from a little book which is famous in India, the biography of a distinguished Hindu judge Unukul Chundur Mukherjee. It was written by his nephew, and is unintentionally funny, in fact exceedingly so. I offer here the closing scene. If you would like to sample the rest of the book, it can be had by applying to the publishers Messer's Thacker, Spink and Company Calcutta. And having said these words, he hermetically sealed his lips not to open them again. All the well-known doctors of Calcutta that could be procured for a man of his position and wealth were brought, doctors Paine, Phaer and Nilmahub Mukherjee and others. They did what they could do, with their pure sense and knack of medical knowledge, but it proved after all as if to milk the ram. His wife and children had not the mournful consolation to hear his last words. He remained sotto voce for a few hours, and then was taken from us at 6.12 p.m., according to the Caprice of God, which passeth understanding. CHAPTER XXXII The scott has one too. The flying fish that went hunting in the field. Find for smuggling. Lots of pets on board. The color of the sea. The most important member of nature's family. The captain's story of cold weather. Omissions in the ship's library. Washing decks. Pajamas on deck. The cat's toilet. No interest in the bulletin. Perfect rest. The milky way and the Magellan clouds. Mauritius. Port Lewis. A hot country. Under French control. A variety of people and complexions. Trained to cure pipe. A wonderful office-holder. The wooden peg ornament. The prominent historical event of Mauritius. Paul and Virginia. One of Virginia's wedding gifts. Heaven copied after Mauritius. Early history of Mauritius. Quarantines. Population of all kinds. What the world consists of. Where Russia and Germany are. A picture of Milan Cathedral. Newspapers. The language. Best sugar in the world. Literature of Mauritius. There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined ones. Puddinhead Wilson's New Calendar. We sailed from Calcutta toward the end of March. Stopped a day at Madras. Two or three days in Ceylon. Then sailed westward on a long flight from Mauritius. From my diary. April 7. We are far abroad upon the smooth waters of the Indian Ocean now. It is shady and pleasant, and peaceful under the vast spread of the awnings, and life is perfect again. Ideal. The difference between a river and the sea is that the river looks fluid. The sea. Solid. Usually looks as if you could step out and walk on it. The captain has this peculiarity. He cannot tell the truth in a plausible way. In this he is the very opposite of the austere scot who sits midway of the table. He cannot tell a lie in an unplausible way. When the captain finishes a statement the passengers glance at each other privately, as, who should say, do you believe that? When the scot finishes one the look says, how strange and interesting. The whole secret is in the manner and method of the two men. The captain is a little shy and diffident, and he states the simplest fact as if he were a little afraid of it, while the scot delivers himself of the most abandoned lie with such an air of stern veracity that one is forced to believe it, although one knows it isn't so. For instance the scot told about a pet flying fish he once owned that lived in a little fountain in his conservatory and supported itself by catching birds and frogs and rats in the neighbouring fields. It was plain that no one at the table doubted the statement. By and by in the course of some talk about custom house annoyances the captain brought out the following simple everyday incident, but through his infirmity of style managed to tell it in such a way that it got no credence. He said, I went ashore at Naples one voyage when I was in that trade and stood around helping my passengers, for I could speak a little Italian. Two or three times at intervals the officer asked me if I had anything dutiable about me, and seemed more and more put out and disappointed every time I told him no. Finally a passenger whom I had helped through asked me to come out and take something. I thanked him but excused myself, saying I had taken a whiskey just before I came ashore. It was a fatal admission. The officer at once made me pay six pence import duty on the whiskey just from ship to shore, you see. And he fined me five pounds for not declaring the goods, another five pounds for falsely denying that I had anything dutiable about me, also five pounds for concealing the goods, and fifty pounds for smuggling, which is the maximum penalty for unlawfully bringing in goods under the value of seven pence hapeny. Altogether sixty five pounds six pence for a little thing like that. The Scott is always believed, yet he never tells anything but lies, whereas the Captain is never believed, although he never tells a lie so far as I can judge. If he should say his uncle was a male person he would probably say it in such a way that nobody would believe it. At the same time the Scott could claim that he had a female uncle and not stir a doubt in anybody's mind. My own luck has been curious all my literary life. I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe. Lots of pets on board, birds and things. In these far countries the white people do seem to run remarkably to pets. Our host in Konpur had a fine collection of birds, the finest we saw on a private house in India, and in Colombo Dr. Murray's great compound and commodious bungalow were well populated with domesticated company from the woods, frisky little squirrels, a Ceylon miner walking sociably about the house, a small green parrot that whistled a single urgent note of call without motion of its beak, also chuckled, a monkey in a cage on the back veranda, and some more out in the trees, also a number of beautiful macaws in the trees, and various and sundry birds and animals of breeds not known to me, but no cat. Yet a cat would have liked that place. April 9. Tea-planting is the great business in Ceylon now. A passenger says it often pays forty percent on the investment, says there's a boom. April 10. The sea is a Mediterranean blue, and I believe that that is about the divinous color known to nature. It is strange and fine, nature's lavish generosity to her creatures, at least to all of them except man. For those that fly she has provided a home that is nobly spacious, a home which is forty miles deep and envelops the whole globe, and has not an obstruction in it. For those that swim she has provided a more than imperial domain, a domain which is miles deep and covers four-fifths of the globe. But as for man, she has cut him off with the mere odds and ends of the creation. She has given him the thin skin, the meager skin which has stretched over the remaining one-fifth. The naked bones stick up through it in most places. On the one half of this domain he can raise snow, ice, sand, rocks, and nothing else. So the valuable part of his inheritance really consists of but a single-fifth of the family estate, and out of it he has to grub hard to get enough to keep him alive, and provide kings and soldiers and powder to extend the blessings of civilization with. Yet man, in his simplicity and complacency and inability to cipher, thinks nature regards him as the important member of the family, in fact her favorite. Surely it must occur to even his dull head sometimes that she has a curious way of showing it. Afternoon, the captain has been telling how, in one of his arctic voyages, it was so cold that the mate's shadow froze fast to the deck and had to be ripped loose by main strength. And even then he got only about two-thirds of it back. Nobody said anything and the captain went away. I think he is becoming disheartened. Also, to be fair, there is another word of praise due to the ship's library. It contains no copy of the vicar of Wakefield. That strange menagerie of complacent hypocrites and idiots of theatrical cheap-John heroes and heroines who are always showing off, of bad people who are not interesting and good people who are fatiguing. A singular book, not a sincere line in it and not a character that invites respect. A book which is one long waste-pipe discharge of goody-goody puerilities and dreary moralities, a book which is full of pathos which revolts and humor which grieves the heart. There are few things in literature that are more piteous, more pathetic than the celebrated humorous incident of Moses and the Spectacles. Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library, just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it. Customs in tropic seas. At five in the morning they pipe to wash down the decks, and at once the ladies who are sleeping there turn out and they and their beds go below. Then, one after another, the men come up from the bath in their pajamas and walk the decks an hour or two with bare legs and bare feet. Coffee and fruit served. The ship-cat and her kitten now appear and get about their toilets. Next the sea-barber comes and flays us on the breezy deck. Breakfast at nine thirty and the day begins. I do not know how a day could be more reposeful. No motion, a level blue sea. Nothing in sight from horizon to horizon. The speed of the ship furnishes a cooling breeze. There is no mail to read and answer. No newspapers to excite you. No telegrams to fret you or fright you. The world is far, far away. It has ceased to exist for you. Seemed a fading dream along in the first days has dissolved to an unreality now. It has gone from your mind with all its businesses and ambitions. Its prosperity and disasters. Its exaltations and despairs. Its joys and griefs and cares and worries. They are no concern of yours any more. They have gone out of your life. They are a storm which has passed and left a deep calm behind. The people group themselves about the decks in their snowy white linen and read, smoke, sew, play cards, talk, nap, and so on. In other ships the passengers are always ciphering about when they are going to arrive. Out in these seas it is rare, very rare, to hear that subject broached. In other ships there is always an eager rush to the bulletin board at noon to find out what the run has been. In these seas the bulletin seems to attract no interest. I have seen no one visit it. In thirteen days I have visited it only once. Then I happen to notice the figures of the days run. On that day there happened to be talk at dinner about the speed of modern ships. I was the only passenger present who knew this ship's gate. Necessarily the Atlantic custom of betting on the ship's run is not a custom here. Nobody ever mentions it. I myself am wholly indifferent as to when we are going to get in. If anyone else feels interested in the matter he has not indicated it in my hearing. If I had my way we should never get in at all. This sort of sea life is charged with an indestructible charm. There is no weariness, no fatigue, no worry, no responsibility, no work, no depression of spirits. There is nothing like this serenity, this comfort, this peace, this deep contentment to be found anywhere on land. If I had my way I would sail on forever and never go to live on the solid ground again. One of Kipling's ballads has delivered the aspect and sentiment of this bewitching sea correctly. The engine ocean sets and smiles so soft, so bright, so blue and blue. There aren't a wave for miles and miles, except the jiggle from the screw. April 14. It turns out that the astronomical apprentice worked off a section of the Milky Way on me for the Magellan clouds. A man of more experience in the business showed one of them to me last night. It was small and faint and delicate, and looked like the ghost of a bunch of white smoke left floating in the sky by an exploded bombshell. Wednesday, April 15, Mauritius, arrived and anchored off Port Lewis, 2 a.m., rugged clusters of crags and peaks, green to their summits, from their bases to the sea a green plain with just tilt enough to it to make the water drain off. I believe it is in 56 degrees east and 22 degrees south, a hot tropical country. The green plain has an inviting look, has scattering dwellings nestling among the greenery, seen of the sentimental adventure of Paul and Virginia. Island under French control, which means a community which depends upon quarantines not sanitation for its health. Thursday, April 16, went ashore in the forenoon at Port Lewis, a little town, but with the largest variety of nationalities and complexions we have encountered yet, French, English, Chinese, Arabs, Africans with wool, blacks with straight hair, East Indians, half-whites, quadrunes, and great varieties in costumes and colors. Took the train for Curepipe at 1.30, two hours run, gradually up hill. What a contrast, this frantic luxuriance of vegetation with the arid plains of India. These architecturally picturesque crags and knobs and miniature mountains with the monotony of the Indian dead levels. A native pointed out a handsome, swarly man of grave and dignified bearing, and said in an odd tone, That is so-and-so, has held office of one sort or another under this government for 37 years. He is known all over this whole island and in the other countries of the world perhaps, who knows. One thing is certain, you can speak his name anywhere in this whole island, and you will find not one grown person that has not heard it. It is a wonderful thing to be so celebrated. Yet look at him, it makes no change in him. He does not even seem to know it. Curepipe means Pincushion, or Pegtown, probably. 16 miles, two hours, by rail from Port Lewis. At each end of every roof and on the apex of every dormer window, a wooden peg two feet high stands up. In some cases its top is blunt. In others the peg is sharp and looks like a toothpick. The passion for this humble ornament is universal. Apparently there has been only one prominent event in the history of Mauritius, and that one didn't happen. I refer to the romantic sojourn of Paul and Virginia here. It was that story that made Mauritius known to the world, made the name familiar to everybody, the geographical position of it to nobody. A clergyman was asked to guess what was in a box on a table. It was a vellum fan painted with a shipwreck and was one of Virginia's wedding gifts. April 18. This is the only country in the world where the stranger is not asked, how do you like this place? This is indeed a large distinction. Here the citizen does the talking about the country himself. The stranger is not asked to help. You get all sorts of information. From one citizen you gather the idea that Mauritius was made first and then heaven, and that heaven was copied after Mauritius. Another one tells you that this is an exaggeration, that the two chief villages, Port Louis and Curepipe, fall short of heavenly perfection, that nobody lives in Port Louis except upon compulsion, and that Curepipe is the wettest and rainiest place in the world. An English citizen said, In the early part of this century Mauritius was used by the French as a basis from which to operate against England's Indian merchant men. So England captured the island and also the neighbour, Bourbon, to stop that annoyance. England gave Bourbon back. The government in London did not want any more possessions in the West Indies. If the government had had a better quality of geography in stock, it would not have wasted Bourbon in that foolish way. A big war will temporarily shut up the Suez Canal someday, and the English ships will have to go to India around the Cape of Good Hope again. Then England will have to have Bourbon and will take it. Mauritius was a crown colony until twenty years ago, with a governor appointed by the crown, and assisted by a council appointed by himself. But Pope Hennessy came out as governor then, and he worked hard to get a part of the council made elective and succeeded. So now the whole council is French, and in all ordinary matters of legislation they vote together, and in the French interest, not the English. The English population is very slender. It has not votes enough to elect a legislator. Half a dozen rich French families elect the legislator. Pope Hennessy was an Irishman, a Catholic, a home ruler, MP, a hater of England and the English, a very troublesome person, and a serious encumbrance at Westminster. So it was decided to send him out to govern unhealthy countries, in hope that something would happen to him. But nothing did. The first experiment was not merely a failure, it was more than a failure. He proved to be more of a disease himself than any he was sent to encounter. The next experiment was here. The dark scheme failed again. It was an off-season, and there was nothing but measles here at the time. Pope Hennessy's health was not affected. He worked with the French and for the French and against the English, and he made the English very tired and the French very happy, and lived to have the joy of seeing the flag he served publicly hissed. His memory is held in worshipful reverence and affection by the French. It is a land of extraordinary quarantines. They quarantine a ship for anything or for nothing. Quarantine her for twenty and even thirty days. They once quarantined a ship because her captain had had the smallpox when he was a boy. That and because he was English. The population is very small, small to insignificance. The majority is East Indian, then Mongrels, then Negroes, descendants of the slaves of the French times, then French, then English. There was an American, but he is dead or mislaid. The Mongrels are the result of all kinds of mixtures, black and white, mulatto and white, quadrune and white, octarune and white. And so there is every shade of complexion, ebony, old mahogany, horse chestnut, sorrel, molasses candy, clouded amber, clear amber, old ivory white, new ivory white, fish belly white. This latter, the leprous complexion frequent with the Anglo-Saxon long resident in tropical climates. You wouldn't expect a person to be proud of being a Mauritian, now would you? But it is so. The most of them have never been out of the island and haven't read much or studied much, and they think the world consists of three principal countries, Judea, France and Mauritius. So they are very proud of belonging to one of the three grand divisions of the globe. They think that Russia and Germany are in England, and that England does not amount to much. They have heard vaguely about the United States and the Equator, but they think both of them are monarchies. They think Mount Peter-Bott is the highest mountain in the world, and if you show one of them a picture of Milan Cathedral, he will swell up with satisfaction and say that the idea of that jungle of spires was stolen from the forest of peg-tops and toothpicks that makes the roofs of Curepipe look so fine and prickly. There is not much trade in books. The newspapers educate and entertain the people, mainly the latter. They have two pages of large print reading matter, one of them English, the other French. The English page is a translation of the French one. The typography is super extra-primitive. In this quality it has not its equal anywhere. There is no proofreader now. He is dead. Where do they get matter to fill up a page in this little island lost in the wastes of the Indian Ocean? Oh, Madagascar. They discuss Madagascar in France. That is the bulk. Then they chalk up the rest with advice to the government. Also slurs upon the English administration. The papers are all owned and edited by Creoles, French. The language of the country is French. Everybody speaks it, has to. You have to know French, particularly Mongol-French. The patois spoken by Tom, Dick, and Harry of the multi-form complexions. Or you can't get along. This was a flourishing country in former days, for it made then and still makes the best sugar in the world. But first the Suez canal severed it from the world and left it out in the cold, and next the beetroot sugar, helped by bounties, captured the European markets. Sugar is the life of Mauritius, and it is losing its grip. Its downward course was checked by the depreciation of the rupee, for the planter pays wages in rupees but sells his crop for gold. And the insurrection in Cuba and paralyzation of the sugar industry there have given our prices here a life-saving lift. But the outlook has nothing permanently favourable about it. It takes a year to mature the canes, on the high ground three and six months longer. And there is always a chance that the annual cyclone will rip the profit out of the crop. In recent times a cyclone took the whole crop, as you may say, and the island never saw a finer one. Some of the noblest sugar estates in the island are in deep difficulties. A dozen of them are investments of English capital, and the companies that own them are at work now, trying to settle up and get out with a saving of half the money they put in. You know, in these days, when a country begins to introduce the tea culture, it means that its own specialty has gone back on it. Look at Bengal! Look at Ceylon! Well, they've begun to introduce the tea culture here. Many copies of Paul and Virginia are sold every year in Mauritius. No other book is so popular here except the Bible. By many it is supposed to be a part of the Bible. All the missionaries work up their French on it when they come here to pervert the Catholic mongrel. It is the greatest story that was ever written about Mauritius. And the only one. END OF CHAPTER 62 This is Chapter 63 of Following the Equator. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Following the Equator by Mark Twain, Chapter 63. Port Lewis matches no good, good roads, death notices, why European nations rob each other, what immigrants to Mauritius do, population, labour wages, the Cameroon, the Palmist and other eatables, monkeys, the cyclone of 1892, Mauritius, a Sunday landscape. The principal difference between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives, Putin had Wilson's new calendar. April 20, the cyclone of 1892 killed and crippled hundreds of people. It was accompanied by a deluge of rain which drowned Port Lewis and produced a water famine. Quite true, for it burst the reservoir and the water pipes, and for a time after the flood had disappeared there was much distress from want of water. This is the only place in the world where no breed of matches can stand the damp. Only one match in sixteen will light. The roads are hard and smooth. Some of the compounds are spacious, some of the bungalows comodious, and the roadways are walled by tall bamboo hedges, trim and green and beautiful, and there are azalea hedges too, both the white and the red. I never saw that before. As to healthiness, I translate from today's, April 20, Merchants and Planters Gazette, from the article of a regular contributor, Carminge, concerning the death of the nephew of a prominent citizen. Sad and legubrious existence, this which we lead in Mauritius, I believe there is no other country in the world where one dies more easily than among us. The least in disposition becomes a mortal malady. A simple headache develops into meningitis, a cold into pneumonia, and presently, when we are least expecting it, death is a guest in our home. This daily paper has a meteorological report which tells you what the weather was, day before yesterday. One is never pestered by a beggar or a peddler in this town, so far as I can see. This is pleasantly different from India. April 22. To such as believe that the quaint product called French civilization would be an improvement upon the civilization of New Guinea and the like, the snatching of Madagascar and the laying on of French civilization there will be fully justified. But why did the English allow the French to have Madagascar? Did she respect a theft of a couple of centuries ago? Dear me, robbery by European nations of each other's territories has never been a sin, is not a sin today. To the several cabinets, the several political establishments of the world are closed lines, and a large part of the official duty of these cabinets is to keep an eye on each other's wash and grab what they can of it as opportunity offers. All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth, including America, of course, consist of pilferings from other people's wash. No tribe, how so ever insignificant, and no nation, how so ever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not stolen. When the English, the French, and the Spaniards reached America, the Indian tribes had been raiding each other's territorial clothes lines for ages, and every acre of ground in the Continent had been stolen and re-stolen five hundred times. The English, the French, and the Spaniards went to work and stole it all over again, and when that was satisfactorily accomplished they went diligently to work and stole it from each other. In Europe and Asia and Africa every acre of ground has been stolen several millions of times. A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law. Christian governments are as frank today, as open and above board, in discussing projects for raiding each other's clothes lines, as ever they were before the Golden Rule came smiling into this inhospitable world, and couldn't get a knight's lodging anywhere. In one hundred and fifty years England has beneficently retired garment after garment from the Indian lines, until there is hardly a rag of the original wash left dangling anywhere. In eight hundred years an obscure tribe of Muscovite savages has risen to the dazzling position of land robber in chief. She found a quarter of the world hanging out to dry on a hundred parallels of latitude, and she scooped in the whole wash. She keeps a sharp eye on a multitude of little lines that stretch along the northern boundaries of India, and every now and then she snatches a hip rag or a pair of pajamas. It is England's prospective property, and Russia knows it, but Russia cares nothing for that. In fact, in our day land robbery, claim jumping, is become a European governmental frenzy. Some have been hard-added in the borders of China, in Burma, in Siam, and the islands of the sea, and all have been added in Africa. Africa has been as coolly divided up and portioned out among the gang as if they had bought it and paid for it, and now straightway they are beginning the old game again, to steal each other's grabbings. Germany found a vast slice of central Africa with the English flag and the English missionary and the English trader scattered all over it, but with certain formalities neglected, no signs up keep off the grass, trespassers forbidden, et cetera, and she stepped in with a cold, calm smile and put up the signs herself, and swept those English pioneers promptly out of the country. There is a tremendous point there. It can be put into the form of a maxim. Get your formalities right, never mind about the moralities. It was an impudent thing, but England had to put up with it. Now, in the case of Madagascar, the formalities had originally been observed, but by neglect they had fallen into desuitude ages ago. England should have snatched Madagascar from the French clothes line. Without an effort she could have saved those harmless natives from the calamity of French civilization, and she did not do it. Now it is too late. The signs of the time show plainly enough what is going to happen. All the savage lands in the world are going to be brought under a subjection to the Christian governments of Europe. I am not sorry, but glad. This coming fate might have been a calamity to those savage peoples two hundred years ago, but now it will in some cases be a benefaction. The sooner the seizure is consummated, the better for the savages. The dreary and dragging ages of bloodshed and disorder and oppression will give place to peace and order and the reign of law. When one considers what India was under her Hindu and Mohammedan rulers, and what she is now, when he remembers the miseries of her millions then, and the protections and humanities which they enjoy now, he must concede that the most fortunate thing that has ever befallen that empire was the establishment of British supremacy there. The savage lands of the world are to pass to alien possession, their peoples to the mercies of alien rulers. Let us hope and believe that they will all benefit by the change. April 23. The first year they gather shells. The second year they gather shells and drink. The third year they do not gather shells. Said of immigrants to Mauritius. Population 375,120 sugar factories. Population 1851,185,000. The increase is due mainly to the introduction of Indian Coolies. They now apparently form the great majority of the population. They are admirable breeders. Their homes are always hazy with children. Great savers of money. A British officer told me that in India he paid his servant ten rupees a month and he had eleven cousins, uncles, parents, etc., dependent upon him, and he supported them on his wages. These thrifty Coolies are said to be acquiring land, a trifle at a time, and cultivating it, and may own the island by and by. The Indian women do very hard labour for wages running from forty one-hundredths of a rupee for twelve hours' work to fifty one-hundredths. They carry mats of sugar on their heads, seventy pounds, all day, lading ships for half a rupee, and work at gardening all day for less. The Cameron is a fresh water creature like a crayfish. It is regarded here as the world's chiefest delicacy, and certainly it is good. Guards patrol the streams to prevent poaching it. A fine of two-hundred rupees or three-hundred, they say, for poaching. Bait is thrown in the water. The Cameron goes for it. The Fisher drops his loop in and works it around and about the Cameron he has selected till he gets it over its tail. Then there's a jerk, or something to certify the Cameron that it is his turn now. He suddenly backs away, which moves the loop still further up his person, and draws it taut, and his days are ended. Another dish, called palmiest, is like raw turnip shavings, and tastes like green almonds. Is very delicate and good. Costs the life of a palm tree twelve to twenty years old, for it is the pith. Another dish looks like greens or a tangle of fine seaweed is a preparation of the deadly night shade. Good enough. The monkeys live in the dense forests on the flanks of the Toy Mountains, and they flock down knights and raid the sugar fields. Also on other estates they come down and destroy a sort of bean crop, just for fun, apparently, tear off the pods and throw them down. The cyclone of 1892 tore down two great blocks of stone buildings in the center of Port Louis, the chief architectural feature, and left the uncomely and apparently frail block standing. Everywhere in its track it annihilated houses, tore off roofs, destroyed trees and crops. The men were in the towns, the women and children at home in the country, getting crippled, killed, frightened to insanity, and the rain delaging them, the wind howling, the thunder crashing, the lightning glaring. This for an hour or so. Then a lull and sunshine. Many ventured out of safe shelter. Then suddenly here it came again from the opposite point, and renewed and completed the devastation. It is said the Chinese fed the sufferers for days on free rice. Whole streets in Port Louis were laid flat, wrecked. During a minute and a half the wind blew one hundred and twenty-three miles an hour. No official record made after that, when it may have reached one hundred and fifty. It cut down an obelisk. It carried an American ship into the woods after breaking the chains of two anchors. They now use four, two forward, two astern. Common report says it killed one thousand two hundred in Port Louis alone, in half an hour. Then came the lull of the central calm. People did not know the barometer was still going down. Then suddenly all perdition broke loose again, while people were rushing around seeking friends and rescuing the wounded. The noise was comparable to nothing. There is nothing resembling it but thunder and cannon, and these are feeble in comparison. What there is of Mauritius is beautiful. You have undulating wide expanses of sugarcane, a fine, fresh green, and very pleasant to the eye. And everywhere else you have a ragged luxuriance of tropic vegetation, of vivid greens of varying shades, a wild tangle of underbrush, with graceful tall palms lifting their crippled plumes high above it, and you have stretches of shady dense forest with limpid streams frolicking through them, continually glimpsed and lost, and glimpsed again in the pleasantest hide-and-seek fashion. And you have some tiny mountains, some quaint and picturesque groups of toy peaks, and a dainty little vest pocket matterhorn, and here and there and now and then a strip of sea with a white ruffle of surf breaks into the view. That is Mauritius, and pretty enough. The details are few. The masked result is charming, but not imposing, not riotous, not exciting. It is a Sunday landscape. Perspective and the enchantments wrought by distance are wanting. There are no distances. There is no perspective, so to speak. Fifteen miles as the crow flies is the usual limit of vision. Mauritius is a garden and a park combined. It affects one's emotions as parks and gardens affect them. The surfaces of one's spiritual deeps are pleasantly played upon. The deeps themselves are not reached, not stirred. Spaciousness, remote altitudes, the sense of mystery which haunts apparently inaccessible mountain domes and summits reposing in the sky—these are the things which exalt the spirit and move it to see visions and dream dreams. The sandwich islands remain my ideal of the perfect thing in the matter of tropical islands. I would add another store to Mauna Loa's sixteen thousand feet, if I could, and make it particularly bold and steep and craggy and forbidding and snowy. And I would make the volcano spout its lava floods out of its summit instead of its sides. But aside from these non-essentials, I have no corrections to suggest. I hope these will be attended to. I do not wish to have to speak of it again.