Late that afternoon we were reunited at the Sailors’ Home. As time wore on the conviction grew that we must shake off Haywood once for all. Go where we would, he was ever at our heels, bringing disgrace upon us. Picking pockets was his glee. When other excitement failed he turned to filching small articles from the booths along the way. The last straw was added to our burden as we were returning to the Home along the Strand on our second day in Calcutta. The sophisticated inhabitants of the metropolis, far from springing aside at the approach of a European, are more accustomed to push him into the gutter. To be jostled by a “nigger” was an insult that Haywood could not brook. He resorted to Bowery tactics; but to little effect, for the Strand was crowded. The day was hot. The higher caste natives, our chief annoyers, carried umbrellas that soon suggested to the New Yorker a better means of retaliation. Opening his pocket knife, he marched boldly through the throng, slashing viciously at every sunshade whose owner provoked his ire. An angry murmur rose behind us. Before we had reached the Home, a screaming mob of tradesmen surged around us, waving ruined umbrellas in our faces. Decidedly it was time to abandon the perpetrator of such outrages. Hints had availed nothing, frankness less. Violence against a “pal” was out of keeping with the code of morals of “the road.” There was nothing left but strategy.
The New Yorker ate heartily that evening. His plate was still heaped high with currie and rice when Marten and I retired to a bench in the garden of the Home. Plan had I none, as yet, for continuing my journey, for Calcutta was worth a week of sight-seeing. But plans are quickly made in the vagabond world.
“Look here, mate,” said Marten, in a stage whisper, “we’ve got to ditch that fellow. The cops’ll be running us in along with him some day.”
I nodded. A seaman came to stretch himself out in the grass near at hand, and we fell silent. Darkness was striding upon us when a 328servant of the Home advanced to close the gate leading into the street. Suddenly Marten raised a hand and shouted to the gateman.
“Let’s dig out,” he muttered.
“Where?” I queried.
“Up country.”
“Sure,” I answered, springing to my feet.
We slipped out through the gate, stalked across the Maidan among the statues of sahibs who have made history in India, past old Fort William, and down to the banks of the Hoogly. The tropical night had fallen, and above the city behind blazed the brilliant southern cross. For an hour we tramped along the docks, jostled now and then by black stevedores and native seamen. The cobble stones under our feet gave way to a soft country road. A railway crossed our path and we stumbled along it in the darkness. Out of the night rose a large, two-story bungalow.
“Guards’ shack,” said Marten.
A “goods train” was making up in the yards. A European in the uniform of a brakeman ran down the steps of the bungalow, a lantern in his hand. Behind him came a coolie, carrying his lunch-basket.
“Goin’ out soon, mate?” bawled Marten.
“All made up,” answered the Englishman, peering at us a moment with the lantern high above his head, and hurrying on.
“Think we’ll go along,” shouted Marten.
The guard was already swallowed up in the darkness, but his voice came back to us out of the night:—
“All right! Lay low!”
A moment later the tiny British engine shrieked, a man in the neighboring tower opened the block, and the diminutive freight screamed by us. We grasped the rods of a high, open car and swung ourselves up. On the floor, folded to the size of a large mattress, lay a tarpaulin car-cover. A cooling breeze, sweeping over the moving train, lulled us to sleep. Once we were awakened by the roar of a passing express, and peered over the edge of the car to find ourselves on a switch. Then the train rattled on and we stretched out again. A second time we were aroused by shunting engines, and the guard, passing by, called out that he had reached the end of his run. We climbed out, and, retreating to a grassy slope, slept out the night.
The morning sun showed an extensive forest close at hand. A red, sandy roadway, deep-shaded by thick overhanging branches, led off through the trees. Here and there in a tiny clearing a scrawny native 329cooked a scanty breakfast over a fire of leaves and twigs before his thatch hut. Above us sounded the note of a tropical bird. The jostling multitudes and sullen roar of Calcutta seemed innumerable leagues distant.
The forest opened and fell away on either hand; and we paused on the high, grassy bank of a broad river, glistening in the slanting sunlight. Below, in two groups, natives, male and female, were bathing. Along a highway following the course of the river stretched a one-row town, low hovels of a single story for the most part, above which a government building and a modest little church stood out conspicuously.
A quaint, old-fashioned spire against the background of an India horizon is a landmark not easily forgotten.
“Thunder!” snorted Martin. “Is this all we’ve made? That bloody train must have been side-tracked half the time we was poundin’ our list’ners. I know this burg. It’s Hoogly, not forty miles from Cally. But there’s a commish here. He’s a real sport, and ticketed me to Cally four years ago. Don’t believe he’ll remember my figure-’ead, neither. Come on.”
We strolled on down the highway. Before the government building a score of prisoners, with belts and heavy anklets of iron connected by two jointed bars, were piling cobble stones.
“But here!” I cried suddenly; “He’ll only give you a ticket back to Calcutta if we’re so near there.”
“No bloody fear,” retorted Marten; “he’ll ticket me the way I want to go. That’s old Lord Curzy’s law.”
“Then you’ll have to drop that yarn about the Guiseppe Sarto.”
Marten had thus christened his phantom ship, not because he hoped to win favor with the Pope, but because he had been hard-pressed for an Italian name. Commissioners who listened to his “song and dance” had a disconcerting habit of drawing from a pigeon-hole the latest marine guide at the mention of an English vessel. But Italian windjammers, unlisted, might be moved about as freely as pawns on a chessboard.
“drop nothing,” snapped the ex-pearl fisher. “Think I’m goin’ to let a good yarn like that go to waste, an’ after me spendin’ a whole bloody day learnin’ to pronounce that dago name—an’ the skipper’s? Not me! I’m goin’ to send the Joe Taylor”—in familiar parlance he preferred the English version of the name—“over to Bombay, this time. I’ll have ’er due there in four days.”
330We turned in at an imposing lodge gate and followed a graveled walk towards a great, white bungalow with windows commanding a vista of the sparkling Hoogly and the rolling plains beyond. From the veranda, curtained by trailing vines, richly-garbed servants watched our approach with the half-belligerent, half-curious air of faithful house dogs. Having no personal interest in the proceedings, I dropped into a rustic bench beside the highway. A chatter of Hindustanee greeted my companion; a stocky Punjabi rose from his heels and entered the bungalow.
There ensued a scene without precedent in my Indian experience. A tall, comely Englishman, dressed in the whitest of ducks, stepped briskly out upon the veranda, and, totally ignoring the awful gulf that separates a district commissioner from a penniless beachcomber, bawled out:—
“I say, you chaps, come inside and have some breakfast.”
Much less would have been my astonishment had he suddenly opened fire on us from a masked battery. I looked up to see Marten leaning weakly against a veranda post.
“I only come with my mate, sir,” I explained. “It’s him as wants the ticket. I’m only waitin’, sir.”
“Then come along and have some breakfast while you wait,” retorted the Englishman. “Early risers have good appetites, and where would you buy anything fit to eat in Hoogly? I’ve finished, but Maghmoód has covers laid for you.”
We entered the bungalow on tiptoe and took places at a flower-decked table. Two turbaned servants slipped noiselessly into the room and served us viands of other lands. A punkah-wallah on the veranda kept the great fans in motion. Upon me fell the vague sense of having witnessed scenes like this in some former existence. Even here, then, on the banks of the Hoogly, men ate with knives and forks from delicate china ware, wiping their fingers on snow-white linen rather than on a leg of their trousers, and left fruit peelings on their plates instead of throwing them under the table! It seemed anachronistic.
“I told you,” murmured Marten, finishing his steak and a long silence, and mopping his plate dry with a slice of bread plastered with butter from far-off Denmark; “I told you he was a real sport. He’s the same one, an’ give me a swell hand-out four years ago.”
Maghmoód entered bearing cigars and cigarettes on a silver tray, 331and the information that we were to follow the commissioner to his office, two miles distant.
An hour later we were journeying leisurely northwestward in a crowded train that halted at every hamlet and cross-road. Marten had received a ticket to Bankipore, far beyond the destination of the local at Burdwan, where we alighted three hours before the arrival of the night express. A gaping crowd surrounded us as we halted to purchase sweetmeats in the bazaars and, flocking at our heels, quickly drew upon us the attention of the local police.
Dreading Russian spies, the Indian government has, during the few years past, required its officers to follow closely the trail of foreigners within the country. The native policeman, however, could not distinguish a suspicious character from a member of the viceroy’s council, and takes a childish delight in demonstrating his importance to society by subjecting every sahib stranger who will suffer it to a lengthy cross-examination. Half the gendarmes of Burdwan, eager to win from their superiors reputation for perspicacity, sought to bring us before the recorders at the police station. Their methods were ludicrous. They neither commanded nor requested; they invited us in the flowery phrases of compliment to accompany them, and, when we passed on unheeding, turned back in sorrow to their posts.
Two lynx-eyed officers, however, hung on our heels, and, following us to the station as night fell, joined a group of railway gendarmes on the platform. A lengthy conference ensued; then the squad lined up before the bench on which we were seated, and a sergeant drew out one of the small volumes which the government has adopted as a register for transient Europeans.
“Will the sahibs be pleased to give me their names?” wheedled the sergeant, in the timid voice of a half-starved Villon addressing his verses to a noble patron.
I took the book and pencil from his hand and filled out the blanks on a page.
“And you, sahib?” said the officer, turning to Marten.
“Oh, go to the devil!” growled my companion; “I ain’t no Roossian. You got no damn business botherin’ Europeans. Go chase yourself.”
“The sahib must give the informations or he cannot go on the train,” murmured the native.
“How the devil will you stop me from goin’?” demanded Marten.
332The officer muttered something in the vernacular to his companions.
“You would, would you?” bellowed Marten.
“Ah! The sahib speaks Hindustanee?” gasped the sergeant. “What is your name, please, sir?”
“Look here,” growled Marten, “I’ll give you my name if you’ll promise not to ask any more fool questions.”
The native smiled with delight and poised his pencil.
“And the name, sir?”
“Higgeldy Piggeldy,” said Marten.
“Ah! And how is it spelled, please, sahib?”
The sergeant wrote the words slowly and solemnly at my companion’s dictation.
“And which is the sahib’s birthplace?” he wheedled.
“You bloody liar,” roared Marten; “didn’t you say you wouldn’t ask anything else?”
“Ah! Yes, sahib,” bleated the babu; “but we must have the informations. Please, sir, which is your birthplace?”
“If you don’t chase yourself, I’ll break your neck!” roared Marten, springing to his feet.
The assembled officers fell over each other in their haste to escape the onslaught. Marten returned to the bench and sat down in moody silence. The sergeant, urged forward by his fellow officers, advanced timidly to within several paces of us and, poised ready to spring, addressed me in gentle tones:—
“Sahib, the police wish, please, sir, to know why the sahibs have come to Burdwan.”
“Because the local dropped us here, and we had to wait for the express.”
“But why have you not take the express all the time?”
“We were at Hoogly. It doesn’t stop there.”
“Then, why have you not stay in the station? Why have you walked in the bazaars and in the temples?”
“To see the sights, of course.”
“But there are not sights in Burdwan. It is a dirty village and very poor and very small. Europeans are coming to Benares and to Calcutta, but they are not coming in Burdwan. Why have the sahibs come in Burdwan, and the sun is very hot?”
“I told you why. The sun doesn’t bother us.”
“Then why have the sahibs bought sweets and chappaties in the bazaars?”
333“Because we were hungry.”
“Sahibs are not eating native food; they must have European food. Why have you bought these?”
“For Lord’s sake, hit that nigger on the head with something!” burst out Marten. “I want to sleep.”
The sergeant retreated several paces and continued his examination.
“And why have the sahibs gone to the tem—?”
The shriek of an incoming train drowned the rest, and we hastened towards the European compartment.
“You must not go in the train!” screamed the sergeant, while the squad danced excitedly around us. “Stop! You must answer—”
We stepped inside and slammed the door.
“The train cannot be allowed to go!” screeched the babu, racing up and down the platform. “The sahibs are not allowed to go. You must hold the train, sahib!” he cried to a European guard hurrying by.
“Hold nothing,” answered the official. “Are you crazy? This is the Bombay mail,” and he blew his whistle.
The sergeant grasped the edge of the open window with one hand and, waving his notebook wildly in the other, raced along the platform beside us.
“You must answer the questions, sahibs—”
The train was rapidly gaining headway.
“Get down, sahibs! Come out! You are not allowed—”
He could hold the pace no longer. With a final shriek he released his hold and we sped on into the night.
Hours afterward we were awakened by a voice at the open window. A native officer was peering in upon us.
“I have received a telegraph from Burdwan for a sahib who has not answered some questions,” he smiled, holding up his notebook.
“My name’s Franck,” I yawned.
“Then it must be the other sahib,” said the native. “You are, sir, I think, Mr. Higgeldy Piggeldy?”
“Naw! Mine’s Marten,” said my companion, drawing out his papers. “Bloody funny name, that. Can’t be no Englishman. Must be a Roossian.”
We left the express at daybreak. Bankipore was suffering from one of the long droughts that have ever been the blight of this section of India. The flat plains of the surrounding country spread out an 334arid, sun-baked desert as far as the eye could see. Along the roadway the dust rose in clouds at every step, the trees stood lifeless in ragged shrouds of dead, brown leaves. The few low-caste natives still energetic enough to bestir themselves dragged by at the listless pace of animals turned out to die, utter hopelessness in their shriveled faces, their tongues lolling from their mouths. The sear grass of the great Maidan was crushed to powder under our feet; a half-mile stroll brought on all the symptoms of physical fatigue; the moistureless, dust-laden air smarted in our throats and lungs and left our lips and nostrils parched and cracking.
In the center of the Maidan, as far as possible from the human kennels of the surrounding town, were pitched several sun-bleached tents. A dun-colored coolie, squatting in a dusty patch, cried out at our approach; and a native of higher caste pushed aside the flap of the tent and, shading his eyes under an outstretched hand, gazed towards us. He was dressed in uniform, his jacket open at the throat, and his bare feet thrust into a pair of shabby slippers. A figure commonplace enough, yet at sight of him we gasped with delight. For on his head sat a fez! It was far from becoming to its wearer; a turban would have offered more protection against the Indian sun, but it heralded a Mohammedan free from the fanatical superstitions of the Brahmin faith. We might quench our thirst at once with no pollution of the cup; and depart without feeling that creepy sensation of guilt that one experiences at home in stopping in a saloon for a drink of water—if such things happen. How the point of view towards one’s fellow men change with every advance to the eastward! In this superstitious land an Islamite seemed almost a brother.
But we were thirsty.
“Pawnee hai? Oh! Maghmoód, we would drink,” cried Marten.
The follower of the prophet smiled at the words of the vernacular as he answered in perfect English:—
“Assuredly, gentlemen. I should be delighted. Step inside, where it is cooler.”
His was no crude-builded language of the babu. An Oxford fellow could not have expressed his thoughts more clearly, nor given more immediate evidence of a sahib point of view.
The tent was furnished with mats and couches. In one corner stood a chair and a desk littered with papers. The Mohammedan 335handed us a chettie of water. When we had drunk our fill, he offered cigarettes and motioned to a couch.
“Be seated, gentlemen,” he said. “Unless you have urgent business you may as well rest a bit.”
“Gee!” puffed my companion, leaning back on his elbows; “I’m glad a Mohammedan’s superstitions don’t make him believe all this tommy-rot about pollution.”
Marten of Tacoma was not distinguished for tact.
“We try, at any rate,” smiled the officer, “to be sane in our beliefs.”
“Of course,” went on my mate, “you have plenty of fool superstitions, too; and you put rings in your wives’ noses, to lead ’em around by, I suppose?”
A flash of fire kindled the eye of our host, but he smiled again as he replied:
“We try, though, sir, to be sparing of unnecessary insults.”
“Gee!” murmured Marten, without looking up; “This is a good cigarette.”
“Is this an encampment?” I put in, feeling it my duty to lead the conversation into other channels. “I don’t see any sepoys about.”
“Oh, by no means,” said the Mohammedan; “this is police headquarters. The smaller tents house the men.”
“Then you are not a soldier?”
“Not in recent years. I am chief of police for Bankipore.”
Marten cast a half-startled glance at the profile of the man he had taken for a simple sergeant, and assumed a more dignified posture.
“The police, then, live in tents here?” I went on.
“If we didn’t, few of us would be living at all,” replied the chief. “Early in March, with the famine, the plague broke out, and the inhabitants have been dying in hundreds ever since. Ten of the force were carried from their huts to the funeral pyres in the first week. Then we set up the tents.”
“Doesn’t the government try to check the epidemic?”
“Try! We have been fighting it tooth and nail since the day it began. But what can we do among ignorant, superstitious Hindus? Our people are poor. They live in filthy huts with dirt floors, into which rats can dig easily. If we attempt to fumigate a house, the family abandons it and sleeps on the ground outside, the surest way of taking the plague. If we try to purify their water and food we 336have a riot on our hands. The huts, too, are so packed together and burdened with filth that the only way to clean them would be to burn up the town. We have a force of government doctors. Medicine, also, is free to all. But you know my people. They would far rather die of plague than run the risk of losing caste through the doctor’s touch. If a man dies, his family prefers to scoop a hole in the floor and squat on his grave, rather than to turn his body over to Christians or Mohammedans. We have strict laws against concealing sickness and death, but it is difficult to enforce them. To make things worse, the rumor is always going the rounds that the sahib government has ordered the doctors to poison their patients or cast a spell upon them; and among the masses such tales are readily believed. What can you expect of ignorant, fanatical people who barely realize that reading and writing exist, and who never learn anything except on hearsay? Police and doctors and government medicine will never wipe out the plague. The only thing that can stop it is rain, and until that comes Bankipore will keep on dying.”
Marvelous was the manner in which this son of the Orient ran on in an alien tongue, never at a loss for the word to express his meaning precisely.
“Do all those attacked by the plague die?” I asked.
“I have been keeping tab on the cases,” returned the chief, “and I find that a fraction of less than ninety-six per cent result fatally. I know of men who have recovered. Our former district commissioner was one. If the victim is a European or a well-to-do native he has about one chance for life to three for death. But among the sudras, the coolies, the peasants, the poor shopkeepers, there is small hope. They have always half starved on a rice diet, the drought has left us famine-stricken for a year; obviously, having no constitutions to fall back upon, they merely lie down and die, never making an effort unless their religious superstitions are in danger of violation. No, it is only rain that will save us,” he concluded, pushing aside the flap of the tent and gazing hopelessly at the cloudless sky.
We turned away into the town. It needed no word from the chief of police to call attention to the ravages of plague and famine. The shopkeepers, humped over their wares, wore the air of dogs ever in the fear of a beating; the low-caste natives stared greedily at the stale, dust-covered foodstuffs spread out along the way; fleshless personifications of misery crawled by, whining for cowries—the sea-shells that charitable India bestows on her beggar army. The inhabitants 337were not hungry. That is their normal condition. They were starving. Yet the general misery made them none the less slaves of their omnipresent superstitions. The gaunt, sunken-eyed merchant screamed in frenzy when our fingers approached his octogenarian rice cakes and chappaties; he held his bony claw on a level with our knees to catch the coppers we offered. His stock was plentiful, if grey-bearded; his prices as low as in the days of abundance. It was, after all, chiefly a famine of annas.
At the great government bungalow, on a low hill to the eastward of the town, were few evidences of affliction. The official force, from the richly-gowned and turbaned judge, holding court on the veranda, to the punkah-wallah who cooled his court-room, were glossy, well-fed creatures. The commissioner, who drove up in a dog cart ornamented with two footmen in scarlet and white livery, and who marched with majestic tread through a lane of kowtowing inferiors, certainly had not come without his breakfast. But even he must have known of the famine, for in the stringy shade of thin-foliaged trees nearby huddled scores of wretches waiting for leave to appeal for government assistance.
Native starvelings, obviously, should not take precedence over a sahib. While I dropped into a proffered seat at the right hand of the judge, Marten followed the Englishman inside. A long line of prisoners, shackled in pairs and guarded by many native policemen, awaited judgment. Two by two they dropped on their knees in the sun-scorched dust, sat down on their heels, and, raising clasped hands to their faces, rocked slowly back and forth. The judge muttered a half-dozen words, which writers behind him jotted down in ponderous volumes, waved a flabby hand, and the culprits passed on.
“These,” whispered an interpreter in my ear, “are wicked thieves. They have stolen chappaties in the bazaars. They have prison for three months. These next escape quickly with six weeks. They have cut a coolie with knives. Those who kneel now have polluted high-caste food.”
Close to an hour the procession continued. An aged coolie, wrinkled and creased of skin as if he had been wrung out and hung up to dry, and a naked, half-grown boy brought up the rear. While they knelt, the secretary turned over the pages of his book.
“More thieves,” said the interpreter. “The boy has stolen a brass lota; the man, the lunch of a train guard, three months ago. Their prison is ended.”
338The judge spoke and a policeman produced a large bunch of keys and removed their shackles. Man and boy fell on their faces in the dust, and rising, wandered away over the brow of the hill.
A moment later Marten emerged from the bungalow.
“The old song and dance is as good as ever!” he cried, when we were out of earshot. “I got a boost to Allahabad an’ two days’ batter an’ the commish’s sympathy. Come on; let’s take in the sights.”
Bankipore’s chief object of interest was a stone granary, in shape an immense bee-hive or hay-cock, depository in days of plenty for years of famine. As such things go in India, it was a very modern structure, having been erected in the time of the American revolution. It was empty. An outside stairway, winding upward, led to a circular opening in the apex, through which trains of coolies, in days gone by, poured a steady stream of grain. Within was Stygian darkness. We were rewarded for the perspiring ascent by a far-reaching view of the famine-stricken plains, and off to the eastward I caught my first glimpse of the Ganges.
We halted late that night at Buxar, far short of Allahabad, and took slower train next morning to Moghul Serai. For to have remained on board the express would have been to pass in the darkness the holy city of Benares.
The pilgrim train was densely packed with wildly-excited natives and their precious bundles. Not once during the seven-mile journey across the arid plateau did a vista of protruding brown feet greet us as we looked back along the carriages. The windows of every compartment framed eager, longing faces, straining for the first glimpse of the sacred city. To many of our fellow-travelers this twentieth of April had been in anticipation, and would be in retrospect, the greatest day of their worldly existence. For the mere sight of holy “Kashi” suffices to wipe out many sins of past decades. Even the gods of the Brahmin come here to consummate their purification.
Bankipur’s chief object of interest is a vast granary built in the time of the American Revolution to keep grain for times of famine. From its top the traveler catches his first glimpse of the Ganges
Women of Delhi near gate forced during the Sepoy rebellion. One carries water in a Standard Oil can, another a basket of dung-cakes
As we rounded a low sand dune, a muffled chorus of exclamations sounded above the rumble of the train, and called me to the open window. To the left, a half-mile distant, the sacred river Ganges swept round from the eastward in a graceful curve and continued southward across our path. On the opposite shore, bathing its feet in the sparkling stream, sprawled the holy city. Travelers familiar with all urban dwelling places of man name three as most distinctive in sky-line,—New York, Constantinople and Benares. The last, certainly, 339is not least impressive. Long before Gautama, seeking truth, journeyed thither, multitudes of Hindus had been absolved of their sins at the foot of this village on the Ganges. To the bathing ghats and shrines of the Brahmin the Buddhist added his temples. Then came the Mohammedan conquerors with new beauties of Saracenic architecture. In the toleration of British rule Jain and Sihk and even Christian have contributed their share to this composite monument to the world’s religions. Through it all, the city has grown without rhyme or reason. Temples, monasteries, shrines, kiosks, topes, mosques, chapels have vied with each other and the huts and shops of the inhabitants in a wild scramble for place close to the absolving waters of the Ganges, until the crescent-shaped “Kashi” of to-day lies heaped upon itself, as different from the orderly cities of the western world as a mass of football players in hot scrimmage from a company of soldiers. From the very midst of the architectural scramble, giving center to the picture, rise two slender minarets of the Mosque Aurunzebe, needing but a connecting bar to suggest two goal posts.
The train rumbled across the railway bridge and halted on the edge of the city. No engineering genius could have surveyed a line through it. We plunged into the riot of buildings and were at once engulfed in a whirlpool of humanity. Damascus and Cairo had seemed over-populated; compared with Benares, they were deserted. Where the chattering stream flowed against us, we advanced by short spurts, pausing for breath when we were tossed aside into the wares of bawling shopkeepers, or against a fa?ade decorated with bois de vache. Worshipers, massed before outdoor shrines, blocked the way as effectually as stone walls. Cross currents of pilgrims, bursting forth from Jain or Hindu temple, bore us away with them through side streets we had not chosen to explore. Pilgrims there were everywhere, of every caste, of every shade, from the brass-tinted hillman to the black Madrasi, representatives of all the land of India from the snow line of the Himalayas to Tuticorin by the sea. Among them the inhabitants of Benares were a mere handful.
Sacred bulls shouldered us aside with utter indifference to what had once been the color of our skins. Twice the vast bulk of a holy elephant loomed up before us. On the friezes and roofs of Hindu temples monkeys wearing glittering and apparently costly rings on every finger scampered and chattered with an audacity that to the natives was an additional proof of their divinity.
340We had been buffeted back and forth through the tortuous channels for more than an hour when a frenzied beating of drums and a wailing of pipes bore down upon us.
“Religious procession!” screamed Marten, dragging me after him up the steps of a Jain temple. “We’ll have to hang out here till it gets by. How’s them fer glad rags?”
The paraders were, indeed, attired in astonishing costumes, even for India. The street below us was quickly filled with a screaming of colors no less discordant than the harrowing “music” to which a thousand marchers kept uncertain step. Some of the fanatics, not satisfied with an exaggeration of native garb, masqueraded in the most fantastic of guises, among which the most amusing was that of a bold fellow burlesquing a sahib. He was “made up” to emphasize the white man’s idiosyncrasies, and marched in a hollow square where no point could be hidden from the view of the delighted bystanders. To the Hindu, he is an ass who wears jacket and trousers in preference to a cool, flowing robe; the tenderness of sahib feet is the subject of many a vulgar jest. The burlesquer was attired in a suit of shrieking checks that fitted his slender form as tightly as a glove; on his feet were shoes with great projecting soles in which he might have walked with impunity on red-hot irons. His flour-powdered face was far paler than that of the latest subaltern to a............