Following the Equator, Complete

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


When India is mentioned to the citizen of a far country it suggests
Clive, Hastings, the Mutiny, Kipling, and a number of other great events;
and the mention of Calcutta infallibly brings up the Black Hole. And so,
when that citizen finds himself in the capital of India he goes first of
all to see the Black Hole of Calcutta--and is disappointed.

The Black Hole was not preserved; it is gone, long, long ago. It is
strange. Just as it stood, it was itself a monument; a ready-made one.
It was finished, it was complete, its materials were strong and lasting,
it needed no furbishing up, no repairs; it merely needed to be let alone.
It was the first brick, the Foundation Stone, upon which was reared a
mighty Empire--the Indian Empire of Great Britain. It was the ghastly
episode of the Black Hole that maddened the British and brought Clive,
that young military marvel, raging up from Madras; it was the seed from
which sprung Plassey; and it was that extraordinary battle, whose like
had not been seen in the earth since Agincourt, that laid deep and strong
the foundations of England's colossal Indian sovereignty.

And yet within the time of men who still live, the Black Hole was torn
down and thrown away as carelessly as if its bricks were common clay, not
ingots of historic gold. There is no accounting for human beings.

The supposed site of the Black Hole is marked by an engraved plate. I
saw that; and better that than nothing. The Black Hole was a prison--a
cell is nearer the right word--eighteen feet square, the dimensions of an
ordinary bedchamber; and into this place the victorious Nabob of Bengal
packed 146 of his English prisoners. There was hardly standing room for
them; scarcely a breath of air was to be got; the time was night, the
weather sweltering hot. Before the dawn came, the captives were all dead
but twenty-three. Mr. Holwell's long account of the awful episode was
familiar to the world a hundred years ago, but one seldom sees in print
even an extract from it in our day. Among the striking things in it is
this. Mr. Holwell, perishing with thirst, kept himself alive by sucking
the perspiration from his sleeves. It gives one a vivid idea of the
situation. He presently found that while he was busy drawing life from
one of his sleeves a young English gentleman was stealing supplies from
the other one. Holwell was an unselfish man, a man of the most generous
impulses; he lived and died famous for these fine and rare qualities; yet
when he found out what was happening to that unwatched sleeve, he took
the precaution to suck that one dry first. The miseries of the Black
Hole were able to change even a nature like his. But that young
gentleman was one of the twenty-three survivors, and he said it was the
stolen perspiration that saved his life. From the middle of Mr.
Holwell's narrative I will make a brief excerpt:

"Then a general prayer to Heaven, to hasten the approach of the
flames to the right and left of us, and put a period to our misery.
But these failing, they whose strength and spirits were quite
exhausted laid themselves down and expired quietly upon their
fellows: others who had yet some strength and vigor left made a last
effort at the windows, and several succeeded by leaping and
scrambling over the backs and heads of those in the first rank, and
got hold of the bars, from which there was no removing them. Many
to the right and left sunk with the violent pressure, and were soon
suffocated; for now a steam arose from the living and the dead,
which affected us in all its circumstances as if we were forcibly
held with our heads over a bowl full of strong volatile spirit of
hartshorn, until suffocated; nor could the effluvia of the one be
distinguished from the other, and frequently, when I was forced by
the load upon my head and shoulders to hold my face down, I was
obliged, near as I was to the window, instantly to raise it again to
avoid suffocation. I need not, my dear friend, ask your
commiseration, when I tell you, that in this plight, from half an
hour past eleven till near two in the morning, I sustained the
weight of a heavy man, with his knees in my back, and the pressure
of his whole body on my head. A Dutch surgeon who had taken his
seat upon my left shoulder, and a Topaz (a black Christian soldier)
bearing on my right; all which nothing could have enabled me to
support but the props and pressure equally sustaining me all around.
The two latter I frequently dislodged by shifting my hold on the
bars and driving my knuckles into their ribs; but my friend above
stuck fast, held immovable by two bars.

"I exerted anew my strength and fortitude; but the repeated trials
and efforts I made to dislodge the insufferable incumbrances upon me
at last quite exhausted me; and towards two o'clock, finding I must
quit the window or sink where I was, I resolved on the former,
having bore, truly for the sake of others, infinitely more for life
than the best of it is worth. In the rank close behind me was an
officer of one of the ships, whose name was Cary, and who had
behaved with much bravery during the siege (his wife, a fine woman,
though country born, would not quit him, but accompanied him into
the prison, and was one who survived). This poor wretch had been
long raving for water and air; I told him I was determined to give
up life, and recommended his gaining my station. On my quitting it
he made a fruitless attempt to get my place; but the Dutch surgeon,
who sat on my shoulder, supplanted him. Poor Cary expressed his
thankfulness, and said he would give up life too; but it was with
the utmost labor we forced our way from the window (several in the
inner ranks appearing to me dead standing, unable to fall by the
throng and equal pressure around). He laid himself down to die; and
his death, I believe, was very sudden; for he was a short, full,
sanguine man. His strength was great; and, I imagine, had he not
retired with me, I should never have been able to force my way. I
was at this time sensible of no pain, and little uneasiness; I can
give you no better idea of my situation than by repeating my simile
of the bowl of spirit of hartshorn. I found a stupor coming on
apace, and laid myself down by that gallant old man, the Rev. Mr.
Jervas Bellamy, who laid dead with his son, the lieutenant, hand in
hand, near the southernmost wall of the prison. When I had lain
there some little time, I still had reflection enough to suffer some
uneasiness in the thought that I should be trampled upon, when dead,
as I myself had done to others. With some difficulty I raised
myself, and gained the platform a second time, where I presently
lost all sensation; the last trace of sensibility that I have been
able to recollect after my laying down, was my sash being uneasy
about my waist, which I untied, and threw from me. Of what passed
in this interval, to the time of my resurrection from this hole of
horrors, I can give you no account."

There was plenty to see in Calcutta, but there was not plenty of time for
it. I saw the fort that Clive built; and the place where Warren Hastings
and the author of the Junius Letters fought their duel; and the great
botanical gardens; and the fashionable afternoon turnout in the Maidan;
and a grand review of the garrison in a great plain at sunrise; and a
military tournament in which great bodies of native soldiery exhibited
the perfection of their drill at all arms, a spectacular and beautiful
show occupying several nights and closing with the mimic storming of a
native fort which was as good as the reality for thrilling and accurate
detail, and better than the reality for security and comfort; we had a
pleasure excursion on the 'Hoogly' by courtesy of friends, and devoted
the rest of the time to social life and the Indian museum. One should
spend a month in the museum, an enchanted palace of Indian antiquities.
Indeed, a person might spend half a year among the beautiful and
wonderful things without exhausting their interest.

It was winter. We were of Kipling's "hosts of tourists who travel up and
down India in the cold weather showing how things ought to be managed."
It is a common expression there, "the cold weather," and the people think
there is such a thing. It is because they have lived there half a
lifetime, and their perceptions have become blunted. When a person is
accustomed to 138 in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not
valuable. I had read, in the histories, that the June marches made
between Lucknow and Cawnpore by the British forces in the time of the
Mutiny were made weather--138 in the shade and had taken it for
historical embroidery. I had read it again in Serjeant-Major
Forbes-Mitchell's account of his military experiences in the Mutiny
--at least I thought I had--and in Calcutta I asked him if it was true,
and he said it was. An officer of high rank who had been in the thick of
the Mutiny said the same. As long as those men were talking about what
they knew, they were trustworthy, and I believed them; but when they said
it was now "cold weather," I saw that they had traveled outside of their
sphere of knowledge and were floundering. I believe that in India "cold
weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through
the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which
will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.
It was observable that brass ones were in use while I was in Calcutta,
showing that it was not yet time to change to porcelain; I was told the
change to porcelain was not usually made until May. But this cold
weather was too warm for us; so we started to Darjeeling, in the
Himalayas--a twenty-four hour journey.




CHAPTER LV.

There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been
squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy
neighbor.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.


FROM DIARY:

February 14. We left at 4:30 P.M. Until dark we moved through rich
vegetation, then changed to a boat and crossed the Ganges.

February 15. Up with the sun. A brilliant morning, and frosty. A
double suit of flannels is found necessary. The plain is perfectly
level, and seems to stretch away and away and away, dimming and
softening, to the uttermost bounds of nowhere. What a soaring,
strenuous, gushing fountain spray of delicate greenery a bunch of bamboo
is! As far as the eye can reach, these grand vegetable geysers grace the
view, their spoutings refined to steam by distance. And there are fields
of bananas, with the sunshine glancing from the varnished surface of
their drooping vast leaves. And there are frequent groves of palm; and
an effective accent is given to the landscape by isolated individuals of
this picturesque family, towering, clean-stemmed, their plumes broken and
hanging ragged, Nature's imitation of an umbrella that has been out to
see what a cyclone is like and is trying not to look disappointed. And
everywhere through the soft morning vistas we glimpse the villages, the
countless villages, the myriad villages, thatched, built of clean new
matting, snuggling among grouped palms and sheaves of bamboo; villages,
villages, no end of villages, not three hundred yards apart, and dozens
and dozens of them in sight all the time; a mighty City, hundreds of
miles long, hundreds of miles broad, made all of villages, the biggest
city in the earth, and as populous as a European kingdom. I have seen no
such city as this before. And there is a continuously repeated and
replenished multitude of naked men in view on both sides and ahead. We
fly through it mile after mile, but still it is always there, on both
sides and ahead--brown-bodied, naked men and boys, plowing in the fields.
But not woman. In these two hours I have not seen a woman or a girl
working in the fields.

"From Greenland's icy mountains,
From India's coral strand,
Where Afric's sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand.
From many an ancient river,
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver
Their land from error's chain."

Those are beautiful verses, and they have remained in my memory all my
life. But if the closing lines are true, let us hope that when we come
to answer the call and deliver the land from its errors, we shall secrete
from it some of our high-civilization ways, and at the same time borrow
some of its pagan ways to enrich our high system with. We have a right
to do this. If we lift those people up, we have a right to lift
ourselves up nine or ten grades or so, at their expense. A few years ago
I spent several weeks at Tolz, in Bavaria. It is a Roman Catholic
region, and not even Benares is more deeply or pervasively or
intelligently devout. In my diary of those days I find this:

"We took a long drive yesterday around about the lovely country
roads. But it was a drive whose pleasure was damaged in a couple of
ways: by the dreadful shrines and by the shameful spectacle of gray
and venerable old grandmothers toiling in the fields. The shrines
were frequent along the roads--figures of the Saviour nailed to the
cross and streaming with blood from the wounds of the nails and the
thorns.

"When missionaries go from here do they find fault with the pagan
idols? I saw many women seventy and even eighty years old mowing
and binding in the fields, and pitchforking the loads into the
wagons."

I was in Austria later, and in Munich. In Munich I saw gray old women
pushing trucks up hill and down, long distances, trucks laden with
barrels of beer, incredible loads. In my Austrian diary I find this:

"In the fields I often see a woman and a cow harnessed to the plow,
and a man driving.

"In the public street of Marienbad to-day, I saw an old, bent,
gray-headed woman, in harness with a dog, drawing a laden sled over
bare dirt roads and bare pavements; and at his ease walked the
driver, smoking his pipe, a hale fellow not thirty years old."

Five or six years ago I bought an open boat, made a kind of a canvas
wagon-roof over the stern of it to shelter me from sun and rain; hired a
courier and a boatman, and made a twelve-day floating voyage down the
Rhone from Lake Bourget to Marseilles. In my diary of that trip I find
this entry. I was far down the Rhone then:

"Passing St. Etienne, 2:15 P.M. On a distant ridge inland, a tall
openwork structure commandingly situated, with a statue of the
Virgin standing on it. A devout country. All down this river,
wherever there is a crag there is a statue of the Virgin on it. I
believe I have seen a hundred of them. And yet, in many respects,
the peasantry seem to be mere pagans, and destitute of any
considerable degree of civilization.

" . . . . We reached a not very promising looking village about
4 o'clock, and I concluded to tie up for the day; munching fruit and
fogging the hood with pipe-smoke had grown monotonous; I could not
have the hood furled, because the floods of rain fell unceasingly.
The tavern was on the river bank, as is the custom. It was dull
there, and melancholy--nothing to do but look out of the window into
the drenching rain, and shiver; one could do that, for it was bleak
and cold and windy, and country France furnishes no fire. Winter
overcoats did not help me much; they had to be supplemented with
rugs. The raindrops were so large and struck the river with such
force that they knocked up the water like pebble-splashes.

"With the exception of a very occasional woodenshod peasant, nobody
was abroad in this bitter weather--I mean nobody of our sex. But
all weathers are alike to the women in these continental countries.
To them and the other animals, life is serious; nothing interrupts
their slavery. Three of them were washing clothes in the river
under the window when I arrived, and they continued at it as long as
there was light to work by. One was apparently thirty; another--the
mother!--above fifty; the third--grandmother!--so old and worn and
gray she could have passed for eighty; I took her to be that old.
They had no waterproofs nor rubbers, of course; over their shoulders
they wore gunnysacks--simply conductors for rivers of water; some of
the volume reached the ground; the rest soaked in on the way.

"At last a vigorous fellow of thirty-five arrived, dry and
comfortable, smoking his pipe under his big umbrella in an open
donkey-cart-husband, son, and grandson of those women! He stood up
in the cart, sheltering himself, and began to superintend, issuing
his orders in a masterly tone of command, and showing temper when
they were not obeyed swiftly enough.

"Without complaint or murmur the drowned women patiently carried out
the orders, lifting the immense baskets of soggy, wrung-out clothing
into the cart and stowing them to the man's satisfaction. There
were six of the great baskets, and a man of mere ordinary strength
could not have lifted any one of them. The cart being full now, the
Frenchman descended, still sheltered by his umbrella, entered the
tavern, and the women went drooping homeward, trudging in the wake
of the cart, and soon were blended with the deluge and lost to
sight.

"When I went down into the public room, the Frenchman had his bottle
of wine and plate of food on a bare table black with grease, and was
'chomping' like a horse. He had the little religious paper which is
in everybody's hands on the Rhone borders, and was enlightening
himself with the histories of French saints who used to flee to the
desert in the Middle Ages to escape the contamination of woman. For
two hundred years France has been sending missionaries to other
savage lands. To spare to the needy from poverty like hers is fine
and true generosity."

But to get back to India--where, as my favorite poem says--

"Every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile."

It is because Bavaria and Austria and France have not introduced their
civilization to him yet. But Bavaria and Austria and France are on their
way. They are coming. They will rescue him; they will refine the
vileness out of him.

Some time during the forenoon, approaching the mountains, we changed from
the regular train to one composed of little canvas-sheltered cars that
skimmed along within a foot of the ground and seemed to be going fifty
miles an hour when they were really making about twenty. Each car had
seating capacity for half-a-dozen persons; and when the curtains were up
one was substantially out of doors, and could see everywhere, and get all
the breeze, and be luxuriously comfortable. It was not a pleasure
excursion in name only, but in fact.

After a while the stopped at a little wooden coop of a station just
within the curtain of the sombre jungle, a place with a deep and dense
forest of great trees and scrub and vines all about it. The royal Bengal
tiger is in great force there, and is very bold and unconventional. From
this lonely little station a message once went to the railway manager in
Calcutta: "Tiger eating station-master on front porch; telegraph
instructions."

It was there that I had my first tiger hunt. I killed thirteen. We were
presently away again, and the train began to climb the mountains. In one
place seven wild elephants crossed the track, but two of them got away
before I could overtake them. The railway journey up the mountain is
forty miles, and it takes eight hours to make it. It is so wild and
interesting and exciting and enchanting that it ought to take a week. As
for the vegetation, it is a museum. The jungle seemed to contain samples
of every rare and curious tree and bush that we had ever seen or heard
of. It is from that museum, I think, that the globe must have been
supplied with the trees and vines and shrubs that it holds precious.

The road is infinitely and charmingly crooked. It goes winding in and
out under lofty cliffs that are smothered in vines and foliage, and
around the edges of bottomless chasms; and all the way one glides by
files of picturesque natives, some carrying burdens up, others going down
from their work in the tea-gardens; and once there was a gaudy wedding
procession, all bright tinsel and color, and a bride, comely and girlish,
who peeped out from the curtains of her palanquin, exposing her face with
that pure delight which the young and happy take in sin for sin's own
sake.

By and by we were well up in the region of the clouds, and from that
breezy height we looked down and afar over a wonderful picture--the
Plains of India, stretching to the horizon, soft and fair, level as a
floor, shimmering with heat, mottled with cloud-shadows, and cloven with
shining rivers. Immediately below us, and receding down, down, down,
toward the valley, was a shaven confusion of hilltops, with ribbony roads
and paths squirming and snaking cream-yellow all over them and about
them, every curve and twist sharply distinct.

At an elevation of 6,000 feet we entered a thick cloud, and it shut out
the world and kept it shut out. We climbed 1,000 feet higher, then began
to descend, and presently got down to Darjeeling, which is 6,000 feet
above the level of the Plains.

We had passed many a mountain village on the way up, and seen some new
kinds of natives, among them many samples of the fighting Ghurkas. They
are not large men, but they are strong and resolute. There are no better
soldiers among Britain's native troops. And we had passed shoals of
their women climbing the forty miles of steep road from the valley to
their mountain homes, with tall baskets on their backs hitched to their
foreheads by a band, and containing a freightage weighing--I will not say
how many hundreds of pounds, for the sum is unbelievable. These were
young women, and they strode smartly along under these astonishing
burdens with the air of people out for a holiday. I was told that a
woman will carry a piano on her back all the way up the mountain; and
that more than once a woman had done it. If these were old women I
should regard the Ghurkas as no more civilized than the Europeans.
At the railway station at Darjeeling you find plenty of cab-substitutes
--open coffins, in which you sit, and are then borne on men's shoulders up
the steep roads into the town.

Up there we found a fairly comfortable hotel, the property of an
indiscriminate and incoherent landlord, who looks after nothing, but
leaves everything to his army of Indian servants. No, he does look after
the bill--to be just to him--and the tourist cannot do better than follow
his example. I was told by a resident that the summit of Kinchinjunga is
often hidden in the clouds, and that sometimes a tourist has waited
twenty-two days and then been obliged to go away without a sight of it.
And yet went not disappointed; for when he got his hotel bill he
recognized that he was now seeing the highest thing in the Himalayas.
But this is probably a lie.

After lecturing I went to the Club that night, and that was a comfortable
place. It is loftily situated, and looks out over a vast spread of
scenery; from it you can see where the boundaries of three countries come
together, some thirty miles away; Thibet is one of them, Nepaul another,
and I think Herzegovina was the other. Apparently, in every town and
city in India the gentlemen of the British civil and military service
have a club; sometimes it is a palatial one, always it is pleasant and
homelike. The hotels are not always as good as they might be, and the
stranger who has access to the Club is grateful for his privilege and
knows how to value it.

Next day was Sunday. Friends came in the gray dawn with horses, and my
party rode away to a distant point where Kinchinjunga and Mount Everest
show up best, but I stayed at home for a private view; for it was very
old, and I was not acquainted with the horses, any way. I got a pipe and
a few blankets and sat for two hours at the window, and saw the sun drive
away the veiling gray and touch up the snow-peaks one after another with
pale pink splashes and delicate washes of gold, and finally flood the
whole mighty convulsion of snow-mountains with a deluge of rich
splendors.