Book: Following the Equator, Part 4
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Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> Following the Equator, Part 4
January 5. At 9 this morning we passed Cape Leeuwin (lioness) and
ceased from our long due-west course along the southern shore of
Australia. Turning this extreme southwestern corner, we now take a long
straight slant nearly N. W., without a break, for Ceylon. As we speed
northward it will grow hotter very fast--but it isn't chilly, now. . . .
The vulture is from the public menagerie at Adelaide--a great and
interesting collection. It was there that we saw the baby tiger solemnly
spreading its mouth and trying to roar like its majestic mother. It
swaggered, scowling, back and forth on its short legs just as it had seen
her do on her long ones, and now and then snarling viciously, exposing
its teeth, with a threatening lift of its upper lip and bristling
moustache; and when it thought it was impressing the visitors, it would
spread its mouth wide and do that screechy cry which it meant for a roar,
but which did not deceive. It took itself quite seriously, and was
lovably comical. And there was a hyena--an ugly creature; as ugly as the
tiger-kitty was pretty. It repeatedly arched its back and delivered
itself of such a human cry; a startling resemblance; a cry which was just
that of a grown person badly hurt. In the dark one would assuredly go to
its assistance--and be disappointed . . . . Many friends of
Australasian Federation on board. They feel sure that the good day is
not far off, now. But there seems to be a party that would go further
--have Australasia cut loose from the British Empire and set up
housekeeping on her own hook. It seems an unwise idea. They point to
the United States, but it seems to me that the cases lack a good deal of
being alike. Australasia governs herself wholly--there is no
interference; and her commerce and manufactures are not oppressed in any
way. If our case had been the same we should not have gone out when we
did.
January 13. Unspeakably hot. The equator is arriving again. We are
within eight degrees of it. Ceylon present. Dear me, it is beautiful!
And most sumptuously tropical, as to character of foliage and opulence of
it. "What though the spicy breezes blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle"--an
eloquent line, an incomparable line; it says little, but conveys whole
libraries of sentiment, and Oriental charm and mystery, and tropic
deliciousness--a line that quivers and tingles with a thousand
unexpressed and inexpressible things, things that haunt one and find no
articulate voice . . . . Colombo, the capital. An Oriental town,
most manifestly; and fascinating.
In this palatial ship the passengers dress for dinner. The ladies'
toilettes make a fine display of color, and this is in keeping with the
elegance of the vessel's furnishings and the flooding brilliancies of the
electric light. On the stormy Atlantic one never sees a man in evening
dress, except at the rarest intervals; and then there is only one, not
two; and he shows up but once on the voyage--the night before the ship
makes port--the night when they have the "concert" and do the amateur
wailings and recitations. He is the tenor, as a rule . . . . There
has been a deal of cricket-playing on board; it seems a queer game for a
ship, but they enclose the promenade deck with nettings and keep the ball
from flying overboard, and the sport goes very well, and is properly
violent and exciting . . . . We must part from this vessel here.
January 14. Hotel Bristol. Servant Brompy. Alert, gentle, smiling,
winning young brown creature as ever was. Beautiful shining black hair
combed back like a woman's, and knotted at the back of his head
--tortoise-shell comb in it, sign that he is a Singhalese; slender, shapely
form; jacket; under it is a beltless and flowing white cotton gown--from
neck straight to heel; he and his outfit quite unmasculine. It was an
embarrassment to undress before him.
We drove to the market, using the Japanese jinriksha--our first
acquaintanceship with it. It is a light cart, with a native to draw it.
He makes good speed for half-an-hour, but it is hard work for him; he is
too slight for it. After the half-hour there is no more pleasure for
you; your attention is all on the man, just as it would be on a tired
horse, and necessarily your sympathy is there too. There's a plenty of
these 'rickshas, and the tariff is incredibly cheap.
I was in Cairo years ago. That was Oriental, but there was a lack. When
you are in Florida or New Orleans you are in the South--that is granted;
but you are not in the South; you are in a modified South, a tempered
South. Cairo was a tempered Orient--an Orient with an indefinite
something wanting. That feeling was not present in Ceylon. Ceylon was
Oriental in the last measure of completeness--utterly Oriental; also
utterly tropical; and indeed to one's unreasoning spiritual sense the two
things belong together. All the requisites were present. The costumes
were right; the black and brown exposures, unconscious of immodesty, were
right; the juggler was there, with his basket, his snakes, his mongoose,
and his arrangements for growing a tree from seed to foliage and ripe
fruitage before one's eyes; in sight were plants and flowers familiar to
one on books but in no other way celebrated, desirable, strange, but in
production restricted to the hot belt of the equator; and out a little
way in the country were the proper deadly snakes, and fierce beasts of
prey, and the wild elephant and the monkey. And there was that swoon in
the air which one associates with the tropics, and that smother of heat,
heavy with odors of unknown flowers, and that sudden invasion of purple
gloom fissured with lightnings,--then the tumult of crashing thunder and
the downpour and presently all sunny and smiling again; all these things
were there; the conditions were complete, nothing was lacking. And away
off in the deeps of the jungle and in the remotenesses of the mountains
were the ruined cities and mouldering temples, mysterious relics of the
pomps of a forgotten time and a vanished race--and this was as it should
be, also, for nothing is quite satisfyingly Oriental that lacks the
somber and impressive qualities of mystery and antiquity.
The drive through the town and out to the Galle Face by the seashore,
what a dream it was of tropical splendors of bloom and blossom, and
Oriental conflagrations of costume! The walking groups of men, women,
boys, girls, babies--each individual was a flame, each group a house
afire for color. And such stunning colors, such intensely vivid colors,
such rich and exquisite minglings and fusings of rainbows and lightnings!
And all harmonious, all in perfect taste; never a discordant note; never
a color on any person swearing at another color on him or failing to
harmonize faultlessly with the colors of any group the wearer might join.
The stuffs were silk-thin, soft, delicate, clinging; and, as a rule, each
piece a solid color: a splendid green, a splendid blue, a splendid
yellow, a splendid purple, a splendid ruby, deep, and rich with
smouldering fires they swept continuously by in crowds and legions and
multitudes, glowing, flashing, burning, radiant; and every five seconds
came a burst of blinding red that made a body catch his breath, and
filled his heart with joy. And then, the unimaginable grace of those
costumes! Sometimes a woman's whole dress was but a scarf wound about
her person and her head, sometimes a man's was but a turban and a
careless rag or two--in both cases generous areas of polished dark skin
showing--but always the arrangement compelled the homage of the eye and
made the heart sing for gladness.
I can see it to this day, that radiant panorama, that wilderness of rich
color, that incomparable dissolving-view of harmonious tints, and lithe
half-covered forms, and beautiful brown faces, and gracious and graceful
gestures and attitudes and movements, free, unstudied, barren of
stiffness and restraint, and--
Just then, into this dream of fairyland and paradise a grating dissonance
was injected.
Out of a missionary school came marching, two and two, sixteen prim and
pious little Christian black girls, Europeanly clothed--dressed, to the
last detail, as they would have been dressed on a summer Sunday in an
English or American village. Those clothes--oh, they were unspeakably
ugly! Ugly, barbarous, destitute of taste, destitute of grace, repulsive
as a shroud. I looked at my womenfolk's clothes--just full-grown
duplicates of the outrages disguising those poor little abused creatures
--and was ashamed to be seen in the street with them. Then I looked at
my own clothes, and was ashamed to be seen in the street with myself.
However, we must put up with our clothes as they are--they have their
reason for existing. They are on us to expose us--to advertise what we
wear them to conceal. They are a sign; a sign of insincerity; a sign of
suppressed vanity; a pretense that we despise gorgeous colors and the
graces of harmony and form; and we put them on to propagate that lie and
back it up. But we do not deceive our neighbor; and when we step into
Ceylon we realize that we have not even deceived ourselves. We do love
brilliant colors and graceful costumes; and at home we will turn out in a
storm to see them when the procession goes by--and envy the wearers. We
go to the theater to look at them and grieve that we can't be clothed
like that. We go to the King's ball, when we get a chance, and are glad
of a sight of the splendid uniforms and the glittering orders. When we
are granted permission to attend an imperial drawing-room we shut
ourselves up in private and parade around in the theatrical court-dress
by the hour, and admire ourselves in the glass, and are utterly happy;
and every member of every governor's staff in democratic America does the
same with his grand new uniform--and if he is not watched he will get
himself photographed in it, too. When I see the Lord Mayor's footman I
am dissatisfied with my lot. Yes, our clothes are a lie, and have been
nothing short of that these hundred years. They are insincere, they are
the ugly and appropriate outward exposure of an inward sham and a moral
decay.
The last little brown boy I chanced to notice in the crowds and swarms of
Colombo had nothing on but a twine string around his waist, but in my
memory the frank honesty of his costume still stands out in pleasant
contrast with the odious flummery in which the little Sunday-school
dowdies were masquerading.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Prosperity is the best protector of principle.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
EVENING--11th. Sailed in the Rosetta. This is a poor old ship, and
ought to be insured and sunk. As in the 'Oceana', just so here:
everybody dresses for dinner; they make it a sort of pious duty. These
fine and formal costumes are a rather conspicuous contrast to the poverty
and shabbiness of the surroundings . . . . If you want a slice of a
lime at four o'clock tea, you must sign an order on the bar. Limes cost
14 cents a barrel.
January 18th. We have been running up the Arabian Sea, latterly.
Closing up on Bombay now, and due to arrive this evening.
January 20th. Bombay! A bewitching place, a bewildering place, an
enchanting place--the Arabian Nights come again? It is a vast city;
contains about a million inhabitants. Natives, they are, with a slight
sprinkling of white people--not enough to have the slightest modifying
effect upon the massed dark complexion of the public. It is winter here,
yet the weather is the divine weather of June, and the foliage is the
fresh and heavenly foliage of June. There is a rank of noble great shade
trees across the way from the hotel, and under them sit groups of
picturesque natives of both sexes; and the juggler in his turban is there
with his snakes and his magic; and all day long the cabs and the
multitudinous varieties of costumes flock by. It does not seem as if one
could ever get tired of watching this moving show, this shining and
shifting spectacle . . . . In the great bazar the pack and jam of
natives was marvelous, the sea of rich-colored turbans and draperies an
inspiring sight, and the quaint and showy Indian architecture was just
the right setting for it. Toward sunset another show; this is the drive
around the sea-shore to Malabar Point, where Lord Sandhurst, the Governor
of the Bombay Presidency, lives. Parsee palaces all along the first part
of the drive; and past them all the world is driving; the private
carriages of wealthy Englishmen and natives of rank are manned by a
driver and three footmen in stunning oriental liveries--two of these
turbaned statues standing up behind, as fine as monuments. Sometimes
even the public carriages have this superabundant crew, slightly
modified--one to drive, one to sit by and see it done, and one to stand
up behind and yell--yell when there is anybody in the way, and for
practice when there isn't. It all helps to keep up the liveliness and
augment the general sense of swiftness and energy and confusion and
pow-wow.
In the region of Scandal Point--felicitous name--where there are handy
rocks to sit on and a noble view of the sea on the one hand, and on the
other the passing and reprising whirl and tumult of gay carriages, are
great groups of comfortably-off Parsee women--perfect flower-beds of
brilliant color, a fascinating spectacle. Tramp, tramp, tramping along
the road, in singles, couples, groups, and gangs, you have the
working-man and the working-woman--but not clothed like ours. Usually
the man is a nobly-built great athlete, with not a rag on but his
loin-handkerchief; his color a deep dark brown, his skin satin, his
rounded muscles knobbing it as if it had eggs under it. Usually the
woman is a slender and shapely creature, as erect as a lightning-rod, and
she has but one thing on--a bright-colored piece of stuff which is wound
about her head and her body down nearly half-way to her knees, and which
clings like her own skin. Her legs and feet are bare, and so are her
arms, except for her fanciful bunches of loose silver rings on her ankles
and on her arms. She has jewelry bunched on the side of her nose also,
and showy clusterings on her toes. When she undresses for bed she takes
off her jewelry, I suppose. If she took off anything more she would
catch cold. As a rule she has a large shiney brass water jar of graceful
shape on her head, and one of her naked arms curves up and the hand holds
it there. She is so straight, so erect, and she steps with such style,
and such easy grace and dignity; and her curved arm and her brazen jar
are such a help to the picture indeed, our working-women cannot begin
with her as a road-decoration.
It is all color, bewitching color, enchanting color--everywhere all
around--all the way around the curving great opaline bay clear to
Government House, where the turbaned big native 'chuprassies' stand
grouped in state at the door in their robes of fiery red, and do most
properly and stunningly finish up the splendid show and make it
theatrically complete. I wish I were a 'chuprassy'.
This is indeed India! the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth
and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of
famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers
and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations
and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods,
cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history,
grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays
bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations--the
one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable
interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant,
wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men
desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give
that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.
Even now, after the lapse of a year, the delirium of those days in Bombay
has not left me, and I hope never will. It was all new, no detail of it
hackneyed. And India did not wait for morning, it began at the hotel
--straight away. The lobbies and halls were full of turbaned, and fez'd
and embroidered, cap'd, and barefooted, and cotton-clad dark natives,
some of them rushing about, others at rest squatting, or sitting on the
ground; some of them chattering with energy, others still and dreamy; in
the dining-room every man's own private native servant standing behind
his chair, and dressed for a part in the Arabian Nights.
Our rooms were high up, on the front. A white man--he was a burly German
--went up with us, and brought three natives along to see to arranging
things. About fourteen others followed in procession, with the
hand-baggage; each carried an article--and only one; a bag, in some
cases, in other cases less. One strong native carried my overcoat,
another a parasol, another a box of cigars, another a novel, and the last
man in the procession had no load but a fan. It was all done with
earnestness and sincerity, there was not a smile in the procession from
the head of it to the tail of it. Each man waited patiently, tranquilly,
in no sort of hurry, till one of us found time to give him a copper, then
he bent his head reverently, touched his forehead with his fingers, and
went his way. They seemed a soft and gentle race, and there was
something both winning and touching about their demeanor.
There was a vast glazed door which opened upon the balcony. It needed
closing, or cleaning, or something, and a native got down on his knees
and went to work at it. He seemed to be doing it well enough, but
perhaps he wasn't, for the burly German put on a look that betrayed
dissatisfaction, then without explaining what was wrong, gave the native
a brisk cuff on the jaw and then told him where the defect was. It
seemed such a shame to do that before us all. The native took it with
meekness, saying nothing, and not showing in his face or manner any
resentment. I had not seen the like of this for fifty years. It carried
me back to my boyhood, and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this
was the usual way of explaining one's desires to a slave. I was able to
remember that the method seemed right and natural to me in those days, I
being born to it and unaware that elsewhere there were other methods; but
I was also able to remember that those unresented cuffings made me sorry
for the victim and ashamed for the punisher. My father was a refined and
kindly gentleman, very grave, rather austere, of rigid probity, a sternly
just and upright man, albeit he attended no church and never spoke of
religious matters, and had no part nor lot in the pious joys of his
Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from this deprivation. He
laid his hand upon me in punishment only twice in his life, and then not
heavily; once for telling him a lie--which surprised me, and showed me
how unsuspicious he was, for that was not my maiden effort. He punished
me those two times only, and never any other member of the family at all;
yet every now and then he cuffed our harmless slave boy, Lewis, for
trifling little blunders and awkwardnesses. My father had passed his life
among the slaves from his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the
custom of the time, not from his nature. When I was ten years old I saw
a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slaveman in anger, for merely doing
something awkwardly--as if that were a crime. It bounded from the man's
skull, and the man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an hour.
I knew the man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it
seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was not deep
enough to explain if I had been asked to do it. Nobody in the village
approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about it.
It is curious--the space-annihilating power of thought. For just one
second, all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missourian village,
on the other side of the globe, vividly seeing again these forgotten
pictures of fifty years ago, and wholly unconscious of all things but
just those; and in the next second I was back in Bombay, and that
kneeling native's smitten cheek was not done tingling yet! Back to
boyhood--fifty years; back to age again, another fifty; and a flight
equal to the circumference of the globe-all in two seconds by the watch!
Some natives--I don't remember how many--went into my bedroom, now, and
put things to rights and arranged the mosquito-bar, and I went to bed to
nurse my cough. It was about nine in the evening. What a state of
things! For three hours the yelling and shouting of natives in the hall
continued, along with the velvety patter of their swift bare feet--what a
racket it was! They were yelling orders and messages down three flights.
Why, in the matter of noise it amounted to a riot, an insurrection, a
revolution. And then there were other noises mixed up with these and at
intervals tremendously accenting them--roofs falling in, I judged,
windows smashing, persons being murdered, crows squawking, and deriding,
and cursing, canaries screeching, monkeys jabbering, macaws blaspheming,
and every now and then fiendish bursts of laughter and explosions of
dynamite. By midnight I had suffered all the different kinds of shocks
there are, and knew that I could never more be disturbed by them, either
isolated or in combination. Then came peace--stillness deep and solemn
and lasted till five.
Then it all broke loose again. And who re-started it? The Bird of Birds
the Indian crow. I came to know him well, by and by, and be infatuated
with him. I suppose he is the hardest lot that wears feathers. Yes, and
the cheerfulest, and the best satisfied with himself. He never arrived
at what he is by any careless process, or any sudden one; he is a work of
art, and "art is long"; he is the product of immemorial ages, and of deep
calculation; one can't make a bird like that in a day. He has been
reincarnated more times than Shiva; and he has kept a sample of each
incarnation, and fused it into his constitution. In the course of his
evolutionary promotions, his sublime march toward ultimate perfection, he
has been a gambler, a low comedian, a dissolute priest, a fussy woman, a
blackguard, a scoffer, a liar, a thief, a spy, an informer, a trading
politician, a swindler, a professional hypocrite, a patriot for cash, a
reformer, a lecturer, a lawyer, a conspirator, a rebel, a royalist, a
democrat, a practicer and propagator of irreverence, a meddler, an
intruder, a busybody, an infidel, and a wallower in sin for the mere love
of it. The strange result, the incredible result, of this patient
accumulation of all damnable traits is, that be does not know what care
is, he does not know what sorrow is, he does not know what remorse is,
his life is one long thundering ecstasy of happiness, and he will go to
his death untroubled, knowing that he will soon turn up again as an
author or something, and be even more intolerably capable and comfortable
than ever he was before.
In his straddling wide forward-step, and his springy side-wise series of
hops, and his impudent air, and his cunning way of canting his head to
one side upon occasion, he reminds one of the American blackbird. But
the sharp resemblances stop there. He is much bigger than the blackbird;
and he lacks the blackbird's trim and slender and beautiful build and
shapely beak; and of course his sober garb of gray and rusty black is a
poor and humble thing compared with the splendid lustre of the
blackbird's metallic sables and shifting and flashing bronze glories.
The blackbird is a perfect gentleman, in deportment and attire, and is
not noisy, I believe, except when holding religious services and
political conventions in a tree; but this Indian sham Quaker is just a
rowdy, and is always noisy when awake--always chaffing, scolding,
scoffing, laughing, ripping, and cursing, and carrying on about something
or other. I never saw such a bird for delivering opinions. Nothing
escapes him; he notices everything that happens, and brings out his
opinion about it, particularly if it is a matter that is none of his
business. And it is never a mild opinion, but always violent--violent
and profane--the presence of ladies does not affect him. His opinions
are not the outcome of reflection, for he never thinks about anything,
but heaves out the opinion that is on top in his mind, and which is often
an opinion about some quite different thing and does not fit the case.
But that is his way; his main idea is to get out an opinion, and if he
stopped to think he would lose chances.
I suppose he has no enemies among men. The whites and Mohammedans never
seemed to molest him; and the Hindoos, because of their religion, never
take the life of any creature, but spare even the snakes and tigers and
fleas and rats. If I sat on one end of the balcony, the crows would
gather on the railing at the other end and talk about me; and edge
closer, little by little, till I could almost reach them; and they would
sit there, in the most unabashed way, and talk about my clothes, and my
hair, and my complexion, and probable character and vocation and
politics, and how I came to be in India, and what I had been doing, and
how many days I had got for it, and how I had happened to go unhanged
so long, and when would it probably come off, and might there be more of
my sort where I came from, and when would they be hanged,--and so on, and
so on, until I could not longer endure the embarrassment of it; then I
would shoo them away, and they would circle around in the air a little
while, laughing and deriding and mocking, and presently settle on the
rail and do it all over again.