TO THE HOLY RIVER
THERE WAS A WIDE LAWN IN FRONT OF THE PALACE OF RAMPUR, SUR rounded by plantations of peaches and mangoes, where once there had been a forest of bamboos much frequented by robbers, but the forest had been cut down, and one huge walking-stick with a silver ferule at one end and a great gold knob at the other, engraved with the crown of Rampur, which the Nawab gave me at Christmas, is a remnant of it, and is in the house in which I now write. Lord Peel, who was given a similar one at the same time, dared me to carry it in London, and I have not yet done so. On the wide lawn bounded by the plantation of fruit-trees and a few ornamental arches of white stone one may sometimes see flocks of pigeons being drilled, which I had never seen till I went to India, or known to be possible. The art comes from the north, whence the Rohillas came, who rule in Rampur, and I often saw it later in Peshawer, looking over the city from a house-top. A man waves a white cloth and the flock of pigeons wheels at his command, and another flock under command of another man may fly right through them; far away to the north-east over the elephant stables one saw the white peaks of the Himalayas.
A gun fired at sunset and dawn throughout Ramadam, so that no Mahomedan should make the mistake of eating at the wrong time. And every now and then through the night a watchman at the edge of the fruit-trees would cry out loudly that he had seen the thief, so that if there happened to be one he should consider himself detected. In the palace a band such as one hears in large London hotels played for us every evening, and it was some while before the Nawab realized how greatly I should have preferred to hear Indian music. For not only have I a real love for Oriental things, which has come to me I know not how, but I am, like most people, fond of travel, and I prefer to travel as the swallow than as the snail, and the more one is surrounded upon one’s travels by the sights and sounds with which one is long familiar, the less room there must be for all the experiences for which one travels. When the Nawab did realize that I cared less for the weeds of England than the orchids of India he sent for his own band, and they came in with the strangest instruments and played music as strange to us as was the furthest land of our travels. Once it was an old and fierce and loved tune that they played; wilder and wilder it grew, more and more beautiful, and the eyes of the players began to flash. “Enough,” said the Nawab, or some similar word in his language, raising a hand, and the wonderful tune stopped instantly and some climax to which it was moving never came. I could never hear it again. I could never learn the name of it. Many questions I asked of others, and got polite answers, but no information. The Nawab had realized that that fierce national song was making hearts throb with emotions that would not be shared by his guests; a little more and the music might overstep the boundary of hospitality, and neither music nor words could be allowed to do that, so he had raised his hand and said, “Enough.” I wish I could have heard that wonderful tune again and heard it to the end.
I was told that in all India there were few, if any, more learned in Indian music than the Nawab of Rampur. And he had sent for a band for his guests all the way from some English hotel. Whose heart in London is kind enough to provide entertainment with a penny whistle at the Albert Hall, in the intervals of a symphony, for those whose taste is not attuned to Beethoven?
One day the Nawab with Macduff took my wife and me into his bedroom to see some of his jewellery, which was in a safe in that room. A silver bed and a few large gold vases and a bunch of tuberoses were almost the only ornaments of the room, and there we were shown some splendid jewels, of which I only remember now a big gold bracelet for the arm with a few great stones set in it. But chiefly I remember how the Nawab got it, or rather his grandfather, for there is a right way and less satisfactory ways of getting anything, and I got the impression from the quiet contentment on my host’s face as he showed us this armlet that his grandfather’s way was the ideal way. Of course a piece of magnificent jewellery must always give some pleasure to any who may be lucky enough to get it, whether it is a present or whether it is bought in a shop; but the grandfather of the Nawab did not go shopping. “This,” the Nawab said to me, “my grandfather took from the Maharajah of Such-and-such, whom he killed in battle.”
The rest of his jewellery was kept in an iron house, and this was to have been shown us. It was the kind of thing that one has read of in fairy-stories, big bowls full of rubies and much besides, but before the day on which we were to have been shown it, after the big party had gone, the Nawab unfortunately fell ill and the sight of this house is one of the memorable things that we missed. He took us one day to see his palace in the capital, for Indian rulers often have many palaces. We went after dinner, and, as the Nawab had not been there for a year, only the sentries were alert, and the servants who should have been waiting until he might come were not expecting him at that moment. I think it was a hot-weather palace, for there was a swimming-bath outside his dressing-room door into which he could dive from his door and swim to other parts of the house; and a huge saw of silver lay across every door in order to keep out snakes. In this palace he showed me a fine piece of silver representing Ulysses tied to the mast and sailing past the sirens, which had been presented to his grandfather by some English officers whose lives he had saved during the Mutiny by sheltering them in Rampur. For a moment one did not see what a ship had to do with it, but it was the restraint of Ulysses among the sirens that was being commemorated in silver. Near by there shone in the moonlight the great dome of the mosque, entirely covered with gold.
I soon went out again after big game with Prince Dillon. We motored about twenty miles, and then got on to elephants. One evening we went on elephants into the jungle to a spot at which a tiger had made a kill. We moved in and out among the trees when we could, and where that could not be done the mahout would ask the elephant to uproot a tree. The language in which a mahout speaks to an elephant is the elephants’ language, which must mean actually that it is the language of the tribe that first trained elephants, a tribe which no longer appears to exist on the earth, for I do not think any men and women have ever been found who talk among themselves the language that the mahout talks to his elephant, but the lore of this tribe remains, and may be the only lore in use in the world that has never been translated into any known language. The elephants brought us just before nightfall to the place where the tiger had killed, and we climbed a tree with the help of ropes that had already been arranged for us, and Prince Dillon and I waited there for the return of the tiger. He had a large electric torch to shine on the tiger, so as to give me a clear shot. We had not long to wait, when the tiger came whispering through the jungle to eat his kill. No more than a whisper did the great beast make. I was unfamiliar with shooting at night and most unfortunately had an electric torch, which just touched my rifle. Faint though the sound was it was utterly unmistakable, metal being used only by man, of all the creatures that inhabit this planet. The roar of the lion is imitated fairly well by the hippopotamus, and roughly by the red-deer and even the bull, but the clink of metal means unmistakably man. And so the tiger was off. At pitch-and-toss, when one is backing heads, one must expect tails to turn up quite often, and at least as often in sport one must expect bad luck, either through one’s own mistakes, or through the power of the weather or forests or mountains, or any other force of Nature that may oppose one. The Nawab was disappointed, for he knew how much a first tiger would have meant to a guest, and Prince Dillon must have been much disappointed too; but nobody blamed me, whose fault it was.
On another day we went after Barasingh, or Swamp Deer, which is also often called Gond, and I shot one of them. It is difficult to shoot from the back of an elephant, on account of the animal’s breathing. The Gond is somewhat like a Highland stag, but a bit larger and lighter in colour, and the points of the horns, with the exception of the brow antlers, do not come forward in the same way; for though one often sees drawings of a red-deer’s antlers sprouting in all directions, that is not the way in which they really grow. And I shot a pig on that day. Though this is probably the most desperate character of the jungle one does not feel that one has acquired very much of a trophy when one has shot a pig, because the achievement is outshone by the men who ride him and kill him with lances. Perhaps, on account of the pig-stickers, I should not have shot any pigs at all, had it not been that the Nawab particularly asked me to do so, because they damaged his people’s crops, and so I shot them as he asked, but only in unrideable country. The pig usually charges, terrifying the elephants, but that is no test of his prowess, because I have seen them considerably alarmed by a hare. The next day we went out again, and went after panther, and I shot three barasingh, two of them very fine heads; and a lovely black-and-gold panther got up and came past my elephant, and I got him, and he came back to Rampur tied to the running-board of the car, and the Nawab came out on to his white marble steps, on to which somebody inadvisedly carried the blood-stained panther, and looked at it with delight, for he saw his hospitality bearing fine fruit.
And then I went to visit the Maharajah of Benares, staying for a night in his guest-house and calling on him in his palace on the other side of the river. The kind Nawab was always reluctant to allow a guest to go, and when I did go to the beautiful city of Benares he sent a wire to remind me not to stay there too long, and so my visit to Benares was curtailed. Two of the Maharajah’s officers showed me many sights of the city, and even tried to disturb a god from his rest, the famous Jaggernath, or Juggernaut as we call him, but he was not going out that day, and my kind hosts were unable to persuade his priests to open his temple. There is a great bell there that an Englishman had once vowed to the temple of Juggernaut, if his rowers got him safe ashore from a storm that rose on the Ganges; the promise of the bell to their god had probably stimulated the rowers, and they got him safely across and Juggernaut had his bell. And I was shown the monkey temple, where spoiled monkeys snatched food ferociously, and the cow-temple, in which cows and peacocks strolled about, and a priest sat by a bell which worshippers rang when they prayed. Whether Heaven copies Earth, or the other way about, the Emperor Jehangir used to have a precisely similar arrangement, a golden bell that any of his subjects could ring, night or day, and make a petition to him. Those who showed me round would I think have liked to show me what an up-to-date city Benares was, but all my interests were lagging thousands of years behind them. The Maharajah’s palace rose sheer from the edge of the water and its steps ran down into it, which made it convenient to land from the launch that he kindly sent for me, but I think that those steps may have met a more serious convenience, for those who hold that the world is balanced on the trident of Mahadeo, who rides an elephant which stands on a tortoise, tell that if you die on the far bank of the Ganges your next life is spent as a donkey. Though the palace was on the wrong side, its doors opened right on to the holy river. Tiger-skins nearly covered the walls of all the rooms that I saw. The beauty of Benares is not a thing that can fade out of one’s memory and, if it is possible to convey that beauty at all in words, I might still write much of it, but, as the earlier proofs of an etching are the clearer and thus more valued, it may be fairer to my reader to give a brief description of that bend of the river which wrote at that time in Benares.
BENARES
The sun had set when I came to the holy river. Steps thronged down to the water, steps everywhere: it must have been ages since the sloping banks sufficed for the feet of so many pilgrims. Temples clustered there: for all I knew, that bend of river was sacreder than the rest; but I knew nothing, I was merely gazing. In a tiny temple beside me a bull was kneeling in stone, before a black altar holding a circle of marigolds. Beyond that I could see no farther into the darkness. The temple had a legend too, that a man told me, and all round that one legend its history was dark to me, like the gloom of the temple round that circle of flowers. Beside it another temple lifted higher. It stood on a terrace and its door was shut. I climbed by steps to the terrace, and there saw sitting upon the stone and gazing away up the Ganges a man with a face like that of someone I knew, an old friend in England, one who might well in another life, if he travelled like Browning’s Waring, be content to sit and contemplate that river. Yet on his face was a most clear expression that I have never seen on the face of the friend that he seemed to resemble. I have seen, though not often, an expression on a man’s face that said: “I have found salvation and you haven’t.” But never before had I seen, deep below that, as I saw it now, the expression of one that was enjoying salvation actually at that moment. One has read of such an expression upon the face of martyrs, at the stake, at the last breath, but I had not before seen it. He sat there gazing westwards up that bend of the Ganges, and multitudes of pigeons sailed home to the temple roof and nestled among the little ruddy domes. Eastwards a haze was over all the river; one began to notice the light of a burning-ghat. The water a dull pale-green lay calm as a great jewel beneath. A large boat rowing swiftly past, going away from the sunset, showed by its speed which way the river ran, there being no ripple to show. From heights of architecture the light faded away, only the West glowed still; and now the light of the fires of death became vivid and full of colour. A new moon stood like a horn above the tops of the temples; and the earth-light made a silver ring all round, and lit the whole orb; all we can ever see of Earth’s magnificent glow, its faint reflection upon rare nights from the sunless face of the moon. It brightened, and the fires of death on the river’s bank grew brighter. The pilgrim sitting on the stone gazed blissfully up the river, seeing something I could not see, for his eyes were now shut. Below the steps a drum throbbed like a pulse, and a priest was chanting; behind him two or three men were singing softly, and a congregation was gathered, before him, silent and motionless.
A star came out; and gongs and bells began to sound at the very edge of the water, to summon men to worship the holy river. Little lights began to glow all round from tiny fires. The sound of the gongs increased and the bells rang more rapidly. Now there broke out from yet another temple a burst of music from drums and from pipes of reed. Someone opened, I never knew why, the door of the temple beside me. The curious note of the pipes grew louder and weirder. The night was throbbing and ringing with drums and bells. The holy river floating by seemed motionless as a beryl. Each flame of the fires of death by the river’s bank was vivid. The pilgrim beside me, in the ecstasy of his discovery, smiled on and on and on.