\ 
 \ 
 
 
THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND 
 MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID 
 
A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
A LITTLE TOUR 
 IN INDIA 
 
 BY 
 
 THE HON. R. PALMER 
 
 LONDON 
 EDWARD ARNOLD 
 
 (All rights reserved-) 
 
tto 
 THE RIGHT REVEREND 
 
 EDWIN JAMES 
 
 LORD BISHOP OF BOMBAY 
 
 (HEREINAFTER REFERRED TO AS "JIM") 
 
 IN GRATEFUL MEMORY 
 
 OF A DELIGHTFUL TOUR 
 
0)5 <V\ 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE following letters were written to various 
 members of my family in the course of a first 
 visit to India last year. On my return I found 
 that they had been collected and typewritten : 
 and I was persuaded to publish them. But, as 
 a self-respecting young man, I wish to refute the 
 charge of having " written a book on India": a 
 tour of five months was too long for such an 
 ambition to survive. Excepting the omission of 
 private passages and the insertion of some few 
 paragraphs from a diary, the letters are printed 
 exactly as they passed through the post, a fact 
 which accounts for sundry monstrosities of syntax 
 barbarous parentheses, unattached pronouns, mixed 
 tenses. It was thought better to leave these than 
 to disguise rough impressions with a thin varnish 
 of literary elaboration. 
 
 R. PALMER. 
 CHRISTMAS, 1912. 
 
 Tii 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAOX 
 FROM BOMBAY TO AGRA ...... I 
 
 Bombay A Hindu tea-party The G.I. P. A monotonous journey 
 Agra The Fort The Taj Sikandarah Itmad-ud-daulah's 
 tomb Fatehpur Sikri The Taj by moonlight. 
 
 II 
 
 THE DURBAR . . . . . . . IO 
 
 i The old cemetery at Agra A full carriage Arrived in camp 
 ii A grumble The State entry Friday at the Jama Masjid The 
 chiefs' camps Old Delhi Kutab's mosque and minar Moghul 
 tombs The Durbar The garden-party in the Fort The Review. 
 
 Ill 
 
 THE RAJPUT CITIES AND AHMEDABAD . . . .2$ 
 
 i Cost of travelling An alarm at the Investiture Jaipur Amber 
 A Brahman A.D.C. Ajmere The Dargah Pushkar Lake 
 Udaipur ii Chitor Ahmedabad The I.C.S. Famine work 
 Difficulties The camels and the trees Politeness unrewarded The 
 chief constable and the dacoits Difficulty of obtaining evidence. 
 
 IV 
 PALITANA, MOUNT ABU . . . . . .40 
 
 Indian railways An unexpected honour Satranjaya The Jains 
 Kathiawar A pathetic wardship Hospitality Isolation and 
 insularity Abu The Dilwarra temples Caste Fatalism A case 
 for the S.P.R. 
 
 V 
 FROM ABU TO KARLI . . . . . .53 
 
 Indian views of Government Minor officials The Ghats Karli. 
 
x CONTENTS 
 
 VI 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A DECCANI MISSION . . . . 6l 
 
 i The North Deccan Elements of the population A Marathi 
 service Caste questions An upset A Christmas letter ii Village 
 administration Abuses A chance for Christians ? iii Caste again 
 Its attraction and its viciousness iv Arrangements of a village 
 Christian virtues Wives and widows An old Tory Police 
 stories A case of zulam. 
 
 VII 
 
 THE SOUTH MAHRATTA COUNTRY : GOA . . . .84 
 
 Bijapur The S.M.C. The Londa-Mormugao railway Goa A 
 Town Council at work Pan-Islamism Hindu metaphysics Sugar- 
 crushing Hindu morals. 
 
 VIII 
 SOUTHERN INDIA . . . . . . .98 
 
 i Plague precautions Railway officials Vijayanagar Madras 
 Social functions The Seven Pagodas ii Church questions Mass- 
 movements Two Indian slums Madura The Temples Trichi- 
 nopoly iii Tanjore An Indian view of Brahmans A medical 
 officer's story The Temple The Palace Back to Bombay iv 
 Medical details A fire Bandra. 
 
 IX 
 SOUTH INDIAN TOPICS . . . . .121 
 
 i Nationalist leaders Indians and the Civil Service ii The seclu- 
 sion of Madras The Servants of India Nationalist claims : the 
 conflict of evidence "National Idealism" iii Centralization and 
 bureaucracy An account of the Bengal affair iv Madras Christian 
 College Caste in Church and State The police again An Indian 
 view of cricket. 
 
 X 
 
 THE MOGHULAI . . . . . . .137 
 
 i From Bombay to Daulatabad An extraordinary fortress The 
 caves of Ellora A Mohammedan festival A C.M.S. mission Two 
 warm receptions and a confirmation ii Moghulai administration 
 Defects and advantages Nature of a Christian's oath The story of 
 the rupee and the coco-nut A touch of the sun. 
 
CONTENTS xi 
 
 XI 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CALCUTTA AND DARJEELING . . . . . 1 49 
 
 i From Aurangabad to Calcutta The multiplication of castes 
 Calcutta Museum and Zoo The Durbar changes The Holi festival 
 The drugged Rohilla Berar Two anecdotes ii A change of 
 climate A Jain temple From Calcutta to Siliguri The Terai 
 and the Himalayas Darjeeling Kinchinjanga Tiger Hill A 
 rhododendron forest iii Attractiveness of the people Nepalese 
 honesty The Bengali Babu Colour division in Calcutta Hindu 
 views of administration Two Bengal views of the Durbar changes 
 Simultaneous examinations A grim and instructive famine story. 
 
 XII 
 
 FROM CALCUTTA TO THE KHYBER . . . .171 
 
 i Benares The Ghats Sarnath Agra and Delhi again Amritsar 
 Lahore Jehangir's tomb ii The plains in March Wazir 
 Kahn's mosque, Lahore Indo-Greek sculptures iii Benares v. 
 Madura The Brahmo Samaj The Arya Samaj Peer Mohammed 
 on King George A democratic paradox The jubilee of the Mutiny 
 in Delhi Education iv From Lahore to Peshawar A violet- 
 crowned city Through the Khyber Passing a caravan A valley 
 of desolation A ride and a view. 
 
 XIII 
 
 KASHMIR . . . . . . . .189 
 
 The drive The tradition of Jehu Murree First view of the 
 snows A thrilling moment Kohala The Jhelum gorge A land- 
 slide Uri Baramula The Happy Valley Srinagar ii After 
 duck Kashmir game Pervading picturesqueness A lovely jhil 
 iii Virtue rewarded A revelation A real duck-shoot iv More 
 about duck-shooting The trees of the valley Its birds v Spring 
 is yeomen in The Upper Jhelum Islamabad Martand Atchibal 
 The Dal Lake An odorous city vi Sambal A squall The 
 Wular Lake Sopor Baramula A wet drive More flowers The 
 end of the story. 
 
 INDEX . . . . . . . .223 
 
A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 FROM BOMBAY TO AGRA 
 
 Bombay A Hindu tea-party The G.I. P. A monotonous 
 journey Agra The Fort The Taj Sikandarah Itmad-ud- 
 daulah's tomb Fatehpur Sikri The Taj by moonlight. 
 
 December i, 1911, IN THE TRAIN (A JOLTY 
 ONE) BETWEEN BOMBAY AND AGRA. I had no 
 time to see any sights in Bombay, as I was 
 shopping, etc., the whole time. The crowds in 
 the city were tremendous, the natives for hundreds 
 of miles round flocking in. They were all in their 
 best clothes, and the colouring was brilliant, orange- 
 scarlet and sky-blue predominating. 
 
 Bombay was, they said, extraordinarily hot for 
 November ; I bought a thermometer to travel with. 
 When I bought it, it stood at 84 inside the Stores 
 at 6.30 p.m. 
 
 The most amusing thing I did in Bombay was 
 to go to tea with a rich Hindu merchant, who 
 
 2 * 
 
2 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 had given Rs. 5,000 to a Christian school : so Jim 
 was going to tea with him, and took me. The 
 furniture was magnificent, the sofas inlaid with 
 mirrors, and so on excepting the staircase, which 
 was painted deal. We had tea in a lovely marble 
 balcony decorated with frescoes of Hindu myths 
 in rather crude pinks and greens. I ate some 
 sponge-cake which tasted gingery : closer scrutiny 
 showed it was alive with ants ; so I tried the other 
 things, which were all very nice. The whole roof 
 had been made into a tessellated terrace, and from 
 it we had a gorgeous view of the sunset crimsoning 
 the whole harbour and sea and sky. Before we 
 left we were all garlanded (my first day !) with 
 wet ropes of flowers, and were given bouquets. I 
 enjoyed it hugely. 
 
 I started last night by the G.I. P. The train 
 is very comfortable. The carriages are large and 
 have the seats, like sofas, along the line of travel, 
 not across it. You bring your own bed, and make 
 it on the sofa. 
 
 It is not a bit hot to-day. My thermometer 
 makes it 74 now (half-past twelve). The country 
 is dull, though prosperous : almost flat, every acre 
 cultivated or pasture. The crops are rather thin, 
 except mealies, which luxuriate. The fodder crop 
 has failed entirely in most parts of Bombay, 
 and Jim has had to give up his trek on that 
 account. In fact, there will be actual famine 
 in February, he says, in a certain number of 
 districts. 
 
FROM BOMBAY TO AGRA 3 
 
 As this train passes through Agra, I have 
 decided to get out there (at 3 a.m. !), and spend 
 four days there, proceeding to Delhi on Wednes- 
 day, the day before the King arrives. There will 
 be plenty of time to see Delhi during the week 
 from the ;th to the i4th. My present plans for 
 the next few weeks are, after Delhi, to visit the 
 cities of Rajputana, which are said by all to be 
 exquisitely lovely (Jaipur, Chitor, Udaipur), reach- 
 ing Ahmedabad by Christmas. That is to say, 
 I travel south-west from Delhi, back towards 
 Bombay, but rather north of the direct line. 
 
 I have come to the conclusion that it will be 
 worth while to stay out to see Kashmir, so I have 
 provisionally booked a passage in the ship leaving 
 Bombay April 2oth, 2.30 p.m. 
 
 We are in wilder country now, in one of the 
 native Rajput States. It is not unlike the 
 Rhodesian bush among the Matoppos : some big 
 trees and a regular forest of smaller ones, but not 
 growing at all thick, and no undergrowth but hay- 
 like grass. The hills look about seven hundred feet 
 high, and we have passed over two deep ravines 
 with river-beds. We also passed over a big river, 
 bigger than the Orange River, which appears to be 
 the Nerbudda ; we are between Itarsi and Bhopal. 
 
 Saturday, December 2, AGRA. I arrived here 
 at 4.30 a.m. . . . I slept a little and was up again 
 at eight. No cabs were to be had, as every 
 
4 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 Mohammedan was going to mosque, so I bicycled 
 down to the Fort. 
 
 An Indian fort corresponds to a Greek acropolis, 
 and in it are generally the royal palace and the best 
 temples. Agra was the chief residence of three of the 
 greatest of the six great Great Moghuls (pronounced 
 to rhyme with " ogles "), namely, Akbar, Jehangir, 
 and Shah Jahan ; but I was quite unprepared for 
 the astonishingly beautiful series of buildings I 
 found. It would take an hour to describe them, 
 as it took the whole morning to see them. The 
 main ones were the Pearl Mosque, which is (in 
 position) to Agra what the Parthenon was to 
 Athens ; the palace of Shah Jahan, which is the 
 apotheosis of delicacy and flowerlike beauty ; and 
 the palace of Akbar and Jehangir, which is of a 
 much severer style. 
 
 The whole Fort is of a wonderful rose-red 
 sandstone, and so is Akbar's palace. All Shah 
 Jahan's buildings are of purest white marble, the 
 interiors profusely inlaid with agate and cornelians 
 of every colour in marvellously graceful patterns. 
 I am getting some photographs : meanwhile I send 
 some horrid cheap German picture-postcards which 
 give but the faintest idea, if that, of what the place 
 is like. So much depends on the lovely colouring 
 and the exquisite delicacy of the detail. Nothing 
 I have seen in Europe is in the same key of beauty, 
 unless it be the Alhambra. 
 
 Monday, December ^th. On Saturday afternoon 
 
FROM BOMBAY TO AGRA 5 
 
 I saw the Taj Mahal. The world in general out 
 here conspires to make you sick of it before you 
 see it, and the inevitable consequence was a trifle 
 of disappointment at first sight ; it looks so " exactly 
 as it does in books." But that feeling soon passes, 
 and admiration grows over one. 
 
 I went back there to-day and realized it is a hot 
 favourite for being the most beautiful single and 
 complete building in the world. I approached in 
 a boat down the river to-day, and this is the most 
 perfect view of it. It is so subtly designed that 
 you only get the full effect when you see it as the 
 architect intended. The Taj itself is not wide 
 enough to make a good base for its dome ; it looks 
 lumpy and heavy when you look at it alone. But 
 the architect put it on a wide platform, with four 
 minarets at the corners, and at a distance these 
 make one group with the Taj and restore the 
 balance. Finally, to perfect the group, he put 
 two mosques of red stone, one on each side, at 
 a lower level, and the effect of these is to give 
 an infinitely graceful lightness to the Taj. Thus 
 the Taj can only be properly seen when it is 
 balanced between the two red mosques i.e. y from 
 the gateway due south or the river due north. 
 But the trees in the garden have grown so that 
 from the gateway the mosques are wholly con- 
 cealed from view, and even the minarets are only 
 partially visible. From the river, however, a 
 perfect view is obtained, and the effect is enhanced 
 by the increased height, since the Taj is on an 
 
6 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 embankment, and also by the reflection in the 
 water. 
 
 The details of the work are as exquisite as in 
 the palace. Most beautiful light-effects are ob- 
 tained in all the vaultings of Shah Jahan's buildings 
 by a device which I have never seen anywhere 
 else. Instead of making the inner surface of, e.g., 
 the top of the porch, a smooth and even curve, 
 they lightly scoop the marble in a kind of Gothic 
 pattern, so that there are faint ridges and hollows 
 in it which catch the light with an almost prismatic 
 effect that is infinitely lovely : it gives, as it were, a 
 living sheen to the stone. 
 
 Round the porches are long Arabic texts inlaid 
 in black slate, and above is a good deal of floral 
 inlay -work on a big scale. Inside, the two tombs 
 are like embroidered silk, so rich is the inlay work : 
 but I think its more sparing use is the more beauti- 
 ful. They are enclosed by a very fine pierced 
 marble screen, and over them hangs a pierced 
 brass Cairene lamp, the " graceful gift of Lord 
 Curzon." The lamp is all right, but the light 
 inside is electric and too hard. The daylight in 
 this chamber is so subdued as to be only adequate 
 at noon. The whole dome is scooped in the way 
 I mentioned, and a musical note is echoed up and 
 up it in the most awe-inspiring and melodious way. 
 It takes seven or eight seconds to die gradually 
 away. 
 
 Yesterday I drove out five miles to Sikandarah, 
 where Akbar's tomb is. It would be a very fine 
 
FROM BOMBAY TO AGRA 7 
 
 sight if it were not so close to Agra ; but it looks 
 unfinished. It is interesting as being the earliest 
 of the great Moghul buildings here, though I 
 hope to see earlier ones to-morrow. The great 
 Moghul period of architecture was, like so many 
 supreme art-periods, surprisingly short. It begins 
 with Akbar in 1570 and only "finds itself" after 
 1620: the decline begins in 1660, and after 1680 
 there is hardly a building of note. The immediate 
 reason for its sudden decline was that whereas 
 Akbar and Shah Jahan employed architects of 
 all creeds and nations (the Taj, by the way, was 
 designed by a Persian, not by an Italian), 
 Aurangzeb (1657-1707), who was a bigot, re- 
 fused to employ any one but devout Moslems, 
 and none of these happened to be any good. The 
 great mosques were built by Hindus and Persians. 
 This morning I saw the third of the great sights 
 of Agra, the tomb of Itmad-ud-daulah i.e., the 
 High Treasurer of Jehangir. Its date is 1628 
 and it is the first of the " Ai " Moghul buildings, 
 and the earliest example of inlay work. It is a 
 most charming building, the most fragile-looking 
 of all of them. Its inlay- work is less delicate 
 than in the later ones, but its lacework in marble 
 is as light as gossamer. It has no dome, but 
 a very graceful roof and turrets of the pagoda 
 order. 
 
 Wednesday. I had better post this before start- 
 ing for Delhi, as the trains up there are so dis- 
 
8 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 organized that it might fail to catch the mail if 
 I waited. 
 
 Yesterday I made the expedition to Fatehpur 
 Sikri, which is twenty-two miles away. It was 
 the abode of a saint, who blessed Akbar's wife 
 in childbirth. For this reason Akbar made it 
 his capital in 1565, and built a splendid city with 
 palaces and a mosque, in red stone. But the water 
 was bad, and after trying for twenty years he 
 had to abandon it and move to Agra. The place 
 remains just as he walked or drove out of it : no 
 one has lived there since and it is near no high- 
 road. It is therefore uniquely interesting as show- 
 ing the early Moghul style. There is no inlay 
 work and no marble. In some places the red 
 stone is minutely carved : it can be pierced as 
 finely as marble. The chief feature is the grace 
 and lightness of the palaces, with their slender 
 pillars and airy cupolas. 
 
 In the courtyard of the mosque is the saint's 
 tomb, in marked contrast to the rest. Outside 
 is a white marble chamber of extremely fine pierced 
 lacework all round. Inside, the tomb is like a 
 four-post bed, and is composed entirely of mother- 
 of-pearl, except the posts, where the mother-of-pearl 
 is interspersed with tortoiseshell and brass inlay. 
 The whole effect is like a big piece of opalescent 
 jewellery. Unfortunately, I failed to get a photo- 
 graph of it. 
 
 Last night we went to see the Taj by moonlight, 
 with a moon almost full. It is incomparably more 
 
FROM BOMBAY TO AGRA 9 
 
 beautiful than by daylight, and more than fulfils 
 the ravings of the enthusiasts who do their best 
 to make it disappointing. You know what a 
 tropical full moon is like, and you know the 
 snowy glister of marble in moonlight. There was 
 also a perfect stillness. Inside, the Cairene lamp 
 justified itself, and the shadows on the vaulting 
 were the very symbols of mystery and peace. 
 
 This morning I paid a third and last visit to 
 the Fort, and loved it more than ever. I wish 
 I could describe the Diwan-i-Khas, but it is too 
 simple. I have never seen such a magical room. 
 The stupid people haven't got a decent photo- 
 graph of it. 
 
II 
 
 THE DURBAR 
 
 i The old cemetery at Agra A full carriage Arrived in camp 
 ii A grumble The State entry Friday at the Jama Masjid 
 The chiefs' camps Old Delhi Kutab's mosque and minar 
 Moghul tombs The Durbar The garden-party in the Fort 
 The Review. 
 
 i 
 
 December 6, 1911, DELHI. Just a line in hopes 
 of catching the mail before I go to bed. One of 
 the last places I visited in Agra was the old 
 Roman Catholic cemetery. There were a lot of 
 Christians there in Akbar's time, mainly Portu- 
 guese ; but the oldest tomb with a legible date 
 is, curiously, an Englishman's, who came to Agra 
 in 1605 an d talked with Akbar. He died in 
 1614. 
 
 I caught the 16.45 ( as tnev please to call it) 
 at Agra Road. I got into a carriage in which 
 were an Englishman and a well-to-do Mohamme- 
 dan. At the next station fifteen native students 
 got in, or tried to. Each carried a fat roll of 
 bedding, and they got hopelessly stuck in the 
 doorway, chattering and struggling like monkeys. 
 
THE DURBAR n 
 
 The train started while the doorway was still 
 jammed, with two of them outside on the foot- 
 board. Thereupon up rose the Englishman, 
 silenced the babel with one word, pulled in the 
 bedding-bundles and stored them away himself, 
 and so cleared the doorway, then relapsed into 
 his newspaper. The incident seemed to me sym- 
 bolic. The fifteen disposed themselves all about 
 the carriage, crowding the Mohammedan's seat, 
 squatting on the floor, on their luggage, in the 
 rack but none of them thought of attempting 
 to sit on our seat ; so we two sahibs sat spaciously 
 on an oasis of silence surrounded by babbling 
 Indians, all of them in Bank Holiday spirits. 
 
 On arrival at Delhi we found thousands of 
 unnecessary people on the platform, and after 
 extricating ourselves spent over an hour trying to 
 find this camp, as to the whereabouts of which 
 there was a conspiracy of misdirecting garrulity. 
 However, here we are at last, and quite ready 
 for bed. 
 
 11 
 
 December 9, 1911, IN CAMP, DELHI. This place 
 is even more odious than I had expected. The 
 Durbar will have to be very fine to make up for it ; 
 and I have aggravated the evil by never doing the 
 right thing. To my surprise I have been invited 
 to the evening Reception, and I have no breeches. 
 
12 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 I have brought no carriage or bicycle, and find 
 it almost impossible to get about. This camp is 
 two miles from anywhere, and six miles from all 
 the great sights of Delhi, except the Fort, which 
 the police have closed till the day before I leave. 
 I shall therefore see nothing except in Jim's 
 motor, and I am three miles from his camp. 
 Walking is horribly unpleasant ; one can't get 
 breakfast till nine or half-past, and lunch only at 
 1.30; meals are unobtainable except in camp, so 
 to get anywhere one has to walk in the heat of 
 the day, and the roads are as crowded as Picca- 
 dilly in the season, and one is jostled by thou- 
 sands of natives, and the dust fills the air, and 
 the place is alive with flies, and one gets a head- 
 ache from the sun. Consequently in the four 
 days I have been here I have hardly stirred 
 from camp without regretting it. 
 
 The statistics are wonderful, of course ; there 
 are scores of square miles of camp, and millions 
 (such, I am told, is the official police estimate, 
 but Sir John Hewett's estimate is five hundred 
 thousand, a biggish divergence !) of strangers in 
 Delhi. But the experience is disagreeable, and 
 there is a pervading sense of waste which is very 
 depressing. Untold millions of rupees have been 
 spent, which go to enrich hotel-keepers, contractors, 
 and dressmakers; and all that is got for it is three 
 or four fine shows and the rather arrogant asser- 
 tion of the British Raj. Meanwhile there is 
 already actual famine in some districts and great 
 
THE DURBAR 13 
 
 distress in others. The rajahs have spent all 
 their spare cash in this show, and have no means 
 of relieving their subjects : indeed, they themselves 
 are likely to be hard up, as their revenues will 
 probably fail them. And I very much doubt 
 whether the political effect will be good. The 
 common people are no doubt impressed by the 
 display : but in this respect their own rajahs far 
 outshine the King, and they are quite as likely 
 to get the impression that their own princes are 
 finer than ours as to realize that their fine princes 
 are vassals of our King. But I dare say that part 
 is all right, only it doesn't seem worth while ; it 
 makes one think of the famine districts in the same 
 depressing way that a London ballroom sometimes 
 makes one think of the slums. 
 
 So far there have been two bright spots from 
 the spectacular point of view. The first of these 
 was the State entry the most extraordinary 
 fantasy of splendour that has even been seen, I 
 imagine. All the native chiefs drove in procession 
 behind the King's escort. The latter the Im- 
 perial Cadet Corps consists of the sons of 
 rajahs, and has a most lovely uniform of cream- 
 colour and sky-blue, with gold plumes in their 
 turbans. 
 
 But the chiefs' procession was the wonder. 
 There were about a hundred of them : I made 
 out ninety-eight, but I'm told a hundred and three 
 is the total. Each one had a little procession 
 of his own. First two splendid liverymen with 
 
14 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 gold staves, then about a dozen horsemen in 
 uniforms which tended to the fierce or fantastic. 
 One set was in chain-mail from head to foot, 
 others in leopard skins, and so on in infinite 
 variety : at the least they were gorgeously uni- 
 formed, various shades of blue and yellow being 
 the favourite colour-scheme. (Some of the horses 
 were lovely too.) Their arms were nearly always 
 lances or pikes : a few had axes or scimitars. 
 
 These were followed by a band of trumpeters, 
 and sometimes two men with golden objects one 
 might well call maces, beautifully wrought. This 
 group was, like English trumpeters, the most richly 
 uniformed of all, with silks and cloth of gold, the 
 turbans being especially magnificent. 
 
 Then came the rajah's coach, drawn by six 
 horses, with leaders and postilions ; and the coach- 
 man was generally too gorgeous to be expected 
 to hold the reins at all. The coaches themselves 
 varied greatly : seven of them were entirely made 
 of solid silver, no wood anywhere, and profusely 
 overlaid with raised goldwork. Others were of 
 wood inlaid with gold and silver ; some were like 
 English royal carriages, and some were quite 
 shabby. They were generally lined with blue 
 or purple cloth, sometimes white. In the carriage 
 sat the rajah in a sumptuous shot-silk robe, 
 generally gold shot with pink or blue : others 
 wore white silk richly embroidered with gold, 
 while some had tapestry patterns on the silk. 
 Their breasts were covered with enormous jewels, 
 
THE DURBAR 15 
 
 chiefly pearls and emeralds : but the hugest of 
 all were always in the front of the turban, and 
 some of these were of incredible size, and sparkled 
 brilliantly in the sun ; and often the lines of the 
 turban were picked out in rubies and pearls, and 
 pendant emeralds hung down over their foreheads. 
 On the left of each rajah sat the British Resident, 
 and two sumptuously attired courtiers opposite. 
 
 The rajah's carriage was followed by two or 
 three other carnages, containing princes and 
 wazirs ; but in between there were almost always 
 two led chargers, whose whole harness and saddles 
 were made of solid embossed gold or silver : and 
 a few had fantastic silver litters carved with lions 
 and dragons. 
 
 Behind the carriages came a crowd of foot- 
 soldiers, and these were generally the most oddly 
 attired group of all : they bordered on the panto- 
 mimic. They were dressed, as it were, in carica- 
 tures of their respective national costumes ; so 
 one saw Pathans in shaggy bearskins, Baluchis, 
 Arabs from the Aden Hinterland, Sikhs, Rajputs, 
 Deccanese, South Indians, Kashmiris, Sikkimese, 
 Bengalis, Burmese with golden pagodas on their 
 hats, Assamese with straw hats a yard wide, 
 Gujeratis with squat blunderbusses, Afridis with 
 guns eight feet long, and so on in bewildering 
 pageant. The procession took nearly three hours 
 to pass, and it was impossible to take it in : but 
 it remains a thing to dream of for the rest of one's 
 life. I don't think it can ever become a regular 
 
16 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 ceremony. There is a feeling about this Durbar 
 that it will never be repeated. 
 
 The other fine sight I saw yesterday from the 
 roof of the cloister of the great Mosque. There 
 were ten thousand or more Mohammedans in the 
 great courtyard for the Friday service, and when 
 they prostrated themselves in unison they made 
 a patterned carpet of every conceivable bright 
 colour. Each man was on one square of the 
 pavement, so they were in perfect lines. When 
 they prayed, they swayed up and down like a 
 coloured sea, to the rhythm of long-drawn 
 "Al-lahs." 
 
 Sunday, loth. For once this camp is within 
 a mile of something, and I could get to church 
 this morning with reasonable comfort. After 
 breakfast, I took advantage of an offer of a bicycle, 
 and rode round the chiefs' camps. There are 
 four enormously long streets of them, and I rode 
 right up one and down another, and so saw the 
 outside of about half of them. They are truly 
 magnificent ; they vary in size, averaging about 
 a hundred and fifty yards of frontage and going 
 back about two hundred and fifty : but some are 
 much bigger. The Nizam and a few others have 
 two camps (he is said to have brought over a 
 hundred wives up here). 
 
 Each camp had a reception pavilion : of these, 
 almost every one that I could see into had silver 
 chairs and the rest of the furniture to match. A 
 
THE DURBAR 17 
 
 few had arches and even kiosks entirely overlaid 
 with silver. In odd contrast to this richness, the 
 decorations generally took the form of small cheap 
 calico Union Jacks with hideous " portraits " of the 
 King and Queen stamped on them ; these were in 
 great profusion. 
 
 I only went into two camps, including the Kash- 
 miri, which was far the most artistic of them all. 
 The whole of its frontage had for a paling a screen 
 of pierced wood, which was perfectly lovely. The 
 wood was dark, like old oak, but grained like chest- 
 nut. (It is walnut.) The screen was about six 
 feet high and stood on a three-foot brick plinth. 
 Every panel was carved into a group of flowers, 
 each one different, most exquisitely done, with a 
 lace-like effect, and one could see through it quite 
 well, as the spaces were cut right away. The gate- 
 way had similar flower carvings, but in relief and 
 not pierced- work. It was of the same wood and 
 gabled with burnished copper. The effect was 
 extremely fine. 
 
 The pavilion was a large tent without sides (i.e., 
 open at the sides). It was supported on poles of 
 solid silver (they may have been overlaid, but did not 
 seem so), about four inches in diameter and spirally 
 carved. The floor was carpeted with dark plum- 
 coloured silk rugs, embroidered with flowers, not 
 very thickly. The ceiling was of the same ; there 
 were two rows of silver chairs leading up to two 
 thrones of gold and silver, and no other furniture 
 in the room at all. 
 
 3 
 
i8 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 A wonderful feature about all the swell camps, 
 English as well as Indian, is the gardening. Nine 
 months ago this area was bare, dry, open veld, and 
 now each camp has extensive grass lawns with beds 
 of chrysanthemums, palms, sunflowers, etc., and 
 some of them have " morning glory" convolvulus 
 entirely covering their front railings. 
 
 Wednesday ', \$th. The last two days have been 
 very full. On Monday Jim took me in his motor, 
 and we visited all the great sights south of Delhi. 
 
 This locality has been a city from time imme- 
 morial : but it emerges into history after the first 
 Mohammedan invasion of India, about A.D. 1000. 
 The then existing city was eleven miles south of 
 the present one. It was captured by the Moslem 
 Viceroy, Kutab-ud-din, in 1193. This Kutab later 
 threw off his allegiance to the Kings of Ghazni (in 
 Afghanistan) and set up an independent kingdom 
 with Delhi as capital. From this date onwards 
 Delhi has almost always been the capital of the 
 chief power in India : but successive dynasties 
 moved their citadels, first eastward, then north- 
 ward ; so that now there is a chain of ruined forts, 
 palaces, and mosques along fifteen miles of road. 
 
 Most of these ruins are mere shells ; the best 
 preserved are the oldest, namely, Kutab's mosque 
 and minar, built to signalize his victory. The 
 mosque must have been magnificent ; there remain 
 some grand arches, more Gothic-looking than later 
 ones, and a cloister made of pillars taken from 
 
THE DURBAR 19 
 
 twenty-seven sacked Jain temples, very finely 
 carved. More famous, but (I think) less beautiful, 
 is the minar, which is nearly two hundred and forty 
 feet high, a queer tapering shape, but too like a 
 vast factory chimney to be very pleasing. It was 
 three hundred feet, but the top was knocked off by 
 lightning. You can see it looking very big from 
 here, eleven miles off. 
 
 Besides the ruins, the most interesting things 
 were a series of well-preserved Moghul tombs, 
 showing the development of that style. The 
 earliest existing Moghul tomb, Humayun's (Akbar's 
 father), who died in 1556, is here, not three miles 
 from the latest one, Safdar Jang's, who died 1754, 
 two years before the sack of Delhi by the Afghans. 
 
 The Durbar was very good ; from the purely 
 aesthetic point of view it was worth all the week's 
 discomfort, and as a political education in imagina- 
 tion it may even be worth all the money spent on it. 
 
 The way the theatre was laid out was like this. 
 A circular space was enclosed, on the south by a 
 small semicircular covered stand for twelve thou- 
 sand people, on the north by a big open mound 
 for fifty thousand. In the centre of the big circle 
 was a high platform (thirty steps), with two solid 
 silver-gilt thrones under a silver and gold canopy ; 
 and within the sector of the smaller circle was a 
 sumptuous pavilion of gold and silver, supported on 
 silver-gilt poles with gold tent-ropes, containing two 
 gilt thrones on a raised dais, with two lesser pairs 
 
20 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 of thrones below, on the right for the Hardinges 
 and on the left for Lord Crewe and the Duchess of 
 Devonshire. 
 
 The King and Queen arrived at twelve o'clock 
 in purple and ermine robes, the King crowned, and 
 drove round, past one half of the mound stand, 
 then in, past the high platform, to the pavilion or 
 skamiana. For some unexplained but no doubt 
 excellent reason I was given about the best seat in 
 the place, in the front row of unofficial people, just 
 opposite the skamiana and not thirty yards from it. 
 
 The scene was brilliant quite beyond description. 
 The distant mound was like a vast tulip-bed of 
 turbans : the flower-like effect was heightened by 
 the fact that large schools occupied blocks of it, 
 having uniform turbans : in this way were formed a 
 yellow bed, a green one, a purple one, a sky-blue 
 one, an orange one, and several white ones. In 
 front of these came the massed scarlet of eighteen 
 thousand troops disposed round the gorgeous 
 crimson and gold platform. The steps of the latter 
 were crimson with broad gold rods, but the strong 
 sun made such a dazzling glitter on these that the 
 whole staircase at times seemed to be made of gold. 
 Over the platform was a golden dome that fixed and 
 focused the whole scene : its gold was not glitter- 
 ing, but frosted to an even lustre, like that of a glass 
 lamp-shade. The thrones on the platform faced 
 away from us and towards the mound. From the 
 platform a broad carpeted way led to the skamiana, 
 and this was not troop-lined, so that there was a 
 
THE DURBAR 21 
 
 completely open grass space in the middle fore- 
 ground, and this was extremely effective. 
 
 From the shamiana three or four steps led down 
 to the open carpeted space just in front of our seats, 
 the front row of which was occupied by the chiefs 
 and other homage-doers. 
 
 After the King had made a formal speech, the 
 homage began. First the Viceroy went up, knelt 
 and kissed hands ; then the others one by one came 
 forward and made bows, nobody coming up to the 
 King or touching him. He bowed slightly in 
 return to each, and so did the Queen : she had a 
 splendid dress of white satin embroidered with gold, 
 a tiara of diamonds and emeralds, and diamonds 
 and emeralds on her breast the emeralds almost as 
 big as the rajahs'. 
 
 Each rajah came up by himself, very slow and 
 stately, and when he passed across the open 
 carpeted space his jewels sparkled and flashed in 
 the sun in a way which made one wonder why 
 people ever troubled to wear jewels in the evening. 
 The diamonds were far and away the most effective, 
 and most of them had magnificent diamonds. Some 
 of the finest jewels were worn by the King's and 
 Queen's pages, little rajahs of from seven to 
 thirteen years old, headed by Jodhpur. They were 
 not uniformly dressed, but all wore some sort of 
 cloth-of-gold dresses, and yellow or gold or orange 
 turbans. These turbans are made of a wonderful 
 shimmering stuff, which the ladies said is never seen 
 in Europe : all the chiefs had it. It looks like a 
 
22 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 very fine gauzy silk shot with gold and silver, and 
 gives a different sheen with every movement. The 
 biggest jewel of all is always worn in the front of 
 the turban, and from it often rises either an aigrette 
 or else a spray of diamonds, pearls, or rubies : I 
 never saw a sapphire at aft on any Indian. 
 
 After the homage the King and Queen moved in 
 a truly Oriental procession along the carpeted way 
 to the high platform, attended by pages, umbrella- 
 bearers, men with golden implements like long- 
 handled aces of spades, to keep the sun off at the 
 sides, men with fly-protectors, men with golden 
 spice-horns, and the Imperial Cadet Corps in atten- 
 dance. Then followed a proclamation and much 
 saluting and trumpeting and band-playing, and then 
 a procession back again to the shamiana, where the 
 King made the dramatic announcement of the 
 transfer of the capital and the restoration of Bengal. 
 
 The official world does not altogether seem to 
 relish this scheme. They vary greatly : Bombay 
 officials mostly welcome it, as it brings Bombay 
 trade. Whether the others oppose it from mere 
 conservatism, or because it reverses Lord Curzon's 
 policy, or because it benefits the seditious Bengalis, 
 I don't know. But it strikes one that part of the 
 official world has got into unsatisfactory relations 
 with the native world. The soldiers and the old- 
 fashioned officials seem out of sympathy with 
 native aspirations. . . . 
 
 Thursday, i^th. It is astonishing how this show 
 
THE DURBAR 23 
 
 is prolonged from day to day without a sense of 
 anti-climax. This is made possible by the skilful 
 variation of the pageants. Yesterday's garden- 
 party and fete was a wonderful sight and entirely 
 different from the rest. It was held in the Fort, 
 which is only less lovely than Agra Fort, and in the 
 same style. The chief difference is that the inlay 
 work is mostly not of precious stones but of gold, 
 and the rest of it is really paint, in many places ; 
 and it has suffered from the looters of the eighteenth 
 century. But all the fountains were running, which 
 added greatly to the effect : and the gardens had 
 been prettily bedded out. 
 
 Between the Fort and the River Jamna is a flat, 
 bare space five hundred yards wide and three- 
 quarters of a mile long. This space was filled 
 with dense masses of natives I should be afraid 
 to say how many, but far the biggest crowd I have 
 ever seen : and looking down from above, the sea 
 of turbans was a very wonderful spectacle : it 
 stretched as far as one could see in every direction, 
 in places a moving crowd, in places a packed mass. 
 Presently the King and Queen appeared in crown 
 and robes, and sat on their silver thrones in a 
 projecting marble balcony, and got a tremendous 
 welcome from the crowd below. Then the natives 
 of various States collected in mobs round banners, 
 and marched past wearing uniform turbans of 
 bright colours, and waving innumerable little flags 
 of the same colour. 
 
 This lasted till sunset, and then, as it got dark, 
 
24 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 the Fort was illuminated most beautifully. The 
 whole of the battlements were outlined in lights : 
 others were hung right in and upon the trees, like 
 fruit ; and the various marble pavilions and water- 
 falls were lit with soft lamps. It was lovely, though 
 it inevitably bore a family resemblance to the White 
 City. It was odd how by artificial light the stucco 
 buildings looked as good as, or better than, the 
 marble ones. 
 
 Then they finished up with fine fireworks in the 
 Bela below, and the rockets showed up the huge 
 crowd, now even denser than before. 
 
 I am writing this at the Review, the last of the 
 great shows ; they have fifty thousand troops here, 
 and the general effect is fine, but at present they 
 are a long way off. 
 
 To-night is the Investiture, which ought to be 
 the finest of the evening functions the Reception 
 was ordinary but the mail leaves before it. 
 
 I hope to see some more of the Fort before 
 I leave to-morrow. I am cutting the State depar- 
 ture, as it is a purely European procession and 
 won't be worth waiting for ; and as soon as the 
 King goes there will be such a rush away that 
 I am told I could not get a place for three days ; 
 so I am leaving to-morrow night for Jaipur. I 
 mean to spend next week visiting Jaipur, Ajmere, 
 Chitor, and Udaipur, which are all in Rajputana 
 on the railway between here and Bombay. 
 
 . . . There are endless other things to record 
 and reflections to make, but are they not written in 
 the books of the Chronicles ? 
 
Ill 
 
 THE RAJPUT CITIES AND AHMEDABAD 
 
 i Cost of travelling An alarm at the Investiture Jaipur 
 Amber A Brahman A.D.C. Ajmere The Dargah Pushkar 
 Lake Udaipur ii Chitor Ahmedabad The I.C.S. Famine 
 work Difficulties The camels and the trees Politeness unre- 
 warded The chief constable and the dacoits Difficulty of 
 obtaining evidence. 
 
 December 18, 1911, JAIPUR. I enclose a sketch- 
 map with my proposed itinerary marked in ink ; 
 it is a great deal of ground to cover. The first 
 tour, which I am doing now, and which lasts till 
 I get back to Bombay on January 8th, means over 
 two thousand miles of railway travelling. I think 
 travelling here is a little dearer than in Europe, 
 as one must always go first-class and do one's 
 sight-seeing in a carriage, and a servant really 
 is necessary. On the other hand, one gets a good 
 deal of hospitality here and there. Apart from the 
 Durbar, I think it will work out at about twenty 
 rupees a day, which equals twenty-seven shillings ; 
 but I shall know better at the end of the month. 
 
 25 
 
26 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 The only incident at Delhi after the last mail 
 left was a momentary alarm of fire at the Investi- 
 ture. A tent, only four tents off, was burnt down, 
 and the noise of the fire-engines, etc., made it seem 
 as though it was our huge tent that was on fire, and 
 some one cried " Fire ! " Every one rose to their 
 feet, except the King and his entourage, who went 
 on calmly investing. Three thousand people in 
 a tent with only one exit to the open air a tent 
 which would not have taken ten minutes to burn 
 it was a blood-curdling moment. Then some- 
 one said sternly, " Sit down ! " and the men did 
 so, the women kept quiet, and every one soon 
 realized that the fire was a little way off. 
 
 I left Delhi on Friday night ; the station was 
 an indescribable pandemonium. Thousands of 
 natives blocked the entrance, all shouting, and it 
 took nearly half an hour to get to the platform, 
 and only then because I was white, and the native 
 next you always gives way when he sees you are 
 white. 
 
 This place is one hundred and ninety miles 
 south-west of Delhi, and a good deal warmer. 
 At Delhi I wanted my thick overcoat till ten 
 o'clock, if sitting still, and again after five ; but 
 between twelve and three it was unpleasantly hot 
 to walk, though in the shade it was never more 
 than 70 (I should say), and at night it was very 
 cold. Here it is like Nice in April, without the 
 cold spells. 
 
 Jaipur is a purely native city, not very old 
 
THE RAJPUT CITIES AND AHMEDABAD 27 
 
 (eighteenth century), but most picturesque, with 
 all the houses pink-washed a warm rose-colour and 
 very wide main streets, like boulevards. These 
 are brimfull of leisurely moving people in bright 
 colours a main industry here is dyeing muslin 
 brilliant reds and orange and equally leisurely 
 animals, all as tame as can be dogs, goats, 
 pigeons (in great flocks), monkeys (very tame), 
 but chiefly cows and bulls. When any rich man 
 dies he lets loose a bull on the streets, where it 
 wanders for the rest of its days, fed by the charit- 
 able. It is very touching, but rather delays the 
 traffic, as there are scores of them in every street. 
 
 The show buildings are disappointing and less 
 worth seeing than the streets. The only really 
 fine one is the Albert Museum, built by Sir 
 Swinton Jacobs. There is a church, but apparently 
 no clergyman. 
 
 The chief sight is seven miles away, the old 
 deserted capital, Amber, built on the side of one 
 of the steep hills which overlook this town on 
 three sides. It has a palace of the great Moghul 
 period (1630), but in an entirely Hindu version 
 of that style. 
 
 Far the finest thing in it was a set of rooms 
 panelled and ceiled in that mica and plaster mirror- 
 work which I described at Agra ; but this one was 
 much more beautiful. I have got a photograph 
 of it which shows the design, but not, of course, 
 the light effects. 
 
 We made the expedition to Amber partly in 
 
28 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 a carriage and partly on an elephant, conducted 
 by a Brahman A.D.C. of the Maharajah's. He 
 was well-read in English literature and talked a 
 good deal about it ; but what interested me most 
 was his attitude to the Presbyterian mission here. 
 He was warmly in favour of it, on the ground that 
 it educated the children and " did excellent medical 
 and moral work," and never converted any one, 
 except " sweeper-caste and such-like," who had 
 something to gain by abandoning Hinduism. I 
 wonder if the exception is as negligible as he 
 seems to think. 
 
 Tuesday, i^th, AJMERE. I got here safely last 
 night. This morning I went to see the Dargah, 
 where there is the tomb of another saint of the 
 Chishti family. Round it pious princes have built 
 courts, mosques, pavilions, tanks, and gateways, 
 in marble or whitewashed stone : several of them 
 good, but none very good. Behind it was a huge 
 pit or ravine with water at the bottom (a hundred 
 feet below), which I was told would cure all my 
 complaints ; but I preferred my complaint. This 
 tank is called the Jhalra : it is the scene of the 
 Breaking of the Pitcher in the Broken Road. 
 
 Much finer was the ruined mosque of Kutab- 
 ud-din, very like his mosque near Delhi I saw 
 last week. Here the only thing left was the 
 mosque itself, the cloisters having disappeared. 
 The arches were extremely fine and beautifully 
 inscribed. 
 
THE RAJPUT CITIES AND AHMEDABAD 29 
 
 After lunch I went to a little lake where there 
 is a very handsome marble embankment, with 
 Shah Jahan pavilions along it, restored by Lord 
 Curzon. 
 
 Then I went on to the Pushkar Lake, seven 
 miles out. This is the most sacred lake in India, 
 and the drive to it is through the first picturesque 
 scenery I have found since leaving Bombay. The 
 plain of Ajmere is surrounded on all sides by hills 
 of the size and shape of the hills in the ^Egean, 
 but a dull brown colour. I drove over a nek 
 between two of these and down into a straggling 
 valley between steep hills, and at the end of it was 
 the lake. 
 
 It is quite small, about four hundred yards by 
 three hundred, and nearly rectangular, with a kind 
 of overflow lakelet. Two entire sides are em- 
 banked, and have alternately houses built right 
 into the water and temples with ghats broad 
 flights of marble steps leading down into the water. 
 On the other two sides there are a few temples. 
 In the evening sun it looked quite lovely, with its 
 background of hills. The foreground was much 
 enriched by the animal life : innumerable fishes 
 which jumped in shoals at the food which pilgrims 
 were throwing them; parties of cormorants which 
 dived and rose in unison, looking very odd ; 
 bitterns and a pale-blue kingfisher, pigeons and 
 numbers of peacocks sunning themselves on the walls 
 and steps ; and a huge old crocodile, which came 
 quite close to me to have a look, or expecting food. 
 
30 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 I successfully got rid, after struggles, of the guides, 
 who tried to tell me which rajahs had built which 
 temples, as if that mattered, and enjoyed the scene 
 hugely till nearly sunset. 
 
 Wednesday, UDAIPUR. Owing to the Durbar 
 disorganization we missed our connection this 
 morning at Chitor (Chitor Fort looks splendid 
 from the railway : I shall try and see it on my 
 way back from here), and only got here at 4 p.m. 
 instead of 10 a.m. 
 
 This city is generally said to be the most 
 beautiful in India, and I can quite believe it, so 
 far as situation goes, from the little I've seen. 
 It stands on the steep bank of a lake a lake 
 about a mile across at the widest, and shaped 
 like an irregular triangle and surrounded by 
 rugged, jungly hills on all sides. The city slopes 
 steeply down right into the water, which is 
 bordered by embankments, temples, and ghats, 
 and at one end rises the pile of the Maharana's 
 palace. Every building is either whitewashed 
 or marble, and ornamented in the usual way 
 with balconies, screened loggias, cupolas, and 
 domes. 
 
 There are also two islands on the lake with 
 white palaces on them and tall palms. The 
 whole picture at sunset, the city lit up, the moun- 
 tains silhouetted, the lake reflecting the gold and 
 purple of the clouds, was unbelievably beautiful ; 
 and when the sun was set the city seemed to 
 
THE RAJPUT CITIES AND AHMEDABAD 31 
 
 grow whiter and the trees greener, and every 
 moment gave it a new charm. 
 The mail is going. 
 
 11 
 
 December 28, 1911, AHMEDABAD. The last 
 morning at Udaipur I got up early and was rowed 
 about the lake from eight to half-past nine. It 
 was delicious. I went to the far end and got 
 fairly close to the feeding waterfowl. Altogether 
 I made out twenty-three different kinds, including 
 five ducks and two kinds of geese, one in great 
 numbers. 
 
 I travelled down again on Friday and slept 
 at Chitorgarh. Here Peer Mahomed (my servant) 
 showed me a bad place on his foot : he had 
 scratched a flea-bite and it had inflamed all up 
 his leg. So I opened the place with my razor 
 and squirted in perchloride of mercury (one in 
 fifteen hundred) with my syringe. He whistled 
 a bit at the time, but the operation, plus a cold 
 compress, proved a great success, and next morn- 
 ing the inflammation was almost gone and he 
 hardly limped. 
 
 I got up very early and drove up to Chitor 
 Fort. It looks fine from below, rising five hundred 
 feet steeply to a long ridge from the plain. It 
 made an imposing silhouette against the sunrise. 
 When I got up, I found it too much in ruins to 
 
32 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 be easily taken in, except the great Tower of 
 Victory, built in 1400 odd. It was a curious 
 polygonal shape, each story with its angles over 
 the sides of the one below it. It is nine stories 
 high and full of re-entrant angles which give 
 great play of light and shade. Every inch inside 
 and out is elaborately carved and very well : but 
 the carving is subdued, so as not to spoil the 
 general unity (as it so often does here). It is 
 all of a rich golden-brown sandstone. 
 
 From Chitor I had to go back to Ajmere, where 
 the Queen's visit had thrown the trains into 
 hopeless confusion. Mine was nearly three hours 
 late : however, I got away at last at midnight and 
 arrived here (it is fifteen hours from Ajmere) at 
 three o'clock on Sunday, Christmas Eve. 
 
 I have stayed here four days, partly to get a 
 peaceful Christmas and partly to see a University 
 friend. 
 
 I have done a certain amount of sight-seeing, 
 and there are several good temples and mosques 
 here, though the only alpha plus things are two 
 windows in a mosque, entirely filled with stone 
 tracery like the most delicate lacework. They 
 are said to be the best in all India. 
 
 But the chief interest of staying here is the 
 glimpse I have got of I.C.S. social life. I am 
 enormously impressed by the I.C.S. spirit and 
 work altogether. It breeds a self-reliance which 
 we see only in the navy. My friend, for instance, 
 left Oxford just a year ago : he has already been 
 
THE RAJPUT CITIES AND AHMEDABAD 33 
 
 six months in charge of a sub-district, a place of 
 about the area and population of Hertfordshire. 
 Here he is the sole responsible white man ; big 
 things he has to refer to his collector ; but he 
 does all the ordinary administration on his own. 
 He goes round visiting every village, audits the 
 accounts and registers, tries all cases up to six 
 months' imprisonment, hears complaints, arbitrates 
 disputes, inspects the wells, roads, and sanitation. 
 If there is any crime or distress, it is he on whom 
 the population depend for succour. Left to them- 
 selves they are quite helpless. 
 
 Just now he is double-worked by reason of 
 the famine. His district is the centre of it. They 
 had seven inches of rain instead of a normal 
 forty, and crops in proportion. He has to go 
 round ascertaining how many men are out of 
 work by reason of the failure of the crop. Where- 
 ever necessary, he opens relief-works of well- 
 digging, and puts those who can't work on to 
 the free dole list. The whole district has fifty 
 thousand men on relief-works and nineteen thou- 
 sand on the free doles. Then he has to save 
 the cattle, either concentrating them and sending 
 food to them, or transporting them to districts 
 where fodder is plentiful. 
 
 These cattle are a great difficulty and expense: 
 every peasant has two or three of them. To 
 kill them would so outrage Hindu feeling as to 
 make further work impossible indeed, it would 
 raise rebellion. If you leave them with their 
 
 4 
 
34 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 owners, they are fed, but the owner and family 
 starve, especially the family. He will spend his 
 relief wages, first on cattle and self, secondly on 
 wife and children, and thirdly on father and mother. 
 Another thing the Government does is to 
 advance money to the landlords and farmers to 
 enable them to keep their men employed and 
 at least sow next year's crop. The danger now- 
 adays is not actual scarcity of grain, since that 
 can be brought by rail, but acute unemployment. 
 No monsoon means no harvest, and so no wages 
 for the coolie, and no capital for the ryot to start 
 next year's work with. 
 
 I have heard a lot here about the difficulties of 
 policing the districts. The two great obstacles 
 are, first, that you can never be sure your police 
 are straight: they are always liable to be suborn- 
 ing false evidence and blackmailing innocent 
 people, or else to be bribed by the criminals to 
 mishandle their case. Secondly, the people will 
 never give evidence if they can help it, and will 
 often swear to the innocence of criminals whom 
 they have actually seen committing the crime. Of 
 the numerous yarns I heard on the subject (all 
 from the personal experiences of district officers), 
 three just illustrate these particular difficulties. 
 
 The first happened to a collector in Sindh. He 
 was riding along one morning when a man came 
 up to him very much excited and in great distress, 
 crying for justice. The collector asked him what 
 was the matter, and he said his camels had been 
 
THE RAJPUT CITIES AND AHMEDABAD 35 
 
 impounded by a policeman for no just cause. 
 " You're lying," said the collector, from politeness or 
 habit ; but the man persisted, and so the collector 
 rode with him to the pound, where, behold, were 
 seventy-six camels. 
 
 The collector then found the policeman and 
 asked him why he had impounded them. The 
 policeman replied, " Sahib, these camels were 
 trampling and spoiling the young trees planted by 
 the canal-side, and this rascal refused to restrain 
 them." So the collector turned crossly to the man 
 and said, " What the deuce do you mean by com- 
 plaining to me ? " or vernacular to that effect. But 
 the man shook his head sadly and said, " There 
 were no trees." Thinking this little discrepancy 
 rather curious, the collector rode down to the 
 canal, taking both parties with him, though the 
 policeman remembered an urgent engagement else- 
 where. Arrived at the canal, no sign of a tree. 
 So the collector freezingly inquired where the trees 
 that had been trampled were. " Oh, sahib, the 
 trees which this accursed man's camels have 
 trampled are to be planted next spring ! " 
 
 A remark like that shows up a little of the 
 difficulty there must be in administration on 
 Western lines where the most elementary Western 
 presuppositions can't be relied on. If that case 
 had been sent up to the collector on paper, he 
 would probably have believed the policeman 
 against the camel-man. As it was, he tried to get 
 the policeman sacked. 
 
36 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 I must say I thought the police at Delhi were 
 rather ruffians. They knocked native drivers about 
 far more than the white Tommies did. The worst 
 of it is that the natives regard oppression as the 
 normal conduct of a Government official, and won't 
 grasp that the Government is on their side. 
 
 Another demoralizing fact is that the worse you 
 behave to them the better they behave to you. I 
 heard a story from Cocks, in Bombay, which illus- 
 trates this. Some years ago he was in the bazaar at 
 Calcutta and wanted change for a fifty-rupee note. 
 There was a whole row of squatting old merchants, 
 each with piles of money by him : so he politely 
 asked one of them if he would change his note. 
 The man only refused surlily and spat. All down 
 the line it was the same, rudeness and expectora- 
 tion ; till suddenly a big negro sailor who was 
 watching came up to him with a grin and said, 
 " Sah, you too dam civil to these chaps : you gib 
 me de note." He then took the note and went 
 up to the nearest merchant and shook his fist 
 in his face. Result, note cashed in less than no 
 time. 
 
 But, to return to the police, the second failing I 
 mentioned is brought out by this story, which I 
 heard from the man it happened to. A dacoity 
 occurred in his collectorate. (A dacoity is robbery 
 with violence by a gang.) The chief constable was 
 on the track of the dacoits, but appealed for help. 
 So the collector got together some mounted police 
 and rode all day, covering seventy miles in a fruit- 
 
THE RAJPUT CITIES AND AHMEDABAD 37 
 
 less effort to catch up. He had just dismounted at 
 sunset, when a man rode breathlessly in to say that 
 the constable had rounded up the dacoits on a hill 
 some four miles away and urgently needed help. 
 So they all remounted and pressed on. Arrived at 
 the hill, they found the constable and his men alone. 
 
 " Where are the dacoits?" cried the collector. 
 
 " Dacoits ? There are no dacoits here, sahib" 
 
 " But you sent this man to fetch me and help 
 you catch them." 
 
 4 'No, sahib, that fool has made a mistake. There 
 were some peaceful travellers here, whom I ques- 
 tioned and found to be quite harmless. That 
 is all." 
 
 So the collector had to sleep there and ride 
 home again next day. He had not gone far when 
 the " fool " appeared cautiously out of the jungle, 
 and said : " There was no mistake, sahib. I did 
 not deceive you. I gave the message as the chief 
 constable gave it to me. But while I was gone, 
 the dacoits gave him half the booty and he let 
 them go." 
 
 Inquiry proved this to be the truth: and this 
 was a chief constable, a man who had risen by 
 years of service and was responsible for the policing 
 of a district as large as a county. Apparently you 
 can never be sure that your own police won't betray 
 you like this : so naturally the English civil ser- 
 vants feel rather aggrieved that when these scandals 
 come to light abuse is heaped (by English M.P.'s) 
 on them, though all their efforts are directed to- 
 
38 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 wards trying to keep their native subordinates 
 straight. 
 
 What astonishes me is that the same M.P.'s who 
 dilate on these abuses are in the same breath 
 urging the supersession of English officials by 
 Indians. 
 
 As to the difficulty of obtaining evidence, the 
 following example is one of many. A leading man 
 in a village openly cut off the head of another 
 before the eyes of a Government clerk and pati- 
 ivallah (i.e., messenger) and a score of villagers. 
 He threatened to kill any one who gave information. 
 No villager said a word. The clerk, after five days' 
 hesitation, told, not his own native superior, but 
 another. The latter, being an enemy of the clerk's 
 superior, refused to believe the story. No white 
 official heard of the matter for nine months, and it 
 was a year before the man was brought to trial. 
 Even then the evidence was hopelessly conflicting. 
 The judge, an Indian, was glad to find this ground 
 of acquittal, and the murderer got off. 
 
 In another case of the same sort a father had 
 seen his son murdered, and then swore it was an 
 accident, for purely sentimental reasons, because 
 the murderer was his nephew. Sometimes this 
 reluctance is due to intimidation ; but more often 
 because the frame of mind of the average man is 
 not, as in England, " I may be the next victim : 
 therefore I will help the law"; but " I may be the 
 next murderer ; therefore I will thwart the law." 
 The whole tradition of the people is that the 
 
THE RAJPUT CITIES AND AHMEDABAD 39 
 
 Government's interest is not theirs, and this attitude 
 makes civilization next to impossible, as it does in 
 schools. They have no glimmering of the boon 
 that security of life and property is : and conse- 
 quently they haven't got it, as they might easily 
 have if they wanted it. 
 
IV 
 PALITANA, MOUNT ABU 
 
 Indian railways An unexpected honour Satranjaya The 
 Jains Kathiawar A pathetic wardship Hospitality Iso- 
 lation and insularity Abu The Dilwarra temples Caste 
 Fatalism A case for the S.P.R. 
 
 December $\ i 1911, MOUNT ABU. Before coming 
 here, I had a most interesting trip to Palitana. As 
 the map shows, it is away down in a corner of 
 Kathiawar, where travellers scarcely ever go ; in 
 fact, the railway was onlyopened in November, and 
 is not marked on the map. It is the capital of a 
 Native State, and close to it is the holy mountain 
 Satranjaya, a famous place of pilgrimage. 
 
 The guide-book said there was a dak bungalow 
 there i.e., a little rest-house provided by Govern- 
 ment where there are no hotels ; so I telegraphed 
 for breakfast to be ready there, and travelled by 
 night from Ahmedabad. 
 
 Railway travelling is a vile business here. The 
 trains are Very slow (well under twenty miles an 
 hour), dirty, and roundabout (e.g., to get from 
 
 Udaipur to Abu last week, fifty-five miles as the 
 
 40 
 
PAL1TANA, MOUNT ABU 41 
 
 crow flies, I had to travel three hundred and 
 seventy-five miles by train, as the map will show 
 you). You invariably start, arrive, or change at 
 about 3 a.m. But what is far worse is the native 
 crowd. A native who wishes to travel always comes 
 to the station twelve or fifteen hours before the 
 train is due. Innumerable others who don't wish 
 to travel come to gossip with the passengers and 
 guard. Consequently every station is choc-a-bloc 
 with a very dirty and malodorous horde of men and 
 women, all chattering as loud as they can bawl, 
 pausing only to spit every tenth or eleventh second 
 (they chew betel-nut, which produces pints of crim- 
 son spittle, too disgusting for words), jostling each 
 other and blocking the whole platform with their 
 bundles of bedding, while at intervals the hawkers 
 of glutinous foodstuffs utter intolerable droning calls 
 from the midst of a seething, pestilential swarm of 
 flies. 
 
 This is a true picture of every station ; and every 
 train (except mails) stops at every station a quarter 
 of an hour for purposes of gossip, and at all large 
 stations half an hour or an hour ; e.g., on the way to 
 Palitana the train stopped fifty-five minutes at 
 Virangam (change), thirty minutes at Wadhwan, 
 thirty-five at Dhola, twenty-five at Sihor (change), 
 and fifteen or at least ten minutes at sixteen others. 
 Consequently we took twelve and a half hours to 
 cover a hundred and seventy miles. 
 
 However, I got to Palitana at last at 9 a.m. and 
 was met on the platform to my natural surprise 
 
42 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 by the Prime Minister of the State ! There was 
 no dak bungalow, and so my telegram had been 
 taken to the Administrator, the only white man in 
 the place, and he, having a proper sense of what 
 is due to sahib -log, had told the Prime Minister to 
 meet me and see that I was cared for in the 
 Maharajah's guest-house. So I was put into a 
 tonga and told that I should find breakfast at the 
 guest-house. The servant here, however, in spite 
 of my telegram, was of opinion that I should prefer 
 to climb the mountain on an empty stomach, and 
 had only provided tea and biscuits. I could get 
 nothing else but chapathi (an alias for dough rolled 
 out flat) : as for bread, there was no such thing in 
 the city. Fortunately, I had brought some provi- 
 sions, and managed to make a sort of meal. But 
 before starting for the mountain I impressed on the 
 Prime Minister's A.D.C. that I hoped for something 
 more substantial when I came down. 
 
 The tonga took me to the foot of the Satranjaya 
 Mountain. It stands two thousand feet straight 
 out of the flat plain, and there is a Pilgrims' Way up 
 the side a steep paved path varied by flights of 
 steps : an average gradient of one in ten and about 
 four miles in length. You could see it like a ribbon 
 up the mountain side, thickly dotted with red and 
 white figures, ascending and descending. 
 
 I was taken up in a dholi, which is a square small 
 mattress slung on two poles and carried by four 
 men. It took an hour and a quarter to get up. 
 The whole top of the mountain is occupied by a 
 
PALITANA, MOUNT ABU 43 
 
 city of Jain temples. There are two ridges and a 
 depression between, and the whole area is covered 
 with these temples, scores of them. There are 
 nineteen chief temples, each with courtyards and 
 shrines round them ; and the rest of the ground is 
 filled up by minor temples, ranging in date from 
 A.D. noo to the present day, but all of the same 
 regular Jain type. By the way, if you want to 
 know what these temples are like and to understand 
 how Jain architecture differs from Hindu, etc., you 
 might get Fergusson's " History of Indian Archi- 
 tecture," which has pictures of all the temples I 
 am likely to see or mention, and is well indexed. It 
 is a very celebrated work out here : it was there that 
 I first saw a picture and description of Palitana, 
 which made me wish to visit it. 
 
 The Jains are not a very big sect : they are 
 analogous to the Quakers in Christendom. Their 
 founder was a contemporary of Buddha's, and, like 
 Gautama, a reformer of Hinduism, whose followers 
 afterwards broke away from Hinduism. What the 
 difference is between Jainism and Buddhism I can't 
 quite discover : all the Jain temples have statues of 
 Buddha as the chief image. (No, not Buddha, I 
 find, but one of the twenty-four Tirthankers or 
 deified Jain saints. Buddha may be one of them.) 
 The best-known characteristic of the Jains is their 
 extreme doctrine of the sanctity of life. The Hindu 
 does not kill wantonly, but except for cows, monkeys, 
 and peacocks, and local sacred beasts, he will kill 
 under provocation. The Buddhist is much stricter, 
 
44 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 and won't even kill snakes. But with the Jain it 
 amounts to fanaticism. Not only won't he kill even 
 a flea (their holy men carry brushes to sweep insects 
 out of their path, lest they should tread on one), but 
 he makes great efforts to keep things alive at all 
 costs. They put up beautifully carved feeding- 
 places for birds, and they build homes for diseased 
 cattle, which are to our ideas horribly cruel, for they 
 keep animals there with broken legs and festering 
 sores. At Ahmedabad I met a string of about 
 fifty Jain women carrying canvas bags from which 
 water was trickling. On inquiry I found they were 
 carrying all the fish from a pond ten miles away, 
 which had dried up, to another pond where there 
 was water. 
 
 Their whole character seems to be of a piece with 
 this. Like their namesake, they are gentle and as 
 good as gold. They are men of peace, devout and 
 simple : and in Palitana at least they were most 
 friendly, showed me everything, though none of 
 them knew a word of English, and made no 
 demands for backshish. The very oiio/z-coolies 
 only asked for eight annas each for carrying me up 
 the mountain and down again I wouldn't walk it 
 for eight rupees. 
 
 From the city there is an illimitable view of 
 burnt brown plain with the sea in the dim distance 
 to the south-east. All India that I have seen since 
 Delhi (viz., Rajputana, Gujerat, and Kathiawar) is 
 bare brown plain, with occasional ranges of bare 
 brown hills. From July to October it is said to be 
 
PALITANA, MOUNT ABU 45 
 
 bright green and then gradually dries up : but this 
 year, owing to the monsoon's failure, it is already as 
 brown as it is usually in March, and the trees are 
 bare as well. One can just see where the grass 
 once was, but the only noticeable vegetation on 
 the plains is cactus and thorn, both sparse. This 
 makes the jungle look much barer than the veldt 
 with its grass : it is more like the Karoo and the 
 Kalahari : but the soil is not such a red brown here. 
 Wherever there is enough water to irrigate a few 
 acres you see an emerald-green patch ; but they are 
 few and far between : nine rivers out of every ten 
 are absolutely dry. Even the Sabarmati at Ahmed- 
 abad, which in flood-time is four hundred yards wide, 
 thirty feet deep, and a rushing torrent, is now about 
 fifty yards wide and one foot deep. 
 
 I got back to Palitana about half-past three, had 
 a bath, and found a solid five-course meal prepared, 
 which I gladly consumed. After that I went to call 
 on the Administrator. He, his wife, and her sister 
 were the only white people in the State. He had 
 been there six years, seventeen miles from a railway 
 until last November. He runs the State autocrati- 
 cally, for the Rajah is only eleven. I saw him, poor 
 little boy ! and felt very sorry for him. He has to 
 live with the Administrator, since his life would not 
 be worth a month's purchase in the zenana, among 
 his mother's rivals. He can only visit his mother 
 occasionally and in charge of a trustworthy guardian, 
 and of course mustn't touch any food there. He was 
 one of the Queen's pages at Delhi, and when I saw 
 
46 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 him he was dressed up in his Durbar clothes and 
 jewels, as he was going to visit his mother and show 
 them to her. 
 
 The Administrator's wife had made a most lovely 
 garden, full of flowers and fruit, which showed what 
 a splendid soil that bare brown earth would be if it 
 could get water. Her vines were incredibly big for 
 two years old. 
 
 He is just going to be shifted, at which he groused 
 a bit : he said he had got to know and be trusted 
 by the people and could be really useful in Palitana : 
 in his new place it would mean starting all over 
 again, new language and everything. I heard just 
 the same complaint in Ahmedabad. A young man 
 very rarely gets even three years in one district, and 
 is being perpetually shifted to places where language 
 and customs are entirely different. It is all done 
 by the central Government at Bombay, and they 
 move people about quite irrespective of their 
 qualifications. 
 
 January 4, MOUNT ABU, RAJPUTANA. The chap- 
 lain here has been most kind and put me up for a 
 week. It is wonderful how hospitable people are 
 here : if you have a mutual acquaintance at all, they 
 are quite offended if you go to a hotel. I think it is 
 all part of the " two thousand to one " feeling which 
 pervades the whole atmosphere the feeling that 
 each Englishman is holding two thousand natives; so 
 that white colour is a passport to hospitality. Also 
 people are lonely and like company. Oddly enough 
 
PALITANA, MOUNT ABU 47 
 
 they don't welcome one as being lately from home. 
 No one out here takes the smallest interest in 
 English affairs. 
 
 Nor do people take any interest in Indian 
 politics either. That is, I suppose, the result of 
 autocracy. They follow Bombay politics to a certain 
 extent, though far less than in England. But a 
 question like the partition of Bengal excites not the 
 faintest interest on the " Bombay side": no one 
 knows anything about it. As you say, it is a 
 question for the experts, so I shall have to wait till 
 I get to Bengal before I hear anything worth 
 recording about it. I told you what I heard at 
 Delhi : but I have met no Bengal people yet. No 
 Bombay man ever goes to Bengal. Leave is invari- 
 ably stored up till one can go to England : and con- 
 sequently I have met lots of men with twenty or 
 thirty years' experience of Bombay Presidency and 
 all its peoples, who are literally more ignorant of, 
 say, the United Provinces than lam. This curious 
 condition seems typical of the dividedness of India. 
 At Delhi unity was the note. Away from it I am 
 more and more impressed by the fact that, apart 
 from the Raj, India is, or would be, merely a 
 geographical expression. 
 
 I do think it is a great pity I.C.S. men don't travel 
 more, but one can't blame them. I do blame some of 
 their wives, however. Occasionally they aggravate me 
 beyond words and some of the soldiers are nearly 
 as bad. To talk to them one might think the popu- 
 lation of India was one hundred and fifty thousand 
 
48 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 and white. " Agra ? No : I've never been there : 
 not a bad place, I believe ; Northumberland Fusiliers 
 isn't it? . . . Jaipur? Where's that ? Gh\ there ! 
 That's a native place, isn't it ? You must go to 
 Peshawar ... the best dances going : I simply 
 long to go there," etc. As for history, I believe 
 if you asked them when Indian history began, 
 they'd say " With Clive, I suppose ! " 
 
 To return to the Partition for a moment, the 
 thing I should like to know was whether Lord Curzon 
 did it purely for administrative efficiency or from 
 political motives as well. Lovat Eraser emphatically 
 says the first, and at present I gather that is true. 
 If so, it seems to me that the new arrangement is 
 demonstrablymore efficient, th ough of course more 
 expensive. 
 
 This place is extremely pretty, four thousand feet 
 up in the Aravalli Hills. The scenery reminds one 
 of the Alpes Maritimes behind Beaulieu, only the 
 colouring is browner. They have had some rain here 
 (though not much), and so there is more vegetation 
 than below ; the mountain-sides are covered with 
 shrubs the only ones in flower now are the jessa- 
 mine bushes. There is a little lake at the end of the 
 town, and from the tops of the hills one can look 
 right over the plain, five thousand feet below. 
 
 The place is the hot-weather resort of the Raj- 
 putana Government. ... It is famous for the two 
 Dilwarra temples, about a mile from here, dated 
 A.D. 1000 and noo. They are small, but inside 
 are most exquisitely carved the most elaborate and 
 
PALITANA, MOUNT ABU 49 
 
 delicate marble carving in India. It is quite impos- 
 sible to describe, and so far I have failed to get any 
 photographs of it, but I hope to. 
 
 I have had two days' shooting total bag one 
 spur-fowl. 
 
 January 5, 1912, MOUNT ABU. On Monday I 
 went to see the Dilwarra temples. Like all really 
 first-class things, they exceed their description : 
 their carving easily surpasses any I have ever seen 
 anywhere. The ceilings are the chief marvel : 
 their construction is astonishingly complex, but the 
 effect is not a bit laboured. I believe it took seven 
 years to repair three square yards of it, where the 
 pigeons had knocked off the pendants. 
 
 As in all Jain temples, I had to leave outside 
 my umbrella, my dog, and my low-caste servant. 
 What can be said of a religion which gives one-fifth 
 of the population the same rights of worship as an 
 umbrella ! The sweeper-caste's position really does 
 seem to me intolerable all the dirty work, no rights, 
 and no hope : since it is a fundamental principle 
 that as a man is born so he must die. A very little 
 education must surely drive him to revolt. 
 
 The Jain temples are full of scores of images of 
 one of the twenty-four deified Tirthankers or saints. 
 The ritual and chanting looks and sounds, at a 
 short distance, very like a Roman Mass. Whether 
 Jainism is necessarily idolatrous I don't know : I 
 expect the ordinary pilgrims do worship the actual 
 image. Popular Hinduism seems to be a most 
 
 5 
 
50 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 extreme and childish form of idolatry so absurd that 
 it can't survive among educated men. At present 
 the educated classes, being high-caste and there- 
 fore " bosses," cling to a Hinduism voided of all 
 its definite content or else become pure materialists. 
 
 The famine years rather brought out the view 
 which the Brahmans take of the low-caste people, 
 to judge by the quaint stories I've heard. 
 Apparently the Maharana of Udaipur was highly 
 indignant when asked to organize relief works 
 for the Bhils in his State, who were starving 
 in thousands. The Bhils are great thieves and 
 poachers, rather gipsyish and unruly, and the 
 Maharana had been chortling at their extermina- 
 tion. " I have been thanking God," he pathetic- 
 ally remarked, "that He has been pleased to rid 
 me of these troublesome Bhils. Why do you wish 
 me to undo the work of God when He is kind ? " 
 
 And the poor people themselves regard this as 
 quite a normal attitude. When a free-food bureau 
 was opened by the English residents at Neemuch 
 in 1900, the natives wouldn't touch the food, even 
 though they were starving, because they believed 
 the sahibs wanted to poison them and so have less 
 trouble in collecting their corpses than if they 
 starved all about the district. 
 
 Another typical refusal occurred later on in that 
 year when cholera followed the famine. The 
 English had the wells analysed and warned the 
 people which were infected, but they paid no 
 attention, saying, "We shall not get cholera unless 
 
PALITANA, MOUNT ABU 51 
 
 it be God's will, and if it be God's will we have no 
 right to try and thwart it." Which seems to show 
 that the doctrine of free-will is the foundation of 
 civilization. 
 
 I must just tell you one more story I heard about 
 another queer rub-up of East and West. This 
 time it was between a/0? and an English police- 
 inspector in Kathiawar. The jogi, i.e., holy man, 
 claimed Divine inspiration, and attracted such a 
 multitude of followers that the police took notice 
 of it. So the inspector sent for the jogi and 
 questioned him. The jogi said he could read 
 men's inner thoughts. " Read mine then," said 
 the inspector. The jogi asked for a night's 
 preparation "to speak with the stars." In the 
 morning he brought three sealed envelopes and 
 laid them at the inspector's feet. " Let the sahib 
 think of a flower," he said. So the inspector 
 thought of " Mignonette " and said, " I have 
 thought." 
 
 " Let the sahib open the first writing." 
 He opened it and found a scrap of paper on 
 which was written " MIGNONETTE " in scrawly 
 capitals. He was much surprised, as there was 
 no possibility of a trick. Then the/0^' said again, 
 " Let the sahib think of a jewel," and again the 
 one he thought of was written on the paper inside 
 the envelope. So when ihzjogi said for the third 
 time, " Let the sahib think of a city," he determined 
 to think of one the jogi had never heard of, 
 and selected Johannesburg. As soon as he had 
 
52 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 thought of it he picked up the third envelope, 
 and on opening it found a paper with " JOHANISIBURG 
 written on it ! 
 
 I heard this from the inspector himself, and he 
 
 said that an English scientist had had a go at the 
 
 jogi afterwards and had been scored off every time. 
 
 Apparently the jogi could force thoughts as a 
 
 conjuror forces cards. 
 
FROM ABU TO KARLI 
 
 Indian views of government Minor officials The Ghats 
 
 Karli. 
 
 January n, 1912, LONAVLA JUNCTION, G.I. P. 
 . . . Apropos of what you say about Indians in the 
 I.C.S., of course the whole crux of the question is 
 simply " Is there a sufficient supply of Indians 
 who've got the moral, political, and common sense 
 requisite for responsible administration?" One 
 ought to add perhaps " according to Western ideas," 
 for we can never give up insisting on the applica- 
 tion of some of our political ideas, such as liberty 
 and justice and government for the good of the 
 subject. The trouble is that Indians haven't yet 
 accepted even these : their political ideas are seen 
 in operation in the Native States, and a purely 
 Indian I.C.S. would inevitably try to run its 
 administration more on those lines than on ours ; 
 and that would, I should think, produce a total 
 breakdown of the Western machinery we have 
 set up. 
 
54 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 Many Englishmen think the Native State 
 method of government is more congenial to the 
 people than ours and should be encouraged. I 
 heard this view urged by a civilian who has been 
 several years in a Native State as Diwan, and 
 helping to introduce Western reforms there. For 
 instance, they have had compulsory free education 
 there for the last eight years, but it has made very 
 little difference. The poorer classes don't send 
 their children unless they are driven, and the 
 native inspectors are slack. Yet Nationalists give 
 you glowing accounts of the progress of universal 
 education in that State, which is an instance of 
 how they will state and live upon an idea quite 
 regardless of whether there is any fact corre- 
 sponding to it. I believe they are really unable 
 to distinguish between the intention and the effect 
 of a policy. 
 
 Even in British India the civilians are hard put 
 to it to make the administration efficient, because 
 they can get absolutely no co-operation from the 
 people. I heard some more about the difficulties 
 of famine relief from one of the Gujerat men only 
 yesterday. The direst extremities won't induce 
 them to stir a yard beyond their accustomed 
 range. One village flatly refused to come to 
 some relief works because they would have had 
 to cross a river which it was not their custom 
 to cross (not from any religious reason). So 
 they just starved contentedly. Similarly, if the 
 man in charge of the works huffs them, they 
 
FROM ABU TO KARLI 55 
 
 revenge themselves by boycotting his works and 
 dying. 
 
 But where the relief is properly managed I'm 
 told they are grateful, at least in remote parts. 
 Where there is a native paper available it turns 
 them against the Government. The men all sit 
 round in the evenings while the wise man of the 
 village reads it out, and it distorts every act of 
 Government till it seems a selfish, blood-sucking 
 piece of tyranny, and enough dirt sticks to kill 
 all gratitude. 
 
 The people who suffer most from this want of 
 co-operation are the police. I think I told you 
 some stories last week about the natives' reluctance 
 to give evidence. Of course, this is partly due to 
 intimidation, but still more, I gather, to their wholly 
 passive view of their relation to the State. And so 
 far from thinking, " I may be the next victim," and 
 so helping to convict a murderer, they are much 
 more likely to argue, "I may be the next murderer" 
 and so help him to escape. 
 
 Another instance of the total absence of the idea 
 of co-operation, on the other side, so to speak, is 
 the way the petty officials use their powers to bully 
 or bleed every one they can take advantage of. I 
 saw a little incident at the station at Bombay this 
 morning which roused my wrath. An English 
 Tommy was in a hurry to catch the 7.30 train 
 for Sialkot (near Kashmir). The booking-clerk 
 deliberately ignored him for some minutes, 
 though he was doing nothing, then he surlily 
 
56 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 denied the existence of the train and refused to 
 issue a ticket ; finally he shouted most offensively, 
 " It is too late ; it would take ten minutes to make 
 out [the ticket], and you shan't have it, so there ! ' 
 and flung the Government order for the ticket back 
 in the Tommy's face. I told the Tommy to travel 
 without a ticket, which he did, but he will naturally 
 relieve his feelings on the first native who annoys 
 him unprotected by a grille. 
 
 From what I've seen of them, the booking-office 
 Babus are a poisonous crowd. They keep the 
 unfortunate third-class passengers penned up in 
 front of their grille and refuse to open the shutter 
 till just before the train starts, and then often only 
 issue tickets, I'm told, to those who promise 
 backshish, and in the jostling rob them of their 
 change, or tell them the price of the ticket wrong ; 
 most of them can't read. It is the same with the 
 luggage- weighing. If I go and give orders they 
 cringe ; if I send my servant they cheat and bully 
 him. And every one tells me that this corruption 
 and petty tyranny is the curse of all minor native 
 officials in every department. It makes my British 
 blood boil, but one comforting reflection is that it is 
 a pillar of the British Raj, since every native trusts 
 any English official far sooner than a native one. 
 
 I joined Jim at Abu Road on Friday and we 
 went to Ahmedabad for the Saturday (which was 
 the Epiphany) and Sunday. Jim was busy, and I 
 had seen the sights in Christmas week, so I stayed 
 
FROM ABU TO KARLI 57 
 
 quiet mostly, and read more of Lovat Fraser. 
 The chapter on Persia I found very illuminating, 
 but when he gets back to Indian politics, e.g., in 
 the Universities Act part, he becomes obscure by 
 losing the thread of exposition in refuting charges 
 against Lord Curzon on side issues. 
 
 Yesterday I invested in a kodak, as Southern 
 India is much more primitive than Rajputana, and 
 I may not be able to buy any photographs. How- 
 ever, I doubt if my own will be a sufficient sub- 
 stitute, as there are so many ways of spoiling 
 each film at every stage of its career that the 
 chance of doing every operation right seems a 
 remote one. 
 
 This morning I set out on my second missionary 
 journey (I stay with missionaries). It has been 
 a little altered since I sent you the map : but the 
 first stage is the same, viz., a semi-camp life with 
 Jim for ten days in the Ahmednagar district. 
 Ahmednagar is near the eastern border of Bombay 
 Presidency, right in the Deccan. 
 
 The Deccan is a high, flat plateau, like the high 
 veldt (only it is two thousand feet up instead of five 
 thousand feet), and of enormous extent. Between 
 the coast and the Deccan is a strip of low, flat land 
 full of creeks and palm-trees. This is called the 
 Konkan. Then comes what corresponds to the 
 Berg in South Africa, a line of steep hills which 
 mark the rise from the Konkan to the Deccan 
 plateau. These are called the Ghats. The 
 Western Ghats (there are corresponding ones on 
 
58 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 the Madras side) run parallel to the coast some 
 sixty miles inland, from about Surat (say a hundred 
 and fifty miles north of Bombay) right down to 
 Cochin, and are a great geographical feature of the 
 land. Among other things they catch the south- 
 west monsoon and bring it down all of a heap, so 
 that while the Deccan is liable to famine, the Ghats 
 and the strip just behind them never are. This 
 place, for instance (Lonavla), is just on the top of 
 the Ghats, near the edge, and looks beautifully 
 green. I asked them if they had had a shortage of 
 rain this year, and they told me that it had been 
 nearly a hundred inches less than the average, but 
 as they had had two hundred and twenty-three 
 inches they could not complain ! 
 
 I came up by an early morning train from 
 Bombay in order to see the Karli Cave, which is 
 near here. I am now waiting for the Poona Mail, 
 in which I hope to find Jim. 
 
 The journey from Bombay to the bottom of the 
 Ghats (pronounced, by the way, to rhyme with 
 " carts," though many old residents make it rhyme 
 with " thoughts") is pretty in parts: you go over two 
 causeways through the sea, the first from Bombay 
 Island to Salsette Island, and the second from 
 Salsette to the mainland : then you run south-east 
 beside a creek which becomes a small river higher 
 up. Then a stretch of flat land. When we got 
 near the line of the Ghats we first entered a valley 
 between two spurs, then edged on to one spur and 
 the climb began. They put on two special engines, 
 
FROM ABU TO KARLI 59 
 
 as it is a one in forty gradient. After a bit we got 
 on to the watershed of the spur and ran up it ; and 
 in between the numerous but short tunnels we 
 could see a valley on either side, green and fertile, 
 with thickly wooded slopes running up to the rugged 
 brown rocks, a most beautiful view. In the rains 
 the train passes fifty waterfalls in fifteen miles. 
 Near the top was a reversing station, and we 
 doubled back along the main mountain-side till we 
 reached the plateau. 
 
 The cave of Karli is about six miles from here, 
 and I drove there. It is a most remarkable piece 
 of work, It must originally have been a small cave 
 in the side of a hill, about five hundred feet up. 
 The Buddhists, about 160 B.C., carved it into a 
 fine temple. It looks like the nave of a big 
 Norman church, a barrel roof, an aisle with tall 
 octagonal pillars having beautifully carved capitals, 
 an apse, and in the apse a domed cell containing 
 relics of Buddha. Between the pillars and the rock 
 are narrow side aisles. The entrance is by a door- 
 way in a carved stone screen. This doorway is a 
 magnificent arch. The wonderful thing is that 
 roof, pillars, capitals, screen, arch and all are just 
 carved from the solid rock, not blocks put into 
 position. The whole " building " is one huge 
 monolith carving. Its dimensions correspond 
 approximately (says Fergusson) to the choir of 
 Norwich Cathedral. One very curious thing is this : 
 all the outer sides of the capitals (z.., in side-aisles) 
 are carved with horses and bullocks, but one, 
 
60 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 and one only, has a regular and unmistakable 
 Sphinx. 
 
 When Jim's train comes in we go on to Poona, 
 where we dine at the Club, and proceed by the 
 Madras Mail to Ahmednagar via Dhond. 
 
VI 
 
 A DECCANI MISSION 
 
 i The North Deccan Elements of the population A Marathi 
 service Caste questions An upset A Christmas letter 
 ii Village administration Abuses A chance for Christians ? 
 iii Caste again Its attraction and its viciousness iv Arrange- 
 ments of a village Christian virtues Wives and widows An old 
 Tory Police stories A case of zulam. 
 
 January 18, 1912, MIRI, AHMEDNAGAR DISTRICT. 
 I have been constantly on the move since last 
 mail. I joined Jim soon after I last wrote, and we 
 dined in Poona. On Saturday morning we passed 
 Ahmednagar, but did not get out till we reached a 
 small station called Lakh, about twenty miles north. 
 There we were met by Canon King. He is the 
 head of the S.P.G. Ahmednagar Mission, which 
 has half a dozen stations in this district. 
 
 From Lakh we drove in tongas five miles to the 
 S.P.G. station of Karegao, a village of about fifteen 
 hundred inhabitants. This north Deccan country 
 is pretty thickly populated. Villages are about as 
 frequent as they are at home, but more populous. 
 Karegao is below the average size, and Sonai has 
 
 6l 
 
62 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 five thousand inhabitants ; but of course there are 
 no houses between the villages. Most of the soil is 
 closely cultivated, though there are big bare spaces 
 where the rock has come through, and one large 
 tract of " forest," i.e., bush-veldt. The staple crop 
 is a native grain in summer and millet in winter. 
 Both depend on the monsoon, which is never very 
 heavy here (under thirty inches). This year they 
 were threatened with total famine, but a most 
 unusual douse of six inches in November has saved 
 the millet, which has come up, only three feet high 
 instead of six feet, but with quite good heads. 
 They are harvesting it now. 
 
 The agriculturists or kumbis form eighty per cent, 
 of the population of the villages, and are Mahrattas. 
 Till we came they were all freebooters, but under 
 the Raj they have settled down to agriculture. 
 They retain, however, the trait of improvidence 
 and are always getting hopelessly into debt to 
 village saukars (moneylenders). They are small- 
 holders. All land belongs nominally to Govern- 
 ment, but so long as the tenant pays his assessment 
 he is to all intents and purposes owner of his fields, 
 which pass from father to son. In fact, Government 
 has recently passed an Act for these regions making 
 the land inalienable for debt, to the great dis- 
 comfiture of the saukars, who now refuse to lend 
 except at exorbitant rates (seventy-five per cent, if 
 there is no other good security), so that the kumbi 
 is left worse off than before. 
 
 The remaining twenty per cent, of the villages is 
 
A DECCANI MISSION 63 
 
 composed, first of Brahmans and Marwaris, secondly 
 of the outcaste " castes." There are two or three 
 families of Brahmans in each village, and they have 
 (but are losing) the monopoly of learning. They 
 only can marry people, and all law work is taken 
 by them. Thus they have great power, and they 
 use it to extort money from the Mahrattas shame- 
 lessly. Consequently they are much disliked (they 
 are of course a different race, for the Mahrattas 
 are Scythians) and their monopolies are being 
 questioned and challenged. They attribute this 
 to the Raj, and are consequently the most seditious 
 class in India. But their caste aloofness, avarice, 
 corruption, and unpopularity make them bad leaders 
 of the masses ; they have only the religious lever 
 to work, and Hinduism is a nebulous lever. The 
 Brahmans have, however, the advantage (uniquely, 
 I think) of being spread over every part of India, 
 and understanding a common language (Sanskrit 
 modernized) ; but their total number is very small 
 about three millions and their caste rules hinder 
 them from increasing. 
 
 The Marwaris own all the village shops and 
 stores. They came from Marwar, in Rajputana, 
 but are now the shopkeepers throughout the North 
 Deccan. They are very pale-skinned, and their 
 women wear skirts. 
 
 Besides these, there are a few odd caste people 
 about, such as the doctor-caste, the cobbler-caste, 
 and so on ; most of these castes are racially distinct, 
 but I don't know anything about them. 
 
64 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 Only the caste-people and those who are outside 
 the caste-system, such as the few Mohammedans 
 (relics of the Ahmednagar kingdom of the eighteenth 
 century) and the Christian native clergy, may live 
 in the village itself. 
 
 The out-caste tribes live outside the village wall 
 in their respective quarters. There are three of 
 these tribes hereabouts, the Mahars, Mangs, and 
 Bhils. The Mahars and Mangs are both aboriginal 
 tribes conquered by the Mahrattas and made to do 
 their dirty work. The Mahars are the scavengers, 
 and have to provide transport for any travellers who 
 come to the village and escort them to the next. 
 They also have to work in the fields for the kumbis. 
 For their services they get a little pay, and in 
 return they have seventy-two rights, but, of course, 
 they can't hold land or enter temples, or use caste 
 wells, and so they are not exactly free. It is from 
 these Mahars that the Christians here are almost 
 exclusively drawn, though some Mangs are 
 Christians too. 
 
 The Mangs are even lower caste than the 
 Mahars. To the Mahratta all outcastes are 
 equally despicable in theory ; but in practice out- 
 caste castes have been formed. So the Mahars 
 look down on the Mangs with the concentrated 
 contempt of those who have no one else to despise. 
 The Mangs are a distinct race of aborigines, 
 originating in the Central Provinces. Their func- 
 tions are to make ropes, hang criminals, act as 
 sweepers (i.e., cleaners out of closets), and form the 
 
A DECCANI MISSION 65 
 
 village band. They are also the only people who 
 will eat pig ; and as the village pig's staple diet is 
 dung, human and otherwise, this fact shows the 
 standard of Mang ideas of cleanliness. They are 
 also the sole devotees of two indigenous goddesses, 
 of child-killing and of cholera, and this makes 
 them necessary as propitiators. 
 
 The third outcaste caste is the Bhils. They are 
 a nomad, thieving gipsy tribe, great shikaris, and 
 rather respected. Their home is in Rajputana, and 
 there are not many here. But being the thief-caste, 
 English people use them for night-watchmen, and 
 we had one on guard at Karegao a condemned 
 murderer, who had done seven years in the 
 Andamans for killing a moneylender. He was 
 very picturesque, with a bamboo bow and a most 
 formidable arrow, like an assagai. 
 
 Jim was received with great ceremony and 
 escorted in procession with cross and acolytes to 
 the mission bungalow. In the afternoon the 
 mission school-children gave an entertainment of 
 songs, and we were all garlanded, after which Jim 
 held a confirmation. 
 
 On Sunday at half-past seven I attended a 
 Eucharist in Mahrathi. There are no chairs in 
 the churches, and the people squat, men one side, 
 women the other. Karegao church is shabby 
 and jerry-built, and about the size of a small 
 college chapel ; but there were 300 people present, 
 a great squash, and 105 communicants. As the 
 total number of Christians in the village is only 1 50, 
 
 6 
 
66 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 besides 130 boys and girls in the schools, there 
 must have been a good many come in from other 
 villages. There is no difficulty in making Chris- 
 tians come to church in this country. The hard 
 part is to keep them straight in between. They 
 used the Mass chants for the Creed, etc., and sang 
 a lot of hymns in attractive sing-songy ways. 
 
 We started at seven on Monday morning for the 
 next place, called Sonai, fourteen miles off. It is 
 quite cold, about 47 at sunrise, and warms up 
 to about 82 at tiffin-time, but there is always a good 
 breeze and the climate is never troublesome ; the 
 evenings are much warmer than at Delhi. 
 
 At Sonai we only stopped one day, for confir- 
 mation and pan-supari, an entertainment which 
 consists of garlanding and giving us betel-nut to 
 chew. Sonai is a large village of 5,000 inhabitants 
 crowded into a remarkably small area, of the usual 
 square mud-houses, looking like ruins, because they 
 have no roof visible, nor ornament, and the mud 
 makes a shaky outline. They have no windows or 
 chimneys, but some of the doors are well carved. 
 Just a few have covered balconies. 
 
 Sonai is in charge of a native priest. There are, 
 I think, seven native priests on this mission and 
 five English. In the whole diocese there are 
 twenty-five native clergy and forty-five English. 
 Of course they hope ultimately to raise a com- 
 pletely native ministry for India, but at present it is 
 very difficult to get them to work satisfactorily here. 
 The trouble is this. Throughout these Deccan 
 
A DECCANI MISSION 67 
 
 villages the heads of the Mahar caste became 
 Christians, and in all about half of the total number 
 of Mahars (i.e., about 30,000 out of 60,000). Con- 
 sequently the Mahars who became Christian 
 never had to break with their caste, and have 
 carried their caste feeling into their life as Chris- 
 tians. I used to think caste had its advantages, 
 but at close quarters one sees it is the invention of 
 the devil himself. It is quite diametrically opposed 
 to the Christian spirit. But the Mahars have 
 retained it, owing to their too quick conversion. 
 
 This reflection gives one pause when one chafes 
 at the slowness of Christian progress in India ; I 
 almost believe the danger is it will be too quick. 
 The last census reveals an increase of twenty-five 
 per cent, in the last ten years, three millions grow- 
 ing to four millions, and the forces are all in our 
 favour at this moment. 
 
 The consequence of this caste feeling is that most 
 native clergy, being Mahars, are unwilling to evan- 
 gelize the Mangs, whom they have immemorially 
 hated and despised don't like sharing a church 
 with them, and so on. I gather that the English 
 clergy are slowly killing it, but until it is dead there 
 will be grave defects in the native ministry. 
 Similarly the native clergy, being Mahars, have no 
 chance of a hearing from Mahrattas, even if they 
 wished to convert them, which they don't always. 
 Hardly any Mahrattas are Christians yet, but they 
 are beginning to stir. At Karegao Jim had three 
 Mahrattas coming to inquire what exactly their 
 
68 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 adoption of Christianity would involve to them 
 a thing unheard of ten years ago. Since the 
 Mahrattas are eighty per cent, of the population, 
 clearly the Christianity of the Deccan will only really 
 begin when a breach is made in their caste-case. 
 
 It is quite natural that they should be slow to 
 come ; conversion means a real sacrifice for them 
 expulsion from their caste, loss of rights, and 
 organized ostracism. But proportionately, those 
 who face it will be worth their salt, and once the 
 breach is made the Church's advance will, I think, 
 be speedy. Hinduism is in practice such a de- 
 grading, cruel, and stagnant system, that once the 
 Mahrattas have faced Christianity they can't (I 
 believe most strongly) reject it. But as presented 
 by a Mahar, they would never look at it ; so the 
 days of a native ministry can't come till there 
 are Mahrattas to take part in it. Above all things 
 we ought to avoid the creation of a Christian caste, 
 as the Mahars might easily become if they were 
 left to themselves. 
 
 From Sonai we trekked next morning in our 
 tongas (which are two-wheeled back-to-back pony 
 carts, with a Cape-cart hood) to Bhanas Hi ware 
 (rhyming with "livery"), another village fourteen 
 miles on. There are Christians in practically every 
 village, and in all big ones a mission ; but in many 
 there is not an S.P.G. mission, because the 
 Romans and American Congregationalists have 
 missions in this district and we avoid competing. 
 
 At Bhanas Hi ware Jim had the usual functions, 
 
A DECCANI MISSION 69 
 
 and I tried to shoot black-buck, but without success. 
 There is no church there, only a school chapel- 
 house, i.e., a mud-house twenty-five feet by twelve, 
 with an altar in it. 
 
 The priest here was also a native. He is trying 
 to break them of their caste habits, and has begun 
 by refusing to admit to communion those who eat 
 dead meat. This sounds autocratic and unjustifi- 
 able, but Jim does not interfere, because dead-meat- 
 eating is a sign of the Mahar caste and very 
 degrading in itself. It arises from their poverty 
 and their duties. The Mahars as village scavengers 
 have to dispose of all cattle, dogs, etc., that die in 
 the village or near it. They do so generally by 
 eating them, a cheap and easy way ; but those who 
 have seen it say that the sight of the Mahars 
 scrambling with the vultures, kites, crows, dogs, and 
 jackals for the carcass of a bullock that has died 
 of disease is most nauseating, and is the chief 
 excuse for the contempt in which the Mahrattas 
 hold them. 
 
 From Bhanas Hi ware we started this morning at 
 7.45 to come here, about sixteen miles. Hill and I 
 tried to shoot black-buck en route, but again 
 unsuccessfully. Incidentally our tonga-&nver was 
 so keen to find the black-buck that he failed to 
 look where he was going, and drove our left wheel 
 over a nine-inch stump at the same time as our 
 right wheel was in a more than usually deep rut, 
 with the result that the tonga was clean upset, and 
 sent me somersaulting from the back seat on to the 
 
;o A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 Deccan plateau, which I fortunately struck with my 
 topi, and rolled over unscathed. I got up and 
 found Hill in the seat I had so lately vacated, but 
 the wrong way up. However, he crawled out, also 
 unhurt. The driver, ponies, guns, and other 
 chattels similarly escaped injury, so we just heaved 
 the tonga on to its wheels again and proceeded on 
 our way. 
 
 We are going to stop here six days. After that 
 I start on my southern journey by myself. I 
 enclose one of Jim's Christmas letters, which is 
 more than averagely entertaining. Here it is : 
 
 " MAY IT PLEASE YOUR LORDSHIP, 
 
 " With homage, tribute, and salute, I, like 
 one of the indulgent, venerable and genuine sons 
 of London dedicate. 
 
 " That I heartily wish the gracious lady, the 
 venerable children and your noble lordship A merry 
 Christmas and A Happy New Year and fervently 
 pray to God the Almighty to give one and all long 
 life, prosperity, health, wealth, strength, wisdom, 
 eternal bliss and everlasting happiness. 
 
 " I hope that your sublime Lordship will with 
 pleasure send in the blessing letter of the season to 
 satisfy the heart of the Royal, legal and rightful 
 heir to the throne of 
 
 11 With infinite thanks to all, 
 
 " 1 am, 
 u Your just Lordship's loyal child, 
 
A DECCANI MISSION 71 
 
 11 
 
 January 2oth, MIRI. The whole subject of these 
 missions is full of excitement : all sorts of considera- 
 tions emerge one never hears of in England : but 
 I haven't time to write about it now : I must try to 
 next week. 
 
 I have not yet shot much, only a partridge and 
 some pigeons. I have missed two black-buck 
 through breathlessness, but hope to get one here. 
 It rained for a few minutes this afternoon, the first 
 I have seen since I landed. 
 
 The advantage of trekking is that one sees the 
 villages. One never hears of them in the towns, 
 unless one can get a civil servant to talk : but here 
 we camp by one every night, and one sees the 
 "real India"; for the villages hold four-fifths of 
 the population. 
 
 Each village is surrounded by a mud wall, forti- 
 fied with prickly pear : under the British Raj the 
 walls are significantly out of repair. There is a 
 gate at either end. Outside the main gate is the 
 village well and the shrine of Hanuman, the 
 monkey-god. Inside, the houses are of mud, cube- 
 shaped and windowless. Sometimes there is a 
 brick temple to Witthoba or some other "popular" 
 deity in the main street. 
 
 The village is administered by the patil or 
 headman. He is linked on to the Raj in this 
 way. The Presidency is divided into about twenty 
 
72 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 collectorates. The collector is the staple British 
 administrator. He is responsible for the collection 
 of taxes and the maintenance of order : he receives 
 all petitions and hears all grievances, and with his 
 assistants goes round all the villages every cold 
 weather, checking the registers, auditing the 
 finances, and trying petty cases. 
 
 But he clearly can't be everywhere at once, as a 
 collectorate may be the size of Wales. So it is 
 divided into six or eight talukas or districts, over 
 which the collector appoints a native mamlatdar, 
 responsible to him. The mamlatdar carries on the 
 ordinary administration of his taluka, subject always 
 to the collector's revision and supervision. Under 
 the mamlatdar are the patils in each village. The 
 mamlatdar is nearly always a Brahman, because he 
 must be educated : but the patil is (here) always a 
 Mahratta, and so there is no love lost between 
 them. The patil 's lieutenant is the village clerk, 
 called kulkurni, who keeps the registers and 
 accounts : he, again, is a Brahman. 
 
 It is a sad fact that the Indian officials, mam- 
 latdar, patil, and kulkurni, and police, are almost 
 without exception hopelessly corrupt and oppres- 
 sively avaricious. (Some civilians say the mam- 
 latdars are no longer corrupt themselves, but their 
 clerks are.) When the English civil servants can 
 get at facts, they can remedy the particular injustice 
 and punish the official : but this is very rarely 
 possible, as the victims will never give evidence if 
 they can help it. We had a case only two days 
 
A DECCANI MISSION 73 
 
 ago, as follows : It is the duty of the Mahar caste 
 to provide bullock-carts for travellers ; these are 
 obtained through the patil. So when Jim reached 
 Karegao village, he applied to the patil for the 
 bailgharris to take him on to Sonai, and they were 
 forthcoming. They travelled by night, and it so 
 happened that one of the drivers was jolted off his 
 seat and, falling, broke his arm. This accident 
 brought him to our notice, and we found that he 
 was no Mahar, but an unoffending Mohammedan 
 who was passing through Karegao on the way to 
 join his wife and family in another village. The 
 patil had seized him and tried to blackmail him, 
 demanding a bribe under threat of sending him 
 and his cart on Mahar's work for Jim. The unfor- 
 tunate man couldn't or wouldn't pay, so he was 
 sent, and his journey interrupted for three days 
 quite illegally. But he made no complaint, and 
 never suggested he was badly used : he merely 
 ascribed the whole adventure to his line of fate. 
 This is a typical instance of petty oppression : many 
 are far more serious. Even the missionaries can 
 get no legal business done unless they bribe the 
 mamlatdars clerk, and no village conceives of a 
 lawsuit as anything but a bribing-match. 
 
 It is gloomy to think that all this goes on under 
 our Raj. Indeed, in one respect the villagers are 
 worse off than before we came. In old days, when 
 an official or moneylender became intolerably op- 
 pressive, the villagers would rise and murder him 
 or burn his house : but if they do so now they are 
 
74 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 punished, and so there is no such limit to official 
 oppression. 
 
 But of course they have the remedy in their own 
 hands if only they would use it ; but they can't 
 imbibe the idea that Government is their friend 
 and will punish its own officers for their benefit. 
 
 Looked at from another point of view, the 
 situation suggests speculation as to the future 
 of Christianity. Here are the best and most re- 
 sponsible of the minor administrative posts in the 
 hands of Brahmans who have proved themselves 
 corrupt, oppressive, and moreover disloyal. Now 
 there is arising another educated class, namely, the 
 Christians, taught in mission schools and colleges 
 under English supervision a more practical kind 
 of education than the Brahmanical. These are 
 the most numerous challengers of the Brahmans' 
 monopoly. Moreover, their religion alone of all 
 Indian religions strictly inculcates honesty and 
 mercy. One can't pretend that Indian Christians 
 are yet anything like so honest and merciful as the 
 average Englishman : but their superiority to the 
 Hindu in honesty is already sufficiently marked to 
 be a commercial asset. The railways and big com- 
 mercial firms often prefer a Christian, and they can 
 always find employment. 
 
 Thus you have a rapidly growing class of nearly 
 equal ability and superior honesty to the Brahmans, 
 ready to supplant the disloyal Brahmans in admini- 
 strative posts. But hitherto the barrier of caste has 
 been upheld by Government. The Christians being 
 
A DECCANI MISSION 75 
 
 outcaste Mahars, the caste-people strongly object to 
 being under their authority, and hitherto Govern- 
 ment has refused to appoint them in proportion 
 to their deserts, and has appointed Mahrattas or 
 Mohammedans of inferior abilities. This conflict 
 between caste and efficiency is of momentous 
 importance and very complex. For instance, if 
 Government persists in excluding Christians from 
 their due, they may become disloyal, not unnaturally 
 (there are signs of it already), and there will be 
 a growing seditious force to deal with, with the risk 
 that the two ablest and most educated native com- 
 munities may unite in disloyalty at some future 
 date. On the other hand, if Government opens 
 the door to Christians (e.g., in many Government 
 schools, I'm told, the Hindus threatened to with- 
 draw in a body if Mahar Christians were admitted ; 
 but in the few cases where Christians have been 
 admitted, the Hindus have climbed down), the 
 result will be to give a great rise in status to 
 Christianity and a great blow to caste, but very 
 likely a great danger to the purity of Christianity. 
 However, these questions are so large that I 
 mustn't go on about them, as it is past bedtime 
 and I want to go out early after buck to-morrow. 
 
 in 
 
 January 2$rd, MIRI. All this trek I have been 
 up against the rather crude form of the caste 
 
76 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 question presented here, and more and more its 
 great danger is borne in on one. It seems to me 
 that the trouble before the Church is not, in the 
 long run, that the caste-people will reject Chris- 
 tianity, but that they will. try to incorporate caste 
 in it. 
 
 This I believe has actually happened in the south 
 with the oldest Indian Christians the so-called 
 Church of St. Thomas, which dates traditionally 
 from the Apostle. Here you find Christian com- 
 munities with regular caste distinctions ; and each 
 caste has a separate Communion service, etc. The 
 result, as you could guess, has been to deaden and 
 de-Christianize the whole religion of the Church. 
 
 It is interesting to try and discover exactly where 
 the attraction of caste lies it clearly has enormous 
 attractions and where its paralysing effects are 
 rooted. Its chief attraction seems to be that it 
 organizes society independently of Government. 
 Each individual falls into his allotted niche auto- 
 matically at birth, and the lines of his life are laid 
 down for him. He learns his father's trade, for 
 which he has a long-inherited aptitude. If he is 
 disabled from any cause, his family, and, failing 
 them, his caste, are bound to support him. Con- 
 sequently, the social problem is automatically 
 solved without Government intervention. 
 
 In fact, it is a kind of unofficial Socialism the 
 corner-stone of it is the joint family system. Each 
 piece of land belongs to a Hindu householder and 
 his family jointly. They work it in common, and 
 
A DECCANI MISSION 77 
 
 each member has a legal right to an equal share of 
 the produce. 
 
 The result of the system is that a man's indi- 
 viduality is lost in that of the family and the caste. 
 The most obvious defect of the caste system is its 
 hopeless unprogressiveness, since its essence is that 
 every one should die in the niche in which he was 
 born ; but this loss of individuality seems to me to 
 be morally much worse. A man is taught to con- 
 sider himself not a unit, but a mere limb or member 
 of his family and caste. The result of ttus is, first, 
 to narrow the range of all his moral energies. He 
 could never play the good Samaritan to any one 
 outside his caste, because he is no more connected 
 with or responsible for his next-door neighbour of 
 another caste than he is for a foreigner or a 
 vegetable. Similarly, as Jim said in his first letter, I 
 think, there is no Mahrathi word for "friend" which 
 does not also mean kinsman. Caste, in fact, enforces 
 a duty towards your neighbour based, not on the 
 inclusive principle of charity, but on the exclusive 
 principle of a corporation. Again, the individual 
 loses moral responsibility ; he exchanges for his 
 own conscience the customs of the caste, and this 
 has produced a constant tendency for the standard 
 to lower itself, since a corporate conscience can 
 deceive itself so much more easily than an indi- 
 vidual's. Consequently, Hinduism is saddled with 
 a number of degrading customs which it has no 
 motive-power to throw off. 
 
 Finally, it undermines moral stamina, because 
 
78 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 nobody has the feeling that he stands or falls by 
 his own efforts. There is no penalty for laziness 
 and no stimulus to keep a man up to the mark. 
 
 The net result is that Hindu society is not only 
 unprogressive, but thoroughly rotten, both from a 
 Christian and from an ordinarily decent point of 
 view. The lesson to be learnt is that caste, in 
 spite of its plausibility, is the invention of the devil 
 and must be broken up if India is to rise to a 
 tolerable Christian ideal. 
 
 But it will die very hard, because its victims are 
 necessarily blinded to its viciousness. It can be 
 done, however, because the Mohammedans have 
 done it. 
 
 IV 
 
 January 2$rd, MIRI. . . . This trek has given 
 me a first glimpse of the villages. They are all laid 
 out on much the same plan. The first thing one 
 comes to is the Mang-wadi, or Mangs' quarter, 
 well outside the walls. The Mangs are rope- 
 makers, hangmen, and scavengers, but sadly neglect 
 the last office in their own quarters. It is advis- 
 able to hurry through this ; and a little farther on 
 one finds the Mahar-wadi, which is a little less 
 trying. Then comes the village wall, about fifteen 
 feet high, of mud, encircling the village proper. 
 No outcastes may live within it. Inside the gate 
 one finds a long main street and many crooked 
 
A DECCANI MISSION 79 
 
 little side-streets. All the houses are cubes of mud 
 with practically no windows, which is perhaps as 
 well, as the family store of manure is heaped up 
 against the wall outside. Some houses have quite 
 fine doors, and the shop-fronts are nicely carved. 
 All the shops are run by Marwaris (who come from 
 Rajputana). 
 
 I forgot to mention the well, which is generally 
 close outside the gate. It is the women's club or 
 pub, and the drink it provides looks far deadlier 
 than any gin-palace's liquids. The one at Karegao, 
 for instance, was a baoli a big well with steps 
 leading down to it. The women stood in the 
 water on the steps and just washed their dusty 
 pitchers and then filled them. What percentage 
 of the village slops drains into it I don't know, 
 but it must be a sporting chance whether a drink 
 gives one cholera, typhoid, dysentery, or worms. 
 Fortunately, the Christians, being outcastes, are 
 not allowed to use it. I wonder whether the 
 Christians will learn elementary sanitation and so 
 increase faster than the Hindus. Already they 
 are visibly cleaner ; indeed, that is one of the 
 most obvious improvements the change of religion 
 makes. It is also generally allowed that they 
 are more truthful and more able to control their 
 passions, and I think their faces, especially the 
 women's, are decidedly gentler. But everything 
 goes by comparison. 
 
 One of the padre's boys last Lent resolved to 
 give up lying. He got it down to sixteen lies 
 
8o A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 the first day and twenty-five the second, but then 
 broke down. In fact, the padre said the chief 
 difference in morals generally was that the Hindu 
 sins and isn't ashamed, whereas the Christian sins 
 and is. Which is a great advance, after all some- 
 what in the ratio of mediaeval Christendom to 
 paganism. And the Christians here are the dregs 
 of the ages. 
 
 I think the difference is more noticeable in the 
 women than in the men, partly because the mission- 
 aries are the only people who make any effort to teach 
 the women even the elements of decency and partly 
 because the Christian women aren't so prematurely 
 aged by early marriages. The child-marriage 
 system, by the way, has produced rather a crux 
 to the working of the mission among the women. 
 The girls are much keener to come to the mission 
 schools than the boys are and their parents are 
 readier to send them, so the mission has twice as 
 many girls as boys in its schools. Consequently 
 only half the girls can marry Christian boys. One 
 might wish the other half to marry Hindus and 
 convert them, but no Hindu will marry a girl who 
 is older than thirteen, and not often over ten. The 
 Church forbids marriage under fourteen. So there 
 is a deadlock, and many girls remain unmarried, 
 and spinsters are wholly unprovided for in the 
 village social system. 
 
 An almost equal difficulty is caused by the 
 widows. No one will marry a widow. Even 
 Christians can't be induced to. Indian custom 
 
A DECCANI MISSION 81 
 
 leaves only three courses open to a widow: (i) to 
 become sati, now forbidden by law ; (2) to become 
 her mother-in-law's drudge, and this may mean the 
 worst kind of slavery, since every one regards it as 
 the direct result of sin in a past life that she has 
 become a widow, and so the mother-in-law is 
 entitled to rub it in for all she is worth and make 
 her do the whole dirty work of the house ; (3) she 
 can become a prostitute a cheerful choice, which 
 has to be made by about twenty-two million women, 
 five million of them children child widows. " By 
 their fruits . . . ." And yet there are plenty of 
 theosophists and other good people who gravely 
 explain that Hinduism is as good a fig-tree as 
 Christianity. I can only say that if they can 
 swallow a thistle like the status of widows there 
 is but one conclusion to be drawn ! 
 
 We went to tea yesterday with the son of the 
 leading landowner here. He croaked over the 
 growth of luxury among the kumbis in quite a 
 homely way. In the good old days they only 
 wore a loin-cloth ; now the extravagant young dogs 
 nearly all wear a shirt. Also wages have risen in 
 the last fifteen years from two or three rupees a 
 month to six or eight. 
 
 I hear the same general abuse of the police here 
 as in Gujerat. The most surprising story I have 
 heard comes from Dharwar, south of this. Three 
 policemen were taking a prisoner across country 
 when they stopped at a river to perform their 
 morning ablutions. While they were washing the 
 
 7 
 
82 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 prisoner " bunked " (such an expressive word !). 
 They were much annoyed, as they knew it was 
 their fault. However, they concocted a story of 
 a rescue and a scuffle in which the prisoner escaped. 
 But feeling that their narrative was a little bald and 
 unconvincing, they looked round for some corro- 
 borative detail calculated to give it verisimilitude. 
 The most promising detail they could see was a 
 stray villager doing his ablutions on the opposite 
 bank of the river, so they shot him and carried 
 off the corpse to headquarters, where they triumph- 
 antly produced it, and their story passed current 
 till one of the three quarrelled with the others and 
 turned informer. 
 
 I've no reason to believe this story isn't true; 
 but I think most of these yarns should be taken 
 cum grano. Even I discovered one of them to be 
 a distortion of the facts only yesterday. I heard 
 the Ahmedabad bomb case quoted against the 
 police. The truth was this, as I heard on the best 
 authority at Ahmedabad. The police were looking 
 for the man who threw a bomb at Lord Minto. A 
 man reported he had discovered a bomb-factory. 
 So the police raided the place indicated, a detached 
 shed, and caught two men actually making bombs. 
 But the trial revealed that the two men had no 
 notion what they were doing, and had only been 
 hired for the day by the informer, who, in order to 
 get the police reward, had filled a shed with the 
 various ingredients of bombs and hired two inno- 
 cent coolies to start packing them into shells. He 
 
A DECCANI MISSION 83 
 
 got seven years. That is what is so confusing. 
 One never knows whether the police are faking the 
 evidence, or the witnesses blackmailing the police, 
 or some outside party doing both. 
 
 The police are by no means the only offenders. 
 The patils are everywhere accused of zulam, i.e., 
 extortion and oppression. This is the sort of thing. 
 One of the S.P.G. padres, on coming to a village, 
 asked the patil to procure him a sheep (travellers 
 always procure supplies through the headman). 
 The patil told him he could not get one for less 
 than five rupees, as they were scarce. The market 
 price is two rupees eight annas : so the padre said 
 he would do without. 
 
 After dinner a poor woman appeared and asked 
 to speak to him. In fear and trembling she said 
 she was anxious to sell her sheep to the padre-stf^, 
 since she needed money : but as the sahib would 
 only offer eight annas, she really couldn't do it. 
 " Who said I only offered eight annas?" asked the 
 padre. " The patil told me so, sahib, and with 
 many threats he tried to force me to sell." 
 
 This constant stream of evidence that Indians 
 use the authority committed to them to chivy and 
 oppress the weak, and take bribes from the rich, 
 seems to me to show the big fact which the 
 Nationalists must alter before they can justly claim 
 self-government. 
 
VII 
 
 THE SOUTH MAHRATTA COUNTRY: GOA 
 
 Bijapur The S.M.C. The Londa-Mormugao railway Goa A 
 Town Council at work Pan-Islamism Hindu metaphysics 
 Sugar-crushing Hindu morals. 
 
 January 31, 1912, PANJIM (NEW GOA), PORTU- 
 GUESE INDIA. I started off from Ahmednagar on 
 Thursday, the 25th, at i a.m., and after twelve 
 hours of beastly trains arrived at Bijapur about one 
 o'clock. Bijapur is now nearly deserted, but for 
 two hundred years it was one of the most important 
 towns in India. An enterprising Mohammedan 
 governor of it revolted from the old kings of the 
 Deccan and made himself independent in 1489. It 
 soon became the most powerful State in South 
 India. Goa belonged to it when the Portuguese 
 came in 1510; and in 1565 it wiped out its only 
 serious Hindu rival, the Rajah of Vijayanagar (of 
 whom more next week). For a hundred years the 
 King of Bijapur was top dog, but in 1686 he was 
 overthrown by Aurangzeb, being the last great 
 victim of the Moghuls. 
 
 The relics of Bijapur's greatness are an extra- 
 
THE SOUTH MAHRATTA COUNTRY: GOA 85 
 
 ordinary number of very good buildings, just miss- 
 ing the first rank of all. But I have seen no 
 town with so many separate fine buildings : there 
 were about thirty mosques, tombs, and palaces. 
 The sight of the place is the tomb of King 
 Mohammad Adil Shah ; it is called the Gol 
 Gumbaz. It is " the Taj of South India," but 
 toto ccelo different. It is quite plain and uniquely 
 massive. The dome is only twelve feet less in 
 diameter than the dome of S. Peter's, and the 
 domed space inside is the largest in the world. 
 It looks it, too, when you get inside. The archi- 
 tecture of it is a wonder, as Fergusson explains 
 at length : but one has to see it to grasp what 
 he means, I think. There were a lot of swallows 
 hawking flies high up in the dome, looking clean 
 out of shot. 
 
 From Bijapur I went south, through the South 
 Deccan country, the same rolling flats as near 
 Ahmednagar, but more uniformly fertile a great 
 cotton country. The Deccan extends roughly as 
 far as a line drawn from Goa to Madras : south of 
 that is the Carnatic. The South Mahratta railway 
 is so primitive as to be rather comfortable : for 
 instance, it runs on wood-fuel, which makes no 
 smuts, though it sometimes fails to boil the water. 
 
 I stopped from Friday to Monday at a town in 
 this district. My host there has been for years on 
 its municipal council, and told me about its working. 
 If I have time and energy left I will write to you 
 about it. 
 
86 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 The number of Christians there is very small, 
 about one hundred and seventy, but they are all 
 caste-people, of various castes ; and I dare say they 
 will make a better nucleus than the thousands of 
 Mahar Christians in the North Deccan. Their 
 whole tone is certainly higher. 
 
 Jim had told the people down here that I wanted 
 to go to Goa, so the chaplain of Dharwar very 
 kindly arranged to take me there. Dharwar is the 
 southernmost collectorate of Bombay Presidency, 
 and the chaplain there has Goa for one of his out- 
 stations. So he combined an official visit with 
 escorting me there, and I joined him at Dharwar 
 on Monday evening. 
 
 On Tuesday morning we set forth for Goa, the 
 padre and I. Soon after leaving Dharwar the 
 country became jungly and got progressively 
 wilder and denser. At first it was like bush-veld ; 
 then there appeared a lovely fern-like bamboo or 
 rather it was like a giant asparagus, fifty feet high 
 and growing in great clumps ; and this bamboo 
 gradually ousted everything else till the whole 
 jungle was one forest of it, a most lovely sight. 
 Then it became denser again, with bamboos inter- 
 spersed and towering. 
 
 After passing Londa, at twelve o'clock we came 
 to the Ghats, which, as I told you the other week, 
 run right down the west coast of India. It took 
 us three hours to get down them, and the scenery 
 was magnificent alpine in contour and tropical 
 in vegetation. A wealth of green forest trees 
 
THE SOUTH MAHRATTA COUNTRY: GOA 87 
 
 covered the great hills from top to bottom, except 
 where the rock was precipitous, and as the train 
 wound in and out, over ravines and spurs, past 
 waterfalls (now small, in the rains torrential) and 
 over viaducts, one saw the long line of Ghats 
 stretching like an irregular rampart for miles and 
 miles, till the green became palest blue and was 
 lost in the haze. 
 
 When we reached the bottom we were in Portu- 
 guese territory and only forty miles from Goa. 
 These last forty miles were almost as lovely as 
 the Ghats, which formed their background. 
 First, the bamboos began again, but in greater 
 variety, the most prominent being of the same 
 type as one sees at home, but grown into great 
 bushy clumps fifty feet high. These were gradu- 
 ally succeeded by palms, which for the last twenty 
 miles monopolized the scene great tall waving 
 coco-nut-palms, most brilliantly green, now in dense 
 groves seventy feet high, now lined in giant hedge- 
 rows, like French poplars, round the even brighter 
 rice-fields, now banked up the slopes which framed 
 the winding creeks and rivers that became more 
 and more frequent as we approached the sea. 
 
 We reached Mormugao, the railhead, at sunset, 
 and proceeded to this place by steamer. Goa is 
 an island between the mouths of two rivers. The 
 harbourage on either side is magnificent, except 
 during the south-west monsoon, when Mormugao 
 alone is sheltered ; but the river silt has made a 
 bar that is only passable at high tide. 
 
88 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 What the possibilities of the place are I don't 
 know. The Portuguese are hopeless slacksters. 
 The railway to Mormugao is entirely a British 
 concern, and we even have to run the telegraph 
 for them. 
 
 The history of Goa is most thrilling. After 
 Vasco da Gama's voyage, the Portuguese at first 
 only opened factories in native cities Calicut, 
 Cochin, and Quilon ; but when Albuquerque came 
 out in 1509 he saw that these factories, even 
 backed by forts, existed only on sufferance, which 
 Arab jealousy made precarious. He therefore 
 decided to annex a base, and chose Goa, which 
 belonged to the King of Bijapur, two hundred 
 miles inland. So he took it, after desperate fights 
 and adventures, and it soon became the richest city 
 in India, with magnificent churches. 
 
 Then the Dutch beat and ruined the Portuguese ; 
 the site proved pestilential, and so the city was 
 gradually deserted and the jungle swallowed every- 
 thing but the churches. These have remained 
 splendid and rich ; and the pilgrimage to the 
 tomb of S. Francis Xavier is made by Indians of 
 all religions. Now the final blow has fallen ; the 
 Republicans have confiscated the churches and all 
 Church property. The decree doing so has for 
 the moment been suspended, so there may be a 
 chance yet. Otherwise, the churches must go to 
 ruin. As a crowning piece of villainy, the whole 
 of the pilgrims' offerings made at the great expo- 
 sition of S. Francis's body in 1910, and amounting 
 
THE SOUTH MAHRATTA COUNTRY: GOA 89 
 
 to Rs. 30,000, has been confiscated and pocketed by 
 the new Governor ! 
 
 The Goanese are all keen Catholics, and the 
 result of the Republican outrages is that there is 
 a movement among them in favour of going over 
 to England. The natives, too, inland, dislike the 
 Portuguese rule, which means heavy taxes, cor- 
 ruption, and neglect. Our guide to-day spoke of 
 it (i.e., of transference to British rule) with en- 
 thusiasm ; but the people are so inert that I'm 
 afraid they won't strike. For our part, we should 
 much like to have Goa, which is the Delagoa Bay 
 of the Deccan. All the Deccan cotton, etc., ought 
 to be shipped at Mormugao ; but Portuguese sloth 
 prevents our developing the place they won't 
 dredge the bar, and so on. Besides, the place is 
 a nest of salt-smugglers. 
 
 We drove over to-day and saw old Goa. The 
 situation is lovely, on a rise in a palm forest over- 
 looking a silvery creek which winds back towards 
 the distant grey-blue Ghats. 
 
 The place is dead, silent and deserted ; the forest 
 has closed in all around it, and when we came there 
 was no sign of life except the chanting of the Mass 
 in the cathedral the one church still used. Beyond 
 the canons, there is no population whatever. One 
 of them showed us the Bom Jesus Church and 
 S. Francis's tomb. There are three other huge 
 sixteenth and seventeenth century churches, with 
 magnificently garish reredoses of gold, a most won- 
 derful sight in the setting visible and remembered. 
 
90 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 There is a museum there with relics of Vasco 
 da Gama, Albuquerque, and the rest, in the middle 
 of which have been stuck a ludicrous stuffed Mer- 
 cury and a red-capped female labelled Republica, 
 both only fit for November 5th. 
 
 Coming back, I could not get stamps here 
 because there is a public holiday to celebrate the 
 anniversary of, as far as I can make out, the 
 assassination of King Carlos, and the place is 
 officially lit up to-night ; the people don't seem 
 at all keen about it, though. 
 
 The climate here is the limit of relaxing ; it has 
 been about ninety day and night, and as damp as 
 a steam laundry a great fever-hole, swarming with 
 mosquitoes. 
 
 I must stop now, as it is past ten, and I have 
 to start at six to-morrow for Madras. I hope to 
 stop one night en route at Vijayanagar, the dead 
 capital of the Hindu kingdom I mentioned just now. 
 
 February 2, 5 a.m., IN TRAIN, DHARWAR. -I 
 will take this opportunity of telling you about the 
 Town Council of that place I was staying at last 
 week. It is a wholly undistinguished city of 30,000 
 inhabitants, which lives on cotton-jenning. For 
 the past twenty years or so it has had municipal 
 self-government. The Council is elected by all 
 payers of two rupees in taxes, and it administers 
 the town's revenue of Rs. 60,000 (,4,000), and 
 is supposed to do all the things an English 
 municipality does. 
 
THE SOUTH MAHRATTA COUNTRY: GOA 91 
 
 My host there has been on this Municipal Council 
 for years and years, and told me a lot about its 
 working. He says that it has undoubtedly been 
 a failure so far. It is always incompetent and 
 generally corrupt. Few Indians seem to have a 
 glimmering of the idea of disinterested public ser- 
 vice. They go in for politics purely to see what 
 they can get out of it, either in cash or in adver- 
 tisement estimable in terms of cash. This makes 
 the elections naturally corrupt, and when a man 
 has been elected he has no sense of either duty 
 or responsibility. Consequently, he doesn't turn 
 up at council meetings unless something lucrative 
 is on, and there is often no quorum. When there 
 is one, nothing is considered on its merits, but 
 always in the light of the particular axes to be 
 ground. 
 
 The result is endless insincere discussion and 
 obstruction, and nothing is done. Into this comes 
 also the deep-rooted Indian dislike of taking re- 
 sponsibility. Even where no corrupt motive is 
 working, they won't make a definite decision if they 
 can possibly help it. If they are driven to do so, it 
 is probably never carried out, as they have no 
 executive officer, and won't create one for fear of 
 lessening their own power. Finally, if an enter- 
 prising man does by great efforts get the council to 
 move, his reforms are likely to be indefinitely hung 
 up owing to governmental red-tape and over- 
 centralization. 
 
 The roads, sanitation, etc., of the place were very 
 
92 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 primitive, and my host told me he had been cease- 
 lessly struggling for elementary reforms, but unless 
 he could see a thing through from start to finish 
 himself, it never got done ; and they don't often let 
 him do that. He told me several stories to illus- 
 trate this, and I will give you two of them as 
 examples. 
 
 The first is this. There are practically no w.c.'s 
 or any equivalent in the town, so he started a 
 scheme to buy a field outside the town and install a 
 " trench system." The native doesn't mind walking 
 half a mile every morning : it is quite a common 
 plan. Of course, intrigues at once began about the 
 buying of the field, and the first thing they did was 
 to exclude my host from the committee appointed 
 to deal with his scheme. So he had to correspond 
 with this committee to get anything done. After 
 nearly a year he got them to agree on the field he 
 wanted. Then the P.W.D. Engineer had to be 
 got hold of to sanction it, and it was another six 
 months before he could be induced to come and 
 look at it. When he came, the committee showed 
 him the wrong field, and he reported it as unsuit- 
 able. It took six months more to rectify this 
 " error," and then the engineer wrote to ask if the 
 right field was for sale, and they said it wasn't, 
 when it was. 
 
 After months more the engineer was got to come 
 and see the right field, but by this time there was 
 a new engineer, who disliked the trench system ; 
 so the whole scheme was remitted to the committee 
 
THE SOUTH MAHRATTA COUNTRY: GOA 93 
 
 for reconsideration. They are still reconsidering it, 
 and so, in spite of my host's efforts, after six years of 
 agitation, the people still use the streets for these 
 unsavoury purposes. 
 
 The other case was the building of a school. 
 This had been discussed for five years and once 
 looked like getting through, only the Director of 
 Public Instruction in Bombay ordered new plans 
 with differently shaped windows, and this gave 
 the obstructionists their chance. There is no 
 school yet. 
 
 Altogether my host gets little thanks for his 
 services. They think him a nuisance, but they 
 find him so necessary that they always re-elect him. 
 In fact, it is only he, so another man told me, that 
 has kept the place solvent. At Dharwar, a similar 
 town, they said just the same : but there, there is no 
 Englishman to keep it going and the municipality 
 has been suspended at least once. This has 
 repeatedly to be done, and that fact in itself shows 
 that Lord Ripon's policy is not quite a success. 
 It is a great pity, as I don't see how the Indians 
 can become fit for political self-government if they 
 make such a hash of municipal affairs. However, 
 it's no use blinking the facts, and if this instance is 
 as typical of all India as it seems to be of the 
 Deccan (I have heard no two opinions about it and 
 a native councillor himself told me it was a farce), 
 it is no use thinking of trusting Indians with more 
 important powers until they show themselves fit to 
 exercise these. 
 
94 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 You ask for continuous news about Bengal, but 
 I have been farther from informed opinion than you 
 have. People here ask me what I know. If I hear 
 anything in Madras I will let you know. 
 
 This part of India is much more primitive than 
 the north fewer trains, no hotels, hardly any 
 one who speaks English, and very few European 
 shops. 
 
 What is much more curious is that Peer 
 Mahommed (my servant) clearly feels himself an 
 entire foreigner here. He has an unbounded con- 
 tempt for all the people, even the Mohammedans. 
 " They not knowing Mohammedan 'lijin bad 
 peoples," as he puts it ; he doesn't speak Kanarese, 
 and very few people hereabouts speak Hindustani ; 
 and he has to cook all his own food. He is far 
 more a compatriot of the Mohammedans of Persia 
 and Syria than of the South Indians. He told me 
 that if it hadn't been for his wife he would have 
 settled at Jerusalem when he was there, and did not 
 seem to regard it at all as being abroad ; and he 
 spoke of Arabia in the same way, but he'd sooner 
 die than settle here. He also asks me at intervals 
 for news of the war in Tripoli, which all shows the 
 strength of the Pan-Islamic sentiment as transcend- 
 ing " national " distinctions. I heard an Indian 
 Judge at Delhi criticizing the proposed Moslem 
 University on that ground ; he said it would be a 
 centre of political intrigue. Already (he said) Turks 
 and Persians foregather at Aligarh, where there is a 
 
THE SOUTH MAHRATTA COUNTRY: GOA 95 
 
 Mohammedan College, and preach a cosmopolitan 
 Pan- 1 slam ism. Of course, the Judge was a Hindu, 
 but he also denounced the proposed Hindu Univer- 
 sity, as he declared it was a machination of the 
 reactionary Brahmans. 
 
 My last host was an authority on Hindu 
 philosophy, and I left feeling rather faint. As 
 Hegel is to Hodge, so is Hinduism to any other 
 philosophy I've come across. Apparently it is 
 consistent with Hinduism to be either a Theist or 
 an Atheist or a Polytheist or a Pantheist. The 
 only dogmas which are really fixed seem to be 
 transmigration of souls and may a, i.e., that all 
 existence is illusion, a kind of disease of the Abso- 
 lute. Not only is all experience illusion, but the 
 experiencing soul is an illusion too. And if you 
 ask (I don't advise you to) how the experiencing 
 soul, being a reflection of the Absolute, can be the 
 victim of illusion, they reply that illusion itself is 
 an illusion. After which you fetch the keeper. 
 
 The serious part of it is that metaphysics isn't 
 confined to a few harmless dons, but permeates to 
 the proletariat. I went to call the other day on 
 a native municipal councillor, and found in his 
 courtyard a beggar singing lugubriously to a man- 
 dolin accompaniment, and was told he was a Ve- 
 dantist who had once been a Mohammedan, but 
 had now left his wife and family, feeling it his 
 vocation to sing the praises of the Absolute,, which 
 must be a little difficult, since I always understood 
 the Absolute has no attributes. 
 
96 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 It isn't surprising that such people are incom- 
 petent at mere business. I went out on Sunday 
 to see a sugar farm. Sugar is a very lucrative 
 crop; it makes a profit of Rs. 100 per acre. But 
 it was all very primitive. .The canes were crushed 
 between rollers worked by four oxen, and the juice 
 was boiled down to gul (Anglice toffee) in a big 
 and dirty pan in the open air. The Government 
 has established experimental farms to demonstrate 
 improved methods ; but the cultivators won't take 
 the trouble to go and see them. So the Govern- 
 ment has to send instructors to the cultivators, 
 and we went over on the occasion of an instructor's 
 visit to this farm. The most notable improvements 
 he was inculcating were (i) how a saving of a hun- 
 dred per cent, in fuel was possible by substituting 
 an oven-furnace for an open bonfire, and (2) how 
 an increase of a hundred per cent, in the price 
 of the g&l was obtainable by skimming off the filth 
 before pouring it into the moulds. We hadn't been 
 there five minutes before we suggested several 
 equally subtle improvements, as any white man 
 would have had to. For instance, the juice from 
 the crushers was laboriously carried in pails to a big 
 tub, and thence again baled out to take it to the 
 cauldron or pan when that was ready for it. The 
 crushers were cleverly placed on lower ground than 
 the tub, and the tub than the cauldron. If they 
 had been vice versa the juice would have flowed 
 through pipes of itself, and much labour and finger- 
 ing would have been saved. But when we gently 
 
THE SOUTH MAHRATTA COUNTRY: GOA 97 
 
 pointed this out to the owner he only smiled blandly 
 and answered, " Ah, yes ; but it will take time." 
 
 On the way here yesterday my host told me 
 some lurid details about Hindu morals. Two of 
 the few repeatable facts were that hardly any Hindu 
 man keeps straight before marriage, and most of 
 the well-to-do keep concubines afterwards. And 
 they aren't a bit ashamed, he said of well, prac- 
 tices which Juvenal would stickle at recording. In 
 fact, many of them have religious sanction, or can 
 be so excused. At the festival humorously called 
 Holi " it is obligatory to say obscene things and 
 meritorious to do them." And though the Brah- 
 mans sonorously preach morality, they are whited 
 sepulchres of the most baneful type. In all these 
 matters he declared the Christians were vastly 
 better (I should hope they were/) in fact, above the 
 European standard, because their religion makes 
 them ashamed of what their environment rubs in. 
 
 It's beginning to get hot here. I'm told that 
 in Sindh in the hot weather they carry a coffin on 
 every train ! 
 
VIII 
 SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 i Plague precautions Railway officials Vijayanagar Madras 
 Social functions The Seven Pagodas ii Church questions 
 Mass-movements Two Indian slums Madura The Temples 
 Trichinopoly iii Tanjore An Indian view of Brahmans A 
 medical officer's story The temple The palace Back to 
 Bombay iv Medical details A fire Bandra. 
 
 i 
 
 February 6, 1912, BUCKINGHAM CANAL, NEAR 
 MADRAS. I'm afraid my last letter may have been 
 a very dull one, as I was so tired when I wrote it. 
 So as I am now on the slowest conveyance known 
 even in India, viz., a towed house-boat, I take the 
 opportunity of beginning this week's. 
 
 I left Panjim (New Goa) on Thursday morning 
 by the seven o'clock boat. The sunrise over the 
 creek was lovely. We arrived off Mormumgao about 
 a quarter-past eight, but the Republican Govern- 
 ment had played us a little joke, and forbidden 
 the boat to land us there on or after February ist, 
 which it was, on plea of plague. A curious result 
 of plague is that it excites officials to take quite 
 fatuous precautions against it, and no useful ones. 
 
SOUTHERN INDIA 99 
 
 In this case it involved our being landed two miles 
 farther on up the creek at Vasco da Gama, whence 
 those bound for Mormumgao had to walk ; similarly 
 the plaguey people of Mormumgao walked out and 
 got in at Vasco. I never heard that a two-mile 
 walk killed fleas, and as the tug in any case never 
 comes to the quayside at Mormumgao I can't see 
 what was gained by the change. 
 
 While waiting for the train at Vasco I got some 
 stamps. I wholly failed to get any of a higher 
 value than twopence ; they are almost unprocurable, 
 but as one could get five different sorts new for 
 a penny, I amassed a good many, plus some used 
 ones the postmaster had. 
 
 On the way back in the train I tried to photo- 
 graph some of the scenery, but I don't know whether 
 they will come out. 
 
 I got as far as Dharwar that night. ... I must 
 say the missionary ladies are far more attractive 
 than the ordinary run of women out here, not 
 because they're better (which they are), nor because 
 they're prettier (which they aren't), but because they 
 have got something to do and are keen about it, 
 which teaches them to say what they think, and 
 this seems to me the one sine qua non of tolerable 
 conversation only, of course, it would result in 
 total silence for some of the others if they adopted 
 it as a rule. 
 
 From Dharwar I started on Friday morning at 
 the savoury hour of four, and reached Hospet 
 (which I marked on the map I sent you) at one 
 
ioo A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 o'clock. Here occurred a characteristic scene with 
 native officials. I had forgotten to re-book at the 
 place where my return from Goa expired, and so 
 as soon as I reached Hospet I went to the station- 
 master and told him I had overridden my ticket 
 and wanted to pay the difference. The station- 
 master and ticket-collector thereupon consulted the 
 book of rules, where they found that Rule 92 was 
 to this effect : " If a passenger override his ticket, 
 and on alighting inform the guard that he has done 
 so before he is detected, he shall be liable to a 
 penalty of one rupee : otherwise he shall pay 
 double fare." 
 
 Would you believe it, these two fatuous officials 
 tried the whole time I was eating luncheon to make 
 me pay double fare because on alighting I had 
 informed the stationmaster instead of the guard, so 
 that my case came under " otherwise " ! However, 
 I was taking none of that argument; but it is typical 
 of the way in which Indians are incapable of using 
 one atom of discretion apart from the written rule. 
 And when I offered to leave them my name and 
 address, for a long time they would only reply : 
 "That is not our will and pleasure." 
 
 From Hospet I proceeded seven miles to Hampi 
 in a bullock-cart. This vehicle is innocent of 
 springs, but has an awning, and they made me a bed 
 of sugar-canes. It was not very uncomfortable, but 
 a good deal too hot, and it took two hours, which 
 is very good going for bullocks ; they were little 
 humpy ones and trotted quite well. 
 
SOUTHERN INDIA 101 
 
 Hampi is one of the most remarkable places 
 I have ever seen. You come suddenly on a range 
 of granite hills steep and individual, like a region 
 of giant ant-hills set base to base ; and they are 
 strewn from top to bottom with thousands of granite 
 boulders of every conceivable shape, from round 
 globes to beam-like slabs, piled and poised in 
 every imaginable fantastic balance. The only 
 things I ever saw at all like it were the Matoppos 
 round Rhodes's grave, but Hampi was much bleaker 
 and more weird, since, if I remember, the Matoppo 
 boulders were well rounded. Strange balancing 
 stones they both had in great numbers. Through 
 these hills (Hampi is well in the range) runs the Tun- 
 gabhadra River, a quick-flowing, eddying, swish- 
 ing stream, boulder-strewn like a Dartmoor " water " 
 and about a hundred and twenty (perhaps only a 
 hundred) yards wide at this moment. It winds and 
 splashes down a course that is too wild to be called 
 a bed and too open to be called a gorge, and the 
 huge boulders shone against the water in the 
 evening sun, and monkeys sat and played on them. 
 
 On the banks of this river are the amazingly 
 vast ruins of the great city of Vijayanagar, which 
 I mentioned last week. From 1350 to 1560 the 
 Hindu kings of Vijayanagar ruled over the whole 
 of South India from the Kistna River to Cape 
 Comorin, and incessantly fought the Mohammedan 
 kings of the Deccan. Finally, in 1565, the four 
 Mohammedan kings (I think : perhaps only the 
 last two) of Ahmedabad, Ahmednagar, Bijapur, 
 
102 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 and Golkonda combined and defeated the King 
 of Vijayanagar, then at the height of his power, at 
 the great battle of Talikot. The rout was so com- 
 plete that Vijayanagar itself was not defended, and 
 the Mohammedans burnt and sacked it for four 
 months, since when it has been a desert. The 
 Indians don't seem to come back to old sites as 
 Europeans do. 
 
 The circuit of the city is twenty-four miles, and 
 in extent the ruins are only comparable to those of 
 Rome. The place is so inaccessible that it is not 
 often visited, and I had no idea of its size, so I 
 had only allowed one day there, which wasn't 
 nearly enough. To go round the main buildings 
 in the heart of the city near the river meant a 
 walk of nearly eight miles. I walked from five 
 o'clock to eight that evening, and though 1 was 
 fearfully tired at the end (I had got up at four, 
 remember), I enjoyed it enormously. 
 
 On first arriving, at half-past four, I had tea 
 by the roadside on the top of a ridge overlooking 
 the river. I sat looking along the river, which 
 was on my left. Between me and it was the great 
 temple (called Sri Pampapatiswami), with its go- 
 puram (Fergusson explains what gopurams are) 
 a hundred and sixty-five feet high, one of the 
 largest in India. From the great temple the 
 old Sacra Via led along the river, passing for 
 the first half-mile down the stone skeleton of a 
 splendid bazaar, each shop being framed in three 
 monoliths, a weirdly ghostlike avenue, all still and 
 
 
SOUTHERN INDIA 103 
 
 empty, with grass where the roadway had been. 
 In front of me and behind were dotted scores of 
 little temples and shrines of Greek simplicity 
 made with huge monolithic blocks ; while on the 
 right, on the reverse slope of the ridge, was another 
 large temple, Krishna's, much ruined, but as big 
 as the Parthenon. 
 
 After tea I followed the sacred way, which after 
 passing the bazaar became stone-flagged and wound 
 along the river, cut in the rock and in one place 
 tunnelling. The views down the gorge-bed were 
 most attractive in the sunset ; at one point were 
 the piers of a big bridge. 
 
 After two and a half miles, and passing a few 
 shrines and temples, this road ended in Witthoba's 
 temple, easily the most beautiful Hindu temple I 
 have seen. There were four pavilions in one 
 enclosure, with finely pillared porticoes, the pillars 
 elaborately carved. Very graceful thin pillars were 
 joined to the thicker ones, giving a great effect of 
 lightness. I find I can't draw it ; perhaps Fergus- 
 son illustrates it, though his pictures of Vijayanagar 
 are much less adequate than most. 
 
 By this time it was quite dark, and I had one 
 and a quarter hour's walk under the full moon to 
 the dak bungalow, through another long skeleton- 
 bazaar ending in a great temple, then over rough 
 ground and through all manner of courts, buildings, 
 stables, and towns which I was too tired to notice 
 much. 
 
 The dak bungalow is three miles from the 
 
104 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 river and still well within the ruins, being itself a 
 temple with the walls filled in by Government. 
 One has to bring one's own food and bedding. 
 
 On Saturday I got up at six and tried to hire 
 a pony to cover the ground : but the first man to 
 promise me one (from a neighbouring village) 
 afterwards said he had lost it, and finally only a 
 colt was produced, which, when I mounted, stood 
 as if about to spread-eagle, and refused to move : 
 so I had recourse to the police-inspector's bicycle, 
 which took me over two miles till the road petered 
 out ; and I did the rest on foot. I went over 
 the same ground as before, in reverse order, as the 
 book said there was nothing so fine among the 
 other ruins, and I wanted to take some photo- 
 graphs: of which I took seven. In the courtyard 
 of the great temple the monkeys came down and 
 let me feed them. 
 
 I rejoined the bullock-cart at ten o'clock and 
 caught the one o'clock train at Hospet for 
 Madras. 
 
 We got to Madras at six on Sunday morning. 
 Just outside they gave us all passports, which you 
 have to present in person for endorsement to the 
 health officer every day for seven days, another 
 futile precaution against plague. However, I got 
 exempted. 
 
 I had a bath and changed at the station and 
 went to St. Mary's Church, the oldest English 
 church in India, where there was Parade Service 
 at eight followed by a Celebration. 
 
SOUTHERN INDIA 105 
 
 After church I met my hostess, and she took 
 me up to their house in her motor. . . . 
 
 After tea two ladies called, and they took me 
 for two hours round Madras in the motor, which 
 finally ran out of petrol at a quarter-past seven, 
 four miles from the house, with a dinner-party at 
 eight. I stopped a passing car and asked for 
 petrol, and the owner, a native banker, most kindly 
 took us all three home in his own car, right out of 
 his way. He told me that people had been so kind 
 to him when he was in England that he was always 
 glad to repay it. 
 
 Madras is a very extensive town, being spaced 
 out with avenues, gardens, and estuaries. Tey- 
 nampet, where the bishop lives, is five miles from 
 the centre. It is all as flat as your palm, but 
 there is a constant breeze off the sea, and the 
 roads are all finely shaded avenues of banyan and 
 other big trees. Consequently it does - not seem 
 as hot as Bombay, being less steamy, though the 
 actual temperature is slightly higher now (about 
 75 at night and 82 by day : Bombay about three 
 degrees lower) ; but in the hot weather Madras 
 goes up to 103, whereas Bombay never exceeds 
 94, neither comparing with the great plains, 
 which reach 1 20. Madras too is distinctly greener 
 than Bombay, with lots of palms and nice cannas, 
 etc., in the gardens. The reason is that though 
 Bombay gets eighty inches to Madras's forty, 
 Bombay gets it from the south-west monsoon, 
 June to October, and is now drying up ; whereas 
 
io6 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 Madras gets it from the north-east monsoon, 
 October to December, and is still fresh. 
 
 We got back in the Good Samaritan's motor 
 just in time for dinner. There was a party of 
 I.C.S. people ; they are always interesting 
 because they have such interesting things to do. 
 The one who sat next me had been trying to 
 buy Pondicherry. It is as great a nuisance to 
 this side of India as Goa is to the other- 
 smugglers, criminals, and refugees. Just now the 
 chief murderers of Ashe, the Tinnevelly collector, 
 are squatting there and smuggling books and guns 
 into British territory. We can't get at them be- 
 cause we foolishly classed them as political 
 offenders and not as ordinary murderers. 
 
 They say the French administration is very 
 corrupt and incompetent, and the cat's paw of 
 Paris cliques. The French at home won't spend 
 money on it, and they can only get third-rate 
 people to go there. I believe it is largely primo- 
 geniture that gets us such good men. 
 
 On Monday morning I did some shopping and 
 saw the results of my first photographs. Out of 
 twelve only three were spoilt, which I thought 
 rather good, though the shopman was a little 
 supercilious about it. 
 
 In the afternoon about a dozen Indians came to 
 tea and we played tennis. They were nearly all 
 Nationalists. In the evening I dined out with some 
 nice I. M.S. people, and we went on to the I.C.S. 
 ball, which is the chief event of the Madras season. 
 
SOUTHERN INDIA 107 
 
 Such is the shortage of girls that all the nice 
 ones are booked by telephone during the day, and 
 often have their programmes (which are rigidly 
 adhered to) filled up before they arrive at the 
 ballroom. 
 
 However, I got four dances, and then went down 
 to supper with a lady who has been here forty 
 years and was great on the virtues of Anglo-Indian 
 women, who are the only ones who can be happy 
 roughing it ; a civilian's wife often has to move 
 her household five hundred miles at three days' 
 notice, selling and buying furniture often two or 
 three times a year. 
 
 I got home about 1.30 on Tuesday morning. In 
 the afternoon I embarked on this boat to go to 
 the Seven Pagodas, which are fully described by 
 Fergusson, though he calls the place Mahavelli- 
 pore. 
 
 So far, we have taken just sixteen hours to do 
 twenty-four miles, and there are five more to do. 
 I was due to arrive at seven o'clock and it is 
 already nearly nine, so I shall find it hot. 
 
 5 p.m. I have now started back from the Seven 
 Pagodas. It is an extremely curious place. There 
 is a shore of sandy waste with big granite boulders 
 and two granite ridges. The inhabitants apparently 
 had a craze for live-rock-carving about A.D. 500, 
 and proceeded first to cut the smaller ridge entirely 
 up into five temples, four in a row and the fifth 
 in front. They are all elaborately carved and 
 
io8 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 look just as if they had been built ; but in fact 
 they are just carved out, like a statue. Besides 
 these five raths (i.e., cars, as each has wheels carved 
 at the base) they carved a whole series of ordinary 
 cave temples in the side of the big ridge, as well 
 as two enormous bas-reliefs of the Penance of 
 Arjan. The bigger is ninety feet long and thirty 
 feet high and full of figures. There is also a 
 built temple on the very edge of the sea, of very 
 good proportions, one of the oldest Dravidian 
 temples known ; and there is an ordinary temple 
 inland still used. 
 
 Fergusson has an interesting section on the place 
 quite early in his book. 
 
 11 
 
 February 13, 1912, MADURA. This letter will 
 have to be curtailed, as mail-day, being earlier 
 down here, has surprised me in the middle of 
 my wanderings. 
 
 I stayed two extra days at Madras till Sunday 
 evening. While there I had a most interesting 
 talk with the Bishop of Madras about Church 
 matters. He is a bit of a pro-native and wants 
 native management of Church matters. In this 
 he is, to me, clearly right. The mass-movement 
 of the depressed classes is the governing factor 
 in the situation. Up to forty years ago mission- 
 aries deliberately avoided evangelizing them for 
 
SOUTHERN INDIA 109 
 
 fear of putting off caste-people : but lately they 
 have turned to them like the " king's wedding " 
 parable and the response is such that there can 
 be little doubt that with adequately staffed missions 
 practically the whole of the outcaste classes through- 
 out India would be Christian in fifty years. 
 
 They number fifty millions, and their detachment 
 from Hinduism will be a catastrophic blow to its 
 whole social system, for Christianity means educa- 
 tion, and that means ceasing to be depressed 
 classes. 
 
 This being so (and in Madras Diocese the actual 
 increase is sixty per cent, in the past ten years) 
 it becomes a question of mathematics. Fifty 
 million Christians means ten thousand clergy if 
 reasonable efficiency is to be possible. The white 
 clergy of all denominations number about three 
 thousand (or less, I think). So that the native 
 pastorate is a matter of urgent necessity. In 
 Madras Diocese they are gradually eliminating the 
 Englishmen. Already there are eighty Indian 
 clergy to seventy English, and the English in 
 mission-stations cannot be more than forty. At 
 present there are quite self-governing native local 
 boards, but the chairmen of central boards still 
 have to be English. The immediately next step 
 is the creation of a native bishop (his name is 
 Azariah), whom the Bishop hopes to consecrate 
 as an assistant-bishop before this year is out. 
 His diocese is to be an entirely new mission district 
 with no whites, four hundred Christians, and two 
 
no A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 million population : the four hundred are the fruit 
 of eighteen months' work. It seems ideal ground 
 for the experiment. The step in itself is wholly 
 good. . . . 
 
 As for the effect of the mass-movement on the 
 caste-people, the Bishop said they have been more 
 impressed by it than by anything else the Church 
 has ever done. The caste-people despise our 
 metaphysics and lukewarmly admire our ethics, but 
 the transformation we have wrought in four 
 million people, whom Hinduism has systematically 
 brutalized for centuries, is a testimony to the 
 dynamic force of Christianity which they can't 
 blink. It is this that has forced them to turn 
 their own high-caste selves to the " uplifting of 
 the depressed classes," but this belated effort of 
 theirs can hardly stem the tide, since they have 
 no gospel to preach to the outcastes except " Be- 
 lieve in the brotherhood of Indians and remain 
 as you are plus a little education," and as hardly 
 any Brahman will consent to touch a Pariah with 
 his little finger, the brotherhood will strike the 
 latter as rather theoretical, whereas the white 
 clergy, to whom Brahmans kow-tow, handle them 
 and fondle their children and teach them and 
 father them and change their whole outlook on life. 
 
 I went slumming on Thursday evening with one 
 of these high-caste raisers of the depressed classes 
 one of the best : he should be a Christian. He 
 took me first to the Wuddars, about the highest 
 of the Madras outcaste tribes, who are the town 
 
SOUTHERN INDIA in 
 
 dustmen. They lived in a long street of one 
 hundred and fifty huts a side, and they had exer- 
 cised their calling at home more efficiently than 
 I had expected. The place was quite fairly clean, 
 and they had a good brick common w.c. at one end. 
 The huts were shaped like a piece of note-paper 
 made to stand with its crease upwards, about six 
 feet high in the middle, six feet broad at the 
 base, and nine feet long, with one diminutive door 
 two feet six high and no other aperture of any 
 kind. I went into one : the only furniture was a 
 few cooking-pots, and a stick fire was burning 
 which filled the place with eye-stinging smoke. 
 All the people thought I was a Government official, 
 so I assembled them and asked questions. Their 
 grievance was low pay (seven rupees a month) 
 and higher prices (a hundred per cent, rise in ten 
 years). They wished Government would oftener 
 send sahibs round to see about them (that was 
 interesting). They wanted a better water-supply : 
 otherwise they had few complaints. They said 
 they shared things when in distress, but would 
 on no account move more than forty miles from 
 Madras in search of work. They hadn't much 
 disease, except small-pox, and they believed in 
 vaccination. I asked a boy when he had last 
 washed : he said a month ago ; he did not know 
 how old he was. No padres had been there : 
 they were grateful that the Brahmans deigned to 
 think of them. One boy in the place could read ; 
 ten others had been to a neighbouring theosophist 
 
ii2 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 school, but on seeing birch-rods there had come 
 away again. 
 
 After that I went through the sweepers' quarter 
 they are the lowest of all and a Pariah won't 
 touch them and there the filth and stink was 
 indescribable : in front of the huts stretched 
 a long open cesspool or w.c., the contents of 
 which could not be seen for the millions of flies 
 and mosquitoes on it, but one's other senses left 
 one in little doubt of their nature : and the naked 
 children were playing round and even in it. 
 
 I did not stop to ask questions I couldn't : 
 but I reflected that I had seen streets of the same 
 caste (in the 'Nagar district) after thirty years' 
 Christianity ; and that those, though dirty, were 
 hospital wards compared to these, while the people's 
 faces here were visibly more bestial and less human. 
 It does seem cruel to have to leave creatures in 
 that condition from sheer fewness of labourers ; 
 but I'm thankful to say I don't think they will 
 have to wait long. Hitherto in this diocese all 
 the missions have been in villages, where the 
 people are stable and accessible : that is why the 
 city has been neglected ; but just think of the effect 
 when a missionary first appears among those 
 horrible people and proves he cares for them and 
 loves them, and teaches them to be clean and 
 human. 
 
 Wednesday, TRICHINOPOLY. On Sunday evening 
 I left for Madura, which I reached on Monday 
 
SOUTHERN INDIA 113 
 
 at noon. It is the second biggest town in this 
 Presidency, 135,000 population. It was the seat 
 of an ancient Hindu kingdom, that of the Pandyas, 
 until Vijayanagar absorbed it : and after the fall 
 of Vijayanagar it was great again, and it was 
 then that the famous temples and palace were 
 built. Like so many of the best buildings in India 
 (for instance, the Taj and the rest at Agra and 
 Delhi, the Bijapur tombs, two of the Goa churches, 
 and so on), they were built between 1630 and 
 1680. 
 
 I stayed with the chaplain, who was extremely 
 kind. 
 
 At five o'clock I went to see the temple. It 
 is the most disappointing sight I have yet seen ; 
 yet every one agrees it is the finest Dravidian 
 temple in India. Why Dravidian temples are 
 so ineffective is explained by Fergusson, but I 
 will add the peculiarly repulsive features of the 
 place from my own experience : 
 
 i. You never at any time or place can 
 see the whole temple : there is no architec- 
 tural unity about it at all. In this it well 
 symbolizes the Hindu religion. All Dravidian 
 temples are built in concentric squares, but 
 either the partition walls are too high, or 
 the things to be seen are roofed over : so 
 that you never see anything of a given aisle, 
 court, hall, tower, chapel, or portico until 
 you are actually inside it. 
 9 
 
114 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 2. All the art is put into the details of 
 sculpture, and (a) every piece of sculpture is 
 whitewashed so thickly that eighty per cent, of 
 the beauty and all the delicacy is obliterated, 
 and the whitewash moreover is filthy ; (b} the 
 sculpture of the gopurams is all in painted 
 stucco and the figures are grotesque and 
 hideous ; and (c] the shrines are smeared with 
 offerings of ghee (native butter) and stink 
 abominably. 
 
 3. The whole place swarms with odious 
 people, the corridors are turned into bazaars 
 with hustling mobs, and guides and beggars 
 pester one (as they did at Rhodes) : the heat 
 is great and the smells are offensive. 
 
 The palace is a far statelier building as a 
 whole, with great Norman columns and almost 
 Gothic roofing. 
 
 I left Madura this morning at 6.15 the tem- 
 perature was about 83 all the time there and 
 came on here, where I saw the great Sri Rangam 
 temple (Fergusson's Seringham), to which the 
 same remarks apply as to Madura ; and also 
 the fort, a queer sheer rock from which one 
 sees thirty miles over flat, fertile country all 
 round. It was to save this that Clive seized 
 Arcot. 
 
 My train is now waiting to take me to Tanjore, 
 where I shall have to post this. 
 
SOUTHERN INDIA 115 
 
 in 
 
 February 2otk, CUMBALLA HILL, BOMBAY. I 
 think I last wrote from Trichinopoly. I went 
 on to Tanjore that evening and stayed with the 
 kind S.P.G. missionary there. He has been in 
 Tanjore since 1875, an< ^ has never been home 
 since 1889, and now never goes even to Madras. 
 
 But even more interesting were two native 
 Christians who were staying there one was the 
 vicar, an old and uneducated man ; the other 
 was a doctor, the medical officer of a neigh- 
 bouring district and very intelligent. Both were 
 Tinnevelly Christians descended from outcaste 
 converts : the distance between them and their 
 grandfathers was one of two thousand years in 
 civilization. Both hated the Brahmans and told 
 me several stories of their tyranny and intolerance. 
 (Tanjore is a great centre of Brahmans.) The 
 main complaint was that they monopolized the 
 Government offices and used their power solely 
 to job for other Brahmans : no Christian could 
 get his grievances attended to by them, and if 
 a Christian did manage to get into the services, 
 he was systematically given bad reports by his 
 Brahman superiors. . . . 
 
 The corollary of these two's hatred of Brahmans 
 was, of course, devotion to the British as their 
 only bulwark against them. The padre said : 
 "You English do not understand how separate 
 
ii6 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 we are from other castes and races. The English 
 are very like the French (Tanjore is close to 
 Pondicherry), and so you think Pariahs are like 
 Brahmans and Madrasis are like Bengalis, just 
 as you are like the French. But it is quite 
 different. You and the French have so many 
 things in common, but what have I in common 
 with a Bengali or a Brahman ? Nothing. His 
 race, his language, his religion, his customs, his 
 sympathies are the opposite of mine : he only 
 wishes to make me his serf." 
 
 The doctor had another set of illuminating 
 stories of the innumerable attempts which are 
 made to bribe him, not only by criminals but by 
 the police, over post-mortems. 
 
 I will only quote one, as they were all much 
 the same. The police sent him a man for post- 
 mortem as " Found Drowned " : he had been 
 fished out of a canal. The doctor found seven- 
 teen wounds on him and his carotid severed, and 
 reported so. The police sent back the report 
 with a verbal message to say that if he would 
 re-write it and certify that death was due to 
 drowning, he would receive five hundred rupees. 
 It was suggested that the seventeen wounds should 
 be ascribed to fishes ! The other stories were 
 much the same ; but he says it happens less often 
 now, because they send their " doubtful " post- 
 mortems to the neighbouring medical officer, 
 who is a Hindu and presumably more accom- 
 modating. 
 
SOUTHERN INDIA 117 
 
 In the morning I went with my host to see 
 the temple. After Madura and Sri Rangam it 
 was a joy. It is not nearly so large, but quite 
 large enough, and has none of their faults. Its 
 plan is simple and easily taken in and very well- 
 proportioned. A road leads under two successive 
 gates into a big open courtyard, about seven 
 acres in extent. Round the court runs a little 
 cloister with cells. Near the far end rises the 
 great gopuram, two hundred feet high, with the 
 main shrine in its base. On either side are two 
 small chapels detached. In front, in the centre 
 of the court, is a pillared portico with the big 
 Sacred Bull under its shadow. 
 
 There are a few other buildings, but not 
 enough to hide or confuse the plan of the 
 place. 
 
 There was no whitewash, and the place was 
 empty and silent, with lovely peacocks in the 
 court. There was space and openness and design : 
 it was like coming from a cellar to a quadrangle. 
 The carving, especially of the small chapels, was 
 really fine and graceful, not overcrowded, but 
 beautifully done, and running more to pillars and 
 curves than to hobgoblins. 
 
 The only blemish was a lot of horrible paintings 
 on the cloister walls. These had been done in 
 honour of the Prince of Wales's visit in 1875. 
 
 In the afternoon I saw the palace, which has 
 two rather fine Durbar halls, but they were 
 painted in every loud colour over every square 
 
n8 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 inch. There ought to be a law against painting 
 stone. 
 
 I took the night mail to Madras, which I 
 reached on Friday morning : I had to spend 
 the day there, as the Bombay mail leaves in the 
 evening. It is a thirty-three hours' journey, so I 
 spent all Saturday crossing the Deccan, a flat 
 and treeless country, but highly cultivated and a 
 good cotton soil. It was, however, looking very 
 dry, except just round the two great rivers 
 Tungabhadra and Kistna, which we crossed, both 
 about half a mile wide, but now broken up into 
 a number of small streams and pools. 
 
 I haven't seen any of the great rivers of the 
 north, except the Jamna : I have seen all the 
 four great southern ones Godavari, Kistna, 
 Tungabhadra, and Cauvery, and they rank with 
 the Olifants and the Orange rather than with 
 the Zambesi ; but in the rains they look very 
 different. 
 
 IV 
 
 Ash Wednesday, 1912, BOMBAY. After leaving 
 Madura I didn't stop long enough anywhere to see 
 much of people. But at Tanjore I met a most 
 interesting native Christian health officer, who told 
 me a lot of stories which could be worked up into 
 thrilling detective stories, especially one about a 
 hanging woman, which is too long for me to 
 
SOUTHERN INDIA 119 
 
 repeat now, as I must be very brief to-night. He 
 also told me that all his predecessors at his district 
 hospital had been Brahmans, and had never allowed 
 a Pariah in for treatment. They had to stand in 
 the outer courtyard, and their bandages, etc., were 
 thrown to them : of course they could never be 
 operated upon. He has insisted on admitting 
 them, and has got Rs. 6,000 from the Government 
 for a Pariah ward : but every native official refused 
 his application for it, till he took it up to the 
 English at Madras. 
 
 Talking of hospitals reminds me that Peer 
 Mohammed told me two curious things in con- 
 nection with the plague at Benares, where he lives. 
 Two years ago he had a daughter inoculated for 
 plague and she died of it within twenty days, and 
 he says he knows of that having happened to other 
 people, which seems to show there is a risk of the 
 inoculation giving one the disease. He also said 
 that the Doms (who are the sweeper-caste there) 
 never have plague, though they are filthy and eat 
 the flour in which rats have died. If this is true, 
 does it mean that they inoculate themselves by 
 eating plaguey food, or is it because they are 
 untouchable to other castes and have no stores of 
 food at home to attract rats ? 
 
 Yesterday there was a huge cotton-fire at Colaba : 
 we drove down to see it, but as a spectacle it was 
 less impressive than a "bonner," the flame was not 
 at all a bright one. 
 
 This afternoon we went for a lovely drive to 
 
120 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 Bandra, through the Mahim woods, a forest of 
 coco-nut-palms with twilight villages hidden among 
 the stems of its pillared shade. Bandra is a resort 
 of Bombay daily-breaders, being ten miles out and 
 on the shore. 
 
 We lost our way coming back, and so I have had 
 very little time to write this before dinner. At ten 
 to-night we start for Manmad, which begins the 
 third and last lap of my travels. 
 
IX 
 SOUTH INDIAN TOPICS 
 
 i Nationalist leaders Indians and the Civil Service ii The 
 seclusion of Madras The Servants of India Nationalist 
 claims: the conflict of evidence "National Idealism" iii 
 Centralization and bureaucracy An account of the Bengal 
 affair iv Madras Christian College Caste in Church and 
 State The police again An Indian view of cricket. 
 
 February 5, 1912, MADRAS. The Nationalist 
 leaders here are extremely nice to talk to, and I 
 think perfectly sincere. They admit the necessity 
 of British rule for a long time to come yet, but they 
 think a much larger percentage of Civil Service 
 appointments should be given to them. In this 
 respect their first demand is for simultaneous 
 examinations, viz., an I.C.S. examination at 
 Calcutta simultaneously with that in London. In 
 itself that seems to me reasonable, but practically 
 it would, I should think, bring about the break- 
 down of the examination system, which is already 
 extremely difficult to work satisfactorily out here, in 
 the Universities. What happens is that when 
 
122 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 books are set for the B.A. degree (just as books 
 are set for Greats or History at Oxford), the 
 Indians learn them absolutely off by heart. 
 Consequently if you set a question like " What did 
 Mill owe to Ricardo ? " they will write down Mill's 
 whole chapter on Ricardo verbatim without com- 
 ment. Then when they are ploughed they hold 
 protest meetings, sign petitions, agitate the Press, 
 and even riot and mob the Senate House, de- 
 manding that all who have failed by one mark 
 only should be passed, and so on. Learning by 
 heart is their sole idea of education at present : 
 the Brahmans often teach their children the whole 
 of some Sanskrit epic by heart, before the children 
 understand a word of Sanskrit : and they're all 
 about as long as the Old Testament. 
 
 As for this Nationalist demand, the two sides 
 give flatly contradictory evidence. Every English 
 civil servant tells you that whenever an Indian has 
 been given the final responsibility for any depart- 
 ment, things have gone hopelessly wrong, and that 
 their municipal corporations, etc., are as corrupt 
 and incompetent as they can be. The Indians 
 tell one that they are never given the chance of a 
 free hand, and that English officials have an idte 
 fixe that they will fail, and so never let them try. 
 In the few cases, like the judicial service, where 
 Indians rise to the top, they are as competent as 
 English : and their corporations are no worse than 
 English ones, and would be better if they weren't 
 official-ridden. My own impression is that in point 
 
SOUTH INDIAN TOPICS 123 
 
 of fact the Anglo- Indians are right, but that they 
 don't try enough to teach Indians the right way to 
 regard public service. They give them their own 
 example, of course, but then every Indian regards 
 every Englishman as a confirmed madman, so that 
 mere example doesn't have its due effect. Also the 
 Anglo- Indians, being thoroughly English, think 
 that because Indians are clever therefore they are 
 not able : whereas many of them are very able as 
 well as clever : what they haven't got is moral 
 courage and stamina and " character" in that 
 sense. But there are exceptions, and we ought to 
 be keenly on the look-out for them and snap them 
 up into our service. 
 
 If the Nationalists had their way now, I'm afraid 
 the administration would soon fall into hopeless 
 chaos : but I don't believe the men I've met here 
 are selfish and merely want to recover the Brahman 
 monoply. They are quite unconscious of their 
 weakness, and of course nothing will convince them 
 of it just like the Celts, who know they are 
 cleverer than the Saxons, and will never see that 
 that is no proof that they are as fit to govern. 
 
 11 
 
 February Jtk, MADRAS. Madras has an air of its 
 own, an air of peace and mildness and content. It 
 has had good rains this year and looks much fresher 
 than the districts dependent on the south-west 
 
124 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 monsoon. I believe it has only had one recent 
 famine, the great one of 1877-8, when five million 
 people died and the canal was dug. The natives 
 are said to be the nicest and quietest in all India, 
 and the whole place looks it. The I.C.S. people 
 complain bitterly of the way they are always 
 treated neglected and sent to the wall. Bombay 
 calls it the " benighted Presidency." The Govern- 
 ment of India never asks for Madras civil servants ; 
 it is ignored. Certainly it was very shabbily 
 treated over the Durbar. Only seven honours, 
 I'm told, out of four hundred and fifty were given 
 to the whole Presidency Bombay, no bigger, had 
 about fifty or sixty the King never came near it, 
 and their Governor has been filched for Bengal. 
 They are all so hurt about this that they take no 
 interest in the change of capital or in the Bengal 
 policy. 
 
 My hosts are friends of all the Nationalist 
 leaders here and have asked several of them up for 
 me to meet none whose names are known in 
 England, but quite important ones. 
 
 The first two to come were both members of 
 Gokhale's Society of the Servants of India. This 
 Society has about twenty-five members, who, after 
 undergoing a four-years novitiate, take seven 
 vows to the effect that they will devote their lives 
 to the service of India unselfishly and without 
 thought of gain. They are vowed to poverty 
 (thirty rupees a month), and are non-political ; but 
 of course all the members are Nationalists, and (I 
 
SOUTH INDIAN TOPICS 125 
 
 expect) Hindus of high caste ; so that it is in 
 great danger of degenerating into politics. At 
 present they teach the poor, slum among the out- 
 castes (behold Brahmanism shamed into imitating 
 Christianity, clean against its own system !), and 
 perform other philanthropic works. One of them 
 is going to take me to see his slum work to- 
 morrow : it involves breaking caste, of course, but 
 apparently they dispense themselves. 
 
 The next day I met a Brahman who is a pub- 
 lisher of Nationalist works and the Secretary of 
 the League for the Protection of Indians in South 
 Africa (of which the Bishop is President). He ex- 
 plained to me the Indian grievance in South Africa, 
 not adding anything new, except that he considered 
 it a fallacy to suppose that the more expensive 
 standard of living which white people have is a 
 sign or part of higher civilization, and that he him- 
 self still lived in a native house, though he had 
 made a lot of money, and when he saw young Eng- 
 lish clerks on three hundred rupees a month taking 
 houses at eighty rupees a month, he thought their 
 ostentation barbarous and a selfish wastefulness. 
 
 After tea he complained of the Anglo- Indian 
 attitude. He said they had so come to regard 
 India-ruling as their Divine right that they un- 
 reasonably denied that any Indian could rule any- 
 thing, and when proposals to give charge of 
 anything to Indians were mentioned to them it 
 instantly roused their spleen. 
 
 I've no doubt that that is true. Nine times out 
 
126 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 of ten the Anglo-Indian is right, and so when the 
 tenth and exceptional man comes along he refuses 
 to judge him on his merits. 
 
 But you get, of course, a direct conflict of evi- 
 dence, the I.C.S telling you that it is fearfully hard 
 to find a trustworthy man for a native post, and the 
 natives telling you that trustworthy men are not 
 given a fair chance or proportion of posts. I here 
 believe the I.C.S., and a proof is the judicial 
 service. The Indians told me that so far as that 
 went, at least, there was no reason why there should 
 be a single English judge. The English tell you 
 that the native judges follow precedents slavishly, 
 and that native magistrates are corrupt. The proof 
 of which if right is that native litigants often ask 
 to be tried before English judges, and never ask 
 not to be. 
 
 When I get an opportunity I will try and find 
 out what they think about the Durbar, etc. A 
 Mohammmedan merchant who came to tea ap- 
 proved of the changes, because, he said (senten- 
 tiously), the aspirations of the Bengalis had been 
 satisfied, and (with a grin) the capital was now to 
 be Delhi. This man seems to me to have more 
 sense than his co-religionists in Bengal. He did 
 not seem to think much of the " shattered good 
 faith of England," which is the only big argument, 
 in my humble judgment, on the other side. But 
 since everything goes by comparison, perhaps Eng- 
 land could break faith every Durbar and still be 
 regarded as a fabulous monster of honesty. 
 
SOUTH INDIAN TOPICS 127 
 
 I am reading an anti- English and most interest- 
 ing book called " Essays in National Idealism," by 
 Ananda Coomaraswamy. He makes out a good 
 case on many points, especially education, but the 
 book as a whole is far the gravest indictment of the 
 Nationalist movement, quite apart from sedition, 
 that I have yet seen. It is fundamentally reac- 
 tionary, and settles what are really ethical ques- 
 tions by aesthetic standards, as I believe the Irish 
 do. For instance, he compares Imperialism to a 
 gardener who roots up a soil's natural flowers and 
 plants sickly ones of a single type from a different 
 soil. On that analogy we have done wrong in 
 trying to eradicate the rank and luxuriant Indian 
 growths of war, corruption, tyranny, and cruelty, 
 and in replacing them by the sickly exotics of 
 peace, honesty, justice, and mercy. The root of 
 the whole conflict seems to me to be the question 
 of the transmigration of souls. 
 
 in 
 
 February \\th. I have stayed on here another 
 two days because my host pressed me to, and he 
 was so interesting that I gladly did. 
 
 Of course he talked most about ecclesiastical 
 affairs, but he said the most interesting things about 
 the change of capitals that I have heard here. 
 Most people here are indifferent, and say, " Govern- 
 ment will be farther off than ever, but in any case 
 
128 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 we can't be more neglected than we are now, and 
 we may hear less of Calcutta." But my host argues 
 thus : Hitherto Madras has been tied hand and 
 foot to the apron-strings of the Government of 
 India. For instance, he gave this example : One of 
 the clergy (Government chaplains) in Madras had 
 to go away on sick-leave for three months. The 
 Bishop got another chaplain to take his work as 
 an extra for that time gratis, but had to grant him 
 20 travelling expenses. This arrangement saved 
 appointing a new chaplain, and therefore saved the 
 Government 60. But the Government of Madras 
 are in such a funk of the Government of India that 
 they dared not sanction the expenditure, and it had 
 to go to Calcutta. Permission was then granted, 
 and arrived, after four months, when the sick chap- 
 lain was back. Similarly every legislative reform 
 has to be referred at each comma to Calcutta, and 
 takes about five years to get through. 
 
 This over-centralization has grown possible be- 
 cause the Government of India is identified with 
 the biggest city in India, so that the balance is 
 upset : Bombay suffers almost as much as Madras ; 
 whereas in future Calcutta will be a counterpoise 
 to the Government of India, and never having 
 been fettered it won't submit to asking Delhi's per- 
 mission to spend every 10. There is, therefore, 
 great hope that Calcutta's independence will win 
 independence for Madras and Bombay, since every 
 Presidency will have to be treated alike, and the 
 balance may be restored. 
 
SOUTH INDIAN TOPICS 129 
 
 If all this is true, I think this bureaucratic cen- 
 tralization is quite a legitimate grievance with the 
 native politicians. It must choke the machine so 
 that the work can only be got through by a 
 mechanical rigidity of officialism. Thus, I am told, 
 the Calcutta people know very little about South 
 India, but try and force on it exact conformity to the 
 Bengal pattern of administration. Then when they 
 are criticized they denounce the critics as seditious. 
 
 This intolerance of criticism seems to me, as an 
 outsider, one of the greatest defects of the Govern- 
 ment here. It is the demoralizing effect of autoc- 
 racy the vice of schoolmasters on an Imperial 
 scale. But the result is that they tend not to 
 employ or trust any man with a spark of inde- 
 pendence, and so drive honest men into the same 
 pen with real disloyalists. Consequently they are 
 unsympathetic to even the best native thought, 
 and from this misunderstanding arises most of the 
 friction and suspicion that were so rife a little 
 while ago. When Lord Morley's reforms were 
 first promulgated, they wouldn't put any of these 
 important natives on to the Executive Councils, 
 but appointed in each case a "safe" and useless 
 man, and then complained that the Native 
 Member of Council was no use. Whereas if, e.g., 
 Bombay had appointed Gokhale, the ablest man 
 (they say) of any colour in India, he might have 
 done a tremendous lot. 
 
 That, at least, is roughly the Liberal (in a real 
 sense) point of view, as voiced by the moderate 
 
 10 
 
130 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 Nationalists who are loyal. I must say I think 
 their point is a just one : and the facts are hardly 
 disputable in regard to the present state of things. 
 Where I think (I have to give what I think for 
 want of knowing better qualified people's thoughts) 
 the Nationalists wrong is in imagining Indians 
 are competent administrators. Experience proves 
 clearly that very few of them are. Good govern- 
 ment requires that we should run the machine for 
 a long time to come yet : but we ought to jump 
 at every really good Indian and use him, instead 
 of driving him into opposition remember the 
 wisdom of Augustus. And we ought not to be 
 afraid of criticism : and a lot of the Indian criticism 
 is good. Above all, we ought to keep our fingers 
 on the pulse of Indian thought (and this is where 
 Native Members of Council could be supremely 
 useful), and be sympathetic to their ideas which 
 are not our ideas. In matters like education we 
 have been stupidly Western, and this galls the 
 best Indians who care for Indian ideals. 
 
 The more intelligent, sympathetic, and liberal 
 we are the more we shall isolate the disloyalists, 
 and strengthen our position : and Heaven and 
 civilization demand that we should not abandon 
 India, at any rate till the Brahman power and 
 monopoly is broken : to hand India over to them 
 (as they now are) would be to set back the clock 
 three thousand years. 
 
 I heard the following account of the Bengal 
 
SOUTH INDIAN TOPICS 131 
 
 affair, from an Englishman who was in Calcutta 
 up to 1900. The universities were very incom- 
 petently run. They are governed by senates, and 
 a fellowship or seat on the senate had been used 
 by Government as a cheap " honour," to palm off 
 on promiscuous people. Consequently the uni- 
 versity staff, course, and so on was settled by 
 quite unfit persons, and the standard had got very 
 low ; so that hundreds of men were in the uni- 
 versities who had no business to be there at all. 
 In fact, seventy per cent, of the students were 
 unfit. The universities charged extremely low 
 fees and could only keep solvent by admitting 
 large numbers, so that they dared not raise their 
 standard for fear of driving the seventy per cent, 
 to other universities. Consequently, the examin- 
 ations, lectures, etc., were all framed for the unfit 
 seventy per cent., and the fit thirty per cent, were 
 intellectually starved. The numbers are so big 
 and staffs so small that individual tuition is im- 
 possible. (Last year the candidates for matricula- 
 tion in Calcutta University alone numbered ten 
 thousand, of whom three thousand passed.) 
 
 Things were so bad that only Government could 
 cope with it, and as Government finances the uni- 
 versities, it had ample right to interfere. Lord 
 Curzon's scheme was to screw up the whole thing all 
 round raise the fees, lessen the numbers, stiffen the 
 examinations, and reform the senates. This was a 
 difficult task anyway, and the talk of Government 
 interference was so phrased as to be understood 
 
132 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 in some quarters as a menace. Consequently when 
 the Bill appeared raising the fees and making a 
 university career less easy, the educated Indians 
 read into it sinister motives. They thought its 
 aim was to reduce their numbers by seventy-five 
 per cent, in order to weaken their power corre- 
 spondingly. So they joined with the vested inter- 
 ests, viz., the university mandarins, and the 
 seventy-five per cent, to oppose the whole scheme. 
 The storm began in the Calcutta University, of 
 which Lord Curzon was ex-officio Chancellor, and 
 throughout the Bengalis took a leading part. 
 
 Lord Curzon was naturally angry with the 
 Bengalis for opposing and in many points thwart- 
 ing him. He regarded them as an unfriendly 
 faction, whose power he would be glad to reduce. 
 
 Then came the question of Partition. It was 
 necessary to divide Bengal for purely administra- 
 tive reasons ; the only question was how to divide 
 it. Well, the division ultimately adopted was one 
 that left the Hindu Bengalis in a minority in both 
 halves, since in Eastern Bengal they were out- 
 numbered by Mohammedans (who are uneducated), 
 while in Bengal itself they were outnumbered by 
 the Oriyas, etc. 
 
 Whether Lord Curzon chose this division for 
 this reason nobody knows, but since he was known 
 to have his knife into the Bengalis, it was inevit- 
 able that they should think so : hence their agita- 
 tion. The remarkable thing about that agitation 
 was that it revealed the solidarity of the educated 
 
SOUTH INDIAN TOPICS 133 
 
 Indian politicians. The national idea had taken 
 hold of them strongly enough to show them the 
 value of acting together : and this was the first 
 time they did so. Lord Curzon had not foreseen 
 this new factor, and imagined he could ride rough- 
 shod over the educated Bengalis ; but the result 
 was he raised a hornets' nest all over India. 
 
 The unrest has now subsided, largely owing 
 to Lord Morley's reforms ; but it may break out 
 again when some fresh question raises a grievance. 
 And when that comes we are likely to find a 
 number of really good men in opposition who 
 might have been won to our side. 
 
 IV 
 
 February, 1912, MADURA. I have been moving 
 in ecclesiastical circles all this week. It's much 
 more thrilling than it sounds, because there is 
 everywhere an atmosphere of expectation, which 
 one does not find at home. I only rather regret 
 having only seen the Church of England at work. 
 I did go round the Madras Christian College, how- 
 ever, which is run mainly by Presbyterians. It is a 
 very big one : there are eight hundred boys in the 
 college and nine hundred in the school. They have 
 a compulsory Scripture lesson, but no evangelizing. 
 There are about a hundred Christians in the college, 
 and of the remaining seven hundred about five 
 hundred are Brahmans. 
 
134 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 It is extremely rare for them to convert any- 
 one ; but the boys assimilate a great deal of 
 Christian ethics into their Hinduism, and their 
 minds are cleared of active hostility or blind 
 prejudices against it. The religious value of this 
 familiarity may be realized by some future genera- 
 tion. It will help to steer them clear of the 
 danger of mass-movements. A sudden Christianity 
 is a dangerous thing. Down here they haven't 
 yet shaken off caste ; and you get Christian 
 congregations which drive Pariahs out of the 
 churches, or demand a separate chalice, or refuse 
 to work among them. In bad cases the bishop 
 interdicts the congregation till it submits. 
 
 I saw a very practical illustration of the defects 
 of the caste-system when I went slumming in 
 Madras. The condition of the sweepers' quarter 
 was unspeakably filthy ; and they told me it 
 belonged to a high-caste landlord, to whom it 
 would be pollution to come and see for himself 
 the foetid condition of his property. It really 
 was rather painful to see. The only alleviating 
 touch was introduced by the two imps who 
 showed us the way. We passed an old cow 
 tethered by the hind-leg. We stepped over the 
 rope, but they both suddenly went flat on their 
 faces in the dirt and crawled under it, explaining 
 with grins that it was not right to show disrespect 
 to cows. If you could have seen the cow! 
 
 I met a police-officer in Madras who for once 
 stood up for that much-abused body. He denied, 
 
SOUTH INDIAN TOPICS 135 
 
 for instance, that they ever tortured ; but some of 
 the things he admitted they did do seem to be 
 almost worse. For instance, he told us a story 
 of how they were short of evidence against a 
 suspected murderer : so they badgered him till he 
 was cowed, and then induced him to confess by 
 promising to do their best to get him off if he 
 would. Once they had extorted the confession 
 they proceeded without delay to try, convict, and 
 hang him. This strikes me as at least a gross 
 violation of the decencies of criminal investigation. 
 Of course the native police think us wholly 
 unreasonable in objecting to their little practices. 
 As they pathetically complained to their chief in 
 Bombay, "A crime is committed. If we catch 
 no prisoner, the sahibs blame us. If we catch 
 one, and make him confess, they blame us still 
 more." The same man who stood up for the 
 Indian police was rather scathing about Indian 
 judges. He said they weren't corrupt, though 
 native litigants always assumed they were : but 
 they were often incompetent, and he also instanced 
 one who was always drunk and another who was 
 a physical wreck. Of course one source of 
 difficulty is that the I.C.S. people, being very 
 competent themselves, are so intolerant of 
 incompetence that they can't endure to wait 
 while Indians learn through their own mistakes. 
 That is why the old-fashioned civilian is disgusted 
 at the amount of work entrusted to Indians 
 already, and I have heard them say they will 
 
136 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 never advise a son of theirs to come out here, as 
 it is " no longer a white man's country ! " 
 
 That reminds me, this place is afflicted with 
 the quaint curse of Eurasian beggars. The 
 Eurasian's prime aim in life is to prove himself 
 a white man, so he will never do manual work, 
 and often, being quite uneducated, he is reduced 
 to begging. But even begging has to be done 
 saAtf-fashion : so they drive up to your door in 
 a bandi (which you have to pay for) and tell 
 you a heartrending story of their destitution ; but 
 if you are moved to give them a cast-off pair of 
 trousers, they insist on your sending your servant 
 to carry it home for them. 
 
 I forgot to tell you last week a pleasing story 
 I heard from one of the South Mahratta country 
 clergy. He introduced cricket into his school to 
 foster a manly spirit, and the boys got quite 
 keen on it. Gradually he evolved a team and 
 arranged a match with a neighbouring school. 
 He told his team that they must work their 
 hardest to win, and to encourage them he gave 
 them fifteen rupees to spend on new bats or 
 whatever would be most useful. When the day 
 came, the team turned out for the match full 
 of quiet confidence, but with all their old 
 accoutrements. "Why," asked the padre, "what 
 have you done with those fifteen rupees I gave 
 you?" "Well, sir," replied the captain, "we 
 thought it best to spend it ail on the umpire." 
 
 They won. 
 
X 
 
 THE MOGHULAI 
 
 i From Bombay to Daulatabad An extraordinary fortress 
 The caves of Ellora A Mohammedan festival A C.M.S. mis- 
 sion Two warm receptions and a confirmation ii Moghulai 
 administration Defects and advantages Nature of a Chris- 
 tian's oath The story of the rupee and the coco-nut A touch 
 of the sun. 
 
 February 25^, ROZA, DECCAN. This professes 
 to be a tour of C.M.S. missions with Jim, but so 
 far we have seen much less of missions than 
 of other things. 
 
 I left Bombay on Wednesday night by a train 
 which contrived to take eleven hours over the 
 hundred and sixty miles to Manmad, which we 
 reached at nine o'clock in the morning. It is 
 the point on the main Bombay-Calcutta line where 
 the Hyderabad railway branches off. 
 
 At Manmad we were joined by two S.P.G, 
 ladies from Ahmednagar (where I toured a month 
 ago), Jim thinking it would promote good relations 
 
 if they could personally visit the C.M.S. ladies. 
 
 137 
 
138 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 At noon the whole five of us embarked in a 
 special saloon which they had attached for Jim to 
 the slowest and hottest train I have yet endured 
 out here. It must have been well up the nineties. 
 The Deccan was as bare and flat and veld-like as 
 ever, and it took us four hours to reach Daulatabad. 
 
 There are three cities close together, each 
 of some historical importance, viz., Daulatabad, 
 Aurangabad, and Roza. 
 
 Daulatabad was a famous Hindu fortress, being 
 called Deogiri in those days. In 1293 ^ was 
 captured by Ala-ud-din, who was the greatest 
 of the second set of Mohammedan emperors at 
 Delhi. This sportsman not only changed its 
 name to Daulatabad, but removed thither the 
 whole population of Delhi en bloc, in a famine 
 year, too! It is the most extraordinary fortress I 
 have ever seen. An isolated hill rises out of the 
 plain, five hundred feet high, in shape a perfect 
 pyramid, but the bottom hundred feet are perpen- 
 dicular, just as if cut with a knife : in fact, one 
 can hardly believe it is natural, though the natives 
 say it is, and no tool-marks are visible : but the 
 whole hill looks artificial. 
 
 The only way up to the citadel passes through 
 a long tunnel which winds in total darkness through 
 the rock, like a rabbit-hole. Where it emerges 
 at the top it used to be covered with an iron 
 shutter, which we saw ; and in siege-time this 
 shutter was heated red-hot, a device which abso- 
 lutely "diddled" all besiegers. 
 
THE MOGHULAI 139 
 
 The city of Aurangabad is named after Aurang- 
 zeb, who made it his capital for some time; but 
 we have not been there yet. We drove from 
 Daulatabad eight miles up to this place, Roza, 
 which is where Aurangzeb is buried. It is also 
 the burial-place of a Moslem saint, and a great 
 place of pilgrimage : and we happen to have hit 
 off the days of the yearly feast. 
 
 There is no mission here, but we have come 
 up for three days to see the famous caves of 
 Ellora. These thirty-two caves are cut along 
 the base of a long ridge some five hundred feet 
 high, on the top of which Roza stands. 
 
 There is a lovely view for miles over the 
 plain below us, and it is only a mile by road 
 down to the caves. Some of them are marvellous 
 efforts. Of the thirty-two, the first twelve are 
 Buddhist and date from A.D. 350 to 750. They 
 are mostly plain pillared halls with cells and 
 chapels, with one chaitya, which is very like a 
 church. 
 
 Then come fifteen Brahmanical caves dating 
 A.D. 600 to 800. These are much more elaborate 
 and the walls are sculptured with reliefs. In the 
 middle of them is the Kailasa Temple, and be- 
 yond them are five Jain caves, dating 850 to 1300, 
 and much more highly finished in detail than 
 the others. 
 
 But the Kailasa Temple is the wonder of the 
 place. Like all the caves, it is carved out of live 
 rock, but in this case alone they've carved it 
 
140 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 from the open air above, instead of leaving it a 
 cave. So it is a complete cathedral framed in the 
 hillside. The top and front are open to the air : 
 the sides and back are about twenty feet from the 
 rock-wall. The dimensions of the temple are 
 one hundred and sixty-four feet long, one hundred 
 and nine feet wide, and ninety-six feet high : it looks 
 about as big as St. Mary's at Oxford, minus the 
 spire. The whole is most elaborately carved, and 
 it is almost incredible that it is a monolith. 
 Fergusson is sure to have pictures of it. 
 
 We went out this evening to see the mela, or 
 feast. To-day is the great day of it. There are, 
 the tasildar told us, a hundred thousand people 
 in Roza, whereof the normal population is two 
 thousand two hundred and eighteen : so you can 
 imagine the state of the village tank, in which 
 all the pilgrims first wash and then drink : our 
 bath-water came from it till we protested. (A 
 tasildar is a district magistrate : what they call 
 mamlatdar in Bombay.) 
 
 We first walked to a spur of hill from which 
 we could see the crowds and the booths and the 
 tents and the wagons spread all about and 
 around the town : then we descended and saw 
 the procession. A box of sandalwood-oil is 
 carried in state to the saint's tomb, and we saw 
 it being carried. First came a rabble in brilliant 
 clothes, singing weirdly. Then came a kind of 
 improvised bodyguard armed with every conceiv- 
 able species of knife, sword, spear, and gun : those 
 
THE MOGHULAI 141 
 
 who had guns were busy firing feux-de-joie of 
 alarming loudness. Then came the draped box, 
 borne on men's heads under a red canopy with 
 silver poles ; then more rabble, and at the rear 
 the Nizam's representative in a smart motor-lan- 
 daulette. Behind him was another large crowd, 
 into which our party got swept, and so we 
 walked in the procession right up to the gate of 
 the tomb, and quite rivalled the sandalwood as a 
 cynosure. 
 
 There were hundreds of beggars sitting at the 
 gateways and corners, crying " Al-lah " just like 
 the man in Kismet : fortunately the humorous 
 coinage of the State enables the charitable to give 
 something to each without great expense, since 
 the smallest current coin is the cowrie-shell, ot 
 which no fewer than five thousand seven hundred 
 and sixty go to the rupee ! 
 
 Wednesday, BADNAPUR. We left Roza on 
 Monday. Jim and I came here by train, three 
 stations south-east of Aurangabad, while the rest 
 of the party drove to Aurangabad and are awaiting 
 us there : we rejoin them to-night. 
 
 The missionaries met us here and we took up 
 our quarters in a camp just outside the village, by 
 the river-bed (now dry), under a grove of tamarinds 
 and banyan-trees. 
 
 The Christians in this district are almost all 
 Mangs, who, if you remember, are the lowest tribe 
 of all, the rope-makers. In the 'Nagar mission, 
 
142 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 where I was in January and which is only thirty 
 miles west of this, across the Godavari, the 
 Christians are Mahars, the tribe above the Mangs : 
 but here the Mahars have not yet come over, though 
 they are ready to if they could have separate 
 churches : which of course they mustn't. 
 
 In Badnapur all the Mangs are Christians, but 
 only about ten per cent, of the total Mang popula- 
 tion of the district has been reached, owing to lack 
 of workers and funds. The civilizing effects of 
 Christianity are more noticeable than ever here : 
 the C.M.S., being so keen on the Bible, are the 
 more particular to insist that their people should 
 learn to read : and a man who can read is a very 
 rare bird in the Moghulai. (Moghulai is the 
 ordinary name for the Nizam's dominions : it was 
 an offshoot of the Moghul Empire.) So already 
 there are Mang Christians in some of the most 
 responsible State positions. The Government 
 thinks highly of them and encourages the mission 
 in every way. They strongly approve of the con- 
 version of Hindus to Christianity as a pis-aller to 
 Mohammedanism. The oath of a Christian has 
 received legal recognition in the Moghulai courts 
 as thirty times as reliable as that of a Hindu, and 
 they trust them more than Mohammedans even, 
 in practice. A Hindu is almost incapable of telling 
 the truth unless he is holding a cow's tail, and 
 even then you can't be sure of him. 
 
 The afternoon we arrived Jim held a Con- 
 firmation in our big tent, and later on laid the 
 
THE MOGHULAI 143 
 
 foundation-stone of a cnurch, for which the 
 Government has given the land. 
 
 Yesterday we drove out to another village ten 
 miles off, called Saigao, where again all the Mangs 
 are Christian. We drove in tongas drawn by 
 trotting bullocks, and got there in an hour and 
 a half. We were received by a motley proces- 
 sion, and marched in state to the church, led by 
 a band of two cornets (played by Mohammedans), 
 a fife, and cymbals, while in front of all was a 
 Hindu, who let off cracker-bombs in our honour 
 all the way. (Who would receive a bishop with 
 Chinese crackers in England ? We have such 
 poor imaginations !) He fastened each cracker on 
 to the end of a long staff and then leaped into 
 the air, using the staff as a jumping-pole ; and 
 as the point hit the ground it exploded the cracker 
 with a tremendous bang. I should have liked to 
 photograph it, but I was in the middle of the 
 procession myself. 
 
 In the church Jim held a biggish Confirmation, 
 thirty-four confirmed. The proceedings were 
 enlivened by a small boy of about five in the 
 front row. The innumerable babies always behave 
 queerly, but this one was distinctly original. He 
 first escaped from his mother, who was handi- 
 capped (i) by a smaller infant, (2) by being a 
 Confirmation candidate ; then advanced to the 
 open space in front of Jim's chair, where he pro- 
 ceeded to divest himself of his only garment, a 
 cotton coat. He then lay on his back and slapped 
 
144 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 his stomach loudly for some minutes, after which 
 he solemnly dressed again : and repeated the per- 
 formance with variations (one very embarrassing) 
 all through the service. 
 
 After the service we had the usual pan-supari, 
 i.e., garlanding, oil of sandal wood on our hands, 
 betel-nut to eat, speeches, and music. All of 
 which was very hot, it being two o'clock in a 
 sun-baked compound, with only a cotton shamiana 
 to shade us. 
 
 We got back to camp at five, and I shot some 
 pigeons and missed several more, while Jim under- 
 went another pan-supari at a neighbouring village. 
 
 This morning Jim has gone to inspect a church 
 twelve miles off, and we all go in to Aurangabad 
 this evening. To-morrow afternoon I set forth for 
 Calcutta. Characteristically the Moghulai post- 
 office has lost all our mail-letters, so I don't know 
 when, if at all, I shall get what you wrote on 
 February Qth. 
 
 P.S. We saw Aurangzeb's tomb at Roza, but 
 it isn't much to look at. He ordered his funeral 
 expenses to be paid out of the proceeds of some 
 caps he had quilted with his own hands : but 
 they only fetched ten rupees. 
 
 n 
 
 February 28, BADNAPUR, HYDERABAD STATE. 
 We got the telegraphed report of the Lords' 
 
THE MOGHULAI 145 
 
 Debate at Roza. I'm looking forward to hearing 
 the Bengali point of view next week. It seems 
 to me the coexistence of the two Governments in 
 a centre like Calcutta is the crux of the capitals 
 question. 
 
 We are in the Moghulai here i.e., the native 
 State of Hyderabad, generally called the Nizam's 
 dominions. It is a very humorous country, from 
 what I have seen and heard of the methods of 
 its government. I'm told the people say they 
 will never know prosperity till they come under 
 the British Raj ; but in some ways I fancy they 
 would find our methodical efficiency less congenial 
 than the existing haphazard despotism. It takes 
 ages to get anything done, since the Government 
 officials lose half the letters they receive and fail 
 to answer the rest : but when any officer is moved 
 to do anything, his action has all the grace of 
 an unexpected benefaction. The padre here told 
 me that a correspondence of two letters a side 
 takes an average of eighteen months to conduct. 
 
 I gather the most serious abuse is the way the 
 Government officials on tour harass and fleece the 
 villages. They just loot anything they want, and 
 beat any one who suggests payment. On approach- 
 ing a strange village the padres have sometimes 
 seen the inhabitants all taking to the jungle under 
 the impression they were officials. But there is 
 a delightful uncertainty about their measures : 
 sometimes they can do better than we ever could. 
 For instance, in the last famine the bannias (money- 
 
 ii 
 
146 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 lenders) in a certain town " cornered " wheat and 
 demanded extortionate prices : whereupon the 
 tasildar sent to say that unless they lowered 
 their prices within four hours he would authorize 
 a general loot. The result was an instantaneous 
 easing of the wheat-market. 
 
 On the other hand, when another town was 
 terrorized by dacoits, it appealed to the Nizam 
 and he sent his own bodyguard to protect them. 
 A week later they appealed again to be left to 
 the dacoits. 
 
 The mission-work here is almost entirely among 
 the Mangs. The mission is on the best of terms 
 with the Government, since Mohammedans greatly 
 prefer Christians to Hindus. (The Government of 
 the Moghulai is Mohammedan, since it is an off- 
 shoot of the old Moghul Empire : but the people 
 are nearly all Hindus, in the villages at any rate.) 
 In fact, they delight to favour Christian Mangs, 
 and flout the patils of the villages, who naturally 
 resent it, and are therefore the chief enemies of 
 the mission. Another cause of ti\e patils hostility 
 is that they used to employ the Mangs to steal 
 crops and divide the proceeds ; but now the 
 Mangs, being Christian, refuse to do this. 
 
 I think the improvement wrought by Christianity 
 is even more visible among the Mangs than it was 
 at 'Nagar among the Mahars. The padres are 
 very pleased over a recent case in the law-courts, 
 where the evidence of one Christian Mang was 
 held to outweigh that of twenty-five Hindu Mahars 
 
THE MOGHULAI 147 
 
 who had all been suborned by a claimant to a 
 property expressly because he was a Christian. 
 He was made to recite the Creed, the Lord's 
 Prayer, and the Ten Commandments in court ! 
 
 The Hindu villagers themselves say of the 
 Christians, " They trust one another," which is 
 really a more remarkable testimony than the other : 
 because it is not natural for a Hindu to connect 
 trust or love with religion at all. 
 
 In fact, the popular view of religion is entirely 
 external, and, so to speak, business-like. Which 
 reminds me of a delicious story of one of the clergy 
 of the 'Nagar mission, only it will lose its savour 
 on paper. He was sitting one evening in the 
 church compound at Karegao, when he saw a man 
 coming stealthily out of the church. As the man's 
 get-up was Hindu and not Christian, he called out 
 to him in Mahrathi, and asked him what he was 
 doing there. The man came up to him salaaming 
 profoundly and saying, "Sahib, I am a poor man." 
 
 " Well, what is the matter ? " said fas padre. 
 
 " Oh, sahib, thy servant is a poor man, a very 
 poor man ! Yesterday I lost a rupee. I searched 
 and searched but could not find it. I did not know 
 how to live. And it chanced that my cousin saw 
 me in my trouble, and he said, * What is amiss ? ' 
 and I answered him, ' I have lost my rupee, and 
 I do not know where to find it.' Then he answered 
 me, ' That God who lives in the church over there 
 is a good fellow ; try him.' So I waited till the 
 dusk, and having waited, I went softly to the 
 
148 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 church and entered in and stood before the image 
 of him and said, ' O thou God, if thou wilt find my 
 rupee for me I will give thee a coco-nut.' Then 
 returned I to my house, and behold in half an hour 
 afterwards I found my rupee. So I waited till this 
 evening's dusk, and I have been in and have paid 
 him the coco-nut : he is a good God." 
 
 Friday, AURANGABAD. When writing this letter 
 on Wednesday at Badnapur I must have left too 
 little between my head and the sun : anyway, soon 
 after starting for the train to come in here I felt a 
 headache, and on arriving here found my tempera- 
 ture was 102, so I retired to bed. Yesterday it 
 was 101, and the doctor came and sampled my 
 blood. To-day he reports it is not fever, and 
 that I shall be able to travel by Monday. My 
 hostess is being most kind and looking after me 
 splendidly. . . . 
 
XI 
 
 CALCUTTA AND DARJEELING 
 
 i From Aurangabad to Calcutta The multiplication of castes 
 Calcutta Museum and Zoo The Durbar changes The Holi 
 festival The drugged Rohilla Berar Two anecdotes ii A 
 change of climate A Jain temple From Calcutta to Siliguri 
 The Terai and the Himalayas Darjeeling Kinchinjanga Tiger 
 Hill A rhododendron forest iii Attractiveness of the people 
 Nepalese honesty The Bengali Babu Colour division in Cal- 
 cutta Hindu views of administration Two Bengal views of 
 the Durbar changes Simultaneous examinations A grim and 
 instructive famine story. 
 
 March 6, 1912, CALCUTTA. I left Aurangabad 
 on Monday at two o'clock. Knowing the train 
 would be hot, I shut up all the Venetian shutters 
 on both sides and thus kept it down to 92, which 
 was not at all uncomfortable. I got to Manmad at 
 six, and there caught the Nagpur mail (i.e., Bombay 
 to Calcutta via Nagpur). I got a carriage to myself, 
 not one of the usual sort, but like a wagon-lit for 
 two. It had a fan and was quite comfortable. In 
 fact, the train altogether was about the best I've 
 
 been on. 
 
 149 
 
ISO A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 I woke up yesterday at Nagpur. From there 
 onwards all day the country was as flat as a billiard- 
 table, with hills in the distance occasionally, and 
 nearly all cultivated to the last inch. But the out- 
 standing difference was that it was green and not 
 brown. There were long stretches of short down- 
 like grass for pasture, reminding me of Nazeing 
 Common rolled flat ; water was plentiful, though 
 the numerous rivers were very low, and the trees 
 were beginning to show spring tints of green. The 
 whole effect was of an even, peaceful prosperity. It 
 was a cool day, my thermometer never showing 
 above 84, and I enjoyed the contrast to the brown 
 and parched Deccan with its temperature of 98. 
 
 What you say about castes in general is true, but 
 it does not account for the extraordinary Indian 
 tendency to multiply castes and sub-castes and sub- 
 sub-castes. The four original castes of priests, 
 soldiers, merchants, and artisans are intelligible. 
 Their origin was probably racial, and they were 
 adopted by religion. But to-day there are more than 
 two thousand three hundred castes which mayn't 
 inter-marry or "interdine," not all above one another, 
 but often parallel ; and the tendency is still to form 
 more. The result is an inter-breeding which has 
 seriously lessened the birth-rate. In some castes the 
 shortage of women is a perpetual problem ; and this 
 was one of the causes of the child-marriage system. 
 Two thousand splits rather mar national unity. 
 
 I went out yesterday morning and saw the 
 
CALCUTTA AND DARJEELING 151 
 
 Museum ; the most interesting thing there is 
 the rail of the Barahut Stupa one of the finest 
 Buddhist rails in existence, dating about 200 B.C. 
 Fergusson explains what a rail is, and also gives 
 pictures of this Barahut one. The carving is very 
 good and must be the outcome of a long tradition, 
 though I have never heard of anything older. 
 
 There were also several fragments of carving in 
 the Museum and some figures from near Peshawar, 
 showing unmistakable Greek influence ; in some 
 cases the mixture was very effective. Fergusson 
 discusses this also. 
 
 Yesterday evening I went to the Zoo; it is a very 
 good one, the best I have seen outside London, 
 and in a way better, because it is confined to tropical 
 animals and they all look so well. A great feature 
 of it is the friendliness of the animals. Everything 
 except the lions and tigers came up to be scratched. 
 They had two glorious Birds of Paradise. 
 
 The climate of Calcutta is very disagreeable just 
 now. It isn't fearfully hot, only about 83, but you 
 want a pair of gills before you can breathe with 
 comfort : and the papers say it is cooler and drier 
 than usual. I should think the climate alone was 
 a very sensible argument in favour of shifting the 
 capital. I don't see how any one could see a thing 
 through in this atmosphere. 
 
 Still every one here is very cross about the 
 transfer, which they take as a personal insult to 
 Calcutta : and especially they resent the way it was 
 done. On the merits of the case I have heard 
 
152 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 nothing new ; but I haven't had time to see many 
 people yet. Of those I have, even the opponents 
 of the change say it will be a very good thing to 
 move the Government offices away from the 
 Bengali Babus, who now swarm in every office. 
 No Englishman has a good word for them : they 
 are said to have less character and backbone than 
 any other Indians, and to be intolerably conceited, 
 besides being seditious. Like so many clever people, 
 they think cleverness is the whole qualification for 
 government. 
 
 The papers here continue to denounce the 
 changes, but so far as I have detected no argu- 
 ment in any of them : it is all abuse. 
 
 All the time I was in bed at Aurangabad the 
 Holi festival was going on. It is the most in- 
 decent of all the Hindu festivals and about the 
 most popular. I could hear the processions from 
 my room, singing songs to Shiva, whose taste is 
 certainly not Puritan. They also fling red paint 
 over each other, and produce a disgusting mess. 
 The Christian women can't go out while it lasts, 
 because the whole Hindu population adopts for 
 the time being the ethics of Lot's fellow-citizens. 
 
 My hostess told me several very interesting 
 things about their work in the city among the 
 Mohammedans, and especially how the relatives 
 of converts often give them drugs which make 
 them temporarily or permanently insane. (I heard 
 of the same thing at Betgeri.) Here is one of her 
 stories. 
 
CALCUTTA AND DARJEELING 153 
 
 One day a Mohammedan Rohilla came with his 
 wife to the padre and said he was anxious to 
 become a Christian. His wife took my hostess 
 aside and asked her, "What are you going to give 
 me if I become a Christian too?" u Nothing, 
 in the sense you mean," she replied. " What, 
 nothing ? Then I shall not become one," answered 
 the woman : " but I shall like to live among 
 Christians." 
 
 So the husband became a catechumen, and they 
 both lived near the mission, and never went into 
 the native city. But after a time the man grew 
 keen, and asked to be allowed to accompany the 
 missionaries on their weekly preaching in the 
 bazaar. So they let him come, after warning him 
 not to eat or drink anything there. Well, his 
 friends saw him among the preachers, and pre- 
 tended to be reconciled to him and impressed by 
 the preaching, and finally enticed him into a 
 house on his way back. Here he refused to eat 
 or drink, but rashly accepted a pipe to smoke. 
 An hour later he dashed up to the mission- 
 bungalow in a tonga in a state of frenzy, seized 
 his wife and family, and drove off with them to 
 the city, yelling the most fearful imprecations 
 against the mission. 
 
 For two years after this he was kept in captivity 
 in the city, and the padre only saw him once, and 
 then he was in the charge of a fierce Mohammedan 
 and hardly spoke. At last late one night the 
 padre was awakened by some one knocking at his 
 
154 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 bungalow and found the man and his family out- 
 side. There had been a fire in the city, and the 
 house in which they were prisoners had been 
 burnt, and they had escaped in the confusion. 
 The padre took them in, and this time they 
 stayed and were all baptized. But after a while 
 they thought it wiser to leave Aurangabad : so 
 they moved to Bombay, where the man finally 
 died a Christian. 
 
 I ought to have told you last week of a trans- 
 action which gives the measure of the incom- 
 petence of Moghulai government. The province 
 of Berar used to be under it, and though Berar 
 is one of the most fertile districts in India, the 
 Nizam could never get more than seventeen lakhs 
 of revenue out of it. So when Lord Curzon 
 offered him twenty-five lakhs per annum in per- 
 petuity if he would transfer it to the Raj, he ac- 
 cepted : and now that we administer it, it produces, 
 with the same taxes, fifty lakhs per annum. It 
 is in this sense that the Nationalist accusation is 
 true that we have trebled the taxation if for 
 " taxation " you read " revenue." 
 
 I heard two rather nice little stories the other 
 day. One is of Mrs. A., whose absent-mindedness 
 is a proverb. One night she was dining with the 
 Lieutenant-Governor, and after tasting the entree 
 leaned across to her husband, remarking, " Really, 
 my dear, we must change the cook." 
 
 The other story throws a sidelight on the police 
 administration. The Lieutenant-Governor was 
 
CALCUTTA AND DARJEELING 155 
 
 once so moved by a beggar-woman's appeal that 
 he gave her two rupees. Overcome with grati- 
 tude, she murmured, " May you become a head- 
 constable ! " 
 
 To-morrow I start for Darjeeling, so I had 
 better bring this to an end now. 
 
 11 
 
 March 9, DARJEELING. Oh, it is nice to 
 feel cold again ! I never thought I should enjoy 
 that sensation, even with a sweater and thick 
 overcoat over my evening clothes ; but really, 
 after Calcutta, it is a positive pleasure. Not that 
 it's really cold, only 46 outside and 56 in here, 
 but it feels like zero. On Thursday in Calcutta 
 it was 92, and the humidity of the air was regis- 
 tered as 97, 1 00 representing saturation, and my 
 under-garments also. 
 
 On Friday morning my hostess went with me 
 to see a famous Jain temple which is one of the 
 few " sights " of Calcutta. It was in the native 
 quarter, and she had never seen it in all the 
 twenty-five years she has been there. It was 
 very striking and rather beautiful, though it sounds 
 alarming. It is built of white marble, but is almost 
 entirely covered with glass mosaic, brilliant colour 
 patterns on white, like a kaleidoscope. It stands 
 in a garden, the beds of which are divided into 
 patterns by white glass mosaic, while all about 
 
156 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 the white stone tanks and paths stand white 
 statues of painted cast-iron, some Indian, some 
 classical. The effect was dazzling and the sun- 
 light carried the crudity. 
 
 I left Calcutta by the 5 p.m. mail for Darjeeling. 
 This is (at first) the quickest train in India, and 
 we reached the Ganges at about eight o'clock. 
 One has to cross in a steamer, though a bridge 
 is now being built at a cost of ,3,000,000. It 
 took an hour to cross, as one has to thread the 
 sand-banks for some distance up-stream. The 
 steamer's searchlight showed up the bare-looking 
 banks and attracted multitudes of moths. 
 
 We got into a train the other side and slept 
 till seven this morning, when we reached Siliguri, 
 where we changed into the Darjeeling- Himalaya 
 Railway, an absurd little railway of two-foot gauge 
 that did incredible things the whole way up here. 
 It runs along the roadside like a tram and doesn't 
 mind how often it crosses and recrosses. After 
 about three-quarters of an hour we came to the 
 hills and then the ascent began. From that point 
 for forty miles the gradient averaged one in thirty, 
 and was often one in twenty-four, but the engine 
 kept it up as if it were level, puffing along at 
 about ten miles an hour and twisting in the most 
 Through-the-Looking-Glassy way. One was per- 
 petually seeing the engine and the guard's van 
 out of the same window at the same moment, 
 and one quite had the feeling that if one put one's 
 head out of the window it might be taken off by 
 
CALCUTTA AND DARJEELING 157 
 
 the engine. Twice (four times the book says : 
 I only noticed two) we looped the loop, and so 
 quickly that if the train had been a long one the 
 engine would 'have been directly over the rear 
 carriages. Four times we backed up a zigzag 
 and then on, without so much as pausing, let 
 alone changing engines : it was like the Swedish 
 dance. 
 
 The lowest foot-hills, the deadly Terai, were 
 covered with dense jungle tall, straight, mast- 
 like forest trees growing close, with rank vegeta- 
 tion below. It was wild and interesting, but only 
 moderately beautiful. The most noticeable plants 
 were a palm-head which grew like mistletoe, 
 high up on the trees ; coarse and flowerless 
 rhododendrons below ; and a very large-leaved 
 bamboo, in each clump of which were two or 
 three quite bare stems that stood out like giant 
 fishing-rods, bending right over at the end. 
 
 We soon got above the forest and wound 
 our way up through normal bush-veld. A little 
 later we had a grand view of valleys and rugged 
 hillsides, but they weren't very lovely, though on 
 a big scale. 
 
 I think one missed the brilliant colouring of the 
 Western Ghats. Here the hills were dull ochre- 
 brown, and the jungle trees were of a colourless 
 green, so to speak ; one hardly noticed them in 
 the distance, except where there were groves of 
 what they call "flame of the forest," which is a 
 tree like an ash, and just now it has no leaves 
 
158 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 but is covered with flowers of an amazing fire- 
 scarlet, bright enough and orange enough to make 
 poynsetias look a dirty magenta. In places these 
 trees were massed, with gorgeous effect. 
 
 After two and a half hours of winding we came 
 to Kurseong. About this point nearly all the lower 
 hills were cleared and planted with tea-gardens, 
 which also ran in terraces a long way up the sheer 
 sides of the main hills. 
 
 It was after Kurseong that the scenery became 
 really lovely. We began to climb round the side 
 of a vast amphitheatre, formed by two huge 
 curved spurs of mountain about ten thousand feet 
 high. 
 
 We were high up (about five thousand feet), on 
 the one mountain and looked right across to the 
 other, over a series of lower spurs which converged 
 to a point. Between each spur was a deep, narrow 
 valley, and the three valleys united like a bird's 
 foot in one big ravine with a big river-bed, which 
 seemed to be straight below us four thousand feet 
 down. All the spurs were covered with tea-gardens, 
 squat, pincushiony bushes dotted over brown earth, 
 and we had a bird's-eye view of the little huts and 
 sheds of grass and corrugated iron, ever so far 
 below. The line crept along the precipitous 
 mountain wall, in and out among the huge 
 buttresses that ran sheer down to the valley far 
 below, leaving hardly a ledge for the trains. The 
 other wall of the amphitheatre was dark and dim 
 in the haze, and through the gap at the far end 
 
CALCUTTA AND DARJEELING 159 
 
 I could just catch a faint glimpse of yellow, which 
 was the first sign of the great snow-ranges. 
 
 Darjeeling proved to lie just beyond the horn 
 of the mountain wall we were climbing along. 
 It is perched on a spur seven thousand feet high, 
 running out from a great block of mountain about 
 ten thousand feet high. On three sides it looks 
 sheer down into chasms, gorges, and valleys about 
 five thousand feet deep, though they are full of 
 smaller hills, while beyond the chasm on the north, 
 north-east, and north-west (which is about thirty 
 miles wide) rise the Eternal Snows, a chain of 
 peaks ranging from twenty thousand feet to 
 twenty-nine thousand feet high. (The perpetual 
 snow-line is about seventeen thousand feet.) 
 
 Unfortunately, the Eternal Snows have a habit 
 of being shrouded in mist, and have been so for the 
 last three weeks, so I could see practically nothing 
 of them this afternoon, though after a while I 
 caught sight of the top of Kinchinjanga in a 
 perfectly absurd and impossible place for a moun- 
 tain-top, far above where any self-respecting cloud 
 would let itself be seen. There wasn't enough 
 of it to be beautiful, but it was the most extra- 
 ordinary sensation to see a piece of snow up 
 above the haze (there were no clouds, only the 
 air wasn't transparent) about where one is 
 accustomed to see the moon, and to realize that 
 it belonged to a mountain forty-five miles off. 
 
 Kinchinjanga is twenty-eight thousand feet ; 
 i.e., if you put Etna on to the top of Teneriffe 
 
160 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 you still would have to put almost all Parnassus 
 on the top of them to get level. 
 
 Sunday. When I got up early this morning 
 there was less haze and a good bit of Kinchinjanga 
 could be seen, say the top two miles. It was 
 wonderfully lovely ; the snow was shining a 
 glistening yellow-white, and where the rock is 
 too steep for snow to lie the contrast added 
 greatly to the effect. But there was something 
 almost unreal and incredible about it. The lower 
 parts were completely hidden by the haze, and this 
 gave the impression that one was looking over 
 the low near hills ad infinitum ; i.e., at first it 
 seemed as if Darjeeling were the highest point 
 in the range, since the chasm which surrounds 
 it on three sides (and which is fifteen to thirty 
 miles wide) stretched as far as the eye could 
 see, owing to the haze (no clouds, only haze). 
 Then suddenly one realizes that there is this vast 
 snowy pile right away above, beginning at three 
 miles high, i.e., about where Mont Blanc leaves 
 off, and rising another two miles into the clear 
 blue air, seemingly afloat high upon the haze. 
 
 It remained visible till about twelve, and then 
 faded like the Cheshire Cat. The rest of the 
 range I've not yet seen. 
 
 Tuesday. Yesterday morning faith triumphed 
 and I got up at three, though people were 
 pessimistic of the prospect of a view. The object 
 
CALCUTTA AND DARJEELING 161 
 
 of this manoeuvre is to reach Tiger Hill by sun- 
 rise. It is seven miles away and a thousand feet 
 higher than Darjeeling, and is sometimes above 
 the haze when Darjeeling is in it : moreover, from 
 it Everest can be seen. 
 
 I started on a pony at four, looking like 
 Tweedledee in battle kit and feeling like an 
 iceberg. There was a half-moon to light the 
 path, but one could see nothing distant. After 
 an hour and a half it suddenly began to get light, 
 but the haze was impenetrable. However, I per- 
 severed, and on nearing the top of Tiger Hill a 
 turn in the path brought me facing Kinchinjanga, 
 and it gave me quite a start, more like the Cheshire 
 Cat than ever. This time it was silver as the moon, 
 and looked about half the distance it had on Sunday. 
 
 As I reached the summit, the top of the mist in 
 the east and west began to take on lovely colours 
 of pink and blue in layers, like a rainbow. The 
 mist to north and south was steely blue, and almost 
 as lovely as anything it could have hidden. Above 
 it towered the eye-compelling Kinchinjanga, and to 
 right and left the tops of the rest of the range just 
 showed in a long, serrated line. Then a brilliant 
 golden light caught the top of Kinchinjanga, and it 
 seemed as if a kind of liquid fire ran down it till the 
 whole of its snows glowed with a cold, yellow glitter 
 that drove the mist down, so that quite half the 
 mountain showed, every line and ridge as clear as 
 possible, looking about ten miles off. Away to the 
 west Everest showed as clearly as if it were twenty 
 
 J2 
 
162 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 miles away instead of a hundred and ten, but it 
 looked quite small of course. 
 
 The view was so lovely that it is difficult to 
 imagine that anything could be lovelier, and so 
 I can only feebly regret . that I have never had a 
 really clear view, such as one gets after rain, when 
 there is no haze and Kinchinjanga looks as though 
 one could throw a stone on to it. From a purely 
 aesthetic point of view the haze, with its tantalizing 
 translucences, is a thing of great beauty in itself, 
 but it doesn't cater for globe-trotters. The only 
 month you are certain of a clear view is October. 
 
 What I do really regret is that I haven't time to 
 make the expedition to Phallut. This is four days' 
 march away, and one rides through a rhododendron 
 forest, which every one says is the absolute acme 
 of loveliness. Even here the rhododendrons are 
 trees not bushes, but small trees, like laburnums, 
 and covered with smallish but brilliantly red 
 blossoms. In the forest, however, they are big 
 trees the houses are built of their timber and 
 every conceivable colour abounds, and the ground 
 is covered with light snow. Phallut itself is ten 
 thousand feet, and from it Everest looks closer 
 than Kinchinjanga does from here. 
 
 in 
 
 March \\th, DARJEELING. The people here are 
 the most attractive I have seen. They are 
 
CALCUTTA AND DARJEELING 163 
 
 Chinese-faced, and cheerful as dromedaries, grin- 
 ning most humorously while they carry incredible 
 loads up precipitous roads. They pack their loads 
 on their backs, holding them with a broad strap, 
 which then passes round their foreheads, so that 
 most of the weight is on their necks. 
 
 Peer Mohammed, however, is rather scornful 
 of them, probably because they are Buddhists. 
 He says, "They eating meat dot is bad. Whin 
 be the meat smelling, and leetle animal coming 
 out, then they cooking." But he gave an un- 
 solicited testimonial to the honesty of the Nepalese 
 (we are close to the boundaries of Nepal), which 
 he attributes to the following law : " When a man 
 stealing, the judge give hookum for men to take 
 him outside to the city, and tying him to one big 
 post. Then two men making claws with iron, like 
 be a tiger, and putting claws on their hands : then 
 scratching and tear his face and all his flesh from 
 his bones. Then, whin he be dying, they tying 
 him to an iliphant by the leg, and a man going in 
 front hold up paper with one writing, which say, 
 4 If be any one stealing, then be treating like this.' 
 That reason for nobody stealing in Nepal." 
 
 It is remarkable how unanimously all the officials 
 I have met denounce the Bengali Babu, as a 
 politician, at any rate. 
 
 The most intelligent of them admit he has the 
 artistic temperament : he is a real poet, a dreamer 
 of beautiful dreams, but he has nothing of what we 
 
164 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 mean by "character." His whole mind is governed 
 by words, and impervious to facts in a way which 
 no inexperienced Englishman can or will believe. 
 Consequently they are wholly unpractical. They 
 have no conception of consistency. For instance, 
 my host told me he had seen one of them write 
 in successive weeks two irreconcilable articles on 
 two aspects of the same question. When he 
 pointed out to the writer that the two couldn't 
 possibly be reconciled, he merely replied, " Why 
 should they be?" 
 
 Naturally they have no business capacity : and 
 they are too untrustworthy for responsible positions 
 in commerce : so you see the whole commerce of 
 Calcutta in the hands of illiterate Marwaris, who 
 employ Bengali B.A.'s as clerks. 
 
 I wish I had had the chance of seeing some 
 of the Babus in Calcutta, as I should then feel 
 more competent to pass judgment : but there 
 seems to be far more of a colour division in 
 Calcutta society than anywhere else I have been ; 
 and I had no chance of seeing any Indians. It is 
 a great pity: and I'm afraid it's largely the fault 
 of the women. If they chose to face some 
 boredom, they could do a lot to promote good 
 feeling : and the boredom would vanish as soon 
 as acquaintance had produced subjects of common 
 interest. In Madras they got on swimmingly. 
 
 The only place where I have met Bengalis is in 
 London at Bar dinners; and I'm afraid that what 
 I've seen of them there confirms the worst I've 
 
CALCUTTA AND DARJEELING 165 
 
 heard of them here : but perhaps those are un- 
 favourable specimens. 
 
 My host also told me some stories to show how 
 impossible it is to make them understand our view 
 of administration : and the worst of it is, we so 
 strongly feel that our view is right that we can't 
 surrender it and let them work out theirs ; because 
 fundamentally both views are based on religion, and 
 even sceptic Englishmen have enough Christianity 
 soaked into them to reject the Hindu view. For 
 instance, the Brahman regards killing an outcaste 
 as on a par with killing a crow the penalty is the 
 same in his sacred law ; but we can't possibly 
 acquiesce in that view. 
 
 One of his stories showed how the Hindu scale 
 of values upsets our scales of justice. It was this : 
 A Brahman had murdered his wife, and the case 
 was as clear as daylight. The judge fixed the 
 trial for a certain day. His clerk begged him 
 not to : but he insisted on fixing it for that day. 
 (That is our cardinal fault : we insist without 
 asking what the native's objection is.) When 
 the trial came off, the evidence was conclusive, 
 and the prisoner pleaded guilty. The jury with- 
 out hesitation returned a verdict of Not Guilty. 
 The judge was naturally indignant, and accused 
 his clerk of corrupt collusion. 
 
 The clerk replied in gentle remonstrance : " Sir, 
 I administered the advice that judicial proceedings 
 undertaken to-day would terminate unsatisfactorily. 
 To-day is the celebration of the anniversary of the 
 
1 66 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 Hindu New Year, and no sagacious, pious, or 
 comprehensive Hindu would inauspiciously com- 
 mence an era of his interminable existence by 
 condemning a twice-born Brahman to the indignity 
 of capital punishment." -I believe it is always very 
 difficult to get a native jury to condemn for 
 murder ; but to condemn a Brahman on New 
 Year's Day would be unthinkable. 
 
 Another curious thing I heard is that no Hindu 
 can understand our distinction between an inten- 
 tional crime and an unintentional. It is all part 
 of the mechanical doctrine of Karma ; but one 
 could find parallels in the Greek tragedians and 
 the Old Testament. 
 
 But it all makes one wonder whether Hindus can 
 ever be brought to appreciate just government for 
 the people. 
 
 March i$tk, CALCUTTA. Since writing last I have 
 met two members of the Bengal Civil Service, who 
 both had interesting things to say about the Durbar 
 changes. 
 
 The first quite confirmed what I had taken to be 
 the cardinal point, viz., the helplessness of the 
 Bengal Government under the old arrangement. 
 He said that when any one came to the Bengal 
 Government with a petition or a grievance and 
 failed to get what they wanted, they always went 
 across to the Government of India offices and as 
 often as not got it there. Consequently the Govern- 
 ment of Bengal never dared give a decision 
 
CALCUTTA AND DARJEELING 167 
 
 for fear of the snub of having it reversed that 
 afternoon. 
 
 He was also very glad to get the Government 
 of India away from the Bengali Babus. He said 
 that these gentry now occupy about seventy per 
 cent, of the native posts in the Government of 
 India Secretariat, whereas at Delhi he thought 
 they would dwindle to twenty per cent. 
 
 His chief objection to the re-partition was that it left 
 Bengal with hardly any healthy stations. Formerly 
 the fever-stricken Civil Servants of Bengal could go 
 to the hilly Behar country, and those of Eastern 
 Bengal to Assam. Now the only hill district will 
 be Darjeeling, employing one man, besides which 
 there are six or seven districts near the Behar 
 border, which, though not hilly, are not feverish. 
 This is a very real grievance, which might be met 
 by frequent exchanges of men, but such a system 
 is too revolutionary to be likely of adoption. 
 
 I see this point was made in the Lords : the full 
 text of the debate appeared this morning. It is 
 more impressive than the summary was, but the 
 case against the transfer still seems to me to rest 
 on the assumption that the coexistence of Govern- 
 ments in Calcutta worked well, whereas I have 
 found no one out here to say so. The case against 
 the re-partition is much more convincing than that 
 against the change of capitals. 
 
 In this connection the other civilian I met was 
 very interesting. He told me that in 1903 the 
 Civil Servants all advised this partition ; he saw 
 
168 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 the papers which went round, but the Government 
 of India overruled them all because it wanted to 
 give the Mohammedans a show of their own. 
 When the Bengalis began agitating he spent two 
 years in putting down their sedition, and twice had 
 his life attempted, after which, as he said, it seemed 
 so silly to find you'd been shot at for nothing. He 
 thought the reversal had done mischief because it 
 was patent that had there been no agitation there 
 would have been no reversal, so that inevitably 
 next time the Bengalis want something reversed 
 they will expect to get it by agitating and bomb- 
 throwing. He thought the removal of the capital 
 good in itself, but it had created a bad impression 
 because it was being said that the Viceroy had run 
 away from the agitators of Calcutta. 
 
 He went on to say that the Bengalis were so 
 plausible that it took most Viceroys about four 
 years to find them out, and then they had to go 
 home. What he most feared was that "one day 
 some fool will come out from England and give 
 'em simultaneous examinations," which he said 
 would result in flooding the Civil Service with 
 Indians, (a) because most Indians are very good 
 crammers and the Indian Civil Service is a cram 
 exam., (b] because those who weren't would buy 
 copies of the papers beforehand, a thing which it 
 would be impossible to stop once the papers were 
 in India. Once the Indian Civil Service is pre- 
 ponderatingly native, our system must break down, 
 because no native really either understands it or 
 
CALCUTTA AND DARJEELING 169 
 
 sympathizes with it. There is the Indian way of 
 administering a State, as worked in the Native 
 States ; and it works well, though not according 
 to our ideas. Alternatively there is our way, but 
 our way run by natives ends in speedy chaos. It 
 is bad enough at present when the subordinates 
 are natives ; the system breaks down as soon as 
 the Englishman takes his eye off. 
 
 As an example he told me his experience of 
 Bengali Babu subordinates in the famine camps of 
 1893-4. In those days natives only came to the 
 famine camps when they were literally starving, 
 and they got corn there, either cheap or free 
 according to circumstances. He found that if he 
 took a day off from going round the camps, the 
 deaths on that day would rise by between two 
 hundred and three hundred, and if he left out one 
 camp, the deaths there would rise by twenty or 
 thirty. The reason was that the Babu camp 
 officers always withheld the corn until he was 
 sighted, and if he didn't come they doled out no 
 corn till evening, so that twenty or thirty men 
 might die ; whereupon they entered those twenty or 
 thirty as having received corn, and pocketed the 
 price of it, about 3d. per death. This they did 
 without winking, and when he discovered it he had 
 to ride thirty miles every day round ten camps to 
 make sure the men were fed. He took a horse- 
 whip, and if he found the men hadn't been fed at 
 the proper time, he used it : in famine time the 
 Government let the collectors be drastic. If these 
 
1 70 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 Babus are the men who would get control of our 
 administration, of course they would soon drive 
 every Englishman out of it. 
 
 I left Darjeeling yesterday afternoon. One has 
 to cross the Ganges in a boat ; it is about a mile 
 wide, but not a bit pretty. There were a lot of 
 porpoises playing in it, which surprised me. In 
 flood-time it is about three miles wide. We 
 crossed at six in the morning, and got here soon 
 after ten. 
 
 I leave this evening for Benares. 
 
XII 
 FROM CALCUTTA TO KHYBER 
 
 i Benares The Ghats Sarnath Agra and Delhi again 
 Amritsar Lahore Jehangir's tomb ii The plains in March 
 Wazir Khan's mosque, Lahore Indo-Greek sculptures iii 
 Benares v. Madura The Brahmo Somaj The Arya Somaj 
 Peer Mohammed on King George A democratic paradox The 
 jubilee of the Mutiny in Delhi Education iv From Lahore 
 to Peshawar A violet-crowned city Through the Khyber 
 Passing a caravan A valley of desolation A ride and a view. 
 
 March 18, AGRA. I left Calcutta on Wednes- 
 day and got to Benares on Thursday morning, 
 two days later than I had intended (owing to my 
 " indisposition "), and so had only two days there 
 instead of four. 
 
 I stayed with a friend in the Government School. 
 In the evening he took me into the city, which 
 is quite the most picturesque I have seen. The 
 reason of this lies in the fact that the nearer you 
 die to the banks (only the west bank, if you die 
 the other side you become a donkey) of the Ganges, 
 
 the better your chance of a "rise" in the next life. 
 
 171 
 
i;2 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 Consequently the competition for sites near the 
 river is like that for City sites in London ; it has 
 forced the houses up to double their usual height, 
 and has squeezed the streets to half their normal 
 breadth. Moreover, people rich enough to pay 
 Benares rents can afford fine balconies and door- 
 ways ; so the result is a city of extremely narrow, 
 irregular streets between fine, tall, purely Oriental 
 houses (a religious centre instinctively avoids 
 foreign adaptations) which almost meet above, as 
 in Old London. All the streets are crowded with 
 pilgrims in their best clothes, and lined with shops 
 full of brass- work and stuffs. 
 
 We went into some of the innumerable temples, 
 none of them specially fine, but did not see the 
 river. The most amusing temple was Durga's, 
 where there are scores of monkeys that will come 
 quite close if you call and feed them. 
 
 On Friday morning we went on the river. 
 Benares apparently owes its sanctity to three 
 things : (i) that the Ganges here flows towards its 
 source, i.e., north ; (2) that the city is on a steep 
 bank facing the sunrise ; and (3) that Rama 
 sacrificed ten horses there and so made it equal in 
 sanctity to Allahabad (where the point of junction 
 between the Jamna and the Ganges is reckoned the 
 most sacred spot in India). 
 
 The city is about three miles long, built along 
 the top of the high river-bank, and from it all along 
 a series of terraces and steps lead down to the 
 river. These steps are called the Ghats (ghat 
 
FROM CALCUTTA TO THE KHYBER 173 
 
 meaning a flight of steps and so applied either to 
 mountains or to real steps, etc.). There are more 
 than forty of them, making a continuous alternation 
 of embankment and steps. Along the embankment 
 runs a road, along whichever terrace is nearest the 
 water, connecting ghat with ghat, and this road is 
 lined with booths and beggars on both sides. The 
 water near the embankment is crowded with native 
 boats and barges of all sorts and sizes, and the 
 water opposite each ghat, where the steps lead 
 right down, is full of bathers. Along the top of 
 the bank are the temples, a continuous line of 
 them; and flanking the broad flights of steps 
 are innumerable shrines and other picturesque 
 buildings. 
 
 The whole length swarms with humanity like a 
 bee-hive, and it was a fascinating sight as we rowed 
 slowly along, seeing the crowds walking, standing, 
 sitting, bathing, boating, praying, juggling, dancing, 
 buying, selling, eating, drinking, burning corpses, 
 all in a cinematographic profusion. 
 
 We stayed on the river till about nine, when it 
 began to get warm, and then came home. 
 
 A lot of people told me I should find the plains 
 intolerably hot in March, but after Calcutta 
 Benares was delightfully cool. I enclose the 
 weather report of the Allahabad paper, which 
 shows how there is a difference of over a hundred 
 degrees between the extremes of temperature in a 
 day. 
 
 In the afternoon we drove to Sarnath, which is 
 
174 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 the site of old Benares. It was here that Gautama 
 began to teach after attaining Buddhahood, and the 
 place is full of Buddhist ruins going back to Asoka's 
 time, 250 B.C. It was too much ruined to be beau- 
 tiful, but I saw a tope (vide Fergusson) for the first 
 time, and the Museum was very interesting. 
 
 I left Benares on Saturday morning and travelled 
 all day, passing through Allahabad and Cawnpore, 
 and reached Agra late at night. 
 
 My excuse for coming back to Agra was to speak 
 in a debate at St. John's College a la Union ; but 
 the debate had to be cancelled because of an 
 epidemic of smallpox. Smallpox is not often fatal 
 here, but spreads rapidly, since the patient's friends 
 generally accompany him to hospital in a closed 
 carriage. 
 
 But I'm very glad to be back here, both to see 
 the place and the people again. As for the place, 
 it is as wonderful after twenty-six other cities as it 
 was when I came to it fresh : it is in a class all by 
 itself. I am more than ever struck by the ineffable 
 superiority of simplicity in white marble to the most 
 elaborate effects in coloured stone, paint, gold, or 
 pietra dura. 
 
 Wednesday, LAHORE. I only stopped in Delhi 
 one night en passant. On revisiting the fort there 
 I found it bore comparison with Agra better than 
 I thought before. The Private Audience Hall 
 is much lovelier in solitude than I realized amid 
 Durbar crowds. It is of cream-coloured marble, 
 
FROM CALCUTTA TO THE KHYBER 175 
 
 profusely ornamented with flower designs in gold 
 paint, like the richest embroidery. But Agra is 
 best. 
 
 The new capital cannot after all be built on the 
 site of the Camps ; it will probably be about six 
 miles south of the present city, near the fourteenth- 
 century Delhi. 
 
 I left Delhi last night for Lahore, stopping for 
 three hours this morning at Amritsar, to see the 
 Golden Temple. The city is the religious capital 
 of the Sikhs and the temple their greatest. It is 
 most picturesque, in fact lovely, though not big. 
 But it stands in the middle of a large square tank, 
 and can only be reached by a marble causeway, 
 with handsome gold lamp-posts along it, and crowds 
 of pilgrims and beggars. The whole of the temple, 
 except the bottom ten feet, is plated with gilt copper, 
 and the effect is very rich and fine. The style is 
 peculiar. Fergusson's picture will show you what 
 it is like, and the chasing on the gold is very good. 
 It was full of worshippers, who made offerings at 
 a tomb and then sat about, listening to a priest 
 reading. 
 
 I drove to Jehangir's tomb this afternoon : it has 
 some lovely tile-work and marble lattices. I have 
 now seen the tombs of all the five Great Moghuls 
 who are buried in India Humayan, Akbar, Jehan- 
 gir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb. Babar is buried 
 at Kabul. The fort here is second-rate, with one 
 or two exquisite bits in it. Kim's gun awakens 
 joyful memories. 
 
A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 March 21 st, LAHORE. I have been travelling 
 almost continually this week, as I wish to get into 
 Kashmir as soon as possible. 
 
 Besides, every one told me I should find Benares 
 to Lahore uncomfortably hot by March 1 5th : but 
 they were quite wrong. 
 
 Coming after Calcutta, the plains are deliciously 
 cool. The shade temperature has never touched 
 90, and at night goes down to 50. Of the four 
 places Benares, Agra, Delhi, and Lahore Delhi 
 is decidedly the coolest, and its climate to me, with 
 fresh memories of Calcutta at 92 and 97 humidity, 
 was a convincing argument for the change of capital. 
 In fact, except for the need of mosquito-curtains, I 
 found it nicer in March than in December. I stayed 
 out till 11.30 a.m. without any discomfort, and went 
 out again on a bicycle at 4 p.m. 
 
 Of course when the hot weather does come it is 
 a regular bake, but it doesn't begin till the middle 
 of April, whereas Calcutta's begins early in March. 
 
 I rode this morning before breakfast to a mosque 
 in the city (Wazir Khan's) which is profusely deco- 
 rated with the most beautiful coloured tilework I 
 have ever seen, brilliant colours and great wealth 
 and grace of design, in flowers and trees. I have 
 seen nothing like it till I got here. I think the art 
 belongs properly to Turkestan. The city is very 
 picturesque and dirty. 
 
FROM CALCUTTA TO THE KHYBER 177 
 
 After breakfast I went to the Museum and saw 
 Kim's gun outside it, with half a dozen Kims play- 
 ing on it. The great thing in the Museum is the 
 room full of Buddhist reliefs from Peshawar and 
 Rawalpindi neighbourhoods. They date from 
 300 B.C. to A.D. 400, and most of them you would 
 never know were Indian at all, especially the earlier 
 ones. They are obviously Hellenistic Greek in 
 style straight noses, Greek mouths, realistic figures, 
 and above all Greek dress, chlamys and chiton, 
 quite unmistakable. Only the attitudes are Indian 
 (squatting, etc.), and, excepting the earliest, the eyes 
 are artificial, and get more and more so, till they 
 melt into the typical Indian sculptured eye. In the 
 late types the nose, too, begins to flatten and the 
 mouth to be blubber-lipped : but for over three 
 hundred years the Greek influence is predominant, 
 and the result is a far more artistic and lifelike 
 series of reliefs than I have seen anywhere in India. 
 Far the best single thing is a fasting Buddha, which 
 is ghastly without being horrible, a most extra- 
 ordinarily arresting piece of realism. Every fibre 
 is individually represented. I only doubt whether 
 such emaciation is possible during life. 
 
 They have also found one regular Ionic column 
 and several Corinthian acanthus capitals or frag- 
 ments thereof. There was one Athene, helmet and 
 spear complete ; and a whole collection of coins of 
 Indo-Bactrian kings, with Greek inscriptions on the 
 obverse and vernacular on the reverse. 
 I start for Peshawar to-morrow. 
 
 13 
 
178 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 in 
 
 March 2\st, LAHORE. It has been a sad rush 
 this week ; two days in each place where I should 
 have liked to put in ten. 
 
 I was as much impressed with Benares as I was 
 disgusted by Madura. It seems to me to be the 
 best manifestation of Hinduism I have seen. The 
 pilgrims really meant business ; there was genuine 
 devotion about their ablutions and processions and 
 multitudinous observances. It was all a jumble, 
 but a reverent jumble. The very smells had an 
 odour of sanctity that made them fitting and almost 
 desirable. 
 
 I went on for the week-end to Agra. I talked 
 a great deal to my friends there, and especially I 
 heard about the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj. 
 Raju told me about them, and being an Indian, his 
 account of them is more interesting and authentic 
 than an Englishman's would have been. He said 
 the Brahmo Samaj (Society of God) is a purely 
 religious sect of reformed Hindus, who discard 
 idolatry, polytheism, mythology, etc., and wish to 
 abolish caste, child-marriage, and perpetual widow- 
 hood. They are practically Unitarians. They 
 were founded in the thirties, but are now being 
 reabsorbed by orthodox Hinduism. Their influ- 
 ence is confined to Bengal and is not likely to 
 last long. 
 
 The Arya Samaj (Society of Aryans) is much 
 
FROM CALCUTTA TO THE KHYBER 179 
 
 more important. It is a political-religious society. 
 Its fundamental thesis is that all knowledge can 
 be found in the Vedas ; so its cry is "Back to 
 the Vedas." It is anti-foreign, anti-Christian, and 
 especially anti- Mohammedan. Its aim is to restore 
 the India of the Vedas, an India for the Indians, 
 governed by Hindus, and aiming at the Vedic 
 ideals. It also discards caste, child-marriage, 
 mythology, and idolatry ; and therefore it has no 
 chance of taking root south of the Vindhya 
 mountains. But in the Punjab it is powerful 
 among the student class, and its numbers are 
 increasing. He put them at a hundred thousand. 
 It is anti- British, and its numbers quadrupled 
 during the years of unrest, 1904-7 ; but for the 
 moment it has no handle against the Government. 
 Its distortions of history and interpretations of the 
 Vedas are incredibly crude and false, but they go 
 down. For instance, the founder, in his book, 
 "The Light of Truth," asserts that railways 
 and all modern science can be found in the 
 Vedas. 
 
 On Monday I went on to Delhi for a day. 
 I spent Tuesday morning in the fort. While 
 we were there, memories of the Durbar surged 
 up in Peer Mohammed, and the following con- 
 versation took place. 
 
 P. M. I think King Gearge much better man 
 than his father. 
 
 SELF. Yes, King George is very good ; he loves 
 all his people. 
 
i8o A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 P. M. What I liking very much was, whin he 
 driving in oping carridge, he salaam to the poor 
 man also as to the rich, that please God very much, 
 I think. 
 
 SELF. Yes, I think so. ... Are you glad he 
 moved the capital to Delhi? 
 
 P. M. Yes, I very pleased. Delhi great 
 Mohammedan city. Calcutta good place for 
 business, but Delhi the city for the Raj. And 
 Bengalis bad man, giving lot of trouble ; so when 
 King Gearge coming, he punish them and taking 
 away capital. Bifore, all government was Bengalis, 
 now other people will have too. Bengalis very 
 sorry, but it be their fault. 
 
 He evidently thought it quite a natural thing 
 that a king should change his capital if its people 
 were troublesome. 
 
 I dined with a most kind missionary who has 
 been out here a long time. He is a strong Liberal, 
 but he said that on democratic principles, i.e., if 
 we conformed to the popular will, we ought un- 
 doubtedly to diminish natives' powers of self- 
 government instead of increasing them. The 
 Municipal Council at Delhi, he added, was largely 
 a failure. He had often asked the people in the 
 bazaar whether they would like its powers 
 increased, and they always answered, " For 
 Heaven's sake, if you want to do anything, 
 diminish them." Its vice-president had had an 
 open cesspool outside his door for years, and 
 won't take the trouble to have it covered. 
 
FROM CALCUTTA TO THE KHYBER 181 
 
 Which indirectly confirms what I learnt in the 
 South, that the Nationalist party have (at present) 
 no right to speak for the man in the street ; they 
 have given no proof that they want what he 
 wants or that they would govern in his interests. 
 If they were really keen for his welfare, there 
 are surely many branches of social reform they 
 could undertake independently of government. 
 
 Five years ago there was a good deal of 
 unrest in Delhi; and in May, 1907, when the 
 jubilee of the Mutiny approached, the Europeans 
 in the Civil Lines heard rumours of their intended 
 massacre on the night of the loth. When the 
 night came, a Eurasian ran round their bungalows 
 announcing that the massacre had begun in the 
 city. So all the intrepid residents in the Civil 
 Lines collected in the club, and sat up all night 
 with loaded rifles. Fortunately, no natives came 
 along or there might have been the most awful 
 trouble. Meanwhile, the slim Eurasian burgled 
 the deserted bungalows and departed. 
 
 Another missionary here, who is a strong 
 sympathizer with the Nationalists, told me he 
 thought that Indians had got quite as many posts 
 in the administration as they could efficiently fill 
 for the present, in the Punjab at any rate. What 
 he chiefly wanted was compulsory free education ; 
 he feared the Government were going to make 
 it free but not compulsory, and that, he said, 
 would be little advance on the present position. 
 I know nothing about this. 
 
182 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 IV 
 
 March 24, PESHAWAR. This is the last letter 
 I shall be able to pos.t on the railway before 
 starting on the two-hundred-mile drive to Kash- 
 mir ; so any subsequent ones may be irregular, 
 as you can never be sure of catching the mail 
 from Srinagar, since the mail-carts may be stopped 
 by landslides or broken harness. 
 
 I was quite glad to get away from Lahore, 
 though Wazir Khan's mosque was one of the 
 most beautiful things I have seen since I came 
 out, and semi-Greek sculptures in the Museum 
 were very interesting. 
 
 I left on Friday morning and travelled all day, 
 through just the same flat, green, well-wooded 
 country as before. The Ravi and the Chenab 
 were unimpressive rivers, shallow and with no 
 determinate bed. The bridges showed they must 
 be enormously wide in the rains. Later on, the 
 mountains rose in the distance on the right, and as 
 we got nearer I could see a long line of snow along 
 their tops, but they were too far off to be very 
 exciting. We got nearest to them about where 
 we crossed the Jhelum (which was a regular big 
 river) : the particular group we saw was the Pir 
 Panjal. 
 
 After Jhelum we passed through most curious 
 country. The whole surface was honeycombed 
 much like Amundsen's description of the Devil's 
 
FROM CALCUTTA TO THE KHYBER 183 
 
 Dancing Room, but wherever there was a flat 
 spot, even a few feet square, at either level, it 
 was growing young corn. 
 
 We crossed the Indus after dark at Attock, and 
 reached Peshawar at 1 1 p.m. 
 
 I have to stop here four days, though there 
 is not much to do, because the Khyber is only 
 picketed on Tuesdays and Fridays. However, 
 I'm quite glad of a rest, as I've been continuously 
 on the move for a fortnight, and this is an 
 exceedingly pretty place. It really has got a 
 violet crown, more complete and more violet 
 than Athens's, of which it reminds me. The 
 place itself is on a flat plain, or at most a low 
 rise in that plain, and the abundance of trees 
 prevents one seeing much unless one climbs to 
 the top of one of the few high buildings. When 
 one does one sees at a glance what loorfyavoc 
 means. 
 
 The hills almost completely encircle the plain 
 at a distance of from ten to twenty miles from 
 the city ; and behind the innermost violet ring- 
 rise others and others as far as the eye can 
 reach through the marvellously clear air, each 
 ridge a shade paler than the last, till in three 
 places the snow mountains form the horizon, 
 throwing the ridges immediately in front of them 
 into dark relief. It is a wonderful panorama of 
 thrilling places, another reminder of the view 
 from the Acropolis. You can see the Khyber 
 and the hills of Afghanistan to the west, south 
 
1 84 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 of them the mountains of the Zakkar Khels and 
 other Afridis of the borderland ; to the north-west 
 the Mohmand, Dir and Swat country, with the 
 Malakand Pass leading from Dargai to Chitral ; 
 the hills towards Chitral and the snows of the 
 Mountains of Solomon can be seen quite plainly. 
 
 The bazaars here are very crowded with grim- 
 looking people, who look as if they enjoyed life 
 less than death, hook-nosed and bearded, some 
 of them giants, wholly different from the worm- 
 like Hindu, but hardly more pleasant. The young 
 ones are very nice-looking. 
 
 There is a Museum here too, full of the same 
 very early Buddhist sculptures as at Lahore the 
 old Gandhara province was in this district. The 
 sculptures here are not so good as those at Lahore, 
 and are more Indian, but they are still quite dif- 
 ferent from and superior to anything later. 
 
 Tuesday. I went through the Khyber to-day. 
 It was glorious, flooding the imagination like Ther- 
 mopylae. The pass is only open on Tuesdays and 
 Fridays, because it has to be picketed all the way 
 along, and all wagons and pack-animals require an 
 armed escort, so a big caravan goes up twice a 
 week. The pass is twenty-three miles long from 
 Jamrud to the Afghan border ; visitors are only 
 allowed as far as AH Masjid, a fort about half-way 
 up ; but, armed with a letter to the authorities, I 
 got special permission to go right through to Landi 
 Kotal, which is at the highest point, after which it 
 
FROM CALCUTTA TO THE KHYBER 185 
 
 slopes steeply down to Afghanistan. I had good 
 luck all the way. I had to start at eight, and it 
 rained from seven to eight it has been showery all 
 this week which had the double effect of laying the 
 dust and clearing the air. It stopped raining about 
 five minutes after I started, so the ten miles' flat 
 driving due west to Jamrud was cool and dust- 
 less, while the mountains looked lovely under the 
 grey sky. 
 
 We passed through Jamrud at a quarter-past nine, 
 and soon came to the entrance of the pass. From 
 this point we were out of British territory, since the 
 frontier strip is independent, only we guard the 
 road. But between Jamrud and the pass we had 
 to pass the caravan, which had just got under way. 
 It was enormous, over a mile long and blocking up 
 the whole road an extraordinary conglomeration 
 of men and beasts, big camels with incredible 
 burdens, just lacking the last straw, minute donkeys 
 with packs a great deal bigger than themselves; 
 ponies and cows and bullocks and buffaloes, all 
 carrying burdens ; flocks of sheep and goats ; 
 bearded men, long-haired youths, very good- 
 looking women, muffled and unmuffled, children of 
 every size, either perched on the bundles or walking. 
 Every creature appeared to be touching all its neigh- 
 bours. How we got through I can't conceive ; it 
 was a process of shouting and lashing and bumping, 
 hairbreadth escapes of donkeys, goats, and women, 
 who never noticed us till the ponies' noses touched 
 them ; imminent peril to ourselves from moun- 
 
1 86 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 tainously supercilious camels, waving huge packing- 
 cases as they swung about. I was thankful for the 
 rain, but wished that the road hadn't been flanked 
 by deep ditches. Fortunately when we were half- 
 way through the road forked and we got clear. 
 
 Leaving the imperturbable caravan behind, 
 guarded by riflemen in front and behind, we 
 entered the pass. For the first seven miles the road 
 winds up a bare valley, not very steep nor very nar- 
 row, but the very Valley of Desolation ; not a blade 
 of grass, only hard, brown, slate-like rock and a 
 dry, slate-grey river-bed. The grey sky was in keep- 
 ing with it, and the entire absence of life and sound. 
 It was empty, silent, and still, yet it seemed to be 
 rustling with innumerable ghosts of the successive 
 hordes of barbarous invaders who passed that way. 
 
 When we got near to AH Masjid there were 
 a few villages, each with a kind of subterranean 
 fort attached, like a rabbit-burrow, and little patches 
 of green crops. 
 
 Beyond Ali Masjid the pass narrowed to a real 
 gorge for about a mile, being some sixty yards from 
 rock to rock. The walls of it were never sheer, but 
 steep enough to be impassable. The scenery re- 
 minded me of Delphi. 
 
 After that it widened out again to a broadish 
 valley, with green crops for three hundred yards on 
 either side of the road, and frequent villages, each 
 one a little fort of mud ; in fact, I mistook them 
 for forts at first. This lasted the rest of the way. 
 
 About half-past eleven the sun broke through 
 
FROM CALCUTTA TO THE KHYBER 187 
 
 and showed how the sloping rocks could magnify 
 its heat. What with the green corn and the 
 sun, this top end of the pass looked happy and 
 prosperous, and nothing suggested its grim asso- 
 ciations except the loopholed village walls and the 
 silhouetted pickets on the hilltops. 
 
 I reached Landi Kotal about noon. It is just 
 a square mud fort covering some two acres, 
 standing on the road in the open valley, about 
 half a mile short of the actual point where it begins 
 to dip again. So from the fort there is no view 
 forwards, only down the road I had come up. But 
 the officer in charge lent me a horse to ride up a 
 neighbouring hill, from which he said I should get 
 a fine view. He gave me two troopers as escort, 
 and sent three riflemen to reconnoitre the hill in 
 advance. 
 
 The first thing my horse, or rather his, did was 
 to bolt, as per usual, and I spent the first quarter 
 of an hour careering over the Tirah at fifty miles 
 an hour, far away from the road and offering a free 
 pot-shot to any Afridi who might have practised on 
 the local lightning ; because, except within twenty 
 yards of the road, any one may shoot any one else 
 (except soldiers on duty) to his heart's content. I 
 also observed that the ground was of a peculiarly 
 stony character, so I thought it wiser to concentrate 
 on keeping my equilibrium rather than on trying to 
 stop the animal, since when they are in that mood in- 
 terference is apt to make them buck or kick and thus 
 unseat one. As it was, though it jumped several 
 
188 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 small ditches, I never looked like coming off, though 
 my helmet got a little out of position, which I con- 
 sidered a rather creditable piece of horsemanship. 
 
 However, in due time the silly creature stopped, 
 and my escort recovered me and we rode up the 
 hill, which was fortunately very steep and took the 
 remaining aggravating tricks out of the horse, such 
 as ambling and pulling. 
 
 When we reached the top, all of a sudden was 
 disclosed a tremendous view : the dramatic surprise 
 of it quite took my breath away, and reminded me 
 of the Third Temptation. On the side we came up 
 the hill was about eight hundred feet high, but on 
 the other it went down about two thousand five 
 hundred feet, and from its foot stretched, it 
 seemed, the whole of Afghanistan, line upon line 
 of low rugged hills and broken plains through 
 which the Kabul River wound hills of every 
 size and shape, great snow mountains massed 
 on the right, the reverse slope of the Khyber hills 
 on the left, and in the dimmest dim distance a long 
 line of snow mountains. The sun was now shining 
 brilliantly, but half the sky was covered with de- 
 tached rolling white clouds, which gave lovely light 
 and shade effects, as did the blue shadows of the 
 golden-brown hills ; only near the river were spots 
 of green. The distant snow mountains were half- 
 hidden by luminous white clouds, and I can't tell 
 how long their line was : I judged they must be 
 fully fifty miles away. The place I was on is 
 appropriately called Pisgah. 
 
XIII 
 KASHMIR 
 
 i The drive The tradition of Jehu Murree First view of the 
 snows A thrilling moment Kohala The Jhelum gorge A 
 landslide Uri Baramula The happy valley Srinagar 
 ii After duck Kashmir game Pervading picturesqueness A 
 lovely jhil iii Virtue rewarded A revelation A real duck- 
 shoot iv More about duck-shooting The trees of the valley 
 Its birds v Spring is yeomen in The Upper Jhelum Islama- 
 bad Martand Atchibal The Dal Lake An odorous city 
 vi Sambal A squall The Wular Lake Sopor Baramula A 
 wet drive More flowers The end of the story. 
 
 March 28, KOHALA DAK BUNGALOW. This is 
 where I am stopping the first night en route for 
 Kashmir. 
 
 I started in the tonga at eight o'clock. A tonga 
 is like a low back-to-back pony-cart with a hood. 
 For the first fifteen miles we proceeded at a hand- 
 gallop, changing ponies every five miles. The pace 
 was a little nerve-trying, as the way the ponies are 
 yoked without traces makes the driver's control of 
 the steering rather vague. Lucid -y the road was 
 
 good and gently uphill. The most alarming 
 
 189 
 
A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 moment was starting each new pair of ponies, as 
 they generally pranced wildly round before the 
 driver had gathered the reins properly. The first 
 new pair swung the tonga round a complete circle, 
 and then darted off like arrows from the bow or 
 a Roman chariot-race. 
 
 After fifteen miles the real climbing began, and 
 the road was muddy with yesterday's rain. The 
 ponies still started madly, but had to be changed 
 after every two and a half miles; they were generally 
 quite cooked. At about twelve it clouded over 
 and soon after one it began to hail, and then sleet 
 fell. The road was foul and slushy, and we nearly 
 stuck once with our near wheel locked in a bullock- 
 cart's : the latter had stuck, and left us very little 
 room to pass, but we just pulled through. This 
 was the place where I was warned the road might 
 be blocked with snow : but luckily the spring is 
 very early this year, and there was no snow 
 except a little that fell yesterday, now thawed 
 into slush. But it was bitterly cold, and I was 
 very glad of the nine layers of garments I had 
 put round me. 
 
 At half-past one I got to Murree, which is thirty- 
 five miles from Pindi and seven thousand five hun- 
 dred feet high : it is the hill-station for the North 
 Punjab. I had lunch over a fire at a deserted hotel 
 (the Murree season has wisely not begun yet) with a 
 very pretty view over a deep wooded valley the 
 trees being mostly firs (nearly like Scotch firs) and 
 pines and thujas. There were also quantities of 
 
KASHMIR 191 
 
 peach, apricot, and medlar trees in full blossom, 
 and these remained common all the way to here. 
 
 Leaving Murree at three o'clock, we left also 
 the valley we had come up and, crossing the 
 shoulder of the spur on which Murree stands, had 
 a magnificent view of the plain with the green 
 sloping hills for foreground. Then, rounding a 
 bluff, we came on to a quite different and even 
 more lovely view of an enormous chasm- valley for 
 foreground, and behind it a line of high, wooded hills 
 (about ten thousand feet), the tops of which had kept 
 yesterday's snow sprinkled among the pine-trees ; 
 while behind these again showed a grand chain 
 of real Eternal Snows, some in sunlight and some 
 with snowstorms playing on them. We had this 
 view for two hours, till as we got lower down 
 the near hills hid the snows. About five o'clock 
 we dropped into the Jhelum Valley, here so steep 
 and narrow as to be fairly called a gorge, with 
 the Jhelum looking tiny far below us. However, 
 an hour and a half brought us down to it, thankful 
 to be alive. 
 
 For soon after we entered it, at one of our 
 changes of horses, the usual stampede taking place, 
 the off pony pranced a little too near the edge 
 of the road, which was narrow and unparapeted ; 
 in fact, both his hind-legs went over the edge, 
 and he was left in the attitude of an heraldic 
 unicorn. Our off wheel was as near as possible 
 over, but fortunately a large stone acted as curb 
 and stopped it, and the pony scrambled back like 
 
192 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 a dog out of a swimming-bath before our near 
 wheel had more than just left the ground. It was 
 quite an exciting moment, and Peer Mohammed 
 ejaculated " Al-lah ! Al-lah ! " more fervently than 
 ever, though he had been moved to utter it at several 
 previous crises : for the journey, though long, was 
 far from uneventful, being full of little incidents: 
 this last one, however, was a trifle beyond a joke. 
 
 We got into Kohala at half- past six. It is sixty- 
 four miles from Rawal Pindi, and almost exactly 
 one-third of the way to Srinagar. I went down 
 and looked at the Jhelum. Just here it is under 
 forty yards wide : I made it thirty-seven by pacing 
 the bridge : the measuring-scale on the bridge's 
 piers shows it is now forty feet deep, and last 
 rains was fifty-nine feet deep. It is running like 
 a mill-race brown, swirling water. The view 
 from the bridge up and down the gorge is most 
 picturesque, though nothing surprising : the hills 
 on either side are (to look at) about a thousand feet 
 high, perhaps not quite so much. 
 
 Friday, URL Another long day and full of 
 incidents. I started from Kohala at half-past eight 
 this morning. The gorge looked bigger and more 
 beautiful than it did last night. We crossed the 
 bridge and went along the face of the right-hand 
 hillside (being the left bank of the stream, which 
 flows south here). We have been in the gorge 
 all day, with a rushing sound of the river for 
 company, and most lovely scenery. All the morn- 
 
KASHMIR 193 
 
 ing a big snow-mountain headed the gorge : it was 
 fifty miles away, but looked quite close. 
 
 About eleven o'clock the gorge broadened and 
 became a valley, i.e., there was a little flat, culti- 
 vatable ground on either side of the river. In this 
 valley were many trees, the prettiest being a kind 
 of mountain-ash, the young leaves of which were 
 so bright a copper-pink that, in the distance, they 
 looked like blossom. 
 
 About twelve we turned sharp eastward, and 
 continued to follow the valley till we reached Garhi, 
 where I lunched. This was thirty-three miles from 
 Kohala. 
 
 Starting again at two, the valley soon narrowed 
 to a gorge again, and for the rest of the afternoon 
 the road was just cut in a ledge on the face of the 
 ravine-side : the river about two hundred feet 
 below, and the hills a thousand feet above us, with 
 glimpses of snow in front. It was very wild and 
 grand, and quite a contrast to the almond-blossom 
 of the valley. In several places there had been 
 small landslips, one still in progress, and we drove 
 past with one eye on the stones in the road and 
 the other on those rolling down ; we dodged the 
 latter, but the former were very bumpy. 
 
 About six o'clock we came to a big landslide 
 which had blocked the whole road with loose earth. 
 A large gang of coolies was working at it, but the 
 more they cleared the more fell. However, they 
 had banked it so as to leave a space about five feet 
 wide on the extreme edge of the precipice, and over 
 
194 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 this we had to pass. I got out to take a photo- 
 graph, and got in on the far side. In fact, they 
 had to take the ponies out, and the coolies drew the 
 tonga through, with about two inches to spare. 
 
 Finally, we got in here about a quarter-past 
 seven, having travelled sixty-nine miles. I was 
 fearfully sleepy, and can hardly keep my eyes open, 
 but the bungalow is full, so I have had to sleep 
 in the dining-room, so take the opportunity of 
 writing this while dinner is being cleared away. 
 
 Saturday, SRINAGAR. Not quite such a long day 
 to-day, but I'm very glad to be out of the tonga. 
 
 When I got up this morning I found we were 
 in a lovely kind of dell where two valleys met 
 at right angles, completely encupped by hills, most 
 of them with snow. Just before we got in last 
 night deodars had begun to appear, and all this 
 morning they were the prevailing tree. They were 
 not very tall, though a few were about ninety or 
 a hundred feet, but they were slenderer and more 
 larch-like in growth than the ones at home. 
 
 We started at eight and continued along the 
 gorge as before, now high above the river, now 
 almost on a level with it, making longish dttours 
 to cross tributary streams. We passed two temples 
 of the peculiar and very effective Kashmiri style, 
 which Fergusson describes (I hope you have looked 
 at Fergusson). 
 
 About half-past eleven the gorge opened and the 
 hills subsided, the river became broad and calm, 
 
KASHMIR 195 
 
 and in front was disclosed a flat valley, on the other 
 side of which rose (thirty miles away) a long wall of 
 snow mountains. Soon we got to Baramula, where 
 the houses were built of cedar-wood and roofed 
 with green turf, quite the prettiest combination I 
 have ever seen, I think. The green roofs especi- 
 ally were lovely, being steep and often gabled. 
 
 After lunching here, I started for Srinagar, 
 thirty-three miles of nearly flat road, lined through- 
 out by tall poplars planted so close together that 
 when they get their leaves they must make a con- 
 tinuous shade, for all their narrowness. 
 
 The valley itself was rather prosaically pros- 
 perous, consisting chiefly of irrigated plough-land. 
 When the corn and rice shows, however, it will 
 be deliciously green. There are also masses of 
 iris plants, for which the valley is famous, but they 
 were not yet in flower. The prettiest pieces of 
 colour were the mustard-fields, of which there were 
 a good many, in full bloom. Otherwise it is a little 
 too early. The poplars are leafless and the planes 
 hardly showing green ; the elms are greenish, and 
 the fruit-trees in full blossom, but of these there 
 were not many till we neared Srinagar. 
 
 The valley itself, in fact, was a trifle disappoint- 
 ing. But the setting ! When we got near the 
 middle of it I could see all round, and so far as 
 I could make out (it had clouded over and was 
 misty in places) the valley is completely surrounded 
 by snow-mountains without a single break, and as 
 it is eighty miles long by twenty-five broad, this 
 
196 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 means a continuous oval chain of snows about two 
 hundred miles in length. Later in the season I 
 dare say many of the lower mountains lose their 
 snow ; but now the snow-line looked about two 
 thousand feet above the valley (i.e., seven thousand 
 feet above sea-level), and so every hill had plenty 
 of it. The effect was fairy-like under the grey sky, 
 and the light from them was such that I needed 
 my smoked glasses all the way, though there was 
 no sunshine at all. 
 
 I got in here at five o'clock. The town looks 
 most attractive, built of wood, many turfed roofs, 
 on a network of streams and canals which centre 
 in the Jhelum. Traffic is by water, as in Venice 
 and Stockholm, and the snows form the background 
 to every picture, while almond-blossom comes into 
 the foreground of most. 
 
 I have taken up my abode in a doonga, which is 
 a kind of long, low house-boat, navigable. I think 
 I shall have a heavenly Holy Week here before 
 moving farther. It is doubtful whether the Sindh 
 Valley is open enough to make it advisable to go 
 up it. 
 
 April 2, ON THE JHELUM, NEAR SRINAGAR, 
 KASHMIR. I thought I shouldn't be able to write 
 to you this week, as I suddenly decided on Sunday 
 evening to go down the river for two days' duck- 
 
KASHMIR 197 
 
 shooting at a place where I heard there were some. 
 But it rained so much on Sunday night and yester- 
 day morning that I was afraid if I went the whole 
 way I shouldn't be able to get back by Wednesday 
 evening against the swollen current : these house- 
 boats move very slowly and can't travel by night 
 because of mudbanks. So I stopped yesterday 
 afternoon ata//hY, half-way down. A/^z/is a sheet 
 of shallow water, like a fen without the grass : there 
 are only weeds and a few rushes. The method 
 of shooting is to get into a canoe-like boat and 
 paddle about quietly, putting the duck up, and then 
 shoot them as they circle round. To get to the 
 boat on this jhil I had to walk through two 
 hundred yards of marsh. There were only three 
 small lots of duck on it, and we put them up all 
 right : but the weak part of the scheme was that 
 they circled round well out of shot. After about 
 an hour of this process, during which I got one 
 long shot at a mallard, it began to rain again hard, 
 and I gave it up. It was so cold I decided not to 
 wait on the chance of a fine morning, and so we 
 are making our way back to Srinagar. One really 
 wants some one who knows the places to find 
 anything, especially at the fag-end of the season. 
 Earlier in the season there are enough reeds on 
 the/Az'/y to give one cover, and on the best ones 
 shelters are provided. 
 
 This would be a delightful country to come for 
 three months' shooting in, either in winter or 
 summer. In winter you get the splendid waterfowl 
 
198 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 shooting, every kind, from geese to snipe, and a 
 good deal of big game, especially stags : only one 
 can't go up the high mountains. In summer you 
 get no bird-shooting except quail, but you get good 
 fishing, fish up to 25 lb., and very good Himalayan 
 big-game shooting, viz., Markhor, Ibex, Sharpu, 
 Ammon, Thibetan Antelope, Thibetan Gazelle, 
 Kashmir Stag, Serow, Tehr, Goral (these last three 
 are only names to me), Brown Bear, Black Bear, 
 Pig, Leopard, and Snow Leopard. Leopards are 
 very common, but snow leopards are the thing : 
 they have lovely skins and are very difficult to get 
 at. In any case you have the most glorious scenery 
 in the world the whole time : below the snow-level 
 the flowers are marvellous, they say ; and the whole 
 affair is said to be the cheapest shooting in the 
 world. I asked the Agency man here the average 
 cost of a three-months trip, and he said, " 100 is 
 the average per head, but it can be done for less." 
 The Uganda Agency sent me a prospectus in 
 December, and they gave an estimate of ^100 per 
 header month three times as much. 
 
 The rain has stopped now, but there are still 
 heavy clouds about, hiding the mountains. It is 
 very tiresome, as this is the weather they ought to 
 be having in March, and March was unusually fine : 
 however, I hope it will clear up in a few days, as 
 there are some lovely expeditions to be made from 
 Srinagar, only they depend on clear weather. 
 
 It is distinctly warmer to-day, too ; my thermo- 
 meter says 54, whereas yesterday no efforts would 
 
KASHMIR 199 
 
 induce it to rise above 46 ; as soon as the sun can 
 get through it will shoot up to 70. Then the 
 spring ought to come in with a run. The great 
 tree hereabouts is the chenar, or plane. Its leaf 
 looks to me smaller and more prettily indented than 
 the English plane ; but they aren't out yet, though 
 the buds are bursting, and three days' sun would do 
 the trick. 
 
 There is a wonderful atmosphere of beauty about 
 the place. The city is extraordinarily picturesque. 
 There are more waterways than streets, and the 
 houses are built on high embankments (to escape 
 floods) and overhang the river, supported by great 
 bracket beams. The houses are of wood, weather- 
 stained to all sorts of browns and greens, and are 
 roofed with brilliantly emerald turf. They have 
 bow-windows, in which their turbaned proprietors 
 sit like spiders all day overlooking the river. One 
 travels about in a cigar-shaped wooden boat, called 
 shikara, paddled by four men : it goes a great pace. 
 There are lots of house-boats and barges on the 
 river, too, and it is crossed by seven bridges, all 
 built entirely of wood, with rows of logs laid alter- 
 nate ways and broadening at the top, I continually 
 wish I could sketch the places I see. 
 
 Even the people are good-looking, and have nice 
 happy, laughing faces, though they are the idlest 
 and most worthless people in all India, almost. 
 But they certainly have artistic genius, which seems 
 to go with lovely scenery : you can see that in their 
 architecture and also in their products. Their 
 
200 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 wood-carving is the best in the world, and their 
 silk embroideries are also lovely. Almost alone 
 among Indians they go to nature for their models, 
 which is contrary to the spirit of Indian art : and 
 being Mohammedans, nature means for them 
 flowers and trees and fruits : and the result is a 
 perfection of flower-imitation which is like nothing 
 Indian, but very close to the Persian art at Delhi 
 and Agra. 
 
 Wednesday, SRINAGAR. This has missed the 
 mail, after all, so it will have to wait till next week. 
 While I was writing yesterday morning, they told 
 me we were passing a.jkil which might have duck, 
 so I got out and into a shikara with a local shikari 
 and paddled to \htjkil. It was a much more satis- 
 factory affair than the last one : very big, quite a 
 mile long, and over half a mile broad, and full of 
 short reeds or iris-leaves which stood eighteen 
 inches out of the water, and gave a little cover : 
 also the clouds had lifted a bit, and it was quite 
 warm. The chief defect of it was that it contained 
 hardly any duck. We only found two couples and 
 a lot of about twenty in three hours. I got one of 
 the former, but missed the twenty badly. 
 
 However, I decided to try again in the evening, 
 and went out at five. There were several lots 
 circling about, but they always kept just too far ; 
 I had some long shots but only tailed one. But on 
 our way back in the dark at 7.30, a single bird 
 crossed in front of us fairly high and I got him in 
 
KASHMIR 201 
 
 the head, so I didn't go home empty-handed. The 
 shot put up several score of duck, but I didn't get 
 another chance. However, I could see that even 
 as late in the season as this a man who knew the 
 place and the language could probably get a dozen 
 on this jhil any evening. 
 
 I was quite content to stay out six hours for the 
 two duck, because the scenery was simply enchant- 
 ing. In the evening there was a heavy storm 
 raging in the mountains to the west, all along one 
 side of the valley. I could hear the thunder and 
 see the mist in slanting lines of rain, like a Turner 
 picture, while gleams of the. sun made lurid lights 
 and indigo shadows in the cloud-mantle that hid the 
 hills. To north the clouds hung low, but the moun- 
 tains showed dimly through like ghosts. To the 
 east the mountains were close and clear, but heavy 
 isolated clouds hid their snows : while away to the 
 south there was blue sky, and the evening sun 
 caught the successive ranges of snows so that they 
 gleamed a soft golden white ; but the steep places 
 of bare rock were of so pale a blue as to be in- 
 distinguishable from the sky behind them, only 
 imagination supplied their outlines. 
 
 The establishment of a minimum wage makes 
 one wonder how long we shall compete against 
 this country, where the maximum wage for skilled 
 labour is eightpence a day to say nothing of 
 China and Japan. 
 
 I have been meaning to send you for a week 
 or two the enclosed cutting about a police scandal. 
 
202 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 Almost every week since I've been out there has 
 been some case in the courts in which police are 
 accused of torturing witnesses, etc., generally in 
 some fairly mild way : this is quite the worst case 
 I've seen reported. It is very difficult to get at 
 the truth, for witnesses are just as likely to be 
 faking the charge against the police as the police 
 are to be faking that against the prisoner. But 
 where such cases are possible things must be 
 pretty bad. 
 
 in 
 
 Easter Eve, SRINAGAR. Virtue found its due 
 reward yesterday. I have been much tried by the 
 experiments in Prayer Book revision which find 
 favour here : but in spite of sundry choppings 
 and changings in matins yesterday, I sallied forth 
 again in the evening, and on my way met the 
 Resident, who very kindly asked me to a shoot 
 to-day, the last of the season, at Holkrah. 
 
 When I got up this morning I discovered 
 Kashmir for the first time. It was cloudless, and 
 behold the mountains stood round about us like 
 a chorus of white angels. It was astonishing. 
 I felt like the servant of Elisha in Dothan : my 
 eyes were opened. East, west, south, north was 
 a glittering line of snow, not the dim, distant forms 
 I had guessed were mountains, but marching up 
 close, the long lines east and west seeming to 
 flank the river like the sentinels guarding a proces- 
 
KASHMIR 203 
 
 sion. Truly here one must lift up one's eyes 
 unto the hills. 
 
 Feeling as if I had breakfasted on champagne, 
 I found myself at the Residency and mounted a 
 motor-car. We drove about nine miles along the 
 poplar-lined road till we came to Holkrah. There 
 we got out and joined three other guns, making 
 seven in all. A very short walk brought us to 
 the jhil, where fourteen shikaras were waiting, 
 and we made our way to our posts. 
 
 The jhil was a biggish lake : it must be two 
 miles long and nearly as broad (but I couldn't 
 see properly). On it were, so to speak, continents 
 and islands of a thick, rush-like green pampas-grass, 
 standing about four to five feet out of the water. 
 So there were straits, isthmuses, archipelagoes, and 
 inland seas, through which one threaded one's way. 
 One of the guns, paddling near me, said that, being 
 the last, this would be the worst shoot of the year: 
 he doubted if we should get a hundred and fifty. 
 In November they counted on eight hundred every 
 time ; the duck were so thick on the water you 
 could hardly see it, and when they were put 
 up the air was full of them ; but now they were 
 all gone except a few mallard, teal, and pochard. 
 
 However, as it was we passed quantities of 
 duck on the " inland seas " ; they kept well in 
 the open. After about twenty minutes' paddling 
 the shikari ran the boat into a small islet, an 
 isolated thicket of rush-grass. We managed so 
 that the boat was hidden, but aground, and I 
 
204 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 could see through two gaps : an ideal ambush. 
 I sat and waited for the first shot, which was to 
 signal the beginning. I felt I could wait for ever, 
 in the brilliant warm sun, with the still, reed- 
 thicketed lake all round me, and the cool, silent, 
 wonderful snows above. Another boat crossed 
 the open water silently and waited in another reed- 
 bed a hundred and fifty yards away, to pick up. 
 
 Then I made two disconcerting discoveries. 
 The first was that the boatmen had mixed up 
 the cartridges, and instead of a hundred and 
 seventy-five No. 4's, I had only twenty-five 4's, 
 and a hundred and fifty 8's and Q'S, some one 
 else's snipe-shot. The second was, that if I tried 
 to shoot upwards, the brim of my helmet caught 
 my shoulder and tilted the helmet over my eyes, 
 or else it fell off: while if I wore it back to 
 front the barrel touched the brim. 
 
 Then the first shot went, and almost immediately 
 two duck came high over me, and I missed 
 them, my helmet falling right over my eyes. 
 When I recovered, I saw more duck in the air 
 together than I have even seen before : there 
 must have been about two thousand, and the air 
 was full of their swish. Most of them were soon 
 clean out of shot, but the guns were going busily. 
 Four came over me so high as to oblige one 
 to fire, but leaving one at a loss where to fire. 
 I missed clean, my hat falling off (one's only 
 chance was to take them exactly overhead). Again 
 a pair and I missed, my hat completely obscuring 
 
KASHMIR 205 
 
 the left eye. This was insupportable, so seeing 
 three approach, I took my hat off, fired yards 
 in front and winged one. Another minute and 
 a low teal swooped over like a driven grouse and 
 caught it in the head : then three more rocketing 
 duck, one again winged. Soon afterwards another 
 express driven shot, broadside this time and can- 
 noning into the water like a bullet. Then a couple 
 more rocketers, and four unavailing shots at them. 
 
 By this time the duck were all circling sky- 
 high and one could only watch their swishing 
 flights. I was interested to see that, beyond all 
 doubt, the teal flew faster than the duck, every 
 time. Yet I found them easier to shoot because 
 they look their full pace, whereas the duck, which 
 are ten per cent, slower, look fifty per cent, slower. 
 
 By this time my 4*3 were exhausted, and I 
 had to use Q'S, but I found that for low (i.e., up 
 to fifty feet) driven or broadside shots up to thirty 
 yards, they were quite as good as the 4/s, in fact 
 killed cleaner, but I couldn't touch the rocketers 
 with them, which I doubt was the shot's fault. 
 They were all over eighty feet and many a full 
 hundred feet up. 
 
 When the first lot were cleared off, coolies 
 went in and beat up the rush-grass pools and 
 creeks, and several pairs and single birds were 
 set moving. I got three at ordinary pheasant- 
 height, two of them second barrel, receding, which 
 shows that Q'S can get through feathers at this 
 angle, both of them over thirty yards. One of 
 
206 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 these I winged, and soon afterwards killed an 
 approaching one dead, which fell behind me and 
 drifted. The spare boat was hunting for the 
 winged one, which got into an islet of rush-grass, 
 and the dead one drifted a hundred and fifty 
 yards from me. This was observed by a large 
 kite or hen-harrier, which coolly hovered and 
 swooped, and made off heavily flapping with his 
 booty. The spare boat pursued him with curses, 
 but to no purpose, losing both birds. 
 
 However, the kite or his mate paid fairly for 
 his spoils, for half an hour later he came sailing 
 up again and began to take an interest in the 
 afore-mentioned islet, where the winged duck was. 
 Lower and lower he circled, and then, when only 
 ten feet up, dropped lightly, and remained down. 
 So the spare boat hurried quietly up and frightened 
 him off and found the retrieved duck with its 
 neck torn, but otherwise undamaged. 
 
 I got two more nice ones, making nine, before 
 1.15, when a cease-fire was prearranged for 
 lunch. I discovered with something of a shock 
 that I had let off fifty cartridges, besides ten quietus 
 at the first two diving winged ones. But I couldn't 
 find the place for the rocketers. I expect a very 
 small aberration takes the charge to one side of 
 the neck, and Q'S won't break a wing at that 
 height, as the 4's did. 
 
 I had been presented with a card containing 
 the following imposing list of waterfowl : 
 
 MALLARD. The mallards were huge : several 
 
KASHMIR 207 
 
 were killed : I missed one easy one and some 
 rocketers. 
 
 PINTAIL. Only one lot seen (I saw them), none 
 killed. These are the great winter bird. 
 
 WIGEON. One was killed. This swarms in 
 winter. 
 
 TEAL (four). Three-fifths of the total bag were 
 teal. 
 
 POCHARD (four). One-third total bag were these ; 
 as big as a small duck : red-brown heads. 
 
 GAD WALL (one). As big as an English wild 
 duck and very like it, with greyer head and 
 breast. 
 
 SHOVELLER. None seen : a winter bird. 
 
 GEESE. None seen : a winter bird. 
 
 SNIPE. Three killed. 
 
 VARIOUS. Two coots killed per errorem. 
 
 There was yet another, next to shoveller but 
 I have forgotten it ; my bag was constituted as 
 marked ; two of the teal were what the shikari 
 called gargan teal : they had odd white-streaked 
 feathers on the back. The coots were innumerable 
 but not shot at. 
 
 By this time it was oppressively hot (I had thick 
 things on), and the mosquitoes swarmed : in the 
 cold I had forgotten them and left my citronella 
 and veil behind. I was bitten thirty times if 
 once ; luckily they are a painless sort ; no swelling, 
 and I believe no malaria. 
 
 I sent the spare boat and recovered my 4*5 
 for the afternoon, but to no purpose. Only a 
 
208 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 few duck were coming back. I missed three 
 perfectly straightforward ones, and after that never 
 got a chance. At four o'clock we paddled slowly 
 home, the mountains now being covered by fleecy 
 clouds. I was feeling I had very few to show for 
 my sixty shots. 
 
 At the landing I met another gun who had only 
 killed five and a coot. The three local guns had 
 already started home. Their cards showed they 
 had killed eleven, twelve, and thirty-one respectively 
 (the thirty-one was a noted shot) ; in my place a 
 noted shot could have certainly got thirty if the 
 hundred-foot ducks were really permeable : but this 
 noted shot had twenty teal out of his thirty-one, and 
 the teal flew averagely much lower. I only missed 
 two teal. 
 
 We saw the Major-General approaching, being 
 paddled through some low reeds. A snipe got up 
 in front of him, and he rose unsteadily (it is not 
 easy to stand in a moving canoe) and fired at it. 
 Unfortunately, both barrels went off at once, and 
 this was altogether too much for the poor Major- 
 General's equilibrium, and he was next seen with 
 his head in the boatman's lap and his legs where 
 his head had lately been. It lacked but little that 
 his head was not in the water-lilies' roots : but the 
 snipe was killed. He arrived in consequence rather 
 peppery. " How many ? " we asked. " Umph ! 
 shot damned badly ; how d'you expect a man to hit 
 birds a mile high when his topi lands on his eye if 
 he looks at them, and he's standing on a see-saw in 
 
KASHMIR 209 
 
 a cactus-jungle, with damned gnats eating slices out 
 of every inch of his skin ? " 
 
 There was some sword-grass among the rushes ; 
 but when the general had cooled down it was clear 
 he'd enjoyed himself very much, though he himself 
 had only killed seven and three snipe. Soon the 
 last gun appeared, having killed fourteen : so the 
 total bag was about ninety, the worst ever known 
 on the jhil, but the duck are " flying exceptionally 
 high this year " : every one must have fired over fifty 
 shots, to judge from the sounds. I should have 
 liked to see Uncle W. in my place. Seven guns 
 of his calibre would have got over two hundred 
 birds, because the central places got even more 
 shooting than I did. I was No. 8, i.e., the end of 
 all, so tended to get the highest and fewest ; but I 
 had quite as many as I wanted in the morning ; in 
 the afternoon no one got much. 
 
 I feast on wild duck and teal every meal. My 
 host gave me my eight (the kite has the ninth) ; and 
 apart from that one can buy duck for three annas 
 and teal for two annas. 
 
 IV 
 
 April 12, ON THE JHELUM, NEAR ISLAMABAD. 
 This will be my last letter before sailing : it 
 seems cruel to come away from this place just 
 now, it is like being interrupted in watching a 
 
 15 
 
210 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 butterfly out of its chrysalis : but apart from that I 
 shall be quite ready to come home. 
 
 I dined at the Residency on Sunday and talked 
 to the Noted Shot about the duck-shooting. He 
 said that they got over a thousand on two con- 
 secutive " days " this season at Holkrah, and 
 always expected eight hundred from November 
 to February. He asserted that the rocketers I 
 had been shooting at were about a hundred and 
 twenty feet high and travelling about ninety miles 
 an hour. Consequently one had to aim yards in 
 front, and nobody had the courage to aim far 
 enough in front at first ; one had to throw one's 
 gun back and lose sight of the bird altogether. 
 Even so he had often killed birds twelve feet 
 behind the one he aimed at. Another N.S. 
 always shoots them with 8's, but says it means 
 allowing them another foot. So I was right in 
 thinking my 9's didn't make much difference. 
 All present agreed that those hundred and twenty 
 feet ducks can be pulled out of the sky, if one 
 shoots well enough, which was the chief point of 
 doubt in my mind. 
 
 I have been cruising up to Islamabad at the 
 south-east end of the valley, which is even more 
 beautiful than Srinagar. The plane-trees are 
 extremely fine, enormously thick, but not so high 
 as those at Winchester, because almost all of 
 them fork into three at twelve or fifteen feet 
 from the ground. I measured the girth of one 
 with the towing cord and found it was twenty- 
 
KASHMIR 211 
 
 nine feet two inches ; and I have seen several quite 
 as big. 
 
 The walnuts are fine too, and look very pretty 
 just now, with their delicate copper-coloured young 
 leaves. There are no other big timber trees in the 
 valley, but masses of fruit-trees with indescribably 
 lovely blossoms. With the aid of the boatmen I 
 made out nine sorts in one orchard, viz., two kinds 
 each of peach, cherry, and plum, besides apricot, 
 pear, and apple. There are also almond and 
 medlar, and various thorns. Much the biggest of 
 them all is the pear, and I think they must be 
 larger than English pear-trees. I measured one 
 roughly this morning and judged it to be forty-five 
 feet high, and its shadow (at eleven o'clock) was 
 about seventy feet in diameter, nearly round. It was 
 one mass of snowy blossom with delicate green 
 leaves among it. 
 
 There are three specially attractive birds here, 
 besides the waterfowl. One is the hoopoe, which 
 has the air of being " the bird of the place," and 
 delights to flutter round one as one walks or rides. 
 It settles in front of one and lets one come within 
 ten or so feet of it ; they are always in pairs just 
 now. Another is a large canary-coloured wagtail, 
 a study in yellow and black-grey, that runs about 
 on the water-lily leaves on \\\tjkils and lakes : and 
 the third is not unlike a giant-crested tit in colour- 
 ing, but its beak and flight are more like a finch's. 
 It is fully the size of a greenfinch, or even butcher- 
 bird, and has an indigo cockatoo-crest. I find that 
 
212 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 this is none other than the celebrated bul-bid, but 
 vocally it is a very poor substitute for the nightin- 
 gale. There is a pair that has accompanied this 
 doonga for two days, flying in and out of the rooms 
 as tame as anything : I can't find a nest. 
 
 This morning I saw a marvellous bird, brilliant 
 crimson or scarlet, and it was so plain, though a 
 hundred and fifty yards off, that I think it must 
 have been iridescent, one of the honey-birds. For 
 a moment I thought a large poppy had fallen out of 
 the sky. I never saw it closer. 
 
 April 11, ON THE JHELUM, NEAR ISLAMABAD. 
 This is your birthday, but I haven't got nothing to 
 drink your health with that's strong enough to be 
 lucky, except the Jhelum water, and that would not 
 be calculated to bring many happy returns to me, so 
 I must be content to do it in spirit (which sounds 
 quite appropriate). 
 
 Gloriouser and gloriouser is this valley becoming. 
 Before I left Srinagar on Monday the irises were 
 coming out fast ; they are the little parma-violet- 
 coloured kind, like those we saw in Cos, and they 
 just carpet the whole of the uncultivated land, like 
 grass. Their colour is not strong enough to 
 produce the effect bluebells do ; but perhaps when 
 they are all out they will. 
 
 I vainly imagined the fruit-trees were out when 
 
KASHMIR 213 
 
 I arrived, rashly generalising from a few peaches 
 and almonds, but now there are five times as many 
 and they are the feature of every foreground. It is 
 a particularly good year, and the blossom simply 
 hides the trees in snowy white. I think the pear is 
 the loveliest of all, as it shows glimpses of green 
 leaves to set off the white, and it is much the 
 biggest. 
 
 On leaving Srinagar I was towed up the river to 
 Islamabad, which is thirty-five miles from Srinagar 
 by road, being at the south-eastern end of the 
 valley. It took two days, as the river winds like a 
 Chinese dragon. Every wind gave a new view of 
 the surrounding snows, so the journey was an orgy 
 of scenery, especially when we passed between 
 mustard-fields or pear-orchards, as we frequently 
 did. 
 
 Of course, as we got nearer Islamabad, we got 
 more and more into the cul-de-sac of the mountains ; 
 so instead of seeing a complete circle of snows from 
 ten to forty miles off, I had them quite close up on 
 three sides, and hardly visible on the fourth. 
 
 I got to Islamabad yesterday afternoon, and rode 
 up to Martand, where there is a ruined temple. It 
 was on a sort of plateau or shelf, quite flat, about 
 four miles wide, which makes a kind of entresol 
 between the valley and the mountains. My pony 
 had Oriental views on pace, so it took me two hours 
 to do the six miles. From the edge of the plateau 
 the view was heavenly. One looked right away 
 over the valley on one side. It was brilliantly 
 
214 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 blotched and streaked with the mustard-fields, of 
 which I calculated I could see over a thousand. 
 The rest of the earth was brown, except for green 
 wheat patches on the hill slopes, where you can't 
 irrigate for rice. The flanking snows, dim below 
 the sun, framed the picture ; the distant northern 
 snows just showed like faint icebergs, eighty miles 
 away. I have never seen such finely cobalt blue 
 distances as one has here. On the other side 
 one looked across the little plateau, striped with 
 mustard and dotted with pear, peach, cherry, plum, 
 apple, appricot, etc., to the overlooking snows, close 
 and encircling and shining with the evening sun. 
 
 One of the most exhilarating things about this 
 place is the wealth of light. In fact, it takes some 
 time to get one's eyes used to it, but then it 
 flows in, so to speak, at every pore, and bathes one 
 in brilliancy. Light affects one's spirits more directly 
 than any external condition, I think ; and here I 
 don't see how one could be anything but happy and 
 chirpy like a bird. It lasts wonderfully long too, 
 and I still feel its ozone at seven p.m. 
 
 The temple was very dilapidated, but large and 
 fine, and specially interesting as having clear 
 remains of a peristyle very like a Greek temple's ; 
 a quite regular series of columns and architraves in 
 stone ; only it formed a kind of cloister, being 
 placed some six feet inside the outer court wall, 
 which was in the regular Kashmiri pointed style, an 
 extremely handsome one, with carved gable-windows 
 or arches. 
 
KASHMIR 215 
 
 This morning I started at seven and rode up to 
 an old garden of Jehangir's called Atchibal, where 
 one of the sources of the Jhelum is. It was very 
 pretty, with waterfalls going through the garden, in 
 which were orchards of blossom and big planes, and 
 summer-houses of the usual wood and turf style ; 
 while on the hillside above were deodars mixed 
 with blackthorn. 
 
 There are two other items which add to the 
 beauty of this end of the valley. One is that many 
 of the roofs are not only covered with green grass 
 (long bright grass like that which grows in water- 
 meads), but have on them clumps of crimson tulips, 
 which make glorious patches of brilliance calling 
 aloud for a sketcher. Others have iris clumps. 
 The other item is that instead of the little iris, they 
 have the big purple one (like those in the borders 
 at home), and it grows just as profusely. In fact, 
 I couldn't believe it wasn't grown for some purpose, 
 but the boatman is positive it is merely a weed. 
 Alas ! it is not in flower yet, except for three or four 
 blossoms in each patch (some are white, not purple); 
 in two weeks' time there will be acres of royallest 
 purple to make the place even more like fairyland. 
 
 Planes, walnuts, and poplars are coming early 
 into leaf, and already look quite clothed but I 
 regret the iris. 
 
 I am on my way back to Srinagar now. It gets 
 quite hot in the afternoon, over 70 in my cabin, 
 but the least breeze is like an iced drink, straight 
 from the snows. 
 
2i6 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 April 15^, SRINAGAR. When I got back here 
 on Friday, I found a lot more things had come out 
 in my absence, notably the big white irises which 
 cover the earth embankments of the river just above 
 the town. Already they make a lovely show ; but 
 there are still three or four buds for every flower 
 that's out. 
 
 On Saturday I went to the Dal Lake again. 
 This time it was clear, and the distant amphitheatre 
 of snows stood out beautifully and was reflected in 
 the lake. The nearer amphitheatre was reflected so 
 clearly you could see every line of the rocks. At 
 the far end is a magnificent grove of chenars 
 (planes), and behind this I found a very large 
 mustard-field, so bright that it hurt one's eyes to 
 look at it from close by, and it stretched away to 
 the blue hills. 
 
 I don't think I told you about the floating gardens 
 on the lake. The villagers make large matted 
 platforms out of the lake reed, and moor them in 
 the water (which is quite shallow) by long stakes. 
 Then they heap them with earth, and plant melons 
 and cucumbers and tomatoes on them, and get 
 incredible crops. Just now there wasn't much on 
 them, but some had mustard. 
 
 Yesterday afternoon it clouded over and we had 
 a storm a very high wind and some rain, which 
 has wrought sad devastation to the pear-blossom. 
 It rained again this morning (and this evening), but 
 was fine by ten o'clock, so I went out in a boat, and 
 explored the back parts of the native town. It was 
 
KASHMIR 217 
 
 a bit whiffy, but very picturesque though how 
 men can be content to live in the places I saw I do 
 find it very hard to conceive. So little trouble 
 could so vastly improve it, yet they don't seem to 
 care a straw. It must be the sun. 
 
 I think I shall leave here on Wednesday and go 
 by boat down the river to Baramula via the Wular 
 Lake, which is the largest in India. I ought to get 
 there on Friday. 
 
 From there I start on Saturday or Sunday in the 
 tonga for Rawalpindi and catch the train for 
 Bombay on Wednesday, arriving Friday morning. 
 Thursday will be very hot, I expect. I see it is 
 already over 104 in many places, and by the 25th 
 it may easily be 110. However, the trains are 
 arranged to mitigate it. 
 
 VI 
 
 May 5, ss. Maloja, SUEZ CANAL. It's a long 
 time since I last wrote, and this ought to reach 
 you only four days before I do, but I may as well 
 tell you what I've been doing. 
 
 I left Srinagar on Wednesday, the I7th, and 
 went down the river by boat to Baramula, where it 
 enters the gorge. The northern half of the valley 
 is barer than the Islamabad end, being more fen 
 and pasture, having orchards only in the villages. 
 But the river-banks were carpeted with the little 
 blue iris, which were thick enough to produce the 
 
218 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 effect bluebells do, though in pale mauve, instead 
 of sky-blue. 
 
 I stopped the first night at Sambal, where a canal 
 branches off to an exquisite little lake called the 
 Manasbal Lake, like a horizontal mirror filling the 
 bottom of a cup of hills, with the inevitable snows 
 behind, but almost hidden. 
 
 The next day I got to the edge of the Wular 
 Lake, and waited a night before crossing. It is the 
 largest lake in India, twelve miles by seven, being 
 formed by the Jhelum as it comes to the cul-de-sac 
 of the valley, until it finds a way out through the 
 gorge. It is not safe to cross, excepting in the early 
 morning, on account of sudden storms down the 
 ravines. One came that evening, very curiously. 
 The boatman ran in to say a storm was coming, 
 and began to quadruple the tethering of the boat. 
 I went out and found it perfectly calm, but I could 
 hear a noise in the nearest mountains, just like that 
 of a distant train when one is waiting by night at a 
 station. It came nearer, and after a few minutes 
 a breeze began, and in another minute it was a gale. 
 It lasted about a quarter of an hour, and then 
 vanished as suddenly as it came. 
 
 Next morning I started at seven. The lake was 
 the loveliest spot of all I had seen. The snows 
 looked quite close all round. Those on the west 
 were really some eighteen miles away, but the 
 golden sunrise-light made them seem near and 
 luminous. To the north appeared range behind 
 range, culminating in Nanga Parbat seventy miles 
 
KASHMIR 219 
 
 away. To north-east and east the mountains run 
 up sheer from lake-side to snow, and the sun flashed 
 on and through their serrations. A spur of them 
 runs out into the valley so as to overlap the south- 
 west line of snows. The whole scene was dupli- 
 cated in the water. 
 
 It took nearly three hours to paddle across 
 (fifteen paddlers working), and then we came to 
 a deliciously picturesque town called Sopor, where 
 the river leaves the lake. Its bridge and orchards 
 are its chief features ; and, of course, its wooden 
 houses and grassy roofs. 
 
 From Sopor it is only a few miles to Baramula, 
 which I reached in the afternoon. It then began to 
 rain, and rained all night ; but on Saturday morn- 
 ing it was fine, so I climbed a spur of the Kaj Nag 
 and enjoyed a last panorama of the valley, lake and 
 snows. I could see from Nanga Parbat on the 
 north to Banihal (behind Islamabad) on the south, 
 about seventy miles each way. On the way down 
 I picked a lot of strange flowers. 
 
 Soon after I got down it clouded over again and 
 began to rain. It rained all that afternoon and all 
 night, so that when I started on Sunday morning 
 the road was very filthy and the sky threatening. 
 About eleven o'clock it began again, and rained 
 steadily for twenty-four hours. So the drive out 
 was not so enjoyable as the drive in ; but the road 
 had stood it very well, and I made sixty-four 
 miles the first day without mishap. The second 
 day we stuck twice, once where the coolies had 
 
220 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA 
 
 heaped stones two feet deep on the road and left 
 them unspread, and there was no room to get 
 round. I got out and abused the coolies, who were 
 calmly heaping yet more stones thirty yards ahead, 
 and made them come and pull us through, which 
 they did, though almost upsetting us. The second 
 stick was in eighteen inches of mud a dissolved 
 landslip where we stuck fast. The prospect of 
 getting out into knee-deep slime was uninviting, 
 so I suggested that Peer Mahomed should. But 
 eventually, with four coolies shoving, the ponies 
 staggered through somehow ; there was only about 
 twenty-five yards of it. 
 
 There were hundreds of new flowers out since I 
 had come in. Of those I knew, the most con- 
 spicuous were St. John's wort, wild rose (in high 
 masses of white, festooning the trees), passion- 
 flower, also a small white clematis, marguerites, 
 and horse-chestnuts (just beginning). There were 
 besides two scarlet-flowered shrubs, and a tree with 
 flowers like a cross between magnolias and tiger- 
 lilies, and several white-flowering bushes. 
 
 I got to Murree that evening, and spent Tuesday 
 morning there, driving down to Rawal Pindi in the 
 afternoon, passing through one phenomenally heavy 
 shower. 
 
 Pindi was surprisingly cool : it never touched 70 
 while I was there. I slept at the station, and while 
 breakfasting I was accosted by yet another Oxford 
 acquaintance ; they seem to haunt the refreshment- 
 rooms of Indian railways. I caught the midday 
 
KASHMIR 221 
 
 Bombay mail, and even in the train it was not 
 hotter than 70 all day. Next morning, Thursday, 
 I awoke between Delhi and Muttra, and saw a fine 
 lot of peacocks roosting in the jungle trees. Then 
 I shut up the shutters, expecting great heat, but it 
 only just struggled up to 92 at tea-time, so I need 
 hardly have been so cautious ; but there was 
 nothing much to see outside. 
 
 We got to Bombay on Friday morning. I spent 
 the day packing and at Cook's. 
 
 On Saturday I bought some mangoes to eat on 
 the ship, and embarked at one o'clock. 
 
 The voyage has been perfectly calm so far, and 
 reasonably cool. Till Aden it never exceeded 82. 
 Then we had two days of 86 and a following wind ; 
 but now it is rapidly turning chilly, and the north 
 wind is ominous of pitching in the Mediterranean. 
 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abu, Mount, 46 
 Afghanistan, 188 
 Agra, 3-9, 10, 174 
 Ahmedabad, 32 
 Ahmednagar, 57, 101 
 Ajmere, 28 
 Akbar, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10 
 Amber, 27 
 Amritsar, 175 
 Arya Samaj, 178-9 
 Aurangabad, 139, 152 
 Aurangzeb, 7, 84, 139 
 
 Bandra, [20 
 
 Benares, 171-4, 178 
 
 Bengal question, 22, 47, 94, 126, 
 
 127, 131-3, 166-8 
 Bhils, 50, 64, 65 
 Bijapur, 84-5, 101 
 Bombay, i, 105, 118, 221 
 Brahmans, 50, 63, 95, 97, no, 115, 
 
 119, 125 
 
 Brahmo Samaj, 178 
 Buddhist architecture, 59, 139, 151, 
 
 174 
 
 Buddhist art, 177, 184 
 Buddhists, 43 
 
 Calcutta, 151-2, 155-6 
 Capital, transfer of, 22, 167-8, 180 
 Caste, 67, 74-8, no, 134, 150, 165 
 Chitor, 30, 31, 32 
 
 Christianity, 67, 74-6, 97, 108-10, 
 146 
 
 Curzon, Lord, 6, 22, 29, 48, 57, 131, 
 132, 154 
 
 Darjeeling, 159-62 
 
 Daulatabad, 138 
 
 Deccan, 58, 85 
 
 Delhi, 11-24, 174, 179 
 
 Dilwarra, 48-9 
 
 Dravidian architecture, 102, 108, 
 
 H3; "7 
 
 Duck- shooting, 197, 200, 203-9, 
 
 210, 
 Durbar, 19-22 
 
 Ellora, Caves of, 139-40 
 
 Famine, 2, 13, 33, 54, 169 
 Fatehpur Sikri, 8 
 
 Ghats, 57, 86 
 Goa, 87-90 
 
 Hampi, 100-4 
 
 Hindu architecture, 103, 113, 171, 
 
 178 
 Hinduism, 49-50, 80-1,95,97, 152, 
 
 178 
 Humayun, 19 
 
 I.C.S., 32 ff., 47, 53, 106, 121 ff., 126, 
 
 135 
 Islamabad, 213 
 
 Jain architecture, 43, 49, 139, 155 
 
 223 
 
224 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Jains, 43, 44, 49 
 Jaipur, 26 
 Jehangir, 4, 175, 215 
 
 Karli, 59 
 
 Kashmir, 195-219 
 
 Kashmir Road, 189-95, 219-20 
 
 Khyber Pass, 184-8 
 
 Konkan, 57 
 
 Kutab-ud-din, 18, 28 
 
 Lahore, 175-7 
 
 Madras, 104-7, IO %> II ^> I2 4 J 33 
 
 Madura, 112-14, 1 7& 
 
 Mahars, 64, 67-9, 78, 86 
 
 Mangs, 64, 78, 141, 146 
 
 Mar war is, 63, 164 
 
 Missions, 28, 65-9, 108-10, 133, 
 
 141-4, 146-7, 152 
 Moghul architecture, 4-9, 19, 27, 
 
 174, 175 
 
 Moghulai, 142, 145 
 Mohammedan architecture, 18-19, 
 
 85, 176 
 
 Mohammedanism, 94 
 Municipalities, 90-3, 180 
 
 Outcastes, 64, 115, 119 
 
 Palitana, 40-6, 55 
 
 Peshawar, 183-4 
 
 Plague, 98, 104, 119 
 
 Police, stories of, 34ff., 8iff., n6ff., 
 
 134 
 
 Pondicherry, 106 
 Poona, 61 
 Pushkar Lake, 29 
 
 Railway-travelling, 2, 25, 40-1, 149, 
 
 156, 221 
 Rajputana, 2, 26-32 
 
 Satranjaya, Mount, 40-2 
 
 Servants of India, 124 
 
 Seven Pagodas, 107-8 
 
 Shah Jahan, 4, 6, 29 
 
 Sikandarah, 6 
 
 Sikhs, 175 
 
 Srinagar, 196, 199, 216 
 
 Tanjore, 115 
 Trichinopoly, 114 
 
 Udaipur, 30-1, 40, 50 
 Vijayanagar, 84, 101-4 
 Wular Lake, 218 
 
 UXWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON. 
 
Telegrams : 4 , and ^ Maddox Street, 
 
 *' Scholarly, London. _. . T . .... 
 
 Bond Street, London, W. 
 Telephone : 
 No. 1 8 8 3 Mayfair . February, 1913. 
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's 
 SPRING 
 
 ANNOUNCEMENTS, 1913. 
 
 MEMORIES OF THE SEA. 
 
 By Admiral C. C. PEN ROSE FITZGERALD. 
 With Illustrations. One Volume. Demy Svo. 125. 6d. net. 
 
 This book takes us back to the middle of the last century, when 
 Admiral FitzGerald joined the Victory in 1854 as a nav al cadet. 
 
 The Author introduces us to a midshipman's berth of that era, and 
 relates, with engaging frankness, some of the escapades of that 
 irrepressibleandlark-lovingyounggentleman, the British midshipman, 
 in those happy days, before the Juggernaut advance of science, 
 mechanics, engineering and soldiering befogged his youthful brains, 
 crushed all the fun out of him, and turned him into a sedate and 
 solemn " know-all " and an aspiring Jack-of -all-trades. 
 
 Admiral FitzGerald tells some amusing yarns of the personal 
 characteristics of some of his old ship-mates, though gracefully 
 omitting the names of those concerning whom he has nothing com- 
 plimentary to say. The period dealt with 1854-74 embraces 
 the great transition epoch during which our navy was gradually and 
 reluctantly changed from wood to iron, and from sails to steam. 
 
 All those who take an interest in our first and perhaps only line 
 of defence, will be surprised, if not amused, at the ultra-conservatism 
 of those veteran seamen who advised the civilian rulers of the navy 
 to retain masts and sails and muzzle- loading guns in our ironclads 
 for a dozen years after these relics of a bygone age ought to have 
 been put upon the scrap-heap ; and indeed it is difficult now to 
 understand what could have been in the minds of the men who 
 rigged as a brig the n,ooo-ton Inflexible, with her double screws, 
 8o-ton guns, and 24 inches of armour. 
 
 LONDON : EDWARD ARNOLD, 41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, W. 
 
2 Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. 
 
 SIR FREDERICK MAURICE. 
 H IRecorfc ot bis Worfe anfc pinions, 
 
 Edited by his Son, Lieut.-Colonel F. MAURICE. 
 
 With Eight Essays on Discipline and National Efficiency by 
 
 Sir F. MAURICE. 
 
 With Photogravure Portrait, Demy Svo. IDS. 6d. net. 
 
 This record describes Sir Frederick Maurice's early life, the 
 influence upon him of his father, Frederick Denison Maurice, his 
 part in the small wars of the Victorian era, his efforts to assist his 
 friend Lord Wolseley with pen and voice in the reform of our 
 national defences, his work as a military historian and educationalist, 
 and his efforts in the cause of national physical improvement. 
 
 Shortly before he was seized by the illness which eventually 
 proved fatal, Sir Frederick Maurice had begun to prepare for 
 publication a number of papers dealing with the principal problems 
 which had occupied his life. He had intended a part of these papers 
 to form a volume treating of the broad aspects of discipline in 
 relation to national efficiency. These have been selected for 
 publication with a short account of his life and work, because, 
 though they may not possess the same intrinsic interest as some of 
 the historical studies he has left, they display more clearly than it is 
 possible for the latter to do the principles and ideals by which he 
 was guided. In some of these essays he discusses the general effect of 
 national service in its Continental form on national well-being and 
 efficiency, explains the true nature of military discipline, the part 
 played in military education by the correct performance of routine 
 duties, and why the proper polishing of a button has its military 
 value. In other papers he considers the loss of power and efficiency 
 caused by neglect to see that the young are brought up in conditions 
 such as would give them a reasonable chance of becoming physically 
 capable of performing the duties of citizenship, and shows that the 
 number of men willing to serve in the army and navy would be 
 more than sufficient for our needs if they were all physically effective. 
 Lastly, he selects as an example of the results of discipline the story 
 of the Birkenhead, and shows that the popular and melodramatic 
 version of the wreck has little relation to the true tale of duty quietly 
 performed in the face of death. 
 
Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. 3 
 
 A LITTLE TOUR IN INDIA. 
 
 By the Hon. ROBERT PALMER. 
 
 //; 
 
 One Volume. Demy 8vo. Cloth. tea./ 6i&. net. 
 
 The tour is described in a series of letters obviously written 
 without a thought of publication. They recount week by week the 
 experiences and impressions of a young man of twenty-three on his 
 first visit to India. 
 
 The charm of the book lies in the nai've vividness and humour of 
 the narrative and the shrewd interest with which a wide range of 
 subjects is touched upon. 
 
 The narrative is in effect the diary of a delightful tour, comprising 
 not only the Durbar and all the great cities on the beaten track of 
 tourists, but also the less familiar ruins of the south, such as Bijapur, 
 Goa, Vijayanagar, and the Seven Pagodas. In Western India too 
 the author saw more than most travellers, having been among the 
 Deccan villages, both in British territory and in the Nizam's 
 Dominions near Aurangabad. Nor have many visitors ascended the 
 sacred mountain of Satranjaya in Kathiawar. 
 
 The tour ends with three weeks in the Happy Valley of Kashmir. 
 
 The narrative is interspersed throughout with discussions of every 
 kind of subject : at one time it is the theory of duck-shooting, at 
 another the future of missions, at another the transference of capitals, 
 at another the absurdities of " globe trotting," and so on. 
 
 Several of the letters are pointed with good stories, and almost 
 every page records some kind of droll incident. No one can read 
 the book without wishing to make the same tour himself. 
 
 THE VIOLET CROWN 
 
 By Sir RENNELL RODD, G.C.V.O., K.C.M.G., 
 
 AUTHOR OF " BALLADS OF THE FLEET," ETC. 
 
 Crown Svo. 33. 6d. net. 
 
 In response to numerous requests of the author's friends, it has 
 been arranged to bring out a new edition of this volume, which has 
 been out of print for some years. Several new poems have been 
 added, and the price has been reduced. 
 
 " And fairer crown had never Queen than this 
 That girds thee round, far-famed Acropolis ! 
 So of these isles, these mountains, and this sea, 
 I wove a crown of song to dedicate to thee." 
 
4 Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. 
 
 UTILITY POULTRY-KEEPING. 
 
 By ELLEN C. DAVIES. 
 With Illustrations. Crown Svo. 2S. 6d. net. 
 
 This excellent and practical little work should find a place on the 
 bookshelves of every poultry-keeper, by reason of its clearness 
 and simplicity of style and the absence of bewildering technicalities. 
 The author does not attempt to cater for the fancier, but for those 
 poultry-keepers who are interested in the British hen from the stand- 
 point of utility, whether they regard the keeping of fowls as a means 
 of livelihood, as an adjunct to other sources of income, or purely as a 
 hobby. Every department of the subject is ably treated, and the 
 expert and amateur alike will find material suited for their respective 
 needs. 
 
 The possibilities of poultry-farming, and of poultry on farms, 
 receive careful treatment, while the chapters on marketing and the 
 organization of our home trade bring out most forcibly the vast and 
 growing importance of this branch of industry from the national 
 standpoint. 
 
 A noteworthy feature is the inclusion of the admirable " Monthly 
 Notes for Utility Poultry- Keepers," which won the prize given by 
 the Utility Poultry Club, and are reprinted by permission of the 
 Club. 
 
 THE YOUNG GARDENER. 
 
 Hn BlementarE (3utfce to tbe jfirst principles ot 
 Cottage <Bart>enfn0. 
 
 By the COUNTESS OF SELBORNE. 
 Paper Covers, 4d. 
 
 This little book merely contains the very elements of gardening, 
 told in such common English that it may be read and understood by 
 children of eleven to fourteen who are interested in their school 
 gardens and wish to have the instruction they received there set 
 down in writing, so that they may refresh their memories when they 
 have left school, and have put their learning to practical use. 
 
 It does not pretend to give an exhaustive list of garden plants, but 
 only of such vegetables and flowers as are in common use in small 
 gardens. The directions for cultivating each plant have been 
 shortened as much as possible, and only the most important things 
 insisted upon. 
 
Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. 5 
 
 WILLIAM AUGUSTUS, DUKE OF 
 
 CUMBERLAND, HIS EARLY LIFE 
 
 AND TIMES, 17211748. 
 
 By the Hon. EVAN CHARTERIS, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "AFFAIRS OF SCOTLAND, 1744-1746." 
 
 With Plans and Illustrations. [In preparation. 
 
 Mr. Charteris has a good subject in "Butcher " Cumberland, not 
 only on account of the historical and romantic interest of his back- 
 ground, but also by reason of the Duke's baneful reputation. 
 
 In the present volume the author has carried the career? of 
 the Duke of Cumberland down to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. 
 The period includes the Duke's campaigns in Flanders against 
 Marshal Saxe, the Battle of Culloden, and the measures taken^for 
 the suppression of the Jacobites in Scotland. Mr. Charteris has had 
 the exceptional advantage of studying the Cumberland Papers at 
 Windsor Castle, and it is largely by the aid of hitherto unpublished 
 documents that he is now able to throw fresh light on a character 
 which has been the subject of so much malevolent criticism. At the 
 same time the volume deals with the social and political conditions 
 among which Cumberland was called on to play so important a part 
 in the life of the nation. These have been treated by the author 
 with some fulness of detail. Cumberland, in spite of his foreign 
 origin, was remarkably typical of the characteristics of the earlier 
 Georgian period, and an endeavour has been made in the present 
 volume to establish the link between the Duke and the politics, the 
 morals, the aims, and the pursuits of the age in which he lived. 
 
 MALINGERING. 
 
 By Sir JOHN COLLIE, M.D., J.P., 
 
 MEDICAL EXAMINER TO THE LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL, CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER UNDER THE 
 METROPOLITAN WATER BOARD, ETC. 
 
 One Volume. Demy Svo. IDS. 6d. net. 
 
 The importance of this work will easily be recognized by all who 
 have responsibilities under the National Health Insurance Act and 
 the Workmen's Compensation Act, or who may have to deal with 
 the subject as employers of labour, insurance companies, solicitors, 
 medical men, etc. The subject is dealt with from every point of 
 view, beginning with the prevention of malingering, proceeding to 
 methods of medical examination in relation to different organs of the 
 body and numerous specific diseases, and concluding with a discus- 
 sion of the position under various Acts of Parliament. It is believed 
 that the book will occupy a unique place and cover ground hitherto 
 unoccupied, while the experience and knowledge of the author give 
 him an unquestioned claim to fill the gap. 
 
6 Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. 
 
 THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 BURKE. 
 
 By JOHN MAcCUNN, LL.D., 
 
 FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL ; 
 AUTHOR OF "Six RADICAL THINKERS." 
 
 Crown 8vo. Cloth. 55. net. 
 
 This is an attempt to do what is not known to have hitherto been 
 done namely, to gather together and state, with a considerable 
 amount of accompanying criticism, in a coherent and philosophical 
 form, the political teaching of Burke. Among the contents will be 
 found the following subjects : Theories and Theorists, From Kin to 
 Kind, "Prudence, the Mother of Political Virtues," What is a 
 People ? Conservatism, The Wisdom of Ancestors, The Limitations 
 of Discussion, and Toleration, Religion and Politics, Government, 
 Rights, etc. 
 
 A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE 
 WORLD. 
 
 By OSCAR BROWNING, M.A., 
 
 FORMERLY LECTURER IN HISTOKY iw THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 With Maps. Crown 8vo. Cloth. [Just ready. 
 
 Beginning with an account of the earliest civilizations of which 
 any knowledge has come down to us those of Egypt and Babylon 
 Mr. Browning traces the course of the main stream of history 
 down to our own day. For the sake of convenience the book is 
 divided into three conventional periods ancient, mediaeval, and 
 modern but there is no real break in the narrative : indeed, a 
 constant recognition of the continuity of history is one of the chief 
 features. How did the modern civilized world which we know 
 to-day come into being ? The answer to that question is contained 
 in this volume, set forth with a sense of proportion and perspective 
 which the author has acquired by an unusually long experience as 
 student and teacher in every branch of historical learning. 
 
 THE LAST CENTURY IN EUROPE, 
 
 1814 igio. 
 
 By C. E. M. HAWKESWORTH, 
 
 ASSISTANT MASTER AT RUGBY SCHOOL. 
 
 One Volume. Crown Svo. 55. net. 
 
 The Times. ' ' It possesses a merit rare in books of the class to which it belongs 
 it permits itself to be read through, almost at a sitting, in spite of its length, 
 without conscious effort. The arrangement is good ; the inter-relation of events 
 not obviously connected with each other is clearly seen and shown ; the style is 
 light as well as lucid. Moreover, there is a very creditable endeavour to indicate 
 the personalities, as well as to record the achievements, of the protagonists in the 
 European drama." 
 
Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. 7 
 
 NEW FICTION. 
 BRIDE ELECT. 
 
 By A. M. CHAMPNEYS. 
 6s. 
 
 This story of contemporary life opens with the love, marriage, 
 and bereavement of one of the principal characters. The child of 
 the marriage is disliked by his father as the cause of his mother's 
 death ; and the father himself, whose affection for his wife survives 
 her, forms a close friendship with a distinguished and beautiful 
 actress. Her efforts towards a more intimate relation are for a 
 time frustrated by his fidelity to his wife's memory ; and when he 
 finds himself, in spite of this obstacle, becoming more and more 
 infatuated, he has recourse to an extreme measure to secure himself 
 against the influence. When this fails, he is rescued from an 
 impending moral catastrophe by a girl to whom he has been 
 constituted guardian. Meanwhile, the history of his ward, her 
 relations with his son, the baneful influences to which she is 
 subjected in her earlier years, and the means by which she 
 eventually emerges from them and discovers her true destiny, form 
 an important part of the story. Simultaneously is related the career 
 of the son and his final reconciliation with his father. 
 
 The opening scenes are laid in New York ; the later, for the most 
 part, in England ; but we are for a short time transported to 
 Paris and given a glimpse of the threatrical society there, as we 
 follow the career and triumphs of the celebrated actress. Of the 
 minor characters, each plays a due part in the evolution of the 
 story. 
 
 THE VILLAGE IN THE JUNGLE. 
 
 By LEONARD WOOLF. 
 55. net. 
 
 " The Village in the Jungle " is a story which gives a vivid and 
 realistic picture of life in a remote jungle village in Ceylon. The 
 author, who was in the Ceylon Civil Service, had exceptional 
 opportunties for obtaining a thorough understanding of native life. 
 The motive of the story is the tragedy of the decay and destruction 
 of such a village. 
 
8 Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. 
 
 NASH, AND SOME OTHERS. 
 
 By C. S. EVANS. 
 Crown Svo. Cloth. 6s. 
 
 The human boy is always with us, and to the many people who 
 are interested in his fresh and unconscious humour, this book, by a 
 new author, should make a direct appeal. Nash, and his boon com- 
 panions, Govey, Wiltshire, and the redoubtable Binks, belong to a 
 class hitherto somewhat neglected in fiction the class of boy that 
 lives in mean streets, receives his education at our elementary schools, 
 and whose only field of recreation is the playground or the street, in 
 which, however, by methods all his own, he manages to enjoy him- 
 self immensely. The adventures of a group of such boys, with their 
 peculiar outlook on life, their queer code of honour and quaint 
 conventions, have provided the author with material for a series of 
 entertaining stories, some of them revolving round the daily routine 
 of the school in which the subjects are often unwilling units. R. L. 
 Stevenson once said that any man who could faithfully remember the 
 events of his childhood might write an incomparable book. How- 
 ever this may be, there can be no doubt that in the present volume 
 the author shows that he has an intimate knowledge of, and real 
 sympathy with, the characters he describes. 
 
 TINKER'S HOLLOW. 
 
 By Mrs. F. E. CRICHTON, Author of "The Soundless Tide," 
 etc. Second Impression. 6s. 
 
 Morning Post. " Mrs. Crichton is to be warmly congratulated on the appear- 
 ance of this truthful and entrancing story of Ulster village life." 
 
 British Weekly." This is a most vital book, and full of the true Ulster atmo- 
 sphere. Mrs. Crichton moves us sometimes to laughter and sometimes to tears. 
 The plot is a good one and well carried through, but the novel excels in its 
 records of the talk of Ulster men and women." 
 
 THE NEST. 
 
 By ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK, Author of " Tante," 
 " Franklin Kane," etc. Second Impression. 6s. 
 
 The critics generally are struck by the extreme cleverness of the five stories 
 in this volume, Punch admiring " the diabolical cleverness" of " The Nest," and Mr. 
 Arnold Bennett calling " The White Pagoda" "extremely brilliant." 
 
 Daily News. "It is not the least exaggeration to say that no living author, 
 man or woman, could have written these stories with such perfect skill and such 
 perfectly natural art." 
 
 Standard. "The whole volume is alive with cleverness, observation, and a 
 certain humour that is entirely Miss Sedgwick's own, and is purely a thing of 
 delight." 
 
Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. 9 
 
 PIERS THE PLOWMAN. 
 
 Edited by K. M. WARREN. 
 New Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 2S. 6d. 
 
 This fourteenth-century poem is full of interest for the general reader 
 as well as for the professed student of literature. It touches some 
 of the most eagerly discussed subjects of our own day in its vivid 
 picture of certain phases of social life in England five hundred years 
 ago. The poem is crowded with matter, social, moral, and religious, 
 expressed imaginatively. The subject is of more importance to 
 the writer than its form, and the poem loses little of its essential 
 nature in the process of translation. 
 
 The authorship of " Piers the Plowman " is to-day the most 
 keenly debated problem of English scholarship, and the controversy 
 is summarized in an appendix. 
 
 ARNOLD'S NEW SERIES OF 
 
 EDUCATIONAL CLASSICS. 
 
 GENERAL EDITOR: 
 JOHN WILLIAM ADAMSON, 
 
 PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON. 
 
 PESTALOZZI'S EDUCATIONAL WRITINGS. 
 
 Edited by J. A. GREEN, 
 
 PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD. 
 
 FROEBEL'S CHIEF WRITINGS ON 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 Edited by S. S. F. FLETCHER, M.A., Ph.D., 
 
 LECTURER IN EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, 
 
 And J. WELTON, M.A., 
 
 PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS. 
 
 THE EDUCATI6NAL WRITINGS OF 
 JOHN LOCKE. 
 
 Edited by J. W. ADAMSON, 
 
 PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON. 
 
 ROUSSEAU ON EDUCATION. 
 
 Edited by R. L. ARCHER, M.A., 
 
 PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, BANGOR. 
 
 VIVES AND THE RENASCENCE 
 EDUCATION OF WOMEN. 
 
 Edited by FOSTER WATSON, M.A., 
 
 PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, ABERYSTWYTH. 
 
 A full Prospectus of this Series can be had, post free, on application. 
 
io Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. 
 
 SOME PRESS OPINIONS 
 ON RECENTLY PUBLISHED BOOKS. 
 
 CAMPAIGNS OF A WAR CORRE- 
 SPONDENT. 
 
 By MELTON PRIOR. Edited by S. L. BENSUSAN. With 
 
 Illustrations from the Author's Sketches in the Illustrated 
 London News. Second Impression. 155. net. 
 
 Sketch." Melton Prior's book is not only one which will be read, but one 
 which will be kept and re-read." 
 
 Observer. "Full of spirit and colour, racy, intimate, and unstrained, these 
 chapters make excellent reading." 
 
 Nation. " A rich harvest of thrilling experiences. . . . The book makes 
 capital reading from cover to cover." 
 
 Daily Chronicle. - " This is perhaps the most entertaining volume of remin- 
 iscences that has ever been written by a newspaper correspondent of the war 
 variety." 
 
 Bystander. " Here is one of the most vivid books on the subject ever printed." 
 
 Tnith. " Even the war now raging cannot divert nor even diminish the interest 
 which must be excited by some of the most thrilling records of past conflicts I 
 have ever read Melton Prior's ' Campaigns.' ' 
 
 Daily Graphic. "This wonderful and enthralling record." 
 
 GERMANY AND THE NEXT WAR. 
 
 By General FRIEDRICH VON BERNHARDI. With a 
 Map. Second Impression. IDS. 6d. net. 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. " Since Machiavelli's ' Prince,' we do not recollect so lucid, 
 so dispassionate, and so cold-bloodedly logical an exposition of the statecraft 
 which aims unswervingly at political predominance." 
 
 Spectator. "This singular book is a very wholesome study for English 
 readers, for in it they will be able to examine the German point of view with a 
 vengeance. The book is remarkable chiefly for this, that it is an unforgettable 
 assertion of the German principle that war is an instrument of policy. It is the 
 last variation of the theme of Frederick the Great, that negotiations without arms 
 are like music-books without instruments." 
 
 WELLINGTON'S ARMY. 
 
 By C. W. OMAN, Chichele Professor of Modern History at- Oxford. 
 With Illustrations. Second Impression. 73. 6d. net. 
 
 Truth. " Intensely interesting. ... A volume which will fascinate a host of 
 readers for whom military history ordinarily has but little attraction." 
 
 Athen&unt. "Professor Oman has written the very book one would have 
 wished him to write on Wellington's army in the Peninsula, how it was organized, 
 moved, armed, clothed, and fed. It throws a flood of light on the campaigns by 
 supplying the small but all-important details which the ordinary historian 
 ignores." 
 
 United Service Magar.hu." Quite indispensable to the student of the Peninsular 
 War. ' ' 
 
Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. n 
 
 THE PASSING OF THE MANCHUS. 
 
 By PERCY H. KENT, 
 
 AUTHOR OF " RAILWAY ENTERPRISE IN CHINA," ETC. 
 
 One Volume. With Illustrations and Maps. 155. net. 
 
 Manchester Courier. " The book is a masterpiece of its kind : wide in its scope, 
 careful in its generalizations, stimulating and helpful." 
 
 Manchester Guardian. "As one possessing copies of the original official 
 documents, in both English and Chinese, the present reviewer is in a position to 
 say that the account of events is in the main accurate from first to last, and that 
 Mr. Kent's book will supply excellent and safe ' cribbing ' for the numberless 
 scissors and-paste authors who are doubtless now preparing to deluge us with 
 rival accounts of the great Chinese revolution." 
 
 Truth. "A really admirable account." 
 
 London and China Telegraph. " Mr. Kent's book is attractive in every way, and 
 should command a wide circle of readers." 
 
 THE HOLY WAR IN TRIPOLI. 
 
 By G. F. ABBOTT, 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 "THROUGH INDIA WITH THE PRINCE," "A TALE OF A TOUR IN MACEDONIA, " ETC. 
 
 One Volume. Demy 8>vo. Illustrated. 155. net. 
 
 Birmingham Daily Post. " We have seldom read a book in which the interest 
 is so sustained. It is a remarkable work, full of tragedy, excitement, and humour, 
 and from the first page to the last it conveys the impression that it is an honest 
 attempt to give the truth about the war in Tripoli from the Turkish camp with- 
 out fear or favour." 
 
 Guardian. "An extremely interesting and instructive book. Evidently the 
 struggle of the Arabs in defence of their freedom has stirred the author 
 profoundly, and something of what he feels he succeeds in imparting to his 
 readers." 
 
 Athenaum. "Full of interesting notices of persons and things, and gives an 
 excellent picture of life in the chaotic headquarters of the Turkish army." 
 
 Evening Standard. "As brilliant an account of the campaign as we should 
 expect from the lively and judicious author of ' Turkey in Transition.' " 
 
 BOYD ALEXANDER'S LAST 
 JOURNEY. 
 
 With a Memoir by HERBERT ALEXANDER. 
 With Numerous Illustrations and Maps. 125. 6d. net. 
 
 Westminster Gazette. " Those whose sympathies were drawn to the romance of 
 Boyd Alexander should read this book. There is a real personality that appears 
 plain through every page of the diary." 
 
 Manchester Courier. "The diary is of the greatest interest, and there is a 
 sincerity attached to the memoirs which lifts it above the usual biographical 
 sketch." 
 
 Belfast Northern Whig. " This volume is exceptional in its appeal to the 
 general reader. The diary is authentic and of great value. It tells in a light, 
 pleasant, modest tone all the vicissitudes almost up to the last fatal moment the 
 gallant explorer met his premature death." 
 
12 Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. 
 
 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND LIFE 
 OF GEORGE TYRRELL. 
 
 By M. D. PETRE. 
 
 Illustrated. Two Volumes. 2 is. net. [Second Impression . 
 
 The Times. "The interest of these volumes lies in their strangely fascinating 
 story of the religious evolution of a contemporary soul. So compelling, indeed, 
 is this interest that the reader may be inclined to resent the chapters which give 
 the detailed account of Tyrrell's breach with the Society, and of the subsequent 
 negotiations for the Celebret, just because they seem for the moment to arrest it. 
 The resentment, if it exists, will be shortsighted and unjust, for the chapters are 
 essential to the completeness of the story ; and they have besides a paramount 
 value for the revelation of certain contrasts in Tyrrell's character which largely 
 affected his whole attitude towards Church authority. As for the autobiography,, 
 it will rank among the most intimate and merciless confessions of a soul that 
 have ever been written, beside those of Augustine and Jean 'Jacques.' " 
 
 Nation. " Father Tyrrell's 'Life' may be regarded either as a study in psy- 
 chology, or as a chapter of contemporary Church History. It is difficult to say 
 which is its predominant interest ; from each point of view the book takes per- 
 manently high rank. The ' Study of Temperament ' with which the second 
 volume opens is worthy of the autobiography ; the work, taken as a whole, is a 
 document of the first importance for students of the religious tendencies of our 
 time." 
 
 Church Times. 1 ' We have been expecting Miss Petre's life of Father Tyrrell 
 for a long time, and now that it has at last appeared we must begin by saying 
 how admirably the work is done. Miss Petre has produced, we believe, a 
 biography that will live. The autobiography is extraordinarily interesting 
 because so extraordinarily frank." 
 
 Morning Post. "The autobiography is a memorable document, and perhaps 
 destined to immortality, seeing that its author's genius for introspection and high 
 distinction of style are alike unquestionable." 
 
 NEW BOOK BY THE AUTHOR OF "MIRACLES OF THE NEW TESTAMENT." 
 
 THROUGH FACTS TO FAITH. 
 
 By the Rev. J. M. THOMPSON, 
 
 FELLOW AND DEAN OF DIVINITY, MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD. 
 
 35. 6d. net. 
 
 Prof. LAKE, in the Daily News, says : " Mr. Thompson's first book provoked 
 a long discussion in the Guardian which certainly did not show his case to be 
 incapable of defence. In ' Through Facts to Faith ' we have the broad outlines 
 of a reconstruction of theology. How far it will prove acceptable I do not know, 
 but on the first reading it seems to me that it ought to be possible for many 
 Churchmen to find real help in their intellectual difficulties in his pages. More- 
 over, the one thing of which I am quite certain is that no one can fail to recognize 
 that, right or wrong, the man who writes here is the friend, not the enemy, of 
 spiritual life, and is really trying to do justice both to ' the Catholic religion ' and 
 ' the Christian verity.' " 
 
Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. 13 
 
 A SURVEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 1780-1830. 
 
 By OLIVER ELTON, 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL. 
 
 In Two Volumes. Demy Svo. 2 is. net. 
 
 Spectator. ' ' Through more than eight hundred closely printed pages the writer's 
 clarity of judgment and power of enjoyment never flag. He gives us closely 
 reasoned criticism, every step thought out, every sentence a fresh effort of 
 appraisement. The gusto of the book is infectious. The reader lays it down 
 with a new zest for literature a unique achievement for a volume of literary 
 history." 
 
 Athenaum. "Among the critics and teachers of English literature in our days 
 Professor Elton holds high rank. He has the fulness and exactness of knowledge 
 and the fertility of apt illustration which are the necessary stock-in-trade of one 
 and the other ; the unwillingness to adopt accepted commonplaces until he has 
 proved them for himself, which is the peculiar gift of the critic. Everywhere 
 through these volumes the lover of literature will come upon fine observation and 
 sound sense." 
 
 Professor HERFORD, in the Manchester Guardian. "We cannot take leave of this 
 book without expressing our sense of the magnitude of Professor Elton's achieve- 
 ment. As an example of criticism and scholarship applied in alliance to the 
 literature of a great epoch, it holds up an ideal which has rarely been approached 
 in this country, but of which it will be in future less pardonable, and, if example 
 counts for anything, less easy to fall short." 
 
 THE WORKER AND HIS COUNTRY. 
 
 By FABIAN WARE. 
 55. net. 
 
 Morning Post." The advantage possessed by Mr. Fabian Ware's book is that 
 it is written, not only with knowledge, but with sympathy and impartiality. The 
 author treats his subject with detachment. For this he is well qualified, for he is not 
 only widely versed in affairs, and in touch with leaders of opinion in England and 
 the Dominions, but he is a foster child of France as well. Though many may 
 disagree with his conclusions, he has produced a book, not only of interest, but 
 of value, which should be read by all who wish to keep alive to tendencies, and 
 who are concerned with the world of to-morrow." 
 
 Neiv Witness. "To find a book dealing with the wrongs and angers of the 
 dispossessed which is worth reading, worth studying carefully, worth keeping 
 for constant reference ; which discusses the feelings and aspirations of the poor 
 with the continual consciousness that they are men, and which comments upon 
 their condition and their future with the sense and spirit of a man. Such a book 
 Mr. Fabian Ware has succeeded in producing." 
 
 UNION AND STRENGTH. 
 
 By L. S. AMERY, M.P. 
 Demy Svo. 125. 6d. net. 
 
 Morning Post. " That Mr. Amery takes wide views, far-reaching, both in space 
 and time and is not afraid to go back to first principles, makes him the 
 philosopher of Imperialism as surely as Mr. Kipling is the poet thereof." 
 
 Globe." This brilliant and thoughtful book. A book to which we wish the 
 attention of every Englishman could be directed. ' ' 
 
 A rmy and Navy Gazette. " 'Union and Strength ' is a book which soldiers should 
 not only read, but should keep by them to refresh their memories." 
 
14 Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. 
 
 MEMORIES OF VICTORIAN LONDON. 
 
 By Mrs. L. B. WALFORD, 
 
 AUTHOR OF " RECOLLECTIONS OF A SCOTTISH NOVELIST." 
 
 In One, Volume. Demy Svo. 125. 6d. net. 
 
 Daily Telegraph. "These memories are late Victorian in atmosphere and 
 personnel, but they are of no time or rather, it may be said, of all time in 
 their reliance upon the drawing power of anecdote. With, as it were, a loose 
 thread of chronological narrative, the' author has chronicled as full and varied 
 a miscellany of good stories as could well be got into a single volume. To name 
 all the famous men and women with whom she came in contact, of whom she is 
 able to give real personal descriptions and entertaining anecdotes, would be to 
 give a list of most of the famous people of the last forty years of Queen Victoria's 
 reign. " 
 
 Manchester Guardian. " Many of her anecdotes of the great are fresh, and, what 
 is more valuable, we get the very accent and point of view of a grade of London 
 society, socially eager, fashionable, yet seriously minded, satisfied and securely 
 placed, that has now crystallized into separate sections, and no longer offers to 
 the student the same fascinating combinations." 
 
 Daily Chronicle. "An engaging, human, delightfully-written book." 
 
 THE ENGLISH HOUSEWIFE OF THE 
 
 SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH 
 
 CENTURIES. 
 
 By ROSE BRADLEY. 
 One Volume. Demy Svo. Illustrated. 125. 6d. net. 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. "There are an unending number of good things to be found 
 in Miss Bradley 's book." 
 
 Athenaum. " Miss Bradley 's enterprise in applying the historical method to a 
 subject of perennial human interest deserves all praise. The book abounds in 
 pleasant and varied lore." 
 
 Nation. " A new and delightful volume." 
 
 Globe. " Apart from any lesson or instruction to be drawn from its pages, her 
 book is well worth reading for the delightful and fragrant atmosphere she 
 imparts." 
 
 THE TRINITY FOOT BEAGLES: 
 
 En Informal IRecorO of Gambrifcoe Sport anfc Sportsmen 
 
 fcurtng tbe past JFifts jijears. 
 
 Compiled by F. CLAUDE KEMPSON. 
 Fully Illustrated. Medium Svo. tos. 6d. net. 
 
 Country Life. " One of the most amusing and original volumes on sport in 
 general and hare-hunting in particular that we have come across during many 
 years of travel through hunting literature ; it ought to be on the shelf of every 
 follower of the timid but wily hare, and no man or woman interested in the sport 
 of hunting should miss reading it." 
 
 Spectator. " A most cheerful volume." 
 
 Times.'' Full not only of practical beagling, but of all the cheery humours of 
 friendly sportsmen." 
 
Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. 15 
 
 JOCK SCOTT, MIDSHIPMAN: HIS LOG. 
 
 By "AURORA." With Illustrations, ss.net. 
 
 Manchester Guardian. " The book is a capital picture of life on board ; much 
 the best of recent times. It makes one realize modern naval society better than 
 any study known to us ; but it does more than this, it shows clearly and well the 
 responsibility and solemnity of a naval officer's life." 
 
 Northern Whig.' 4 Free from frills and exaggeration, leaning always rather to 
 the 'penny plain' than to the 'twopence coloured,' it is long since we have 
 read a more entertaining and instructive book, or one which ought to appeal 
 more to the man who pays the bills." 
 
 Naval and Military Record. "Not only can the book be recommended to 
 anyone wishing to learn something about the navy, but it is certain to attract 
 many readers among naval officers themselves." 
 
 SHIPMATES. 
 
 By A. E. LOANE. 6s. 
 
 Daily Chronicle. "These portraits, from memory, of naval officers who were 
 born between 1805 and 1827, are excellent inde'ed. The book bristles with 
 delightful things. In ten minutes one could mark off a column of worthy 
 pickings, all of which have, in a way, the aroma of good old wine or perhaps I 
 ought to say rare and mellow old rum." 
 
 Westminster Gazette. "Mr. Edward Arnold seems to have a happy knack of 
 finding writers with readable reminiscences of average everyday people. Here 
 we are introduced to a gallery of men to whom distinction has not fallen, but 
 who are yet good company. The book has an atmosphere that many an 
 ambitious and much-quoted volume of recollections lacks." 
 
 A BOY IN THE COUNTRY. 
 
 By J. STEVENSON, 
 
 AUTHOR OP "PAT M'CARTY : HIS RHYMES." 
 
 One Volume. With Illustrations. 55. net. 
 
 Daily Mail. "The scene of this charming series of recollections is laid in 
 Ulster, and the author recalls the days of his boyhood with a freshness and grace 
 that results in delightful reading." 
 
 Daily News. ; ' Mr. Stevenson recalls with delight the joys, austerities, and 
 jests of the long months of boyhood spent in a County Antrim countryside. . . . 
 A very human book, charming and unpretentious and sincere." 
 
 THE LIFE OF AN ELEPHANT. 
 
 By Sir S. EARDLEY-WILMOT, K.C.I.E., 
 
 AUTHOR OF " THE LIFE OF A TIGER," " FOREST LIFE IN INDIA," ETC. 
 
 Fully Illustrated. 75. 6d. net. 
 
 Times. "Sir S. Eardley-Wilmot is a dainty word-painter, and his jungle 
 scenes are true works of literary art. Miss Eardley-Wilmot's vignettes reveal a 
 gift of humour as well as of line-drawing, and add to the pleasure which is 
 conveyed to the reader by every page of this very interesting book." 
 
 Globe. " When we say that Sir Eardley-Wilmot's latest book forms a worthy 
 companion volume to his delightful and memorable ' Life of a Tiger,' those who 
 have read that wonderful story of jungle-life will realize the further treat in store 
 for them." 
 
16 Mr. Edward Arnold's Spring Announcements. 
 
 NEW SCIENTIFIC WORKS. 
 
 NEW AND REVISED EDITION. 
 
 FORENSIC MEDICINE AND TOXICOLOGY. By C. O. HAW- 
 THORNE, M.D., Lecturer on Forensic Medicine in the London School of 
 Medicine for Women ; Physician to the North-West London and Royal 
 Waterloo Hospitals. Crown 8vo. 6s. net. 
 
 NEW AND REVISED (FOURTH) EDITION. 
 
 SERVICE CHEMISTRY. By V. B. LEWES, Professor at the 
 Royal Naval College, Greenwich ; and J. S. S. BRAME. Fully Illustrated. 
 In the Press. 
 
 This text-book deals with the chemical treatment of subjects of such paramount 
 importance to the Services as Explosives, Fuel, Drinking Waters, Boiler Incrus- 
 tation, Corrosion and Fouling of Ships, Spontaneous Ignition of Coal Cargoes, 
 Paints, Ventilation, etc. In preparing it the authors have tried to develop in a 
 rational way the main facts of the Science, and the theories which are deduced 
 from them, and have then amplified as fully as possible those portions which 
 touch on Service questions. 
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF APPLIED ELECTROCHEMISTRY. 
 
 By A. J. ALLMAND, D.Sc. 136 Figures. Demy 8vo. i8s. net. 
 A text-book of the fundamental principles and processes employed in the in- 
 dustrial applications of electrochemistry. The various forms of cells and electric 
 furnaces are fully described. 
 
 WINDING ENGINES AND WINDING APPLIANCES. Their 
 Design and Economical Working. By G. McCuLLOCH, A.M.I.M.E., 
 Inspector of Machinery in the Department of Mines, West Australia, and 
 T. CAMPBELL FDTERS, M.I.M.E. Fully Illustrated. 215. net. 
 Mining Journal. "The work before us is probably the first, certainly the most 
 comprehensive, attempt to deal with this important branch of a mine's equip- 
 ment. The authors are to be congratulated on their effort, which is a complete 
 study of the subject." 
 
 INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL MONOGRAPHS. 
 
 NEW VOLUMES. 
 
 LEAD POISONING AND LEAD ABSORPTION. By THOMAS 
 M. LEGGE, M.D. Oxon., D.P.H. Cantab., H.M. Medical Inspector of Fac- 
 tories; and KENNETH W. GOADBY, D.P.H. Cantab. 125. 6d. net. 
 
 Morning Post. " This is an authoritative review of present-day medical know- 
 ledge of lead poisoning. The subject is a vital and interesting one at the present 
 day, when legislative action with regard to it is being taken in almost every 
 civilized country." 
 
 THE CARRIER PROBLEM IN INFECTIOUS DISEASE. 
 
 With particular reference to Enteric Fever, Diphtheria, Cerebro-spinal 
 Meningitis, Bacillary Dysentery, and Cholera. By J. C. G. LEDINGHAM, 
 D.Sc., M.B., and J. A. ARKWRIGHT, M.D. 125. 6d. net. 
 
 THE PROTEIN ELEMENT IN NUTRITION. By Major D. 
 McCAY, M.B., B.Ch., B.A.O., M.R.C.P. Lond., I. M.S., Professor of 
 Physiology, Medical College, Calcutta ; Examiner in Physiology, Calcutta 
 and Punjab University. Demy 8vo. IDS. 6d. net. 
 
 LONDON : EDWARD ARNOLD, 41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, W. 
 
 * .-) 
 
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