Book: Following the Equator, Part 5

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> Following the Equator, Part 5




There is only one India! It is the only country that has a monopoly of
grand and imposing specialties. When another country has a remarkable
thing, it cannot have it all to itself--some other country has a
duplicate. But India--that is different. Its marvels are its own; the
patents cannot be infringed; imitations are not possible. And think of
the size of them, the majesty of them, the weird and outlandish character
of the most of them!

There is the Plague, the Black Death: India invented it; India is the
cradle of that mighty birth.

The Car of Juggernaut was India's invention.

So was the Suttee; and within the time of men still living eight hundred
widows willingly, and, in fact, rejoicingly, burned themselves to death
on the bodies of their dead husbands in a single year. Eight hundred
would do it this year if the British government would let them.

Famine is India's specialty. Elsewhere famines are inconsequential
incidents--in India they are devastating cataclysms; in one case they
annihilate hundreds; in the other, millions.

India had 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all. In religion all other
countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

With her everything is on a giant scale--even her poverty; no other
country can show anything to compare with it. And she has been used to
wealth on so vast a scale that she has to shorten to single words the
expressions describing great sums. She describes 100,000 with one word
--a 'lahk'; she describes ten millions with one word--a 'crore'.

In the bowels of the granite mountains she has patiently carved out
dozens of vast temples, and made them glorious with sculptured colonnades
and stately groups of statuary, and has adorned the eternal walls with
noble paintings. She has built fortresses of such magnitude that the
show-strongholds of the rest of the world are but modest little things by
comparison; palaces that are wonders for rarity of materials, delicacy
and beauty of workmanship, and for cost; and one tomb which men go around
the globe to see. It takes eighty nations, speaking eighty languages, to
people her, and they number three hundred millions.

On top of all this she is the mother and home of that wonder of wonders
caste--and of that mystery of mysteries, the satanic brotherhood of the
Thugs.

India had the start of the whole world in the beginning of things. She
had the first civilization; she had the first accumulation of material
wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and subtle intellects; she
had mines, and woods, and a fruitful soil. It would seem as if she
should have kept the lead, and should be to-day not the meek dependent of
an alien master, but mistress of the world, and delivering law and
command to every tribe and nation in it. But, in truth, there was never
any possibility of such supremacy for her. If there had been but one
India and one language--but there were eighty of them! Where there are
eighty nations and several hundred governments, fighting and quarreling
must be the common business of life; unity of purpose and policy are
impossible; out of such elements supremacy in the world cannot come.
Even caste itself could have had the defeating effect of a multiplicity
of tongues, no doubt; for it separates a people into layers, and layers,
and still other layers, that have no community of feeling with each
other; and in such a condition of things as that, patriotism can have no
healthy growth.

It was the division of the country into so many States and nations that
made Thuggee possible and prosperous. It is difficult to realize the
situation. But perhaps one may approximate it by imagining the States of
our Union peopled by separate nations, speaking separate languages, with
guards and custom-houses strung along all frontiers, plenty of
interruptions for travelers and traders, interpreters able to handle all
the languages very rare or non-existent, and a few wars always going on
here and there and yonder as a further embarrassment to commerce and
excursioning. It would make intercommunication in a measure ungeneral.
India had eighty languages, and more custom-houses than cats. No clever
man with the instinct of a highway robber could fail to notice what a
chance for business was here offered. India was full of clever men with
the highwayman instinct, and so, quite naturally, the brotherhood of the
Thugs came into being to meet the long-felt want.

How long ago that was nobody knows-centuries, it is supposed. One of the
chiefest wonders connected with it was the success with which it kept its
secret. The English trader did business in India two hundred years and
more before he ever heard of it; and yet it was assassinating its
thousands all around him every year, the whole time.




CHAPTER XLIV.

The old saw says, "Let a sleeping dog lie." Right.... Still, when there
is much at stake it is better to get a newspaper to do it.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

FROM DIARY:

January 28. I learned of an official Thug-book the other day. I was
not aware before that there was such a thing. I am allowed the temporary
use of it. We are making preparations for travel. Mainly the
preparations are purchases of bedding. This is to be used in sleeping
berths in the trains; in private houses sometimes; and in nine-tenths of
the hotels. It is not realizable; and yet it is true. It is a survival;
an apparently unnecessary thing which in some strange way has outlived
the conditions which once made it necessary. It comes down from a time
when the railway and the hotel did not exist; when the occasional white
traveler went horseback or by bullock-cart, and stopped over night in the
small dak-bungalow provided at easy distances by the government--a
shelter, merely, and nothing more. He had to carry bedding along, or do
without. The dwellings of the English residents are spacious and
comfortable and commodiously furnished, and surely it must be an odd
sight to see half a dozen guests come filing into such a place and
dumping blankets and pillows here and there and everywhere. But custom
makes incongruous things congruous.

One buys the bedding, with waterproof hold-all for it at almost any shop
--there is no difficulty about it.

January 30. What a spectacle the railway station was, at train-time! It
was a very large station, yet when we arrived it seemed as if the whole
world was present--half of it inside, the other half outside, and both
halves, bearing mountainous head-loads of bedding and other freight,
trying simultaneously to pass each other, in opposing floods, in one
narrow door. These opposing floods were patient, gentle, long-suffering
natives, with whites scattered among them at rare intervals; and wherever
a white man's native servant appeared, that native seemed to have put
aside his natural gentleness for the time and invested himself with the
white man's privilege of making a way for himself by promptly shoving all
intervening black things out of it. In these exhibitions of authority
Satan was scandalous. He was probably a Thug in one of his former
incarnations.

Inside the great station, tides upon tides of rainbow-costumed natives
swept along, this way and that, in massed and bewildering confusion,
eager, anxious, belated, distressed; and washed up to the long trains and
flowed into them with their packs and bundles, and disappeared, followed
at once by the next wash, the next wave. And here and there, in the
midst of this hurly-burly, and seemingly undisturbed by it, sat great
groups of natives on the bare stone floor,--young, slender brown women,
old, gray wrinkled women, little soft brown babies, old men, young men,
boys; all poor people, but all the females among them, both big and
little, bejeweled with cheap and showy nose-rings, toe-rings, leglets,
and armlets, these things constituting all their wealth, no doubt. These
silent crowds sat there with their humble bundles and baskets and small
household gear about them, and patiently waited--for what? A train that
was to start at some time or other during the day or night! They hadn't
timed themselves well, but that was no matter--the thing had been so
ordered from on high, therefore why worry? There was plenty of time,
hours and hours of it, and the thing that was to happen would happen
--there was no hurrying it.

The natives traveled third class, and at marvelously cheap rates. They
were packed and crammed into cars that held each about fifty; and it was
said that often a Brahmin of the highest caste was thus brought into
personal touch, and consequent defilement, with persons of the lowest
castes--no doubt a very shocking thing if a body could understand it and
properly appreciate it. Yes, a Brahmin who didn't own a rupee and
couldn't borrow one, might have to touch elbows with a rich hereditary
lord of inferior caste, inheritor of an ancient title a couple of yards
long, and he would just have to stand it; for if either of the two was
allowed to go in the cars where the sacred white people were, it probably
wouldn't be the august poor Brahmin. There was an immense string of
those third-class cars, for the natives travel by hordes; and a weary
hard night of it the occupants would have, no doubt.

When we reached our car, Satan and Barney had already arrived there with
their train of porters carrying bedding and parasols and cigar boxes, and
were at work. We named him Barney for short; we couldn't use his real
name, there wasn't time.

It was a car that promised comfort; indeed, luxury. Yet the cost of it
--well, economy could no further go; even in France; not even in Italy. It
was built of the plainest and cheapest partially-smoothed boards, with a
coating of dull paint on them, and there was nowhere a thought of
decoration. The floor was bare, but would not long remain so when the
dust should begin to fly. Across one end of the compartment ran a
netting for the accommodation of hand-baggage; at the other end was a
door which would shut, upon compulsion, but wouldn't stay shut; it opened
into a narrow little closet which had a wash-bowl in one end of it, and a
place to put a towel, in case you had one with you--and you would be sure
to have towels, because you buy them with the bedding, knowing that the
railway doesn't furnish them. On each side of the car, and running fore
and aft, was a broad leather-covered sofa to sit on in the day and sleep
on at night. Over each sofa hung, by straps, a wide, flat,
leather-covered shelf--to sleep on. In the daytime you can hitch it up
against the wall, out of the way--and then you have a big unencumbered
and most comfortable room to spread out in. No car in any country is
quite its equal for comfort (and privacy) I think. For usually there are
but two persons in it; and even when there are four there is but little
sense of impaired privacy. Our own cars at home can surpass the railway
world in all details but that one: they have no cosiness; there are too
many people together.

At the foot of each sofa was a side-door, for entrance and exit.
Along the whole length of the sofa on each side of the car ran a row of
large single-plate windows, of a blue tint-blue to soften the bitter
glare of the sun and protect one's eyes from torture. These could be let
down out of the way when one wanted the breeze. In the roof were two oil
lamps which gave a light strong enough to read by; each had a green-cloth
attachment by which it could be covered when the light should be no
longer needed.

While we talked outside with friends, Barney and Satan placed the
hand-baggage, books, fruits, and soda-bottles in the racks, and the
hold-alls and heavy baggage in the closet, hung the overcoats and
sun-helmets and towels on the hooks, hoisted the two bed-shelves up out
of the way, then shouldered their bedding and retired to the third class.

Now then, you see what a handsome, spacious, light, airy, homelike place
it was, wherein to walk up and down, or sit and write, or stretch out and
read and smoke. A central door in the forward end of the compartment
opened into a similar compartment. It was occupied by my wife and
daughter. About nine in the evening, while we halted a while at a
station, Barney and Satan came and undid the clumsy big hold-alls, and
spread the bedding on the sofas in both compartments--mattresses, sheets,
gay coverlets, pillows, all complete; there are no chambermaids in India
--apparently it was an office that was never heard of. Then they
closed the communicating door, nimbly tidied up our place, put the
night-clothing on the beds and the slippers under them, then returned
to their own quarters.

January 31. It was novel and pleasant, and I stayed awake as long as I
could, to enjoy it, and to read about those strange people the Thugs. In
my sleep they remained with me, and tried to strangle me. The leader of
the gang was that giant Hindoo who was such a picture in the strong light
when we were leaving those Hindoo betrothal festivities at two o'clock in
the morning--Rao Bahadur Baskirao Balinkanje Pitale, Vakeel to the
Gaikwar of Baroda. It was he that brought me the invitation from his
master to go to Baroda and lecture to that prince--and now he was
misbehaving in my dreams. But all things can happen in dreams. It is
indeed as the Sweet Singer of Michigan says--irrelevantly, of course, for
the one and unfailing great quality which distinguishes her poetry from
Shakespeare's and makes it precious to us is its stern and simple
irrelevancy:

My heart was gay and happy,
This was ever in my mind,
There is better times a coming,
And I hope some day to find
Myself capable of composing,
It was my heart's delight
To compose on a sentimental subject
If it came in my mind just right.

--["The Sentimental Song Book," p. 49; theme, "The Author's Early Life,"
19th stanza.]


Barroda. Arrived at 7 this morning. The dawn was just beginning to
show. It was forlorn to have to turn out in a strange place at such a
time, and the blinking lights in the station made it seem night still.
But the gentlemen who had come to receive us were there with their
servants, and they make quick work; there was no lost time. We were soon
outside and moving swiftly through the soft gray light, and presently
were comfortably housed--with more servants to help than we were used to,
and with rather embarassingly important officials to direct them. But it
was custom; they spoke Ballarat English, their bearing was charming and
hospitable, and so all went well.

Breakfast was a satisfaction. Across the lawns was visible in the
distance through the open window an Indian well, with two oxen tramping
leisurely up and down long inclines, drawing water; and out of the
stillness came the suffering screech of the machinery--not quite musical,
and yet soothingly melancholy and dreamy and reposeful--a wail of lost
spirits, one might imagine. And commemorative and reminiscent, perhaps;
for of course the Thugs used to throw people down that well when they
were done with them.

After breakfast the day began, a sufficiently busy one. We were driven
by winding roads through a vast park, with noble forests of great trees,
and with tangles and jungles of lovely growths of a humbler sort; and at
one place three large gray apes came out and pranced across the road--a
good deal of a surprise and an unpleasant one, for such creatures belong
in the menagerie, and they look artificial and out of place in a
wilderness.

We came to the city, by and by, and drove all through it. Intensely
Indian, it was, and crumbly, and mouldering, and immemorially old, to all
appearance. And the houses--oh, indescribably quaint and curious they
were, with their fronts an elaborate lace-work of intricate and beautiful
wood-carving, and now and then further adorned with rude pictures of
elephants and princes and gods done in shouting colors; and all the
ground floors along these cramped and narrow lanes occupied as shops
--shops unbelievably small and impossibly packed with merchantable rubbish,
and with nine-tenths-naked natives squatting at their work of hammering,
pounding, brazing, soldering, sewing, designing, cooking, measuring out
grain, grinding it, repairing idols--and then the swarm of ragged and
noisy humanity under the horses' feet and everywhere, and the pervading
reek and fume and smell! It was all wonderful and delightful.

Imagine a file of elephants marching through such a crevice of a street
and scraping the paint off both sides of it with their hides. How big
they must look, and how little they must make the houses look; and when
the elephants are in their glittering court costume, what a contrast they
must make with the humble and sordid surroundings. And when a mad
elephant goes raging through, belting right and left with his trunk, how
do these swarms of people get out of the way? I suppose it is a thing
which happens now and then in the mad season (for elephants have a mad
season).

I wonder how old the town is. There are patches of building--massive
structures, monuments, apparently--that are so battered and worn, and
seemingly so tired and so burdened with the weight of age, and so dulled
and stupefied with trying to remember things they forgot before history
began, that they give one the feeling that they must have been a part of
original Creation. This is indeed one of the oldest of the princedoms of
India, and has always been celebrated for its barbaric pomps and
splendors, and for the wealth of its princes.




CHAPTER XLV.

It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the
heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Out of the town again; a long drive through open country, by winding
roads among secluded villages nestling in the inviting shade of tropic
vegetation, a Sabbath stillness everywhere, sometimes a pervading sense
of solitude, but always barefoot natives gliding by like spirits, without
sound of footfall, and others in the distance dissolving away and
vanishing like the creatures of dreams. Now and then a string of stately
camels passed by--always interesting things to look at--and they were
velvet-shod by nature, and made no noise. Indeed, there were no noises
of any sort in this paradise. Yes, once there was one, for a moment: a
file of native convicts passed along in charge of an officer, and we
caught the soft clink of their chains. In a retired spot, resting
himself under a tree, was a holy person--a naked black fakeer, thin and
skinny, and whitey-gray all over with ashes.

By and by to the elephant stables, and I took a ride; but it was by
request--I did not ask for it, and didn't want it; but I took it, because
otherwise they would have thought I was afraid, which I was. The
elephant kneels down, by command--one end of him at a time--and you climb
the ladder and get into the howdah, and then he gets up, one end at a
time, just as a ship gets up over a wave; and after that, as he strides
monstrously about, his motion is much like a ship's motion. The mahout
bores into the back of his head with a great iron prod and you wonder at
his temerity and at the elephant's patience, and you think that perhaps
the patience will not last; but it does, and nothing happens. The mahout
talks to the elephant in a low voice all the time, and the elephant seems
to understand it all and to be pleased with it; and he obeys every order
in the most contented and docile way. Among these twenty-five elephants
were two which were larger than any I had ever seen before, and if I had
thought I could learn to not be afraid, I would have taken one of them
while the police were not looking.

In the howdah-house there were many howdahs that were made of silver, one
of gold, and one of old ivory, and equipped with cushions and canopies of
rich and costly stuffs. The wardrobe of the elephants was there, too;
vast velvet covers stiff and heavy with gold embroidery; and bells of
silver and gold; and ropes of these metals for fastening the things on
harness, so to speak; and monster hoops of massive gold for the elephant
to wear on his ankles when he is out in procession on business of state.

But we did not see the treasury of crown jewels, and that was a
disappointment, for in mass and richness it ranks only second in India.
By mistake we were taken to see the new palace instead, and we used up
the last remnant of our spare time there. It was a pity, too; for the
new palace is mixed modern American-European, and has not a merit except
costliness. It is wholly foreign to India, and impudent and out of
place. The architect has escaped. This comes of overdoing the
suppression of the Thugs; they had their merits. The old palace is
oriental and charming, and in consonance with the country. The old
palace would still be great if there were nothing of it but the spacious
and lofty hall where the durbars are held. It is not a good place to
lecture in, on account of the echoes, but it is a good place to hold
durbars in and regulate the affairs of a kingdom, and that is what it is
for. If I had it I would have a durbar every day, instead of once or
twice a year.

The prince is an educated gentleman. His culture is European. He has
been in Europe five times. People say that this is costly amusement for
him, since in crossing the sea he must sometimes be obliged to drink
water from vessels that are more or less public, and thus damage his
caste. To get it purified again he must make pilgrimage to some renowned
Hindoo temples and contribute a fortune or two to them. His people are
like the other Hindoos, profoundly religious; and they could not be
content with a master who was impure.

We failed to see the jewels, but we saw the gold cannon and the silver
one--they seemed to be six-pounders. They were not designed for
business, but for salutes upon rare and particularly important state
occasions. An ancestor of the present Gaikwar had the silver one made,
and a subsequent ancestor had the gold one made, in order to outdo him.

This sort of artillery is in keeping with the traditions of Baroda, which
was of old famous for style and show. It used to entertain visiting
rajahs and viceroys with tiger-fights, elephant-fights, illuminations,
and elephant-processions of the most glittering and gorgeous character.

It makes the circus a pale, poor thing.

In the train, during a part of the return journey from Baroda, we had the
company of a gentleman who had with him a remarkable looking dog. I had
not seen one of its kind before, as far as I could remember; though of
course I might have seen one and not noticed it, for I am not acquainted
with dogs, but only with cats. This dog's coat was smooth and shiny and
black, and I think it had tan trimmings around the edges of the dog, and
perhaps underneath. It was a long, low dog, with very short, strange
legs--legs that curved inboard, something like parentheses wrong way (.
Indeed, it was made on the plan of a bench for length and lowness. It
seemed to be satisfied, but I thought the plan poor, and structurally
weak, on account of the distance between the forward supports and those
abaft. With age the dog's back was likely to sag; and it seemed to me
that it would have been a stronger and more practicable dog if it had had
some more legs. It had not begun to sag yet, but the shape of the legs
showed that the undue weight imposed upon them was beginning to tell.
It had a long nose, and floppy ears that hung down, and a resigned
expression of countenance. I did not like to ask what kind of a dog it
was, or how it came to be deformed, for it was plain that the gentleman
was very fond of it, and naturally he could be sensitive about it. From
delicacy I thought it best not to seem to notice it too much. No doubt a
man with a dog like that feels just as a person does who has a child that
is out of true. The gentleman was not merely fond of the dog, he was
also proud of it--just the same again, as a mother feels about her
child when it is an idiot. I could see that he was proud of it,
not-withstanding it was such a long dog and looked so resigned and pious.
It had been all over the world with him, and had been pilgriming like
that for years and years. It had traveled 50,000 miles by sea and rail,
and had ridden in front of him on his horse 8,000. It had a silver medal
from the Geographical Society of Great Britain for its travels, and I saw
it. It had won prizes in dog shows, both in India and in England--I saw
them. He said its pedigree was on record in the Kennel Club, and that it
was a well-known dog. He said a great many people in London could
recognize it the moment they saw it. I did not say anything, but I did
not think it anything strange; I should know that dog again, myself, yet
I am not careful about noticing dogs. He said that when he walked along
in London, people often stopped and looked at the dog. Of course I did
not say anything, for I did not want to hurt his feelings, but I could
have explained to him that if you take a great long low dog like that and
waddle it along the street anywhere in the world and not charge anything,
people will stop and look. He was gratified because the dog took prizes.
But that was nothing; if I were built like that I could take prizes
myself. I wished I knew what kind of a dog it was, and what it was for,
but I could not very well ask, for that would show that I did not know.
Not that I want a dog like that, but only to know the secret of its
birth.

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