* T T T nV ft T * T T 
 
 Hi 
 
 

 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND 
 MRS. PRUDENCE W, KOFOID 
 
The Novel of the Indian Mutiny 
 ON THE FACE OF THE WATERS 
 
 BY FLORA ANNIE STEEL 
 
 In One volume, crown 8vo, price 6s. Twentieth Thousand 
 
 The Spectator. " We have read Mrs. Steel's book with ever -increasing 
 surprise and admiration surprise at her insight into people with whom 
 she can scarcely have been intimate, admiration for the genius which has 
 enabled her to realise that wonderful welter of the East and West, which 
 Delhi must have presented just before the Mutiny. We know in literature 
 of few sketches better than those which reveal to us Buhadur Shah, the 
 last great Moghul ... or that of Zeemet Maihl, the evil Queen, ... or 
 of the Moulaire, who roused by his preaching the war against the English, 
 ... or of Tiddu, the hereditary juggler-actor, ... or of Soma, the 
 haughty, sullen Sepoy. And the best evidence of Mrs. Steel's genius is 
 that those who can scarcely conceive the society will feel certain that it 
 is truly drawn. There is many an officer who would give his sword to 
 write military history as Mrs. Steel has written the history of the rising, 
 the siege, and the storm. It is the most wonderful picture. We know 
 that none who lived through the Mutiny will lay the book down without 
 a gasp of admiration, and believe that the same emotion will be felt by 
 thousands to whom the scenes depicted are but lurid phantasmagoria." 
 
 The Academy. "All that relates to the natives, whether to the sepoys, 
 or the Court, or the town, is admirable ; and the sketches of British 
 military and civil life are absolutely convincing. Mrs. Steel sees detail 
 everywhere, and records it minutely ; but she is full of humanity, and can 
 give us the mysticism of the Oriental as faithfully as the easy-going morality 
 of the Anglo-Indian. Each incident, almost each chapter, is a picture by 
 itself, revealing an extraordinary wealth of descriptive power, and a masterly 
 insight into character." 
 
 A.T.Q.C. in The Speaker. ' ' It certainly is a remarkable book. The 
 native intrigues are brilliantly handled. Alice Gissing may claim to stand 
 beside the really great women of fiction. The whole book has the high 
 seriousness which, until quite recently, few people dreamed of as possible 
 in an Anglo-Indian novel." 
 
 The Saturday Review. " Many novelists and spinners of tales have 
 made use of the Indian Mutiny, but Mrs. Steel leaves them all a long way 
 behind. Major Erlton and Alice Gissing challenge comparison with 
 Rawdon Crawley and Becky Sharp. ' On the Face of the Waters ' is 
 the best novel of the Great Mutiny, and we are not likely to see its rival 
 in our time." 
 
 The St. James's Gazette. "Of the familiar incidents of the early 
 Mutiny, how vivid and full of dramatic effect are the scenes as she paints 
 them ! The tale has been often told, but never quite with Mrs. Steel's 
 catholic sympathy with the native point of view. Her position is now 
 established as a writer of the truth and romance of India. She is a fine 
 writer, and she has written a fine novel about an epoch in our history 
 which Englishmen can never cease to weep over and to glory in." 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 
Novels of Native Indian Life 
 
 In One volume, crown Sz>0, price 6s. eacJi 
 
 FROM THE FIVE RIVERS 
 
 BY FLORA ANNIE STEEL 
 
 Tlie Times. "Time was when these sketches of native Punjabi society 
 would have been considered a curiosity in literature. They are sufficiently 
 remarkable, even in these days, when interest in the ' dumb millions ' of 
 India is thoroughly alive, and writers, great and small, vie in ministering 
 to it. Mrs. Steel has evidently been brought into close contact with the 
 domestic life of all classes, Hindu and Mahomedan, in city and village, 
 and has steeped herself in their customs and superstitions. . . . Mrs. 
 Steel's book is of exceptional merit and freshness." 
 
 THE POTTER'S THUMB 
 
 BY FLORA ANNIE STEEL 
 
 The Pall Mall Budget. " For this week the only novel worth 
 mentioning is Mrs. Steel's ' The Potter's Thumb.' Her admirable ' From 
 the Five Rivers," since it dealt with native Indian life, was naturally com- 
 pared with Mr. Kipling's stories. In 'The Potter's Thumb' the charm 
 which came from the freshness of them still remains. Almost every 
 character is convincing, and some of them excellent to a degree." 
 
 THE NAULAHKA 
 
 BY RUDYARD KIPLING AND WOLCOTT BALESTIER 
 
 The Athenaeum. "There is no one but Mr. Kipling who can make 
 his readers taste and smell, as well as see and hear, the East ; and in this 
 book (if we except the description of Tarvin's adventures in the deserted 
 city of Gunvaur, which is perhaps less clear-cut than usual) he has surely 
 surpassed himself. In his faculty for getting inside the Eastern mind and 
 showing its queer workings Mr. Kipling stands alone." 
 
 An Anglo-Indian Novel by Alice M. Kipling 
 
 Just Ready, price js. 6d. 
 
 A PINCHBECK GODDESS 
 
 LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 
ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 Translated from the French of 
 
 ANDRE CHEVRILLON 
 
 M 
 
 (I 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM MARCHANT 
 
 Xonfcon 
 
 WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 
 MDCCCXCVII 
 
All rights reserved 
 
DS-W3 
 C.52. 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP ' PAGE 
 
 I. AT SEA ! 
 
 II. CEYLON. BUDDHISM H 
 
 III. PONDICHERY. CALCUTTA .... 44 
 
 IV. THE HIMALAYA. DARJILING .... 56 
 V. BENARES. BRAHMANISM. HINDUISM . . 74 
 
 VI. LUCKNOW. CAWNPUR. AGRA . . .158 
 
 VII. DELHI. JAIPUR . . '> . . . .190 
 
 VIII. BOMBAY 2I Q 
 
 IX. ELURA 233 
 
 X. THE VOYAGE 348 
 
 M809551 
 
ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 A T SEA 
 
 OFF MASSOUAH, November 3. 
 
 FOR three days we have been going straight toward 
 the South, and, the other morning, just as the faint 
 outline of Sinai was vanishing upon the horizon, 
 we came into the regions of excessive heat. It is 
 a moist, close heat, in which the muscles are re- 
 laxed, the whole body seems melting and sinking 
 away a heat oppressive, prostrating by night as 
 well as day. At times one's clothing seems to 
 burn the skin and to become unendurable. There 
 is no going below for meals : all day long we lie 
 inert in our deck-chairs. A double tent shuts us 
 in, completely hiding both sea and sky ; and 
 still the eyes become inflamed with the excess of 
 light. 
 
 Coleridge's weird poem of the " Ancient Mariner " 
 comes to my mind. Thus he sailed, oppressed with 
 a strange numbness, a kind of torpor, that cannot be 
 shaken off. There is not the slightest breeze ; our 
 speed outruns the light wind which follows in our 
 
2 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 wake ; the fiery air is heavy and motionless ; we 
 are not conscious of the ship's advance. There is 
 something unnatural about a sea like this ; it seems 
 under a spell, struck by a malediction ; it has not 
 the fluidity of water. Sometimes a glimpse of it 
 can be seen through a rent in the canvas shelter, 
 and it is a sheet of molten glass, inert, dense, heavy ; 
 nothing could be more dismal than its monotonous 
 glare in the sunlight. At a distance it steams, and 
 this whitish, quivering haze, this tremulous fog, shuts 
 us in, hiding the sea a few miles away. Beyond, 
 the imagination depicts fiery wildernesses, terrific 
 solitudes void of all life. 
 
 By night the sensation of rapid motion, of slip- 
 ping away into some unknown world, recurs. The 
 constellations are seen to be leaving their familiar 
 places. In each twenty-four hours they have gone 
 so many degrees farther northward. The Great 
 Bear is plunging downward to the horizon : now 
 he has lost two, now three, of his big stars : now 
 he is gone completely ; and in front of us rise, 
 sparkling, the four points of the Southern Cross, 
 while slowly the great belt of the Milky Way is 
 pushed back. 
 
 Lying upon the deck, which by night is de- 
 serted, one hears the incessant rustling of the 
 water ; looking fixedly at the stars, you feel con- 
 scious of an ascent toward the equator, of a going 
 up over the convexity of the globe, over this great 
 dark ball that hangs in space ; and at certain 
 moments you seem to see the measured movement 
 of the heavenly bodies those eternal beacons, 
 
AT SEA 3 
 
 millions of leagues away, in inconceivable depths 
 of space. 
 
 One o'clock A.M. The mercury stands at 100, 
 and still it is a moist heat. One falls into a strange 
 drowsiness interrupted by feverish awakenings, 
 when the swarms of stars that suddenly appear 
 frighten one. Then follows heavy sleep, a sinking 
 away into black darkness, wherein the brain gropes 
 confusedly, amid flashes of sharp pain and sudden 
 swoons, dropping abruptly off into unconscious- 
 ness, or, again, feebly striving against the crushing 
 torpor. After this, a sort of fevered excitement, a 
 singular lucidity of mind, crowds of recollections, 
 whole periods of life appearing entire ; and, of a 
 sudden, around you, the wondrous tropical night, 
 large and luminous, deep blue between the stars 
 which, low on the horizon, blaze as bright as those 
 in the zenith. Nor is the sea dark now, but full 
 of a deep light, illumined in its depths by all the 
 absorbed sunshine of the day, and on its surface 
 by countless splashes of starlight. 
 
 Four o'clock. The white stellar dust overhead is 
 gone. Only the great stars still throb with a pale 
 light, and a faint rose colour flushes in the east, so 
 faint one can but just see it. Suddenly it has gone 
 all round the edge of the sky, like some pervasive 
 fluid of infinite tenuity, melting by exquisite grada- 
 tions into the pallid spaces overhead. The blue of 
 the sea becomes visible, a chaste, dull, neutral blue, 
 not yet touched by the sun. The horizon retreats, 
 becomes defined, and the watery space broadens in 
 the daylight. 
 
4 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 November 5. 
 
 We reached Aden last night. Awaking, in the 
 morning, the coast is visible. How describe it ? It 
 is a negro land, nude and black, under a blazing 
 sun a huge bank of coal, rising out of the sea ; no 
 vapour, no vegetation softens the sharp silhouette of 
 the gloomy volcanic rocks outlined with implacable 
 hardness against the blue of the sky. Contrasted 
 with this landscape of Erebus, the sea again seems 
 liquid, cool, of a delicate greenish tint. On the left 
 lies the Arab coast, a dazzling white wilderness, 
 melting in the distance into white undulations of 
 the heated atmosphere. 
 
 We shall be off again almost immediately, and 
 have no time to go on shore. Looking from the 
 deck, I see upon a road groups of superb negroes 
 draped in red a red victorious and brutal in the 
 sunlight, flaming against the blackness of the land- 
 scape ; meagre, withered camels, moving their 
 slender, thick-lipped heads from side to side with 
 gentle, haughty undulation ; files of little Scriptural 
 asses ; lastly, two English soldiers with tennis rackets. 
 They are all coming down toward the shore on a 
 road of cinders along below the carbonised rocks. 
 
 On our deck some oily Jews, with greedy, piteous 
 faces, weep, endeavouring to persuade us to buy 
 ostrich feathers. Invincibly persistent, they cling 
 to us, they surround us with their timid yet eager 
 gestures. What a contrast between their lament- 
 able aspect, as of whipped dogs, and the gaiety of 
 these supple negro boys with their broad, white 
 
AT SEA 5 
 
 laugh ! The well-developed, active bodies are 
 lustrous in the sunlight. A very small black boy, 
 scarcely a five - year - old baby, with irresistible 
 grimaces, with the graceful clumsiness of a young 
 kitten, is determined, at all hazards, to sell me an 
 old East India Company rupee. He forces it into 
 my hand, and the touch of the little paw, dry and 
 parchment-like, reminds me of a monkey's. 
 
 We throw small coins into the water, and the 
 whole little crowd dive for them. They jump off 
 like frogs, their heads cleaving the lustrous surface 
 of the water, and the eye follows the black kicking 
 until it disappears in the green depths. Other boys 
 paddle around the ship, astride upon tree-trunks, 
 urging themselves on with a smacking of the lips 
 and with strident cries like the chirping of crickets. 
 They are the offspring of the sea, rejoicing in life 
 and movement, like insects hatched in the sand and 
 hopping about upon the shore. Now and then a 
 shark snaps one up, but what does it matter ? 
 What matter if a swallow darts upon a fly ? One 
 of these children has had an arm taken off by a 
 snap of the powerful jaws ; you find yourself 
 wondering that the arm has not grown again, like 
 a lobster's claw. 
 
 Four English ships, arriving last night, have 
 sailed again immediately ; and our steamer, long, 
 slender, lying low on the water, its two raking 
 funnels smoking all the time, seems like a runner 
 detained against his will, eager to get away, im- 
 patient to resume his race and arrive on the farther 
 coast of Japan ! 
 
6 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 At nine o'clock I hear begin that motion of the 
 screw which is now to last uninterruptedly for a 
 week. 
 
 November 6. 
 
 Under the double tent the evenings are disagree- 
 able, with stale odours of tobacco, of cooking, of oil 
 from the engine-room. It has become tiresome to 
 pace the deck with one's fellow-passengers, exchang- 
 ing commonplaces on European politics this is to 
 endure all the boredom of civilised life. One would 
 gladly escape being elbowed by this crowd moving 
 about under the electric light, like any crowd in 
 Hyde Park or the Champs-Elysees ; tall, correct 
 Englishmen, mindful of their digestion, and at this 
 hour making the fifth mile of their constitutional ; 
 French functionaries who smoke, leaning against 
 the quarter-nettings ; yawning loungers extended 
 in deck-chairs ; bare-legged children who drive 
 hoops, while their mammas embroider or read the 
 latest novel. From the ladies' cabin come waltz- 
 tunes, as of hand-organs in London or Paris streets : 
 "The Beautiful Blue Danube," or "Sweet Dream 
 Faces," or that eternal " Kathleen Mavourneen," 
 which, with all its foolish sentimentality of words, 
 has the irresistible charm of an old French chan- 
 son how hackneyed it all is ! And yet how hard 
 it is to put all these commonplace things com- 
 pletely out of the mind ! In truth, it requires a 
 great effort of the imagination to grasp the strange 
 reality : to be conscious of the black expanse upon 
 which we lie, itself moving in the darkness outside 
 
AT SEA 7 
 
 of all these human noises ; the ten thousand feet 
 straight down between us and the submarine ground 
 weighed upon by this black watery mass these 
 unknown depths where things have remained 
 changeless through eons. 
 
 But go quite aft, and put your head out from 
 under the tent : the people who are walking the 
 deck disappear, the waltzes cease, the Edison light 
 goes out. A strong wind smites you in the face, 
 taking you by surprise. At first you see nothing 
 but the empty blackness of space ; suddenly the 
 tall masts with the crossed yards lift their immense 
 geometric lines, swaying slowly against the bright 
 stars and the swarming cosmic dust ; a pervasive 
 low noise fills the darkness. At your feet, under a 
 black whirl, phosphorescent masses, bluish globes, 
 fly, and, beaten madly by the screw, make a broad 
 milky path a great undefined furrow in the dark- 
 ness. And you feel yourself alone upon the huge 
 thing which is running blindly on, lost in the night, 
 between the mystery of the sea, brooding a luminous 
 life, and the mystery of the sky, where shine, in 
 whitish patches, suns as yet unformed between 
 these two overwhelming blacknesses in which float, 
 coming one knows not whence, the beginnings of 
 worlds, and the beginnings of life. 
 
 November 7. 
 
 In the morning, but few passengers on deck. All 
 day long the ship rolls heavily : she lies down slowly 
 to starboard, recovers, lies down to port, and her 
 three masts describe their regular oscillation against 
 
ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 the sky. The huge creature, whose dull heart- 
 throbs one feels, quivers all over, exults in this 
 slow, mighty movement, in this profound rhythmic 
 oscillation, in this going forward through the heavy 
 blue seas which lift the surface in vast glassy domes, 
 in all this disturbance which comes to us from the 
 South, from the great watery spaces which cover 
 the austral hemisphere. Separated from us only 
 by the bulwarks there is a liquid tumult, a merry 
 uproar of glittering foam falling back into the 
 blue, there is a white water-dust spread in sheets, 
 dazzling with light, and running off in sinuous 
 furrows with a great noise as of tearing silk. 
 
 Beyond is the immense disk of the sea, of a mar- 
 vellous blue, and on the starboard side burning like 
 molten metal ; the barren sea, burning under the 
 fury of the blazing sun the lord who from on high 
 devours the heavens and fills all space with his shin- 
 ing ; only an infinite, gloomy splendour, only these 
 brute forces of heat and light, only these eternal 
 things whose indifference crushes us and no life 
 at all, for the little flying-fish, springing back and 
 forth over the angry surface, seem but flames thrown 
 out from it like arrows of white fire. 
 
 After a time this great blaze of light makes one 
 sad, and weighs down the heart with an extreme 
 depression. It is easy to understand the homesick- 
 ness of men of the North condemned to sail these 
 Southern seas. Here the infinite has no vague 
 gentleness, no melancholy charm, alluring and 
 tempting, no subtle sadness whose very pang is a 
 pleasure. It crushes and stupefies, and the whole 
 
AT SEA 9 
 
 being sinks under it, incapable of any effort to 
 rally. 
 
 As one thus lies inert, a whole inner world of 
 memories awakens ; it grows, and fills the mind. 
 It is an enfeebling besetment, but one has not 
 strength to fight it off ; it is a half-dream, very 
 simple, yet weighted heavily with emotion. A 
 scene appears as through a mist torn apart, then 
 closing in again : through heavy masses of foliage 
 falls a greenish light, there is a muddy bit of road 
 between patches of yellow broom ; sad little trees 
 writhe against a grey sky. There are cottage-roofs, 
 lustrous, wet with rain. Why can I not to-day 
 dispel this vision of a little place near the gloomy 
 harbour of Brest ? Still I see it. The place is not 
 far from Portsic. There is complete solitude ; bare 
 fields, sad and wintry, divided into wan squares, 
 and bounded by low, black hedges. The wind is 
 coming up, and clouds come with it ; they rise 
 higher, and gradually weave a pallid veil over the 
 sky. Three trees graze each other with their slender 
 branches. Behind is the Goulet ; how cold and 
 grey the water, fretted by a slight ripple which is 
 touched at one point by a trembling ray of pallid 
 sunlight ! This ripple frets the stream between 
 banks the colour of rusted iron. On these banks 
 not a detail, not an accident of colour, only the 
 hard, rough outline. There is a profound sensation 
 of melancholy, bitter, and not temporary but en- 
 during. These rocks, this gorse, this stream, this 
 little icy wind all this has suffered thus for ever, 
 rigorously and patiently. Long, long has this grey 
 
IO ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 water shivered between its walls of rusty iron. 
 Presently, something strange is noticeable ; upon 
 this rough promontory of rock, high up against 
 the pale sky, there is what seem like splashes and 
 trails of blood ; there are reddish lights, mysterious 
 gleams, motionless, dismal. Then one is aware 
 that this also is water, but infinitely remote, as in 
 another world. And beyond lies darkness, ashen, 
 cold, dense where a distant sea, crimsoned by an 
 invisible sun, fades away, vanishes, ends like suf- 
 fering absorbed in nothingness. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 CEYLON BUDDHISM 
 
 YESTERDAY, as we were playing quoits, a little 
 English girl, pale and discontented-looking, pro- 
 mised the captain a smile, if we should reach 
 Colombo this evening. 
 
 The captain will win his smile : at five o'clock 
 foggy stains appear on the horizon ; about six, under 
 a lowering sky, heavy with great violet-coloured 
 clouds, a grove of cocoanut-trees becomes visible. 
 Drawing nearer, we are able to distinguish a host of 
 tall, stiff, slender trunks, bursting, by an oblique 
 impulse, into a foliage of palm-leaves above. It is 
 a vast forest, which seems to rise out of the sea. 
 Even within two miles of land it is impossible to 
 see the ground : there is only the dense growth upon 
 it, in every direction, this mighty vegetation over- 
 flowing with strength and sap, the great equatorial 
 vegetation, which springs out of ground soaked with 
 rains and spreads wide its enormous leaves in the 
 furnace-heat of the air. 
 
 We have not yet reached the land, and still, the 
 sensation of this equatorial world is already very 
 distinct. There is not the limpid, liquid blue of the 
 classic East. Here, both sea and sky are violent, 
 surcharged, so to speak. You feel that this is a 
 
12 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 place of storms and typhoons, a region situated on 
 the girdle of the globe, looking toward a hemisphere 
 of ocean an overwhelming nature, under the ver- 
 tical sun. 
 
 Meantime the sea grows dark ; there are flushes 
 of red across it, and spaces of undulation. These 
 disappear, and there remains only a dull purplish 
 lustre, pulsating under the tumultuous sky. Over- 
 head, a chaos of light and colours; in the west, 
 a vague radiance of a soft rose-tint; in the east, 
 enormous cloud-masses rolling up, piling themselves 
 high, then breaking down into fantastic shapes, in 
 violets, greens, and flaming orange. Then all be- 
 coming colourless, there remain only black heaps, 
 masses of gigantic dead shapes. 
 
 But the heavy, oily water still gives out a myste- 
 rious light which projects itself into the wan space. 
 On the surface, a swarm of black objects crawling 
 among the waves, in pirogues, upon gliding trunks 
 of trees gather around the ship's side with deafen- 
 ing outcries. Then, of a sudden, in two minutes' 
 time, all this disappears into the night, an impene- 
 trable, stifling night, later filled by a heavy, violent, 
 warm rain. 
 
 Having landed, I can see nothing, so dense is the 
 darkness. Farther on, by the gaslight, I conjecture 
 broad, straight avenues, with red soil, bordered by 
 great gardens and palm-groves. The heat, endur- 
 able upon the water, is overwhelming here. The 
 air, motionless and laden with the disturbing per- 
 fume of invisible flowers, weighs upon the mute 
 city. Figures in narrow white garments, moving 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 1 3 
 
 very quickly, barefooted, silent, graze us in passing, 
 and disappear. This is altogether a new world, 
 very different from the East as we know it in 
 Egypt. Yes, one is very far away from home in 
 this silence, this darkness, these heavy perfumes, 
 this moist heat. 
 
 The Oriental Hotel is a large and comfortable 
 building. The proprietress, a most correct English- 
 woman, installs me, giving brief orders that servants 
 receive with silent inclinations of the head. I have 
 a great whitewashed room, entirely without furni- 
 ture, except a little iron bedstead covered with a 
 mosquito netting, and a deep arm-chair of cool 
 straw, in which I recline during the silent, oppres- 
 sive hours ; on the ceiling is an odd-looking spot 
 a little, motionless lizard ; then two, three little 
 lizards, watching me with very sharp eyes. 
 
 In the long corridors crowds of Bengalese and 
 Cinhalese servants, slender and gentle -looking. 
 They glide noiselessly, with timid gestures, very 
 respectful in the presence of the tall, solid Euro- 
 peans, the handsome, muscular Englishmen, who, 
 in evening dress, with shining white shirt-fronts, 
 and the air of superior and unapproachable beings, 
 make their way into the great dining-room. 
 
 It is a very handsome dining-room, full of passing 
 Europeans, black stains in the white Asiatic crowd. 
 It is like a great restaurant, situated where the 
 highways of the world cross. At these tables are 
 travellers from the opposite sides of the globe ; 
 passengers on the Paramatta, which sails to-morrow 
 for Australia and New Zealand ; French army 
 
14 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 officers ; passengers on the Caledonian, which goes 
 on to-night to Singapore and Saigon ; Chinese on 
 their way to Europe ; English civilians going out 
 to administer India. 
 
 Opposite me at table four Frenchmen, rich 
 bourgeois, who, having had enough of Scotland and 
 Switzerland, are on the way to Japan : Parisians by 
 birth and race, flaneurs du boulevard, readers of the 
 Figaro, habitues of the Palais Royal, admirers of 
 M. Sarcey, republicans and liberals after the school 
 of M. Thiers ; one a laureate of the Academic des 
 Sciences morales ; all four typical of French educa- 
 tion, of the Lycee and FJicole de Droit, and of the 
 boulevard. Two of them are well versed in litera- 
 ture and philosophy the philosophy of Victor 
 Hugo and of M. Paul Bert. With this, a raciness 
 somewhat cynical but brilliant, a clear head, visibly 
 bewildered, however, at sight of a world which 
 seems to be able to do without Paris. A third is 
 more simple, of a stronger and sturdier growth, 
 more sanguine and rugged, more frankly cheerful, 
 getting more pleasure out of life, noisy, and "a 
 ladies' man " ; not quite so much the epicure, a 
 little more the glutton ; precisely M. Zola's repre- 
 sentative of the middle class, the plump bourgeois 
 who, seated on his hearth-rug, digests his dinner. 
 There they are, flushed, rapid in word and gesture. 
 Mobile in face, in contrast with the blond, tranquil 
 Englishmen and the graceful Cinhalese two of 
 them agreeably excited, the third man on his 
 high horse, full-blown, expanded, his heart open ; 
 happier, more jovial, more simply egotistical than 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 1 5 
 
 ever. He cries: "Bring us some good wine!" 
 And the party drink champagne from goblets. 
 
 Two hundred guests are at dinner. The great 
 punkahs swing slowly back and forth with regular 
 and ample sweep, red, between high, whitewashed 
 walls. Upon the lustrous tablecloths a profusion 
 of blood-red flowers ; and all around us in motion 
 a multitude of Cinhalese servants, very serious, 
 very gentle, a yellow shell comb at the top of the 
 chignon, dark in their narrow white garments, 
 mute, moving noiselessly on naked feet among the 
 tables with their floral decorations and their crowd 
 of guests. 
 
 November 10. 
 
 In the morning we walk about the city a mar- 
 vellous city, in which there is nothing to be seen 
 but verdure, the plants hiding the houses. The 
 atmosphere is damp and very hot, and penetrated 
 through and through with moist light. 
 
 The streets are the avenues of a vast tropical 
 garden. Palm-trees, ferns, ebony-trees, sandal- 
 wood, cinnamon-trees, camphor-trees, pineapples 
 plants with strong sap ; the most prized hot- 
 house flowers are at home here, growing without 
 cultivation ; and all this vegetable world gives out 
 a strong, heavy perfume. You feel that this is a 
 summer which lasts for ever ; that every month in 
 the year, without interruption, the dark crests of 
 the great cocoanut-palms are covered with their 
 heavy fruit ; that this red soil produces incessantly, 
 that it is always bringing forth these swarms of 
 
1 6 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 great flowers, that these trees have always the same 
 green and supple magnificence. They crowd each 
 other and are all entangled ; there is not a sugges- 
 tion of the regular, slow growth of European trees. 
 These cocoanut- palms look fresh and soft, like 
 enormous annuals, like some giant cereal, frail, 
 bending, soaked with sap, which has grown out 
 of all measure in a hot night of June. Some spring 
 to a very great height, lifting far above the others, 
 with a flexible curve, a strong, graceful impulse, 
 their lofty crest of leaves, spread wide in the warm 
 atmosphere. 
 
 And the red road goes on and on, between 
 lustrous heaps of drooping palms, masses of dark 
 vegetation, from which the great sword-like leaves, 
 springing out, flash with green light. Here and 
 there are large ponds of black water water which 
 is almost invisible, so distinctly and perfectly is 
 the surrounding vegetation reflected in it. Broad 
 bands of pink lotus trail over this water, and seem 
 no more real than the green of the palms' reflec- 
 tion. Here and there, gleaming white, far within 
 a fabulous garden, some handsome villa, crowned 
 with palm-trees its galleries, verandas, balustrades, 
 steps, all loaded with enchanted flowers. Timid, 
 frail, the Cinhalese glide past, a delicate, gentle race, 
 with masses of ebony-black hair worn long like a 
 woman's, a race made languid by perpetual summer 
 and the constant moist sunlight. They move slowly, 
 their serious and tranquil faces, strangely exotic, ex- 
 pressing an uncomprehended soul the soul formed 
 by this world so remote from our own. 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM I J 
 
 Going by train to Kandy, on the way I made 
 the acquaintance of a Cinhalese gentleman. Very 
 civilised, this gentleman altogether correct in his 
 tweed coat with a gardenia in his button-hole, only 
 that his legs were sheathed in a very narrow white 
 petticoat. His physiognomy almost European 
 like an Italian, but more delicate, feminine, and sun- 
 burnt : features, bony and salient ; a strong lustrous 
 beard, black and curly. 
 
 After fifteen minutes of silence, conversation be- 
 gins as in a European railway carriage. He offers 
 me a match and remarks that the weather is very 
 warm. A sentence as to the temperature is, in 
 English countries, the indispensable preliminary 
 rite by which human beings enter into communi- 
 cation with each other. After this, in a few very 
 definite words, he gives me information concern- 
 ing the population of the island, its government, its 
 religions. As he talks, I feel how deep is here 
 the English stamp : he speaks the language with 
 singular purity, without the least accent. He is a 
 Christian, a lawyer, a member of the legislative 
 council. His disdainful pity for "the ignorance 
 and idolatry" of the poor Cinhalese peasant is 
 worthy of an English colonist. But, in fifty years, 
 he says, all this will be changed ; the railways have 
 already done much good ; before them, the savage 
 country retreats. " At Colombo, we hope to found 
 a great university, like that at Bombay or Benares, 
 and later, when we are worthy of it, to have our 
 parliament a national assembly elected by suffrage 
 of various grades ; all this, of course, by degrees, 
 
I 8 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 and without separation from the great British 
 Empire, from England, to whom we owe our 
 entrance into the world of civilisation." He adds 
 that he is " Aryan " ; this is as clear and certain 
 to him as it is certain and clear to me that I am 
 French ; consequently he esteems himself the equal 
 of any European ; and certainly he is the superior 
 of many Europeans in intelligence, education, and 
 manners. 
 
 But he is somewhat too English ; it is too evi- 
 dent that to him the Englishman is the ideal model 
 of humanity. A copy so perfect is not natural. 
 And then all this European display swears at his 
 white petticoat and at certain Asiatic hints in his 
 physiognomy. Naturally, one prefers the Chinese 
 with his pigtail and his blue robe to the Japanese 
 in frockcoat and Derby hat. One is distrustful at 
 the astonishing address with which individuals of 
 yellow or black skin imitate the European ; and 
 cannot but question whether the imitation goes at 
 all below the surface, whether the depths do not 
 still remain mysteriously Mongol or Negro. Cer- 
 tainly this man does his best to surprise me, with 
 his air of knowing the world, his stiff manner, the 
 nonchalant slowness of movement with which he 
 takes an Egyptian cigarette from his case of yellow 
 tortoiseshell. 
 
 It is amusing, this little railway upon which my 
 friend, the Cinhalese lawyer, counts to bring civili- 
 sation into the depths of the palm forests ; a pretty 
 plaything, a nice little toy railway, not very likely 
 to alarm the eternal vegetation of the equator. 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 19 
 
 The engine burns no vile black coal, but fragrant 
 woods. We glide along under great trees whose 
 leafy tops make a green arch above the track. 
 There are charming stations which have but slight 
 resemblance to a French gare, little cabins all pink 
 and blue with climbing flowers and hidden under 
 great glossy shrubs. There is no restaurant, but 
 slender, bronzed epheboi, in bright-coloured robes, 
 pass, slow and smiling, holding out baskets filled with 
 pineapples, mangoes, bananas in pink clusters, or 
 sometimes yellow young cocoanuts which they open 
 adroitly with three strokes of a hatchet, that you may 
 drink out of the nut its cool and perfumed milk. 
 
 We pass through low lands, damp under the 
 interminable marshy forest. The earth is a vege- 
 table slime which produces unweariedly these mul- 
 titudes of great, wild, primitive trees. The light 
 never strikes through them ; their sombre verdure 
 reflects itself in the blackness of melancholy pools 
 of water. The imprisoned air sleeps heavily among 
 these crowded trunks. Their feet in the tepid 
 water, their heads in the blazing sunshine, the trees 
 spring out of a thicket of colossal brakes, interwoven, 
 gripped fast by tropical climbing plants. Within, 
 one may conjecture what must be the dense hum- 
 ming and the furious whirring of myriads of 
 insects the violent, primitive life as of the first 
 geologic ages, when, after the great rainy periods, 
 organic life came out of the ground upon the 
 summons of the torrid sun. 
 
 We cross the Kelanya Ganga, a brown river flow- 
 ing between tall green bamboos ; then there is an up 
 
20 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 grade, and almost instantly the landscape changes. 
 We emerge at last from the oppressive virgin forest, 
 and enter a wild garden, intersected with cool, open 
 rice swamps, starred with flowers the fragrant 
 flowers of the champak and frangipani a garden 
 of delights, where rocks repose under tall, quivering 
 ferns, where little mossy huts, crouching beneath 
 the Cinhalese greenery, are almost hidden from 
 sight ; an Eden, where parrots cleave the air like 
 arrows of light, and great butterflies seem flying 
 flames; where the trees are loaded with golden 
 fruit, and the noble luminous palms hold up green 
 transparencies against the sky. Sometimes roads, 
 like red ribbons, are seen, amid this splendour of 
 flowers ; and a peculiar warm fragrance, like the 
 perfume of a greenhouse, arises from the purple 
 earth. 
 
 Very near us, as we pass, half hidden by a curtain 
 of climbing plants, two lofty, dark masses, dull- 
 coloured like rock, move, and I perceive two ele- 
 phants. Peaceful, imperturbable, their great heads 
 drooping, sweeping the ground with their pendant 
 trunks, their big feet spread out softly in the red 
 dust, they move along as if asleep, cradling with 
 their monotonous motion their drivers, who seem 
 also sleeping. Why is it so impressive, the sudden 
 vision of these monsters framed in this equatorial 
 scenery ? Is it because they are at home in these 
 thickets, because we know that over there, beyond 
 the mountains, their kind wander at liberty because 
 they make part of this world, are the living manifes- 
 tation of this nature, like the palm-trees ? 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 21 
 
 We go on ascending, now along the edge of the 
 rock, making a circuit around steep declivities. At 
 this point vegetation is tamer, and it is possible for 
 man to struggle with it : the plantations of coffee 
 and cocoa begin. We are now on the edge of an 
 immense amphitheatre, sinking beneath us to a 
 depth of several thousand feet clothed with palm- 
 trees and gigantic ferns a misty amphitheatre, a 
 shadowy valley which traverses half the island, ex- 
 tending as far as Colombo. In its gloomy depths 
 there are the same primitive damp forests those 
 impenetrable forests from which comes a mysterious 
 sound of life. But beyond, across this valley, the 
 Cinhalese mountains lift their summits to the sky, 
 the old sacred summits, of which all the religions of 
 the island dream ; the crests of barren rock, lifted 
 toward the sun, victorious, at last enfranchised from 
 the weight of all this vegetation. 
 
 We reach Kandy, the old native city, the ancient 
 capital of the Cinhalese kings. The Cinhalese kings ! 
 The words have a singular charm. Do they not 
 evoke an impossible, enchanting fairyland, a little 
 court, all fanciful as ever poet dreamed of ? The 
 old palace is there, on the edge of a lake of black 
 water, under tall palm-trees. 
 
 All around the little city, sleeping at the foot of 
 low hills, the happy roads wander among flowers. 
 
 Near the palace, on the shore of the black lake, 
 wherein swans mirror their white splendour, is a 
 Buddhist temple, an old, strange temple, somewhat 
 Chinese of aspect, with its conical roofs, its rotund 
 pavilions, its carved balustrades, its doors guarded 
 
22 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 by monsters a grotesque, outlandish edifice, all 
 white under the thick shadow of the trees. I know 
 not why I had so much trouble in believing that 
 this was a temple. At the first glance, you suspect, 
 you feel, that an Egyptian mosque is a sacred spot. 
 But the Semitic world is near our own, and inter- 
 penetrates it. This Cinhalese world is completely 
 separate from us, and has always been so. It is 
 impossible to understand it by sympathy, to dis- 
 cover the habitual mental condition of the race 
 which reproduces itself under these palms, whose 
 vague aspirations are expressed by these architec- 
 tural forms and by daily offerings of flowers to 
 the smiling Buddha. 
 
 Whence come they, and what do they signify, 
 these three formidable monsters grimacing upon 
 the portico ? And of what are they thinking, all 
 day long, these monks who wander over the marble 
 pavements ? Barefooted, with shaven heads, one 
 bare arm emerging from the great yellow robe 
 which drapes them, they glide along the passages ; 
 there are five or six, going noiselessly past, light- 
 ing the inner darkness with the soft gleam of their 
 saffron-coloured garments. They smile mysteriously, 
 with a gentle seriousness that is indescribable. 
 
 The monk who is my guide conducts me into the 
 great central courtyard, to the sacred fig-tree which 
 consecrated the monastery. It is a scion of the 
 tree Bo, which, for five years, sheltered the medita- 
 tions of the divine Sakya-Muni. With a slow bend 
 of the head, the monk gave me a leaf of this tree ; 
 at the moment I seemed to read the meaning of his 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 23 
 
 face : the pallid face of a vegetarian, quiet and re- 
 fined, the prominent forehead, the intelligent, close- 
 shut lips yet always with the same half-smile, so 
 serious and tranquil. 
 
 Silent, they wander among perpetual flowers, in 
 the shadow of the giant bamboos, fed with the few 
 grains of rice that they receive from charity, in the 
 cool darkness of the marble corridors, at the foot 
 of the serene image ' of the great Buddha : very 
 different are these from the men who, at this 
 moment, with anxious eyes and wrinkled foreheads, 
 jostle each other in the fogs of Bond Street, or on 
 the slippery pavements of Paris. 
 
 What is there under this immutable smile ? The 
 Buddhist priest, Sri Smangala, superior of the 
 monastery of Kandy, a very wise and very learned 
 man, who is interested in our Europe, and has the 
 opinion that, with their positivism, their psychology, 
 and their ethics, our thinkers are not far from the 
 doctrines of Buddha, has had the kindness to con- 
 verse with me for a half-hour. He indicates to me 
 certain books, and gives me an idea of the life of 
 these monks. But, after all, we can only see the 
 outside ; it is impossible to penetrate their souls. 
 
 There are two classes of monks, the novices (sa- 
 manera) or mendicants, properly so called ; and the 
 elders (smmana), those who can control their wills* 
 To attain the mastery over one's self, which is the 
 grand aim, the monk follows the precepts laid down 
 in the Pittri Mokkha, the oldest of the sacred books 
 of Buddhism, which is admitted, even by the severest 
 criticism, to date from the year 350 B.C. 
 
24 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 A monk is allowed to possess eight things : three 
 robes, a girdle, a wooden bowl to receive alms, a 
 razor, a needle, and a filter to remove from what 
 he drinks the particles of organic matter, which are 
 held sacred, because they have life. In the mon- 
 astery all the minor rules concerning this life of 
 poverty are strictly observed. The novice rises 
 before daylight, washes his garment, sweeps the 
 corridors of the temple and the ground around the 
 sacred fig-tree, then draws the water for the day's 
 use, and filters it. He then withdraws into a solitary 
 place, and meditates ; having placed flowers before 
 the sacred tree, he thinks upon the virtues of Buddha 
 and upon his own failings ; after this, he takes his 
 bowl and accompanies his superior, who goes out 
 to beg. They ask for nothing, but they stand 
 silently before the door. Returning, the novice 
 washes his master's feet, washes his wooden bowl, 
 boils his rice ; and thinks upon the goodness and 
 charity of Buddha. After an hour he lights a lamp 
 and begins to study, copies manuscripts, or else, 
 perhaps, sitting at the feet of his superior, receives 
 instruction from him, and confesses to him the 
 faults of the day. 
 
 The elder monks, enfranchised from manual 
 labour, give more time to meditation ; not to 
 prayer, for the Buddhist does not invoke aid from 
 the Divinity. To escape from suffering, he depends 
 upon himself only, using the method which Spinoza 
 and the Stoics also recommend, namely, to forget 
 the fleeting self in a consideration of the universe 
 of existences. This universe he contemplates in five 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 25 
 
 meditations, of which the first is called Maitri-bha- 
 vana, or reflection up.on love. Thinking upon all 
 creatures that live, and reflecting what happiness 
 would be his if he were himself free from all 
 sorrow, passion, or evil desire, he wishes to all 
 beings this felicity. Then, toward his enemies, 
 remembering only their good actions, he strives 
 in all sincerity to wish them the same happiness 
 that he would desire for himself. 
 
 The second meditation (Karuna-bhavana) is that 
 of pity. Thinking of all beings who suffer, and en- 
 deavouring to conceive their sufferings, he seeks to 
 awaken in himself the grief that others feel, and to 
 have sincere pity for them. 
 
 The third is the meditation upon joy (Mudita- 
 bhavand). Thinking of all people who are happy, 
 or believe themselves to be so, the monk represents 
 to himself the happiness of others, and rejoices in 
 their joy. 
 
 The fourth meditation (Asubha-bhavana) is upon 
 impurity. Thinking upon the wickedness and the 
 pollution of the body, the monk says to himself that 
 this is all fugitive as the foam of the sea, that all 
 this exists only from the alternating succession of 
 births and deaths, and that this succession is only an 
 appearance. 
 
 Lastly, comes the meditation upon serenity (Upek- 
 sha - bhavand). Thinking of all things that are 
 esteemed to be good or to be evil, and that are 
 evanescent : power and dependence ; love and hate ; 
 wealth and poverty ; fame and ignominy ; youth 
 and beauty, old age and disease ; he contemplates 
 
26 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 them all with invincible indifference, with absolute 
 serenity. 
 
 There are in this monastery a hundred and twenty 
 monks ; it is a learned, and moreover a legal, institu- 
 tion, respected as in old times some great abbey, 
 Citeaux or St. Germain, with us. I visited the 
 library, a quiet hall with a domed roof, where the 
 palm-leaf manuscripts are kept, enveloped in linen. 
 In a corner some Japanese novices pilgrims and 
 students from the other end of the Buddhist world 
 were reading. I was shown a beautiful red book, 
 containing three //Az&tt, or sacred writings, from the 
 Buddhists of the South. On the first page were 
 these words : 
 
 " To the very reverend Sri Weligama, Superior of 
 the Monastery of Kandy, in token of respect, 
 
 " EDWARD, PRINCE OF WALES." 
 
 About five o'clock the heat of the sun has abated. 
 I quit the temple, eager to lose myself in this equa- 
 torial nature. Nature is the one thing to be seen 
 here, and, in the presence of her grandeur, men and 
 customs fail to interest. Whence comes this all- 
 powerful attraction ? Is it because our remote 
 ancestors, the first beings who had the human form, 
 made their appearance in a world like this, when the 
 continents were covered by all this tropical growth ? 
 Is it that their instincts, asleep for centuries, 
 awaken in us, at sight of things which were familiar 
 to them ? 
 
 I follow a deserted road, between hedges starry 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 2J 
 
 with blue, yellow, and red flowers enormous, splen- 
 did flowers, with stiff, satiny petals, growing wild 
 here, but more magnificent than a king's conserva- 
 tories could show. And out of this sumptuous par- 
 terre spring tall, supple stems, caoutchouc, Chinese 
 bamboo, with palm leaves ten feet long. At the 
 left, below the road, a grove of cocoanut-trees ex- 
 tends down the hill, and the straight, close-crowded 
 stems, each crowned with its great cluster of stiff 
 leaves, is like an army of young men, lordly and 
 primitive, their heads bristling with great savage 
 plumes. They are there by thousands, the axils of 
 their branches laden with young cocoanuts, which 
 must be very tender and cool to eat. Nothing gives 
 a better idea of force than the way these rigid, 
 parallel columns spring up into the air. The vio- 
 lence of the organising power which raised them out 
 of the soil, the suction of earth and water by their 
 roots, the swarming multitudes of them brought 
 forth in this tropical heat all this is very impressive 
 to the imagination. Other trees are loaded with a 
 green scaly fruit, as large as one's head ; this, I recog- 
 nise as the breadfruit. Here are also mango-trees, 
 the nutmeg, the cinnamon, the mahogany-tree, im- 
 penetrable thickets of unknown essences, whence 
 rise in sheaves twenty kinds of palm-trees, not stiff, 
 solitary, dusty, like the Egyptian palm, but supple, 
 glossy, grassy these children of the humid equator. 
 You have but to step on the green grass along the 
 roadside, and at once it curls up, withers, grows 
 yellow in great spots. This intensity of vegetable 
 life is something marvellous. It quivers in these 
 
28 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 sensitive plants ; it stiffens in these tropical creepers, 
 which drop from the highest tree-tops to the ground 
 in tight-stretched curtains of green ; it blazes in 
 these scarlet leaves and in the gleam of poisonous 
 flowers amid the verdure. Amid all this vegetation 
 run mad, the red road goes on. Below, among the 
 pillared cocoanut-palms, here and there I catch a 
 glimpse of a broad yellow river running with great 
 rapidity ; and in the distance, northward, drowned 
 in a tide of greyish clouds, is the vapoury outline of 
 mountains. This is the virgin land of Ceylon, where 
 still roam the wild elephant, akin to the vanished 
 mastodon, and the Veddah, the last survivor of the 
 prehistoric man. 
 
 Some Cinhalese go by the men wearing the 
 long skirt, girt about the waist, the rest of the 
 figure nude, the hair fastened up in a knot, slender 
 and bronzed ; the women, gracefully draped, with 
 lifted arm half-bent, shelter the head by a great 
 stiff leaf used as a parasol. One, a Greek torso, 
 with Aryan features, her bronze skin lustreless 
 against the crimson of her short drawers, carries 
 a jar upon her shoulder. 
 
 A family returning from hunting go by in Indian 
 file. At its head a man, in red skirt, a long, slender 
 gun in his hand, walks with short, timid steps. The 
 woman follows him. Behind trot two little boys, 
 quite naked, very frail-looking, and one holds the 
 spoils by its claw a poor little yellow parrot, 
 whose pretty head hangs down, the eyes closed 
 in death. It is a happy and peaceful population 
 which lives under these lofty palms, finding food 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 29 
 
 at hand in the cocoanut and the breadfruit. A 
 family possesses a cocoanut grove : they live in its 
 shelter ; they live upon its fruit. They go half- 
 clad, graceful and slow of motion, smiling as you 
 pass them, perpetually combing their hair with 
 a comb of yellow tortoiseshell. At every fountain 
 basin the bathers are sporting in the water, or 
 lounging under the trees in the green shadow of 
 the foliage. A happy race, an idle existence ; they 
 are Tennyson's lotus-eaters. Their religion is 
 worthy of themselves, simple and calm. It does 
 not lead to passionate emotions, like Christianity ; 
 nor to overwhelming metaphysical meditations, 
 tyrannical rites, and foolish ceremonies, like the 
 Indian Brahmanism. Without doubt, there is in 
 Buddhism much high metaphysics with which the 
 Cinhalese priests are familiar ; but they do not 
 worry the people with this. To live peaceably, 
 and in the evening to come and bow before the 
 smiling Buddha, and throw at his feet the great 
 flowers of the frangipani : their religion requires 
 nothing of them nothing more than this. Man 
 is very gentle here, very languid, dominated by this 
 overwhelming nature, by the fiery sunshine and 
 the overflowing vegetation. He makes no revolt, 
 no struggle against the uncaring or rival develop- 
 ment of the inanimate around him. There is no 
 tragic conflict, no "struggle for existence," none 
 of that manifestation of the human will by which 
 man asserts his supremacy and takes his place as 
 a force, in the presence of the forces of the material 
 world. Here all destinies are alike ; they all live 
 
30 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 here among the flowers, feebler than they, half 
 asleep in the warm air and the enervating perfume. 
 
 At last the road turns, and leads back to the 
 town, lying along the edge of an immense plateau, 
 and always under the shadow of enormous trees. 
 On one side, a dense, shadowy jungle, where 
 monkeys abound ; on the left, the misty valley, 
 terminating in the far distance with phantom out- 
 lines of mountain crests and peaks. And now, 
 suddenly, without any twilight, night comes on ; 
 and forests and horizons alike disappear in the 
 sudden darkness, like some luminous dream which 
 melts away all at once. 
 
 Now the equatorial stars come out. There is 
 a great silence, with a few plaintive sounds out of 
 the invisible forests, and the buzzing of insects. 
 Moments like these are loaded with an indescrib- 
 able, pleasurable melancholy ; certain successions 
 of sounds make the heart heavy, one knows not 
 why traverse the soul with a strange, deep thrill. 
 Suddenly, one feels so remote, so lost, in the in- 
 different tranquillity of nature ! One feels himself 
 detached from the group to which a human being 
 belongs : his country, friends, family ; the illusion 
 that life makes to each of us is unmade, and the 
 man stands alone, a creature for a moment flung 
 out of the darkness and driven hither and thither 
 upon the surface of the incomprehensible. 
 
 Millions of stars stars that seem alive quiver 
 in the spaces overhead. Below, the silent sil- 
 houettes, the giant phantoms of great ferns and 
 unfamiliar trees, seem like a dream. The air is 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 3 1 
 
 full of the humming of the great tropical insects. 
 Fireflies flit in the darkness, and you turn your 
 head to listen, as you catch a far-distant, almost 
 imperceptible, sound of barbaric music, a strangely- 
 rhythmed noise of trumpets and gongs telling of 
 an offering of flowers in some temple in a remote 
 village. 
 
 As I draw near Kandy the road becomes popu- 
 lous. Men and women are crowding into the town. 
 From afar, in the silence, the singular Buddhist 
 chant calls them across the jungles, and they come 
 from their remote little dwellings, scattered in the 
 thickets under the tall palm-trees. 
 
 Moving rapidly among the silent bands of the 
 flower-laden worshippers, I cross the city, almost 
 invisible in the dense darkness. There is no other 
 sound than the throbbing of the gongs which fills 
 the air. Beside the black lake, upon the great por- 
 tico, the three monsters are always watching, and 
 the entrance to the gardens is guarded by priests, 
 who silently receive the offerings. Passing under a 
 silver grating, we come into the darkness of a great 
 hall, where small sacred lamps throw mysterious 
 gleams. Perfumes arise from a hundred censers 
 and spread in bluish clouds, which hang motionless 
 overhead ; and this heavy, stupefying incense gives 
 to the scene a certain unreality and character as 
 of a dream. Here and there, half visible in the 
 obscurity, there are formidable silhouettes of enor- 
 mous Buddhas, Buddhas sitting, Buddhas reposing, 
 in the midst of flowers. 
 
 We ascend a dark staircase; on either side are ob- 
 
32 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 scure frescos of demons confusedly struggling amid 
 flames ; above, standing behind a silver balustrade, 
 priests receive the flowers which the worshippers lay 
 upon a large table. In front of this silent multitude 
 a very handsome youth stands motionless, his arms 
 filled with a great heap of fragrant jasmine. He 
 offers the flowers, then bows several times before 
 the image, and then stands, half bending forward, 
 his hands crossed on his breast, smiling, with his 
 beautiful curved lips and long, lustrous eyes, a 
 strange smile, mystic and wild. There is an oppres- 
 sive silence, suddenly broken by the deep vibration 
 of the tomtom and trumpet, and the Asiatic chant 
 rising from below. In the faint light of the sacred 
 lamps, the priests, indistinct, silent, standing behind 
 the flowers, are solemn and hieratic. To see this 
 serious, effeminate crowd, thus moving about in the 
 dim, perfumed vapour, to see them slowly perform 
 the prescribed gestures of the rite, seems like some 
 consecrated mystery of remote ages, some Eleu- 
 sinian initiation. 
 
 Quite in the background, in a solitary tabernacle 
 behind the priests, an inviolate retreat, a great figure 
 of crystal, vague in outline, casting no shadow, sits, 
 with crossed legs. And its transparency seems as 
 that of a phantom, a pure spirit, enfranchised 
 from matter ; this is a symbolic image of him who, 
 by the intensity of his meditation, breaks the bonds 
 of flesh and of desire. Dominating the crowd, he 
 seems superior to the restlessness of humanity, and 
 the eternal smile of his translucent lips tells he has 
 entered into eternal peace. 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 33 
 
 The more I observe this country and these men, 
 the better I understand, it seems to me, this religion 
 and this system of ethics. The point of departure 
 is in the human being : the fatigue, the crushing 
 load, an immense need of rest and quietude, in 
 presence of natural phenomena that are so violent, 
 disproportionate, and full of change, where all 
 visible things undergo incessant renewal, are for 
 ever springing into existence and for ever perishing. 
 What is said to-day by our great European thinkers 
 has been taught by the Buddhist sages for the last 
 three centuries. Nothing zs t they say ; all becomes ; 
 the world is but a current of ephemeral appear- 
 ances ; there is nothing stable in it, and nothing 
 permanent except change itself. The earth, the 
 sky, the twenty-eight inferni, demons themselves, 
 and the inferior worlds which they inhabit, all is 
 for ever flowing past like the waters of a river ; or, 
 more truly, is coming and going like the diverse 
 colours of a flame, which springs up, becomes in- 
 tense, decreases, is extinguished. After this one, 
 another, and then another ; and so on, through a 
 series in perpetually recurrent cycles. The series 
 is eternal ; it had no beginning, and will have no 
 end. 
 
 In this universe, what is man ? A something 
 that thinks, but, like all the rest of things, nothing 
 more than a sum of forces, united for a time, but 
 condemned presently to separate ; a collection of 
 faculties and tendencies, a series of images, ideas, 
 fancies, wishes, emotions, which are transitory, 
 while their order for a time subsists, as the form 
 
 c 
 
34 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 and structure of an organised body endures through 
 the perishing and reconstructing of the molecules 
 which compose it. Nothing in man is stable, 
 neither the incidents which collectively and suc- 
 cessively, according to a certain law, constitute his 
 personality, nor that law itself, which changes slowly 
 with his growth and his decline. There are five 
 elements (skandhas] whose cohesion makes the in- 
 dividual, and the Buddhist shows in detail that no 
 one of these elements is a permanent substance. 
 The first comprises the material qualities (extent, 
 solidity, colour) ; these are like the foam, which 
 slowly is born, then vanishes. The second includes 
 the sensations ; these are like bubbles dancing on 
 the surface of the water. In the third, perceptions 
 and judgments are like the vague mists of noonday. 
 In the fourth, the moral and mental tendencies 
 " are like the plantain stem, which has no strength 
 or solidity." To conclude, thoughts, the fifth, are 
 spectres, illusions of magic. 
 
 " O mendicants ! " said Gautama, " in whatever 
 manner the different teachers regard the soul, they 
 imagine it to be one of the five elements, or to be 
 the sum of them all. Thus, O mendicants ! the 
 man who is not converted, and who does not under- 
 stand the law of the converted, sometimes considers 
 the soul as identical with the material qualities, or as 
 possessing them, or as containing them, or as re- 
 siding in them ; sometimes as identical with sensa- 
 tion, or as containing it, or as residing in it," and 
 so on, as to the other three elements. Conceiving 
 the soul, therefore, in one or other of these ways, 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 35 
 
 he reaches the idea : I am. From sensation, for 
 example, the ignorant or sensual man derives the 
 notion : I am ; this / exists. I shall be or not be, 
 I shall have or shall not have material qualities, I 
 shall have or not have ideas. " But the wise disciple 
 of converted men, though he possesses the five 
 organs of the senses, being freed from ignorance, 
 has attained to knowledge. For this reason the 
 ideas : I am, this / exists, I shall be or shall not 
 be, no longer present themselves to his mind." 
 
 Descartes has said : Cogito, ergo sum. The Buddha 
 would have said : " I think, therefore I am not." 
 For what is thought but a series of changes, a suc- 
 cession of different events ? According to modern 
 psychologists it is nothing else. A mechanism, 
 which Taine in France and Stuart Mill in England 
 have studied, creates in us the illusion of the /-sub- 
 stance, the most pernicious of all, Buddhists say 
 the principal snare laid for us by Maya, the 
 great Tempter ; for this is the tie which attaches 
 us to things, the great mirage which plucks us 
 from immobility and indifference, and flings us 
 into action and drives us onward. Buddhism calls 
 this heresy, the heresy of individualism (sakkaya 
 dittki). 
 
 Once admit that there is nothing in the world 
 but a flow of appearances, that neither in ourselves, 
 nor outside of ourselves, anything is lasting, and 
 conduct becomes clear ; the man recognises as an 
 illusion this / which seemed to him so important. 
 He is at once enfranchised ; he no longer aspires 
 to continue this 7; he ceases to make effort, or to 
 
36 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 desire ; he has lost the thirst for life, and is thus set 
 free from suffering. For whence comes suffering ? 
 Precisely from these events which constitute per- 
 sonal existence : birth, old age, illness, decrepitude, 
 death. And why are these events suffering ? Be- 
 cause the illusion of the /, whence comes the will 
 to live and to persist in existence, creates desire 
 and fear, makes us repulse old age and illness and 
 death, and desire their opposites. Uproot from us 
 this love of being, and, ceasing to resist, or act, or 
 think, escaping the universal law of change, we 
 shall become insensible to suffering, which proceeds 
 from change. " He who conquers this contemp- 
 tible thirst of being, suffering quits him, as drops 
 of water slip off the lotus leaf." There follows an 
 enumeration of the ways that lead to this condition 
 of perfection : the first, which destroys the heresy 
 of individualism and the belief in the necessity of 
 rites and ceremonies ; the second, which destroys 
 all passion, all hate, all illusion ; the third, which 
 removes the last traces of self-love ; the fourth, or 
 lofty path of the arahats, that is to say, of men 
 enfranchised by intuition, who have ceased to aspire 
 to any existence, material or immaterial. 
 
 Arriving at this point, the man has given up 
 himself ; he no longer gravitates toward himself ; 
 he is no longer a centre of attraction, an egoistic 
 force labouring to persist. He can give himself to 
 others ; and charity, pity for another's sufferings, 
 penetrates his heart. " As a mother, at the risk of 
 her own life, defends her son, her only son, let a 
 man cultivate a boundless love for all that exists, 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 37 
 
 for the entire world ; let this love extend around 
 him, above him, below him, free from the rival 
 sentiment of self-interest : let him persist firmly in 
 this condition of mind during all his waking hours, 
 whether he is standing or sitting, in action or in 
 repose." " His senses are at peace. He is like a 
 well-trained horse : he is freed from pride, washed 
 from the pollution of ignorance, insensible to the 
 incitements of the flesh." It appears that the gods 
 themselves envy a fate like this. " He whose con- 
 duct is upright is like the broad earth, immovable ; 
 like the columns which sustain a portico, steadfast ; 
 calm as a lake of crystal." For him there is no 
 further birth. "Tranquil is the mind, tranquil are 
 the words and acts of him who is enfranchised 
 by wisdom. They aspire not to a future life ; the 
 allurement of living having disappeared, and no 
 new desire arising in their hearts, they, the wise, 
 become extinct, as a lamp to which no new oil is 
 supplied." This is the supreme felicity. Having 
 sounded the depths of all things, Sakya-Muni, like 
 the Brahmas, his predecessors, found nothing sub- 
 stantial. All substance that he touched melted 
 under his hand, and his embrace enfolded only 
 the empty air. Everywhere gleamed illusive phan- 
 tasmagoria, everywhere events whirled and fled 
 away. Nothing was permanent ; let us cease, 
 therefore, to wish to be permanent ourselves. 
 Nature deceives the ignorant, to attain her ends ; 
 but the wise man refuses to be duped by her. He 
 escapes from the incessant motion of appearances 
 to take refuge in the calm of nothingness. He 
 
38 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 has made a void in his own mind, nothing moves 
 within him, and if his lips stir, it is only in a 
 smile of charity and compassion for the sad human 
 tumult. 
 
 Such are the characteristic features of this 
 Buddhist religion, whose rites I witnessed in the 
 faintly-lighted temple near the black lake. Inertia, 
 a condition of being at peace, a blessed quietude, 
 an indifference of the will, a numbness of the per- 
 sonality, gentleness all these Buddhist virtues are 
 visible among these Cinhalese of the interior, this 
 gracious people who just now bent silently before 
 the sacred image, ignorant of effort, of revolt, and 
 of despair, smiling and at rest, among the flowers. 
 Whether their tranquillity and languor come to them 
 from their religion, or whether their religion only 
 gives expression to tendencies in them which sur- 
 rounding nature has established, they are true 
 Buddhists. They are walking in the first of the 
 paths of salvation ; above them, these priests who 
 receive the flowers, impassive behind the silver 
 railings, these ascetic mendicants, with close-shut 
 lips and intellectual brows, are sages walking in the 
 second and third paths, victorious over passion and 
 hate and illusion. But the Buddhists tell us no 
 man has attained to the highest path, no man has 
 reached the lofty, serene regions, the calm of 
 Nirwana, except the Master, whose pale, expres- 
 sionless face is faintly seen in the dimness, above 
 the priests and the worshippers, with eyes nearly 
 closed, amid moving clouds of perfume. 
 
 In the morning it was a great surprise on awak- 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 39 
 
 ing to find myself here, the red road in front, and 
 the tiny houses crouching among the verdure of 
 the hills. At this early hour, all things have a 
 singular glitter, a wet, fresh lustre. Silvery mists 
 cling to the hillsides, and softly enwrap the ter- 
 raced palm-trees, which rise out of the vapour, 
 dripping with dew and shining with virgin brilliancy. 
 Not a person is to be seen on the road leading to 
 the Peradinya Gardens ; there is only this fragrant 
 vegetation, as of a newly-created paradise in which 
 man has not yet appeared. 
 
 At a bend of the road a bridge of black wood 
 appears, and I stand still in wonder. Under the 
 open sky, between two walls of solid verdure, a 
 muddy, lustrous river moves with slow current. 
 There is not a wave, not a ripple, not a shiver on 
 its surface ; the heavy water moves as if solid, its 
 brown lustre cut by strong, motionless shadows. 
 On both sides the luxuriance of wet vegetation : at 
 the left noble palm-trees, rising in terraces, lustrous, 
 mighty, and regular, thrice royal in their height, 
 their beauty, and their glossy foliage ; at the right, 
 thick clumps of trees, verdant walls of bamboo, and 
 tropical climbers, a luxuriance of green and supple 
 things, which spring out of the muddy soil, crowd- 
 ing, crushing each other to get to the light^and 
 then falling back in a confused mass, spreading 
 itself out in the blackness of the shadow which all 
 this vegetation casts upon the river. And all along, 
 so far as the lustrous curve can be seen, the same 
 display of useless strength carelessly lavished to 
 overflowing, the same furious outburst of life. 
 
40 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 Not far distant are the Peradinya Gardens, where 
 I spend the day, dining alone on a little rice and 
 some cocoanuts in the hut of a Cinhalese keeper. 
 One can walk for many leagues in this place, meet- 
 ing no human being, yet still conscious of a certain 
 order, a plan in this marvellous, wild garden. It 
 is the paradise of some Eastern tale, designed, in- 
 habited, by invisible genii, far from the real, terres- 
 trial life. Humming-birds in endless variety, a little 
 winged world, sparkle in the magnificence of this 
 solitude. There are wide lawns where tropical 
 plants can grow freely and attain their full size ; 
 there are stiff avenues of lofty trees, which shoot 
 up, shining and metallic, their foliage, a single 
 cluster of palm leaves, a hundred and twenty feet 
 from the ground ; there are ferns of improbable 
 shades, blue ferns subtle as vapours ; there are leaves 
 as delicate as dream vegetation green lace, like a 
 cobweb, varieties of Adiantum, a very fairies' hair. 
 At the end of an avenue of banians there are giant 
 caoutchoucs extending their enormous branches so 
 far that, unable to be supported by the parent trunk, 
 they drop to the ground, take root, and form new 
 trees. In every direction their monstrous roots, 
 thrown out from the ground, rise, in rough verte- 
 brae four feet high, and spread to a great distance 
 with powerful, sinuous motion. It is like molten 
 rock, a radiation of cooled lava from some primeval 
 crater long extinct. 
 
 At last I reach the triumph, the apotheosis, so 
 to speak, of the island's vegetation. On the edge 
 of the gardens, beside the slow-moving, yellowish 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 4! 
 
 water of a ganga, there is a sheaf of bamboos 
 a hundred feet in circuit. They are crowded 
 together, smothering each other, each one as large 
 as a European tree. The hard stems, bluish and 
 glossy, in joints two feet long, perfectly round, 
 are gorged with water. Some, spotted with green, 
 seem to have been poisoned. They grow so 
 crowded that only the outside stems are visible ; 
 the others, covered and repressed, spring straight 
 up in darkness. With a supple movement, at the 
 height of a hundred feet, they separate, spread 
 apart in the form of a vase, and are lost in a great 
 rustling mass of dark leafage. This gloomy sheaf 
 has something actually sinister in its aspect ; it 
 seems to be an upspringing of venomous sap. 
 Really, you feel yourself overcome with terror in 
 the presence of a gigantic force whose outburst 
 nothing can arrest. It is impossible to describe this 
 crowd of trunks, packed close against each other, 
 the violence of their impetus, the lithe slenderness 
 of the lofty stems. The life is strong and simple in 
 these giants of the tropical flora. In June and July 
 they grow a foot a day. Now, even in November, 
 the sap is all in ebullition, and the organic work goes 
 on in a tumult of eagerness ; this is quite different 
 from the slow growth of our oak-trees in Europe, 
 built up, cell after cell, by the deliberate hand of 
 centuries. These bamboos are big grasses ; they 
 have the brilliancy and suppleness of ferns, as they 
 spring up impetuously from the deep soil toward the 
 creating sun. 
 
42 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 November 12. 
 
 Yesterday, on the railway, returning from the 
 interior of the island, I met a Hollander ; fat, gentle, 
 pale, peaceful of gesture, scanty of speech. Of the 
 Dutch temperament there is left only the phlegm 
 and softness ; the sanguine flesh tint has disappeared 
 under the heat. After five minutes he asked me 
 my address, that he might send me some flowers ; 
 for my pockets overflowing with roses, jasmines, 
 mimosas, my admiration for the very great size 
 of the floral display on every side, had surprised 
 him. After a time I learned that my man is a 
 native of Ceylon, that he has tea plantations in the 
 mountain, and lives, with his family, at Colombo. 
 To-day I dine with him. His bungalow, situated 
 in the cinnamon gardens, is like a villa of some 
 rich old Roman : deliciously bright and cool, 
 immense halls separated by partitions of fragrant 
 woods, carved and cut in fretwork ; great wicker 
 chaises tongues, where one may recline all day 
 with cigarette or book. The children pretty, but 
 singularly pallid, a translucid, waxen tint, fined 
 down and enfeebled by the climate ; a household 
 of servants, who seem very much beloved ; parents 
 and children speak Cinhalese to them. 
 
 After breakfast we loiter in the garden, where 
 grow freely the rare flowers of our greenhouses, 
 and the most beautiful Cinhalese palms. As I 
 broke a blade of some large grass-like plant, a jet 
 of sap burned my hand. This shows the heat and 
 activity of Cinhalese vegetation. 
 
CEYLON BUDDHISM 43 
 
 I am obliged to go ; to-night we shall be at sea. 
 I desired to see again the calm and serious eyes of 
 the monks and the smile of the reclining Buddha, 
 that the recollection might not be lost at once ; 
 accordingly I ended my last day in the temple of 
 Colombo. 
 
 In the evening, while the day was dying, I went 
 as far as the beach of Mount Lavinia, a solitary 
 shore bordered by a tall, dark forest of cocoanut- 
 trees, which suggests a thought of little savage, 
 desolate islands upon the equator's line, lost in the 
 vast expanse of waters. In the distance, roughened 
 by the wind outside, the sea was blue, the vast 
 Indian Ocean, all alive, full of ardour and force, 
 foaming upon the horizon in sudden and silent 
 patches of white. The big waves coming in upon 
 the red land broke with dull, heavy sound, and 
 amid the monotony of this tumult, from time to 
 time, I heard the sad rustling of the tall cocoanut- 
 trees. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 PONDICHERY CALCUTTA 
 
 November 16. 
 
 WE resume the sea life : long enervating days 
 upon the tranquil water, under the same sky, pale 
 with excess of light ; long nights on deck, under 
 the tropical stars ; and then, a weariness of this 
 monotony. 
 
 One morning we awake in the harbour of Pon- 
 dichery. Natives, nude and black, each with his big 
 turban on, have come paddling out to us. Rapidly 
 resuming their costume of ceremony (which is only 
 a handkerchief), and climbing by the port-holes like 
 a band of lively ants, they seize upon us and hurry 
 us into their skiffs. They ply their paddles rapidly, 
 their eyes shining with delight, and utter enthusi- 
 astic cries, in which suddenly we recognise French 
 words : 
 
 " Hurrah pour papa ! Hurrah pour maman ! 
 Hurrah pour le bon voyage ! " 
 
 This is all they know of our language, the big, 
 savage children. This ignorance does not prevent 
 them, I understand, from possessing the franchise, 
 and voting, with all the dignity of free citizens. The 
 high-priest of the pagoda comes to an agreement 
 with the governor, and the people vote under his 
 
PONDICHRY CALCUTTA 45 
 
 orders, as they would perform a rite, a religious 
 ceremony akin to the periodical procession of the 
 sacred images in their chariots. 
 
 A great crowd on the pier. We bring with us 
 a high functionary of the Republic. The military 
 forces of French India, the three hundred Sepoys 
 that Great Britain tolerates, are here, drawn up in 
 double rank, enchanted at playing soldier, very 
 much pleased with their brilliant uniforms. With 
 many blows from the butt-end of guns the crowd 
 of curious natives is kept off ; the whites, however, 
 pass freely under the arches of triumph on which 
 appear official welcomes and acclamations. Poor, 
 white population of Pondichery, poor Frenchmen, 
 born so far away, posterity of gallant ancestors 
 who established themselves here when France was 
 a famous power on Indian soil, and are now so 
 forgotten, so remote ! I notice descendants of old 
 colonial families, and nothing is more striking than 
 to discover in them the features and the expression 
 of our race. They seem marvellously provincial, 
 behind the times, with a kind of fatigue, effeminacy, 
 enfeeblement, sometimes an appearance of being 
 withered. Everything here seems like a little 
 French provincial town, very remote from the 
 centre, yet living only by the few drops of life dis- 
 tributed from their own centre, the fatuous sub- 
 prefecture, where everything is according to rule, 
 tiresome, old-fashioned. This place is much more 
 remote from Paris than Carpentras or Landerneau. 
 
 Meantime the high functionary disembarks. The 
 notables receive him ; there are prolonged presenta- 
 
46 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 tions and official smiles. Very pompously, a native 
 personage bends before him, much entangled in 
 his white robes, loaded with jewels, very stout and 
 heavy of motion, his little eyes blinking in his 
 fat, dull Brahman's face. He leans with dignity 
 upon his silver cane, an heirloom with which his 
 family was honoured one day, when, bullets having 
 given out, his ancestor offered ingots of gold where- 
 with to bombard the English laying siege to 
 Pondiche'ry. 
 
 More presentations, addresses, shaking of hands. 
 Now the functionary of the Republic, attended by 
 his secretaries in black coats, advances at the head 
 of the procession, passes under the triumphal 
 arches, and the French army of the three hundred 
 Sepoys marches after. Very touching, and slightly 
 comic in its exotic setting, is this ceremony, which 
 recalls our distributions of prizes, official inaugura- 
 tions of monuments, and electoral rounds made by 
 ministers. 
 
 The city is agreeable to behold, bright and clean. 
 Everywhere this red Indian soil, and perfumes from 
 unseen sources. The roads stretch away in straight 
 lines, bordered by palm-trees, and constantly tra- 
 versed by little striped squirrels raising little clouds 
 of dust. We are already far distant from Ceylon ; 
 this vegetation has something precise and well 
 regulated about it. This avenue of palm-trees was 
 no doubt the same ten years ago that it is to-day; 
 there is nothing of the soft undulation of rapid 
 growth here. 
 
 The greatest delight of the eye here is to observe 
 
PONDICHERY CALCUTTA 47 
 
 this multitude of women moving about, so simply 
 and superbly draped. With their erect bearing, the 
 shoulders thrown back, the head carrying a copper 
 jar, their outlines are truly statuesque. Notwith- 
 standing the brilliancy of colour, it is a world 
 that makes one think of ancient Greece ; the same 
 plastic attitudes, the same tranquillity of gesture, 
 the same outdoor life, and the same small houses 
 built of earth, low, cool, white, square, devoid of 
 furniture, where women sit in the shadow and 
 spin. 
 
 At two miles' distance from Pondich6ry we 
 come to the pagoda of Villianur ; and we no longer 
 think of Greece. Above the village twenty wretched 
 hovels of dried mud, twenty huts of savages, within 
 whose shade black figures with bestial heads are 
 drowsing rises an indescribable something, a bluish 
 heap of swarming figures, a confused pyramid of 
 porcelain monsters, grimacing, innumerable, in 
 serried ranks, one above another. It is hideous 
 and insane, this pagoda roof ; it is an imagination 
 of a diseased brain, which, crushed, perverted by 
 the torrid sun, raves in grotesque and horrible 
 visions. And in this heap of shapeless figures, of 
 twisted limbs that writhe about each other, there 
 is not merely the lack of sanity, but there is also 
 a something savage, disturbing, incomprehensible, 
 like the Polynesian idols or the ancient sanguinary 
 Mexican divinities something that speaks of the 
 old indigenous races which the Aryan conquerors 
 met everywhere in India : mysterious black races 
 that still people this southern part of the peninsula, 
 
48 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 sending out wandering tribes through the forests 
 of the interior. This character is noticeable in all 
 the architecture of Southern India. Next door to 
 Pondich6ry, at Madura and Trichinopoli, it attains 
 its utmost extravagance and strangeness, displaying 
 itself in granite pagodas as large as cities, covering 
 the earth with pillars, heaping up, in gigantic pyra- 
 mids, gods and goddesses, demons, heroes, monkeys, 
 horses, elephants a whole world of human and 
 animal forms, which are massed together in most 
 astonishing confusion. 
 
 A crowd of black-skinned priests and worshippers 
 came yelping about us, and a hundred hands were 
 greedily stretched out. Some random blows with 
 a stick from my guide, and sadness settled upon 
 their faces, outcries changed to wailing, and the 
 begging hands were extended, clasped in suppli- 
 cation. Quick, some little silver coins to restore 
 joy in this poor black world ; and the piteous faces 
 of the Brahmans are overspread with broad smiles 
 of infantile delight ! At once they send the crowd 
 away, and consult, with an air of mystery. Two 
 minutes' conference, and then two of the older 
 priests slip away, they vanish into the sanctuary, 
 and return triumphantly, their faces radiant at the 
 surprise they are preparing for us, leading out a 
 troop of bayaderes in full costume. Clad in silks, 
 their noses, ears, arms, and ankles loaded with rings, 
 with languid, alluring gestures, and shiverings of the 
 body and of the finger-tips, they execute an erotic 
 pantomime. Not very seductive, these bayaderes, 
 with their brutish fat faces and thick lips which 
 
PONDICHERY CALCUTTA 49 
 
 mark the inferior race. Their look is vacant and 
 almost idiotic, the mouth open in a stupid smile. 
 Evidently the soul is lacking ; these black women 
 are too near the animal. 
 
 Behind them is the entrance to the sanctuary ; 
 we are not allowed to go in ; but in the darkness I 
 can discover vague figures of gilded divinities, and 
 an extremely ugly idol in a tabernacle. Idols, 
 bayaderes, pyramids of monsters heaped upon each 
 other, black-skinned worshippers, savage, begging 
 priests, we leave them all with little delay, some- 
 what confused, not very well comprehending what 
 we have seen. 
 
 In the evening, returning to Pondichery, I observe 
 the statue of Dupleix. He looks toward the sea, 
 standing, in an attitude of command, bold, impe- 
 rious, with defiant eyes full of an extraordinary de- 
 termination and hardihood. " A famous man," says 
 an Englishman, " and one who gave us no end of 
 trouble. And now what good is Pondichery to 
 you ? You oblige us to keep customs officers on 
 the frontier ; and all our robbers take refuge with 
 you. What does this colony bring you in ? " 
 
 " Nothing at all," a Frenchman replied ; " but 
 Dupleix must have a statue in India, and he must 
 have it on his own ground." 
 
 November 19. 
 
 What is this new sea on which we sail to-day, all 
 brown and muddy, with dense, heavy waves ? There 
 are no shores on the horizon. As far as the eye 
 can see, quivers, under the clear blue sky, this great 
 
50 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 mud-coloured circle, shot through with tawny lights. 
 We are entering the mouth of the Hugli ; these 
 waters are loaded with earth brought by the Ganges 
 and the Brahmaputra from the plains of Hindustan 
 and the slopes of the Himalaya. About two o'clock 
 in the afternoon the sea begins to be covered with 
 flecks, brown like itself, but motionless, dull, or of a 
 uniform lustre, and in the general glitter the only 
 points that do not sparkle in the sunlight. This is 
 the mud which the river deposits, earth which it 
 casts up from its waters earth as yet inert, entirely 
 bare, primitive brute matter ; but destined to be a 
 source of life in the future, whence will spring 
 tropical jungles with their swarming organisms, 
 their venomous vegetation, their hum of fiery 
 insects, their pestilential marshes. And one recalls 
 to mind that far away, beyond the horizon, along 
 an extent of two hundred miles, this prolific slime 
 is slowly accumulating ; in the midst of the barren 
 waters there is silently forming a new bit of Asia. 
 
 By degrees a shore appears ; but very indistinct, 
 ill defined, a shore of soft mud, only a little above 
 the water, like the earth in early days of creation, 
 Then, there is vegetation : herbaceous at first, 
 gloomy thickets of bamboos and climbing plants ; 
 then dense jungles which thrive in an air made pes- 
 tilential by too rapid vegetable growth and decay, 
 deadly hotbeds of fermentation where cholera and 
 fever are endemic, where Nature, left to herself in 
 the absence of man, again essays the soft forms of 
 primitive life, and crocodiles and serpents and giant 
 frogs bask in the tepid mud, and flowers, stimulated 
 
PONDICHERY CALCUTTA 5 1 
 
 by the putrid miasma, climb like flames around the 
 lofty trees. It is a place where, if one were ship- 
 wrecked, the river itself would be less dangerous 
 than the jungle with its fevers and its beasts of 
 prey ; and so, here and there on the shore there 
 are white towers where sailors who have been cast 
 away can find food and medicine and be out of 
 reach of tigers, while they wait for some passing 
 boat to take them off. 
 
 We advance slowly, with infinite precautions. 
 The great river is vehement, and would quickly 
 overturn the boat if, caught for an instant on a 
 sand-bank, she presented her side to the current. 
 We take soundings constantly. The river bed is 
 of moving sands, which the violence of the water 
 displaces, agitates, digs out, heaps up. Now the 
 shores close in, and cultivated lands appear : vast 
 golden harvests, light-coloured rice-fields, noble 
 clusters of shining palms. On the edge of the 
 bank a white file of natives is moving through the 
 tall grass. Upon the river great vessels are passing 
 slowly, powerful steamers, whose destinations are 
 England, and America, and Australia. There are 
 brigs at anchor in great numbers, the splendid 
 sunlight shining upon their poor worn sides, which 
 have the sinuous curve of the waves. They have 
 laboured on their solitary way, lost in the far-off 
 darkness of ocean, racked in all their ribs, lifted on 
 cruel waves, falling into treacherous hollows with 
 heavy shock, patient hours of obscure suffering. 
 To-day, how peaceful is their sleep upon the shin- 
 ing, rippling surface of the great river ! 
 
52 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 The activity increases : one feels the nearness of 
 a vast human hive. Heavy lighters go by, laying 
 their broad paunches upon the heavy brown water, 
 careening under the effort of the strained sail, the 
 man at the helm a black figure against the light tint 
 of the sky. The water around us is now yellow, 
 sirupy, and the waves, as they rise in light-coloured, 
 sinuous undulations, seem to glide over the darkness. 
 
 A great Liverpool steamer crosses us, high out of 
 the water, five hundred feet long, all black, her huge 
 side rising like an iron fortress. We have a glimpse 
 of an English crowd : anxious-looking faces ; men 
 in white flannel ; girls with yachting caps ; red 
 soldiers. 
 
 And then palm-trees again, which are singularly 
 in contrast with great yellow factories and huge 
 smoking chimneys, exactly like those which blacken 
 the grisaille of our northern sky. Suddenly, a 
 bend of the river ; a forest of masts appears, 
 and behind them, lofty houses Calcutta, all white, 
 all glittering in the sunlight. 
 
 November 23. 
 
 Three days at Calcutta. I have seen nothing, con- 
 fused by the crowd, overwhelmed by the heat. One 
 thing comes to the surface the sensation of white ; 
 white light, white houses, the white-clad crowd 
 streaming through the streets. It is to Colombo or 
 Pondiche"ry as London is to a peaceable country 
 town. By the number of shops, offices, banks, 
 carriages, placards upon the walls, you would think 
 it might be Holborn or the Rue de la Bourse. But 
 
PONDICHERY CALCUTTA 53 
 
 in the streets, instead of Europeans in black coats 
 and silk hats, there is a noisy multitude of small and 
 slender Bengalis, wrapped in white muslin, delicate, 
 feminine of feature not indolent and drowsy as in 
 Ceylon, but active, nervous, rapid, quivering with 
 life. Here, as in London, from the pencil vendors 
 kneeling in a row along the side-walk, to the fat 
 babus reclining in their carriages, all the world is in 
 hot pursuit of money ; it is at once apparent that 
 this city is one of the commercial centres, one of 
 the great markets of the world. 
 
 Nothing is more grotesque than the melange of 
 Asia and London. At times you might think your- 
 self in the West End, near Hyde Park. The same 
 broad, straight streets, the same monumental houses, 
 the same porticos with Greek columns, the same 
 broad side-walks, the same parks with railings around 
 them, the same English statues at street corners. 
 But, at certain hours, all this is deserted ; light fills 
 all the space, and vibrates with a white splendour 
 in the silence. In the active hours, naked men, 
 whose black skins exude moisture from every pore, 
 run about, fighting the dust, flinging water from 
 the leathern sack that they carry under the arm. 
 In offices men work the punkah overhead. At 
 times in summer the shops are shut, the horse-cars 
 stop running, the streets become empty. Upon the 
 whole, activity is artificial here. Nature is too 
 strong for man to be able to forget her, as he does 
 in Belgium or in England ; for him to give himself 
 entirely to labour, for him to cover everything with 
 his work. One can be very happy here, but there 
 
54 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 must be tranquillity and silence, and the green 
 shade of trees the kind of life natural to the 
 country. 
 
 Some expeditions at random in the town. One 
 morning I attempt to penetrate the native quarters. 
 In the narrower streets always the same hurrying 
 crowd of Bengalis, the same thousands of white 
 petticoats, the same thousands of dark, thin, refined 
 faces. From time to time, yellow faces of Chinese, 
 in their blue frocks ; and foreign faces men from 
 Nepaul, from the Dekkan, from Afghanistan. In 
 vain I seek the outskirts of the town, the streets go 
 on ; they are crossed by others, they end in new 
 streets, always full of the same fluttering white 
 garments and the same multitude, with its con- 
 fused noise, its continuous hum as of a hive of 
 bees. And one returns, oppressed by the feeling 
 of this human tide. We are accustomed to say, it 
 is true, that our Europe is but a little corner of 
 the globe, where there has been a local and peculiar 
 development of humanity ; we all know that there 
 are other human types ; we know that there have 
 been others, just as, beside a certain forest of oaks, 
 there grows a forest of pines ; just as, before a 
 certain forest of oaks, there grew a forest of great 
 ferns. But this is merely a cold and abstract 
 idea, void of images and emotions. Here we do 
 indeed perceive the mystery and the diversity 
 of this humanity rising from its deep, obscure 
 springs in millions of undulating waves, all of them 
 ephemeral, born only to disappear, for ever driven 
 out of existence by the incessant afflux of new 
 
PONDICHERY CALCUTTA 55 
 
 water, which some blind, imperious effort, we know 
 not what, lifts toward the light. Thrown suddenly 
 into the midst of this teeming Asiatic world, we 
 discover one of these springs, entirely distinct from 
 our own, having never mingled with it, yet equally 
 deep, inexhaustible, copious, and equally grand in 
 its manifestation of the Being who is never weary 
 in diffusing Himself abroad, according to countless 
 types, in all the variety of sentient life. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE HIMALAYA DARJILING 
 
 November 24. 
 
 TWENTY-FOUR hours of railway bring us to Dar- 
 jiling and the chain of the Himalaya. We take 
 the train at the Bengal Northern Station. It is as 
 large as King's Cross or the Gare de Lyon. In 
 the great glazed terminus, trains ready to depart 
 await their passengers ; and multitudes of Hindu 
 employes of every kind, inspectors, ticket-sellers, 
 guards, porters, lamplighters, refreshment-sellers, 
 quietly and safely carry on its business. Native 
 booksellers have their shops adorned with the last 
 English romances ; piles of newspapers arrive, 
 damp, smelling of printer's ink, great English 
 "papers" of eight pages, loaded with advertise- 
 ments, stiff, lustrous, and not easily unfolded. 
 Five or six babus came into my waggon, installed 
 by their "boys." They opened the newspapers 
 and lighted their cigarettes. Soft faces, gentle and 
 heavy, English short coats ; but their untrousered 
 legs showed brown under the draped muslin of 
 their skirts. 
 
 The train moves out : great stores of coal, gaso- 
 meters, factories, the usual cticor of the suburbs 
 
 of a great city. Then the flat country, rice-fields, 
 
 56 
 
THE HIMALAYA DARJILING 57 
 
 bouquets of palm-trees, shining in the softest and 
 richest light. 
 
 Toward the horizon, pale blue, but not at all 
 misty, the sun descends, but without the slightest 
 change of appearance. It melts, yet remains intact, 
 a pure disc of fluid fire, which throbs slowly, sinks 
 insensibly, melts as it touches the plain, vanishes in 
 a rosy light which floats motionless, vaporised upon 
 the horizon's belt, and dies into the blue overhead. 
 There trembles a single star, rayless, like a great 
 drop of perfectly white water. In the zenith the 
 sky grows dark, while the horizon reddens like glow- 
 ing ashes ; and we spin along in the plain, the inter- 
 minable and empty plain, which now vanishes on all 
 sides into the darkness. 
 
 In the north are distinguishable vast pale stretches, 
 vague gleams of light, the distant sheets of water of 
 a great river which has overflowed its banks. 
 
 November 25. 
 
 In the morning, a vast level country, yellow with 
 grain ; then russet with dry grass. This suggests, 
 for some unknown reason, Turguenieff and the 
 Russian steppes. All things awake, in calm of the 
 first hour : the clear cry of large birds which are 
 passing in triangles ; in the tall grass, files of men 
 are going to their daily labour. The familiar feel- 
 ing recurs, to which our own plains give rise one 
 loves this rich and gentle earth, full of tranquil 
 strength good to men, to animals, plants, to all 
 existences that quietly pursue their regular life 
 upon its deep breast. 
 
58 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 About eight o'clock, straight in front of us, in the 
 open sky, well above the plain, something floated, 
 at which I looked for a long time without thinking 
 about it, a pale outline, whose paleness and pre- 
 cision finally excite attention. Suddenly comes the 
 thought that this must be the Himalaya, a hundred 
 miles away. So high, so light, its snows, scarcely 
 tinged with blue, seem regions of a thinner air in 
 the dense azure. This cannot possibly be part of 
 the earth. Under it there is nothing ; there are 
 no mountains to be seen ; there is, again, the void, 
 blue depth of space ; and it seems as if this were 
 heaven opened, an inaccessible paradise hung in 
 ether, an abode of the luminous, sovereign devas. 
 
 At Siliguri we change trains. The first slopes are 
 now only twenty miles away ; the approach of a 
 new world makes itself distinctly felt. Beside the 
 slender Bengalis, there are Mongol mountaineers, 
 short and thick-set, with square face, yellow skin, 
 oblique eyes, felt boots, a three-bladed poignard 
 stuck into the belt ; and their cloaks of a dark 
 woollen stuff contrast with the light-coloured robes 
 of the effeminate-looking Hindus. This is the 
 frontier of the two races, the limit of two human 
 continents ; for the Tartars, who begin here, cover 
 Central Asia and China, extending to the Arctic 
 snows. What an astonishing human variety in this 
 station here, at the foot of the Himalaya ! A dozen 
 English officers and planters, two or three German 
 and Swedish travellers, then a crowd of Hindus, 
 Lepchas, Bhutias. European coats, the white skirts 
 of the Bengalis, the red robes of the Lepcha women, 
 
THE HIMALAYA DARJILING 59 
 
 who, in feature, ornaments, and dress are almost 
 Siberian, cloaks from Tibet, are piled into open 
 cars which resemble sledges ; the little locomotive 
 whistles, and we run toward the blue wall which 
 bounds the plain. 
 
 When the vapours which are pumped up from the 
 ocean by the equatorial sun are driven by the south- 
 west monsoon, they rise into the Indian sky, travers- 
 ing it in great white multitudes, or melting away 
 in the hot air. In the north they encounter an icy 
 barrier, twenty-three thousand feet high, and they 
 fall in snow or rain upon its slopes. Almost nothing 
 goes beyond. The plateaus of Tibet are arid, the 
 southern slopes receiving all the water drawn from 
 the Indian seas. Nothing can give an idea of these 
 rains. While in London there is an average fall 
 of two feet of water annually, the average here is 
 thirty-one feet. In the year 1861 there was a 
 rainfall of sixty-seven feet. There is great depth 
 of earth, an extreme heat of the sun, and it may 
 be imagined what the vegetation must be. These 
 mountains, whence descend all the great rivers of 
 the plain, spread life throughout Hindustan, and at 
 its source this life has its greatest violence. 
 
 Imagine, then, a monstrous elevation, the great 
 backbone of the earth, against which tempests from 
 the ocean break in storms and downpours of water, 
 like the primitive cataclysms of the world ; a virgin 
 growth, springing up in this fire and water and 
 mist, where all the trees and all the plants of the 
 world, from jungles of bananas and tropical climb- 
 ing plants, to forests of fir-trees, are superposed ; 
 
60 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 add to this the tumult of cataracts, the impetuous 
 cry of the young rivers ; lower down, the mewing 
 of tigers ; high up above the rocks the scream of 
 eagles in the icy air ; everywhere, re-echoing peals 
 of thunder : a dense, violent, noisy life, which seems 
 to stream down from above ; or rather we might 
 say, which ascends into space, becoming fainter, 
 like the murmur of a distant multitude, and expiring 
 in the silent indifference of ice-masses, which pro- 
 ject into empty space : and one perhaps will feel 
 the grandeur of this mountain world. 
 
 We begin to penetrate it, entering the jungle, the 
 thick fur of trees and plants which extends as far as 
 the snows. Even the Cinhalese forests were not 
 like this : the palms and bamboos, of too rapid 
 growth, seemed fragile there, and the admirable 
 lustre of the stems and leaves was due to a perpetual 
 miracle of heat and light. Here, it is the tree itself, 
 solid, ligneous, ancient, not slender and smooth, but 
 rugged, enormous of trunk. Magnolias, mahogany 
 trees, are buried under heavy green mosses, which 
 from every branch hang like dripping hair. Climb- 
 ing plants, two hundred feet long, cross from tree 
 to tree, strained like cables, like great snakes stiffened 
 in some effort ; and beneath the lofty forest there is 
 another, a light mist of ferns, thickets of tall plants, 
 of rhododendrons, smothered in the darkness. 
 
 Now the first slopes are below us, whence the 
 forests descend, stretching out into the plain, like 
 a great dark cloak fallen at the mountain's feet, 
 spreading itself out in vast folds, in heaps of shining 
 verdure, veiled in luminous vapours, pierced with 
 
THE HIMALAYA DARJILING 6 1 
 
 deep holes of shadow. On one side the mountain 
 opens in an amphitheatre, ten miles broad, full of a 
 thick bluish atmosphere that is visible. Within it, 
 three forests seem to have fallen in, and lie heaped 
 up and reeking in the sunlight, giving out sheets of 
 quivering, resinous heat, exhaling the breath of their 
 mighty vegetable existence. 
 
 Beyond, the plains of Bengal extend, vague, in- 
 distinct ; they rise toward the sky, vanish, disappear 
 high up in the light and the mist. 
 
 At seven thousand feet it is very cold ; we already 
 have the cold of Central Asia. We encounter the 
 fog coming toward us like a vast, grey tide : it moves 
 slowly around the trunks of the great forest, clings 
 to them, invades the thickets, is torn, floats in frag- 
 ments, reunites, puts out the sun, leaving it a 
 greenish disc like some strange moon. On each 
 side are pale phantoms of giant trees, vaporous 
 glimpses of dripping undergrowth, a foggy, colossal 
 vegetation which seems to have grown up without 
 sunlight, in some world of dreams. How far away 
 we now are from the luminous plain where man 
 languishes in his white muslins ! From time to 
 time appear miserable Lepcha villages, half visible 
 in the wet darkness, little conical huts, almost 
 Chinese, in which blaze huge bright fires ; low, dark 
 shops, full of bananas and oranges from the plain, 
 and smoked meat. A Mongol population, splashing 
 about in the mud ; children like grotesque figures in 
 yellow wax ; little, angular women clad in heavy 
 red woollen garments ; men wrapped in their goat- 
 skin cloaks, with green boots, and little three-peaked 
 
62 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 felt hats, much more unlike ourselves, with their 
 heavy faces, their projecting cheek-bones, their 
 oblique eyes ; much more foreign than the Hindu 
 or the Cinhalese, and telling of an entirely distinct 
 human race. Everything here is Mongol. The 
 yataghans, the objects of lacquered wood, the 
 stunted statuettes that are sold in the largest village, 
 suggest China ; it is the same outlandish art, the 
 same curious unshapeliness. How explain this, ex- 
 cept by an affinity of race, stronger than barriers 
 and distances, for Tibet is still far away, the other 
 side of the high icy passes, almost inaccessible ; and 
 English India is close by ! 
 
 Suddenly the fog breaks ; it flies beneath us, 
 cleft like a torn curtain, and there is revealed in 
 full light, from base to summit, the whole great 
 white chain. We have just reached the crest of 
 the only line of foot-hills which separates the high 
 peaks from the plains of India. Between us and 
 the snows there is only a sombre circular valley 
 of a hundred square leagues, in which the fog adds 
 its darkness to the shadow of the primeval forests. 
 Across the valley, deployed upon an arc of a 
 hundred and fifty degrees, twenty peaks rise to a 
 height of twenty-three thousand feet ; they rise out 
 of the depths of the valley like huge waves, stiffened, 
 made solid, in their upward spring. In the centre, 
 opposite us, so near that apparently its fall would 
 reach us where we stand, Kunchain-Junga unrolls 
 the dense jungles of its vast base, lifts its rocky 
 masses, its bluish glaciers, and outlines up there 
 against the cold pallor of the sky the sharp peak of 
 
THE HIMALAYA DARJILING 63 
 
 its summit, at a height of twenty-six thousand feet. 
 With a glance the eye measures this prodigious 
 height. 
 
 This is what I have before my eyes : in the fore- 
 ground, along the ridge which we have just reached, 
 specking with white dots the black background of 
 its forests, the little villas of Darjiling, the ultimate 
 verge of the civilised world, on the edge of the 
 abyss of savage Asia, the great unknown country, 
 peopled by yellow races ; then, the dark void of the 
 immense valley, a shadowy amphitheatre filled with 
 shapeless, floating clouds. Five slender, misty rays 
 of light traverse it, reflected from a dazzling mass 
 which is behind us, upon the black shoulder of the 
 mountain. Fixed above the sombre darkness of 
 the floating vapours, these rays measure the gulf. 
 Neither ocean nor desert could give the vertiginous 
 sensation of space, as do these five rigid lines, flung 
 across .this valley, forty miles in breadth, closed by 
 a wall twenty-four thousand feet high. In this deep, 
 a confusion of ridges and slopes ; but, above, calm, 
 uplifting, sovereign light, the inviolable serenity 
 of the great summit where unite all the obscure 
 mountain chains, which, in Nepaul, in Tibet, in 
 India, have lifted themselves, and struggled through 
 the darkness to meet each other, and with joint 
 impulse rise above all things into the silence of 
 bright space, and dominate the world. 
 
 November 26. 
 
 One arrives, prepared by this journey for great 
 emotions ; and here is an English summer resort. 
 
64 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 On the road from the station, opposite the Hima- 
 laya, are large posters : Colman's Mustard, Pears' 
 Soap, Beecham's Pills ; then, a crowd of children 
 on horseback, active, chubby little Saxons, young 
 girls sitting straight in the saddle, the complexion 
 clear, a pink flush on the cheek, wearing jockey 
 caps and perfectly-fitting habits, followed by the 
 Hindu servant, humble in the presence of the 
 stronger race. You pass cottages whose bay- 
 windows are framed in clematis and climbing roses. 
 On the gates of the little gardens are names of 
 English villas, "Birchwood," or "Woodland House." 
 The highest points of Darjiling whence one's eyes 
 rest upon the entire Sikkim is dotted with gay 
 little villas, among them rising a little Saxon church 
 tower of grey stone, like those that keep watch over 
 the pale English landscape. Near by, a tennis 
 ground, from which the players, in their flannels, 
 are just going off. 
 
 At sight of all this the mind changes its orienta- 
 tion, and old recollections emerge from the dark- 
 ness in which they slept, old currents of ideas and 
 emotions recur. You are in England, it is sunset 
 of a summer's day, and if you look up, you expect 
 to see the red streaks of the sky across a wan field. 
 Here are the "Assembly Rooms," where there is 
 dancing in the evening, and the first flirtations 
 which lead to marriage. Here is the Dissenting 
 Chapel, which Methodists, Baptists, and Wesleyans 
 enjoy in turn. Here are the scarlet soldiers, ath- 
 letic, with lustrous hair, who live like gentlemen in 
 their barracks, and, switch in hand, assume airs of 
 
THE HIMALAYA DARJILING 65 
 
 importance in the street. Here is the genteel and 
 respectable "boarding-house," such as you may 
 have known at Eastbourne or Scarborough. You 
 put on a black coat for dinner ; the mistress of the 
 house says grace, and ceremoniously sends round 
 thin slices of lamb or beef, and heavy bits of 
 "pudding." The husband, a personage of less 
 importance, but correct, adds to the respectability 
 of the house. There is conversation, the tranquil 
 conversation of well-bred people who are not sus- 
 picious of one another. In the drawing-room, after 
 dinner, a young lady will seat herself at the piano, 
 and the evening passes with songs from Gilbert and 
 Sullivan's last operetta, or some patriotic or senti- 
 mental melody, and there are plans for the next 
 day's excursion. 
 
 Compare with this the French colony in Tunis 
 or Tonkin, usually all bachelors! How a man is 
 bored there ! How he feels his exile ! But these 
 English are in England, here. They have brought 
 hither not only their institutions, their customs, 
 their prejudices, but their whole natural environ- 
 ment, and the mise en scene to which they are accus- 
 tomed. The contact of a different world seems not 
 to affect them at all. In fact, no race is less capable 
 of adaptation, less flexible ; none so continuously 
 persists in its own type and personality. Hence, 
 their moral energy, and the force of their will, 
 directed by certain immutable ideas ; hence, also, 
 their limited sympathy and comprehension. These 
 people ignore the native entirely, and make no 
 effort to understand him. From the height of their 
 
 E 
 
66 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 civilisation they regard him as a half-savage " ido- 
 later." " Idolater " is the term by which are desig- 
 nated indiscriminately the Hindu, the Buddhist, 
 and the Parsi.* This is quite the Biblical point 
 of view ; thus the Jews spoke of other nations. At 
 Ceylon, a planter, who had been resident in the 
 island for fifteen years, put this question to me : 
 " And what are the names of their idols ? What is 
 it that they worship ? " 
 
 Just now I was admiring the hauteur, the phlegm, 
 the disdainful silence of two English soldiers in the 
 shop of a vendor of Chinese things ; they turned 
 over his bibelots without a glance at himself. This 
 evening, at table d'hote, a young officer, lately arrived, 
 having visited during the day a lama's temple, sums 
 up his impressions briefly : " A nasty hole, which 
 I was only too glad to get out of." The inhabi- 
 tant is to them only a coolie, "a boy," useful for 
 carrying luggage or blacking boots ; as the country 
 to them is only a place for industrial or agricul- 
 tural exploitation. They cut away the finest forests 
 of Darjiling or of Ceylon that they may cover the 
 denuded soil with their melancholy tea planta- 
 tions. Make the ascent of the Sinchul, the adjacent 
 height which overlooks Darjiling, and you will see 
 the grandest panorama in the world : southward, the 
 plains of India; on the north, the Himalayan peaks; 
 but the foreground of the picture is pure English 
 gardens, plantations, villas, churches, barracks. 
 
 * In Italy, Germany, and France an Englishman speaks of the in- 
 habitants as "the natives." In English, the word "foreigner" has 
 the same meaning that "barbarian" had among the Greeks. 
 
THE HIMALAYA DARJILING 6j 
 
 They civilise, and this not only for their own 
 advantage, but from a sense of duty toward the 
 native population. To cover India with railways, 
 to enlarge and multiply its seaports, to increase 
 tenfold its commerce, to convert it to Protestant 
 Christianity, to suppress its castes, to enfranchise its 
 women, to open its zenanas, to give it with a liking 
 for trousers, black coats, cricket, football, English 
 music and poetry " a practical and sensible educa- 
 tion : " in this, say the English, consists their 
 mission in India, being persuaded, with Addison, 
 with Sydney Smith, with Macaulay, that the aug- 
 mentation of human well-being, a decent, reason- 
 able, comfortable civilisation, in a word, English 
 civilisation, is the chief end and aim of humanity. 
 "When we have finished our work in India," an 
 Englishman said to me in Ceylon, "very probably 
 the Hindus will be able to do without us, and will 
 turn us out. But we shall have accomplished our 
 mission." Thereupon he extolled "the railway which 
 strikes through the forests, brings life and light to 
 the interior of the country, and makes war on old 
 superstitions and Buddhist mummeries." They are 
 so enterprising that India now furnished with 
 manufactories, railways, universities, banks has 
 to-day the budget and the commerce of Italy or 
 Austria ; they are so rigid and so strong, that this 
 handful of men among the two hundred million 
 Hindus remain absolutely unchanged, while the 
 Hindu seems to become English from contact with 
 the hundred thousand colonists. At Calcutta I had 
 the opportunity to see books and newspapers of 
 
68 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 Hindu authorship ; not only was their English ex- 
 cellent, but there were the turns of thought, the 
 style, the prejudices, all the English forms of feeling 
 and thinking. Some articles might have come 
 from the pen of the reverend editor of a well- 
 known magazine published in London. Thus, 
 certain artistic individuals of plastic soul, after 
 talking long with a man of original and powerful 
 personality, unconsciously copy his attitudes and 
 gestures, and the inflections of his voice. " A race 
 of flint," says Carlyle of the Anglo-Saxons : yes, 
 a race of flint, which, imprinting itself without 
 itself suffering abrasion into the soft Hindu clay, 
 stamps all its own angles and projections there. 
 Haughty conquerors, untiring organisers, they are 
 here the noble race, a new Brahman race, devas of 
 superior order. And I felt it this morning, when I 
 saw above the grotesque crowd of wretched Mon- 
 gols, the upright carriage, the calm movement, the 
 tranquil, strong gesture, the bright faces, the serene 
 and determined look of three young Englishmen. 
 
 November 27. 
 
 I rise before four o'clock to see the first rays of 
 the sun on Kunchain-Junga. It is frosty and dark : 
 nothing is visible but the outlines of neighbouring 
 trees, and, up there among the cold constellations, 
 the waning moon, too slender a crescent to throw 
 any light. There is nothing to be seen, but you 
 know that in every direction the ground steals 
 away, sinks, and you are conscious of the immense 
 dark forests below, and of the country of Sikkim, 
 
THE HIMALAYA DARJILING 69 
 
 extending in the darkness. The great chain has 
 disappeared entirely. 
 
 About half-past four, high up in|the sky appears 
 a star, a very singular star, for, as you watch it, it 
 seems to grow larger. A spot of rose colour comes, 
 remains, increases. Then sharp outlines are lighted 
 up. Below, the very blackness of night, not a sign 
 of dawn, the earth asleep in the darkness ; and you 
 are afraid of those luminous things appearing up 
 there in space, that light not of this world, which 
 seems a prelude to some stupendous change in the 
 established order. 
 
 Then all the snowy summits, coming out of the 
 night, are lighted up like the mysterious shore of 
 a pink sea ; and then, a long time after, the old 
 forests reappear. 
 
 About seven o'clock I took a guide to penetrate 
 a little the mystery of the jungle. We follow a 
 route lying along the edge of the great valley 
 and commanding it. Below us, out of the dense 
 thickets, tree-ferns arise, like palms, out of their 
 sheath of tawny moss soaked in dew. Farther 
 down, the jungle descends, with its domes of 
 lustrous trees, seen from above, half veiled by the 
 heavy air descends to the bottom of the great 
 valley of the Sikkim, which, four thousand feet 
 below the road, displays the sombre stretch of its 
 virgin forests. Beyond, above the bluish vegeta- 
 tion, begin the glacier-streaks, and high white out- 
 lines cut sharply the pale sky. 
 
 My guide walks with a strong, heavy step, the 
 step of the mountaineers of Tibet a true Chinese 
 
70 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 type ; not the delicate, slender Chinese, but the 
 man of the North, tall and angular. A face 
 ploughed by deep wrinkles, chapped, tanned by 
 the sun. A small, green, three-peaked hat, whence 
 descends a black queue of braided hair, an im- 
 mense sheep-skin cloak, boots of green felt turned 
 up in very long points. Savage ornaments : a 
 green ring, and another of ivory on the thumb ; 
 the left ear stretched, lengthened by a silver disc. 
 He walks on silently, with his regular step, leaning 
 on a great teak-wood pike, covered with pointed 
 characters that are unlike the Hindustani letters, 
 complicated with a sundial whereby the Tibetans 
 read the hour, when they roam their vast desert- 
 plateau beyond the Himalaya. Sometimes, with 
 a motion of the arm, a slow smile, and gutturals 
 which are not human, he designates the remote 
 mountains. We communicate by signs he, the 
 strange Mongolian man, whose race, since the 
 first days of humanity, has roamed the steppes of 
 Central Asia ; I, the Parisian tourist, arriving in 
 this land after the long voyage over monotonous 
 seas. What an abyss between his race and mine ! 
 Impossible to find for us a common origin, in 
 the darkness of the past ! Impossible to under- 
 stand this motionless face, shut against me, this 
 face not made like ours, in which the soul cannot 
 be read. 
 
 On the edge of the road, as I examined with 
 surprise a rock curiously carved, he twice raised his 
 arm toward heaven, toward the sun, I think. This 
 time he seems to have understood me. The same 
 
THE HIMALAYA DARJILING Jl 
 
 gesture, before a row of long poles whence hang 
 white rags covered with sacred characters. These 
 poor banners are religious emblems, and have in- 
 numerable prayers inscribed upon them. A wind 
 blows them toward the sky, and all these silent 
 prayers are heard. At this moment they hang 
 inert, along a narrow pathway which goes down 
 to the miserable hovels of a community of lamas, 
 on the side of the great valley. At its entrance a 
 lad, a novice, seated on the ground, is reciting, with 
 nasal tone, prayers written in Chinese on old strips 
 of some woven fabric. Emerges, from a corner 
 where he had crouched invisible, a yellowish crea- 
 ture, a lama, who comes up and walks around us, 
 making profound salutations, his hands lifted to his 
 forehead. He is horrible and pitiable, this lama, 
 really unnatural ; all the Tartar traits exaggerated, 
 the eyes bloodshot, no chin at all, the mouth lost 
 in the flabby fold of the yellowish neck, the expres- 
 sion brutish and rigid. 
 
 At the door a row of prayer cylinders, which 
 my guide has had an eye on for some minutes. 
 Furtively he goes up to them, and, with an enig- 
 matical smile, one by one, without haste, he turns 
 them. all. What is he thinking of, while in a low 
 voice he mutters his gutturals ? What is the ob- 
 scure emotion which has dictated his act ? 
 
 In the interior, behind a glass case, the vague 
 sketch of a seated Buddha, not calm and smiling, 
 but grimacing with a Mongol grimace. Before 
 him on an altar, offerings poor offerings, not 
 sumptuous flowers, as in Ceylon, but grains of rice, 
 
72 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 some water, and, in old English gin or whisky 
 bottles, some miserable withered plants. All this 
 tells of a primitive and barbaric poverty. On 
 the walls, very ancient frescos are scaling off, 
 ancient bluish paintings which seem to have been 
 monsters of the Mongol imagination, hideous to 
 see. " Darjiling," says the lama, indicating one of 
 them ; another is Kunchain-Junga, the mountain. 
 By what mysterious association of ideas has that 
 grand, simple, noble form a shapeless, complicated 
 dragon for its symbol ? What kind of vague emo- 
 tion, terror, or sadness, did the view awaken in their 
 ancestors ? 
 
 I slip *a few annas into the yellow paw which the 
 poor lama slyly extends to me, and we leave the 
 little mud temple, in the shadow of its floating 
 banners, under the guard of the thousand prayers 
 which stream in the wind, clinging all solitary on 
 the edge of the great misty amphitheatre. 
 
 This evening, all the space is rilled with clouds, 
 and grey vapours drown the valleys which go toward 
 India or toward China. Far away in the west 
 there are gleams of rose-colour, of unknown origin. 
 Upon the black sides of the mountains and on the 
 crowded peaks there is a slow, monotonous proces- 
 sion of grey things, creeping upward interminably. 
 In this pale mist the lower spurs of the mountains, 
 crossing each other, are distinguishable only as 
 superposed walls of blackness. And this produces 
 a vague infinitude, not of surface, like the ocean, 
 but of depth, wherein is outlined a dark world 
 where slowly gather incompleted shapes, spaces of 
 
THE HIMALAYA DARJILING 73 
 
 shadow, confused lights, conjectural forests, ridges 
 that cross each other, blue rays darting across the 
 void : a grey, undulating confusion. 
 
 Upon a ridge one tall twisted tree seems to mark 
 the world's end, on the edge of the abyss. Below, 
 nothing : a vaporous chaos, wherein vague forms 
 are floating. Literally, one seems to have come to 
 empty space, to the world's misty edge, and only 
 chaos beyond. 
 
 At this moment I hear singing, clear childish 
 voices from a school of little English girls, which is 
 somewhere here on the hill ; it is like a memory of 
 childhood coming to a man at the last instant of his 
 life, with the darkness of the Beyond before him. 
 What is it that fills these moments with so painful 
 and subtle emotion ? why are these sunsets so mys- 
 teriously sad, impressing themselves more deeply 
 upon the memory than all the grand sights one 
 has come so far to see ? 
 
 The tree shivers in all its branches, and the grey 
 vapour creeps higher and higher upon the wan back- 
 ground of the sky. And now, the Sikkim is buried 
 in fog. But above all this melancholy confusion, 
 one remembers that the great crimsoned summits 
 rise, that they rest upon a bed of quiet cloud, alone 
 in the presence of the dying sun. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 BENARES BRAHMAN ISM HINDUISM 
 
 November 29. 
 
 A SUDDEN scene -shifting. Yesterday evening I 
 arrived here after twenty-four hours on the Bengal 
 Northern, and twenty-one hours on the Great Penin- 
 sular. On the road there is nothing to see. From 
 the cold Mongol regions we come down at once 
 into the sacred plains of India, through which flows 
 the ancient, divine Ganges. 
 
 For this is classic India, India of the Indians. 
 Here, the European has no dwelling-place ; he only 
 passes through. He has transformed nothing, has 
 established himself neither as merchant nor manu- 
 facturer. This city, these Hindus, these temples 
 are the same to-day that they were ten centuries 
 ago. This is the heart of the Hindu world, the 
 very focus of Brahmanism. Those old Brahmans 
 who, " after they have seen the sons of their sons," 
 go away into the depths of the forest, there to 
 remain in solitary meditation on the substance of 
 things, go from Benares or from adjacent parts of 
 the Ganges valley. Upon this soil were elaborated 
 the six great systems of Hindu philosophy. Twenty- 
 five centuries ago this city was already famous. Yes, 
 when Babylon was struggling with Nineveh ; when 
 
 74 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 75 
 
 Tyre was throwing out her colonies along the shores 
 of the Mediterranean ; before the agora of Athens 
 resounded with the eloquence of her orators, and 
 the temples of Greece were peopled with their 
 marble statues ; when Rome was but a peasant 
 hamlet ; when the old Egyptian cults were in their 
 prime ; then, this city, great and famous, was filled, 
 as it is to-day, with white-skinned Brahmans, in 
 feature resembling those of to-day, even then bowed 
 down by a ritualistic tyranny, crushed in upon them- 
 selves, absorbed in metaphysical speculations, in- 
 definitely dividing the fine-spun thread, arriving at 
 vertigo, and in their hallucination seeing the solid 
 earth give way and sink into that calm nothingness 
 whence eternally arise the appearances of things. 
 Sakya-Muni was one of these Brahmans ; he was 
 born not a hundred miles from here, and, after 
 his five years' meditation, he came to preach at 
 Benares. 
 
 To-day not a trace remains of our European 
 world as it then was ; it is altogether dead, finished, 
 buried in the abyss of time. But this city of Benares 
 remains always the Kasi, " the resplendent city," of 
 India. 
 
 In the morning, when the throbbing disc of the 
 sun rises behind the Ganges, twenty-five thousand 
 Brahmans, crouching on the river bank, in the 
 presence of the Hindu multitude, repeat the old 
 Vedic hymns to the sun, to the divine river, the 
 primitive powers, the visible sources of life. Rome 
 is not so sacred to the Catholic as is Benares to the 
 Hindu ; each stone of it is holy. No pollution, no 
 
j ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 sin can endanger the man who dies within its walls. 
 Were he Christian, were he Musalman, had he even 
 killed a cow or eaten its flesh, he is no less certainly 
 transported into the Kailasa, the Himalayan paradise 
 of Siva. Happy, therefore, the man who can die 
 within the walls of Benares ! More than two 
 hundred thousand pilgrims come hither every year 
 from all parts of India ; among them, many old 
 men and many incurably ill. When a man could 
 not come here to die, often his ashes are brought, 
 that "the sons of the Ganges," the Brahmans of 
 Benares, may pronounce the prayers of the dead, 
 and the sacred river may accept them. " Kasi, holy 
 Kasi," say the Hindus; "a man dies peacefully 
 when he has seen thee ! " 
 
 This city is most extraordinary: elsewhere re- 
 ligion is only part of the public life ; at Benares 
 there is nothing else to be seen. It fills every- 
 thing, occupying every moment of man's existence, 
 and covering the city with its temples. There 
 are more than nineteen hundred of them ; and 
 the multitude of chapels is past all counting. As 
 to the idol population, it is nearly twice as 
 numerous as the human, something like five 
 hundred thousand. 
 
 Yesterday evening, on arriving, as it was still day- 
 light, I walked as far as the river. The tortuous 
 lanes swarm with half-naked humanity. At the 
 entrance to the sacred places, the crowd is more 
 dense : white-faced Brahmans jostle and elbow 
 you ; fakirs sitting on their heels, naked, covered 
 with ashes, the bald head lustrous, the eye fixed, 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM JJ 
 
 thus motionless in the universal swarming, seem 
 made of stone. Stalls overflow with religious 
 objects, necklaces of yellow flowers, rosaries, sacred 
 stones, strange emblems. In the walls, above the 
 doors, niches shelter shapeless divinities, monstrous 
 gods with heads of elephants and bodies encircled 
 with serpents. Here and there, wells, from which 
 ascends a fetid odour of decayed flowers, are in- 
 habited by gods, and around them the crowd is 
 dense. Upon the walls blue paintings narrate the 
 Hindu mythology ; the temples are girt with a 
 garland of obscene divinities, and in the midst of 
 the streets, as if the temples were not numerous 
 enough to contain all the idols, small altars make 
 a pedestal for the fat Ganesa or the shapeless Kali. 
 One's foot slips in the heaps of decaying flowers, 
 there is a strange mud of ordures and sacred jas- 
 mine putrefying in this Ganges water with which 
 all the altars are sprinkled ; and from the glutinous 
 soil rises a strange, nauseating odour. In the midst 
 of the human multitude monkeys gambol and 
 chatter, clinging to the roofs, and cows wander 
 freely and eat the flowers. And you have the 
 same sensation of bewilderment and vertigo as 
 in reading the old Hindu poems, which make 
 the mind faint with their accumulation of myriads 
 of millions of ages, with their endless enumeration 
 of gods and elements and plants and animals, 
 whirling and intertwined. All our mental habits 
 are set at naught. Imagine yourself to have landed 
 in a country where the inhabitants walk on their 
 heads. This race thinks, and feels, and lives in 
 
78 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 a fashion contrary to our own ; and one's first 
 idea on arriving in Benares is that insanity is 
 normal here. 
 
 November 30. 
 
 I rise at five. At half-past six I am on the river. 
 Fresh morning light, white in the horizon as liquid 
 silver. The broad Ganges spreads its brown sur- 
 face, rolling its muddy, choppy current between 
 desert stretches of sand on the left bank and on the 
 right a league of temples, palaces, mosques, marble 
 walls, whose long line disappears in a rosy mist. 
 Immense stairs descend in a grand sweep to the 
 water's edge, and their parallel lines make a broad 
 oblique surface, all glittering in the sunshine. 
 In this light swarm the Hindu people pilgrims, 
 worshippers, priests, who come to perform their 
 matutinal devotions, to adore the Ganges and the 
 rising sun. They are there by thousands, fat, white 
 old Brahmans, seated on stone tables, a huge straw 
 umbrella over their heads, reading the sacred texts 
 to the crowd who are dabbling in the water ; brown 
 Sudras, with heads shaven except for a little tuft 
 falling backward, supple in their dark nudity ; 
 women, draped from head to foot in brilliant 
 colour, who pray standing, with arms lifted and 
 clasped hands stretched toward the sun. As my 
 boat advances over the shining water, the temples 
 and the crowd are more numerous. Flights of 
 steps, four hundred feet broad, rise in enormous 
 pyramids, striped with their thousand stairs. Mas- 
 sive octagonal pillars plunge into the water ; square 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 79 
 
 fagades, great carved cones of red stone, cubes 
 of marble whose sides are excavated into niches, 
 chapels, succeed each other, or are piled one 
 behind another : it is a colossal accumulation of 
 stone, lavished, superposed, in geometrical con- 
 structions, as in ancient Egypt or in the legendary 
 Assyrian cities. And under all this architecture, 
 on the bank of the old river, a hundred thousand 
 Hindus are in motion, fulfilling their religious 
 rites. 
 
 For four hours I go up and down on the river. 
 How describe this inexhaustible variety, this end- 
 less succession of forms and attitudes ? Upon 
 the broad steps white in the sunlight, between the 
 piles, higher up, upon the terraces and upon the 
 heaped blocks of ruined temples, still higher upon 
 balconies and roofs of massive stone, under a forest 
 of straw parasols, the same swarming of brown 
 figures, the same flutter of simple colours. Five 
 nude figures, crouching upon a pillar, abruptly 
 separate, flinging themselves into the water, which 
 splashes up in every direction. Behind these, 
 Brahmans, with lips moving in prayer, are waving 
 branches and monotonously strike the water with 
 them. Below, women emerge from the river, 
 serious and upright in their dripping blue mantles 
 which cling closely, moulding the figure. Crouch- 
 ing on a high marble block, isolated from the 
 crowd, a man wrapped in red silk, motionless, in 
 a hieratic posture regards the sun. Then, strange 
 attitudes and gestures as of maniacs : two women 
 grasping the nose with one hand, and with the 
 
80 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 other striking the breast ; a trembling old woman, 
 her poor body outlined in all its meagreness by the 
 dripping garment, joining her wrinkled hands and 
 whirling six times consecutively. Others, with a 
 rapid vibration of the lips, splash the water metho- 
 dically, making it spurt away from them ; old men 
 in attitudes of river-gods, hold copper vases. And, 
 as background to all this, behind the countless 
 conical chapels on the stairs themselves, a row of 
 eighty temples and palaces. I notice one larger 
 than the rest, a vast rose-coloured cube, sharply 
 relieved against the sky, flowery with balconies, 
 covered with arabesques, notched with colonnettes, 
 pierced by its windows with arched shadows. It 
 flings down to the water's edge its grand staircase, 
 which stretches a broad oblique sheet of glittering 
 white ; and upon its highest steps, nude men are 
 straining their lustrous muscles, brandishing clubs, 
 designing heroic silhouettes upon the marble. 
 
 We have gone over two miles, and the spectacle 
 is the same. The crowd, the architecture, the sun- 
 light, seem to be visions of some opium-dream, 
 where time, space, arid all that they contain, appear 
 enormously magnified and multiplied. Here, as 
 farther down the river, at the foot of the edifices 
 are platforms of wood or stone, making out into 
 the luminous water, and each has its own swarm, 
 a hundred women draped in white, bending over 
 the water ; figures of young men, standing erect ; 
 Brahman s, motionless, meagre, with salient ver- 
 tebrae, bent over, as absorbed in some doleful 
 reverie ; groups of children gambolling around 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 8 1 
 
 funeral piles, on which the dead are burned ; sacred 
 cows, in quiet outlines against the white of the 
 marble stairs ; and from all this moving, praying, 
 singing multitude rises a great noise, a confused 
 rustle of human life. Everywhere on the edge of 
 the great careless river there is the same swarm- 
 ing life, the same vast wave of humanity heaping 
 itself up. 
 
 Thousands of pigeons fly about and light upon 
 cones of temples ; grey crows and great vultures 
 with pendent crops pose upon bases of columns. 
 The air is noisy with the chatter of magnificent 
 parrots ; smoke ascends from the cremation of 
 dead bodies, and here and there the river is black 
 with ashes that have been thrown into it. Great 
 patches of flowers are floating down the current ; 
 prayers without number are ascending to Siva, to 
 Durga, to Ganesa, to Surya, the sun, which has 
 become burning. In presence of the great river, 
 among the pyramids of stone, under the colon- 
 nades of the chapels, at the foot of these huge 
 edifices strange as Indian vegetation and Indian 
 religion swarms the infinite life of India. For a 
 moment you seem to feel, in yourself, the over- 
 whelming sensation which, repeated for genera- 
 tions, modifying the structure of the Aryan brain, 
 has translated itself into their poems and their 
 philosophies. 
 
 Behind individual and perishable existences you 
 feel the force which unfolds itself to produce all 
 things and all lives, imperishable, eternally present, 
 always the same, amid the millions of deaths and 
 
82 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 births which manifest, but do not diminish it. It 
 is this force which they adore ; it is the cult of 
 this force which is the substance of their religion. 
 When once this is understood and felt, it becomes 
 possible to understand the contradictions, the in- 
 coherences, of this complex Hinduism, where a 
 fetichism as of savages is allied to the profoundest 
 speculation ; which adores three hundred and thirty 
 million gods, and also animals, trees, elements, 
 plants, stones ; at once pantheistic, polytheistic, 
 and monotheistic, according to its method of regard- 
 ing the Universal Being, his principal incarnation, 
 certain portions, or the totality of his manifestations 
 in matter or in spirit. This being once understood, 
 it explains the insanities of their imagination, the 
 strangeness of their dreams, which find expression 
 in those interminable, bushy poems, where man, 
 overwhelmed by nature, has for equals and com- 
 rades the monkey, the bear, elephants, plants, 
 insects. In them all there is life, coming and going 
 in waves, dying and being born, multifold, infinitely 
 diverse. And the contrast made it all more clear 
 to me when I saw, above this confused multitude, 
 above this inflorescence of temples, springing up 
 white against the blue of the sky the two minarets 
 of a Musalman mosque. They sprang straight 
 upward, with the ardour of a prayer, with the im- 
 petuosity of a cry ; and one perceived the fervent 
 work of a simple, resolute, monotheistic, and ardent 
 race. 
 
 Noon. I leave the river, and am driven rapidly 
 through the city. Very quickly the lanes, the 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 83 
 
 shops, the chased copper spread out on the side- 
 walks, the temples, the idols in the streets, fly past 
 us. Then, the dusty country. At the hotel it is a 
 strange sensation to come back to European tran- 
 quillity and reasonableness, fine, calm order, correct 
 costume, commonplace and courteous conversation. 
 You fall back into your accustomed place, and the 
 impression of what you have just seen disappears 
 like a dream. And still, a certain disturbance re- 
 mains. If we see a man who makes frantic gestures, 
 talks incoherently, conducts himself differently from 
 the rest of us in all respects, we have no hesitation 
 in saying he acts like a madman. But when you 
 have been alone in the midst of an entire population 
 who are acting thus, you need to be very strong 
 and sure of yourself to express such an opinion. 
 Here, myself and my neighbour at the table d'hote 
 are the exceptions. You doubt, at least, if there is a 
 rule, or an exception ; you lose your bearings ; you 
 have no longer a standard by which you measure 
 things and are accustomed to see others measure 
 them. It impresses you strongly that our European 
 ideas and customs are only local ideas and customs ; 
 that our point of view is merely different from the 
 Hindu point of view ; that, in substance, one is as 
 valid as the other ; and that all fashions of existence 
 are legitimate, in that they exist. By what right 
 have I said that the normal condition of this people 
 is insanity ? 
 
 After tiffin I hesitate in deciding what to do ; 
 outdoors the sun blazes down upon a country 
 which at this hour is entirely deserted. I open 
 
84 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 certain books, that I may seek the meaning of 
 what I have seen. What do these rites signify, 
 these gestures as of maniacs what do they in- 
 dicate ? After an hour's reading the primitive 
 sensation recurs : these men certainly must be 
 mad. 
 
 Here is the daily life of one of the twenty-five 
 thousand Brahmans of Benares. He rises before 
 the dawn, and his first care is to look at an object 
 of good omen. If he sees a crow at his left, a kite, 
 a snake, a cat, a hare, a jackal, an empty jar, a 
 smoking fire, a wood-pile, a widow, a man blind of 
 one eye, he is threatened with great dangers during 
 the day ; if he intended to make a journey, he puts 
 it off. But if he sees a cow, a horse, an elephant, 
 a parrot, a lizard, a clear-burning fire, a virgin, all 
 will go well. If he should sneeze once, he may 
 count upon some special good fortune ; but if twice, 
 some disaster will happen to him. If he yawns, 
 some demon may enter his body. Having avoided 
 all objects of evil omen, the Brahman drops into 
 the endless routine of his religious rites. Under 
 penalty of rendering all the day's acts worthless, he 
 must wash his teeth at the bank of a sacred stream 
 or lake, reciting a special mantra, which ends in 
 this ascription : 
 
 " O Ganges, daughter of Vishnu, thou springest 
 from Vishnu's foot, thou art beloved by him ! 
 Remove from us the stains of sin and of birth ; 
 and, until death, protect us, thy servants ! " 
 
 He then rubs his body with ashes, saying : 
 " Homage to Siva, homage to the source of all 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 85 
 
 birth ! May he protect me during all births ! " 
 He traces the sacred signs upon his forehead the 
 three vertical lines representing the foot of Vishnu, 
 or the three horizontal lines which symbolise the 
 trident of Siva, and twists into a knot the hair left 
 by the razor on the top of his head, that no im- 
 purity may fall from it to pollute the sacred river. 
 
 He is now ready to begin the ceremonies of the 
 morning (sandhyd), those which I have just observed 
 on the banks of the river. Minutely and mechani- 
 cally each Brahman performs by himself these 
 rites of prescribed acts and gestures. 
 
 First, the internal ablution : the worshipper takes 
 water in the hollow of his hand, and, letting it fall 
 from above into his mouth, cleanses his body 
 and soul. Meanwhile he mentally invokes the 
 twenty-four names of Vishnu, saying : " Glory to 
 Kesava, to Narayana, to Madhava, to Govinda," 
 and so on. 
 
 The second rite is the exercise or " discipline " of 
 the respiration (prajayama). Here there are three 
 acts : first, the worshipper compresses the right 
 nostril with the thumb, and drives the breath 
 through the left ; second, he inhales through 
 the left nostril, then compresses it, and inhales 
 through the other ; third, he stops the nose com- 
 pletely with thumb and forefinger, and holds his 
 breath as long as possible. 
 
 All these acts must be done before sunrise, and 
 prepare for what is to follow. Standing on the 
 water's edge, he utters solemnly the famous syllable 
 OM, pronouncing it aum, with a length equalling 
 
86 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 that of three letters. It recalls to him the three 
 persons of the Hindu trinity : Brahma, who creates ; 
 Vishnu, who preserves ; Siva, who destroys. More 
 noble than any other word, imperishable, says 
 Manu, it is eternal as Brahma himself. It is not 
 a sign, but a being, a force ; a force which con- 
 strains the gods, superior to them, the very essence 
 of all things. Mysterious operations of the mind, 
 strange associations of ideas, from which spring 
 conceptions like these ! 
 
 Having uttered this ancient and formidable 
 syllable, the man calls by their names the three 
 worlds : earth, air, sky ; and the four superior 
 heavens. He then turns toward the east, and 
 repeats the verse from the Rig-Veda : " Let us 
 meditate upon the resplendent glory of the divine 
 vivifier, that it may enlighten our minds." As he 
 says the last words he takes water in the palm of 
 his hand and pours it upon the top of his head. 
 "Waters," he says, "give me strength and vigour 
 that I may rejoice. Like loving mothers, bless us, 
 penetrate us with your sacred essence. We come 
 to wash ourselves from the pollution of sins : 
 make us fruitful and prosperous." Then follow 
 other ablutions, other mantras, verses from the 
 Rig- Veda, and this hymn, which relates the origin 
 of all things : " From the burning heat came out 
 all beings. Yes, the complete order of the world : 
 Night, the throbbing Ocean, and after the throbbing 
 Ocean, Time, which separates Light from Darkness. 
 All mortals are its subjects. It is this which dis- 
 poses of all things, and has made, one after another, 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 87 
 
 the sun, the moon, the sky, the earth, the inter- 
 mediate air." This hymn, says Manu, thrice re- 
 peated, effaces the gravest sins. 
 
 About this time, beyond the sands of the opposite 
 shore of the Ganges, the sun appears. As soon as 
 its brilliant disc becomes visible the multitude 
 welcome it, and salute it with "the offering of 
 water." This is thrown into the air, either from 
 a vase or from the hand. Thrice the worshipper, 
 standing in the river up to his waist, flings the water 
 toward the sun. The farther and wider he flings it, 
 the greater the virtue attributed to this act. Then 
 the Brahman, seated upon his heels, fulfils the most 
 sacred of his religious duties : he meditates upon 
 his fingers. For the fingers are sacred, inhabited 
 by different manifestations of Vishnu : the thumb 
 by Govinda, the index finger by Mahidhava, the 
 middle finger by Hrikesa, the third by Trivikama, 
 the little finger by Vishnu himself, while Madhava 
 resides in the thumb. " Homage to the two thumbs," 
 says the Brahman, ". to the two index fingers, to the 
 two middle fingers, to the two ' unnamed fingers,' 
 to the two little fingers, to the two palms, to the two 
 backs of the hand." Then he touches the various 
 parts of his body, and lastly, the right ear, the most 
 sacred of all, where resides fire, water, the sun, and 
 the moon. He then takes a red bag (gomukki), into 
 which he plunges his hand, and by contortions of 
 the fingers rapidly represents the chief incarnations 
 of Vishnu : a fish, a tortoise, a wild boar, a lion, a 
 slip-knot, a garland. There are a hundred and 
 eight of these figures, of which not one should be 
 
38 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 omitted, and the merits attached to these gestures 
 are infinite. 
 
 The second part of the service is no less rich than 
 the first in ablutions and mantras. The Brahman 
 invokes the sun, " Mitra, who regards all creatures 
 with unchanging gaze," and the Dawns, " brilliant 
 children of the sky," the earliest divinities of our 
 Aryan races. He extols the world of Brahma, that 
 of Siva, that of Vishnu ; recites passages from the 
 Mahabharata, the Puranas, all the first hymn of the 
 Rig- Veda, the first lines of the second, the first 
 words of the principal Vedas, of the Yajur, the 
 Sama, and the Atharva, then fragments of gram- 
 mar, inspired prosodies, and, in conclusion, the 
 first words of the book of the Laws of Yajnavalkya, 
 the philosophic Sutras : and finally ends the cere- 
 mony with three kinds of ablutions, which are 
 called the refreshing of the gods, of the sages, and 
 of the ancestors. 
 
 First placing his sacred cord upon the left 
 shoulder, the Brahman takes up water in the right 
 hand and lets it run off his extended fingers. To 
 refresh the sages, the cord must hang about the 
 neck, and the water run over the side of the hand 
 between the thumb and the fore-finger, which is 
 bent back. For the ancestors, the cord passes 
 over the right shoulder, and the water falls from 
 the hand in the same way as for the sages. " Let 
 the fathers be refreshed," says the prayer ; " may 
 this water serve all those who inhabit the seven 
 worlds, as far as to Brahma's dwelling, even though 
 their number be greater than thousands of millions 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 89 
 
 of families. May this water, consecrated by my 
 cord, be accepted by the men of my race who have 
 left no sons." 
 
 With this prayer the morning service ends. 
 Now, remember that this worship is daily, that 
 these formulas must be pronounced, these move- 
 ments of the hands made, with mechanical pre- 
 cision ; that if the worshipper forgets the fiftieth 
 one of the incarnations of Vishnu which he is to 
 figure with his fingers, if he stop his left nostril 
 when it should be the right, the entire ceremony 
 loses its efficacy ; that, not to go astray amid this 
 multitude of words and gestures required for each 
 rite, he is obliged to use mnemotechnic methods ; 
 that there are five of these for each series of 
 formulas ; that his attention always strained and 
 always directed toward the externals of the cult, 
 does not leave his mind a moment in which to re- 
 flect upon the profound meaning of some of these 
 prayers ; and you will comprehend the extraordi- 
 nary scene that the banks of the Ganges at Benares 
 present every morning ; this anxious and demented 
 multitude, these gestures, eager and yet methodical, 
 this rapid movement of the lips, the fixed gaze of 
 these men and women who, standing in the water, 
 seem not even to see their neighbours, and count 
 mentally like men in the delirium of a fever. Re- 
 member that there are ceremonies like these in the 
 afternoon, and also in the evening ; and that, in the 
 intervals, in the street, in the house at meals, when 
 going to bed, similar rites no less minute pursue 
 the Brahman, all preceded by the exercises of 
 
90 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 respiration, the enunciation of the syllable OM, and 
 the invocation of the principal gods. It is esti- 
 mated that between daybreak and noon he has 
 scarcely an hour of rest from the performance of 
 these rites. After the great powers of nature, the 
 Ganges, the Dawn, and the Sun, he goes to worship, 
 in their temples, the representations of divinity, the 
 sacred trees, finally, the cows, to whom he offers 
 flowers. In his own dwelling other divinities await 
 him : five black stones, representing Siva, Ganesa, 
 Surya, Devi, and Vishnu, arranged according to the 
 cardinal points ; one toward the north, a second to 
 the south-east, a third to the south-west, a fourth 
 to the north-west, and one in the centre, this order 
 changing according as the worshipper regards one 
 god or another as most important ; then there is a 
 shell, a bell to which, kneeling, he offers flowers 
 and, lastly, a vase, whose mouth contains Vishnu, 
 the neck Rudra, the paunch Brahma, while at the 
 bottom repose the three divine mothers, the Ganges, 
 the Indus, and the Jumna. 
 
 This is the daily cult of the Brahman of Benares, 
 and on holidays it is still further complicated. 
 Since the great epoch of Brahmanism it has re- 
 mained the same. Some details may alter, but as a 
 whole it has always been thus tyrannical and thus 
 extravagant. As far back as the Upanishads appears 
 the same faith in the power of articulate speech, the 
 same imperative and innumerable prescriptions, the 
 same singular formulas, the same enumeration of 
 grotesque gestures. Every day, for more than 
 twenty-five hundred years, since Buddhism was a 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 9! 
 
 protest against the tyranny and absurdity of rites, 
 has this race mechanically passed through this 
 machinery, resulting in what mental malformations, 
 what habitual attitudes of mind and will, the race is 
 now too different from ourselves for us to be able 
 to conceive. A negro, a Tierra del Fuegan savage, 
 resembles us more than do these people. The 
 negro is more simple than we, nearer to the life of 
 the animals ; but, if we divest ourselves of the un- 
 stable acquirements of our civilisation, we discover, 
 concealed, yet alive, in the depths of our souls nearly 
 all of his instincts. On the contrary, the Hindu 
 soul is as completely developed as our own ; its 
 vegetation is no less rich, but it is entirely different. 
 It is stupefying to see the crowd of ideas, according 
 to us incoherent and absurd, that form the sub- 
 stance of their minds. Each man belongs to a 
 caste, in which, like his ancestors, he is inexorably 
 shut up. At bottom, the idea of caste is as the idea 
 of species among animals. The distinction between 
 a dog and a bull is of the same nature as that be- 
 tween a Sudra and a Brahman. Hence the horror 
 attaching to the idea of marriage between persons 
 of different castes. Notice that to-day the castes 
 are as numerous as the trades and professions. 
 Each Hindu is born a priest or a doctor, a scribe or 
 a potter, a blacksmith or an engraver ; and he be- 
 lieves himself lost if a man of lower caste touches 
 his food or eats at his side. If he quits India, if he 
 crosses the sea, he becomes a pariah : that is to say, 
 he loses his relatives and friends, and can neither 
 buy nor sell, eat, drink, nor live, with any person 
 
92 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 whatever. He is polluted, and nothing can efface 
 this pollution but the supreme purification, the puri- 
 fication " by the cow." Having given large sums of 
 money to the Brahmans, and called together the 
 men of his caste, he swallows the four products of 
 this most sacred of animals, a paste made of the 
 milk and butter and the solid and liquid excrement 
 of the cow. For this animal is one of the high in- 
 carnations of divinity, inferior to the Brahman, but 
 superior to almost all the rest of humanity. 
 
 Our Hindu has many gods, strange deities not 
 well suited to give habits of order and perspicacity 
 to the brain that seeks to conceive of them. In 
 substance they are almost all metaphysical beings, 
 so abstract that they escape the grasp of the ordi- 
 nary mind. For example : Kali is "the energy of 
 Siva," and Siva himself, the eternal power which 
 persists under the change of appearances. These 
 are religious ideas which could not be considered 
 anthropomorphic, scarcely capable even of figured 
 representation. But Kali peoples the temples with 
 her idols. She is a black monster, greedy for blood. 
 Children were formerly sacrificed to her, but now 
 goats are immolated on her altars. No cult is so 
 pleasing to her as the repetition of those of her 
 names which contain the letter M. You think you 
 have grasped her and understand her ; but, be- 
 hold, she is transformed ; she melts away, her 
 attributes change, she becomes identified with 
 Durga, with Parvati, with Samunda. She was 
 black and hideous ; she is now seductive and beau- 
 tiful. Her forms are endless : an enchanting girl 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 93 
 
 of sixteen ; a nude, headless woman ; a stork ; a 
 puff of smoke. 
 
 In the same way Siva is a giant and a dwarf, 
 he has a blue neck, he is clothed in skins, he is a 
 destructive monster, he is a kindly and amorous 
 divinity ; he has one thousand and eight manifesta- 
 tions and a name for each. At times he is confused 
 with Vishnu ; the man intending to worship Siva, 
 worships Vishnu and his diverse incarnations, the 
 fish, the halter, the wild boar, the string. The 
 Hindu also worships Ganesa, and if he writes a 
 book, dedicates it to him as the god of literature. 
 And how does he conceive of this divinity ? As 
 a fat, white Brahman, whose face ends in an 
 elephant's trunk ! 
 
 When the Brahman prays, after having held his 
 breath as long as possible, he repeats, up to the 
 sixty-fourth time, the same mantra. He believes 
 in the supernatural virtue of simple syllables. "Am 
 for the forehead," he says in honour of Durga, 
 " Im for the right eye, Im for the left eye, Urn for 
 the right ear, Um for the left ear, Rim for the right 
 nostril, Rim for the left nostril." Not content with 
 his three hundred and thirty million gods, he also 
 reveres animals, plants, and stones. Sacred cows 
 block up the temples, bulls roam freely through 
 the streets. To buy grass and give it to these 
 animals is a meritorious act. The sacred places 
 are zoological gardens, where pigeons fly, where 
 cows low, where monkeys chatter ; and out of this 
 confusion of men and animals arise strange odours 
 and a marvellous uproar. The monkeys have their 
 
94 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 temple, where no man enters except unshod. A 
 rajah on one occasion solemnly celebrated the 
 marriage of a pair of orang-outangs : a hundred 
 thousand rupees were expended in ceremonies, 
 fetes, and sacrifices. The male monkey, drawn 
 about the city on a car, attended by an army of 
 worshippers, wore a crown ; and the rejoicings 
 lasted two weeks. In the neighbouring city of 
 Allahabad, where snakes are gods, the priests and 
 worshippers creep up to the summit of the hill 
 where the temple stands, with writhings and con- 
 tortions as of snakes ! Peacocks, too, are wor- 
 shipped, and eagles, tortoises, crows, crocodiles. 
 " Pay respect to dogs," says a hymn, " and to the 
 lords of dogs ; to horses, and to the lords of 
 horses." 
 
 The same worship is paid to certain trees, certain 
 flowers, to black stones, to round stones, to stones 
 used as flat-irons, to razors, ploughs, bellows, and 
 scissors. It may be affirmed that there is no crea- 
 ture of the animal world, no vegetable or mineral 
 object, which is not divine in some part of India. 
 In the midst of these mad ideas, there are intuitions 
 of broad scope upon the divinity of Nature, on the 
 radical unity underlying all her manifestations. 
 " Venerate," says the Hindu hymn, " venerate and 
 honour the eternal masculine, Perusha, who has 
 thousands of names, thousands of forms, thousands 
 of eyes, thousands of heads, thousands of arms, and 
 lives for ten thousand million years/' 
 
 Our Hindu has his ethics. An inner voice dictates 
 to him certain actions, which it is meritorious to 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 95 
 
 perform and criminal to neglect. But his code and 
 ours have no similarity whatever. Every society 
 rests upon a certain number of sentiments common 
 to all its members, which check or direct the selfish 
 instincts that would tend to the undue development 
 of the individual at the expense of his neighbours 
 and of the harmonious life of the whole group. It 
 cannot be denied that these sentiments vary ; and 
 as they vary, the form and structure, the power, and 
 the cohesive strength of the society, differ. They 
 may be very simple, as in the ancient cities ; they 
 may be very complex, as in our modern communi- 
 ties, where, slowly, through the ages, extremely 
 diverse circumstances have superposed upon the 
 ancient instincts a great variety of delicate senti- 
 ments. But, simple or complicated, they are a 
 condition without which social life is impossible. 
 With the Hindus ethics have a different origin, it 
 seems, and a different character. They are not a 
 code of duties toward one's neighbour ; they are 
 nothing but a series of prescriptions regulating the 
 external life, actions, food, and dress. Imagine that, 
 in the Middle Ages, had disappeared the social in- 
 stinct which forbade a man to betray, to lie, to steal, 
 to murder, to do violence to women, and also the 
 sense of honour which commanded him to fight 
 bravely, to protect his vassal, to follow his suzerain, 
 to stand by his comrade, to sacrifice himself for the 
 band in which he is enrolled, to keep his plighted 
 word, to be solicitous as to his own reputation. 
 Suppress entirely religious morality, consecrating 
 these sentiments ; and retain only the religious 
 
96 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 observances commanded by the Church, to attend 
 Mass, to communicate at Easter, to confess, fast, 
 observe Lent, have one's children baptized, sub- 
 mit to extreme unction : now multiply these ob- 
 servances infinitely, so that they fill the man's 
 entire life, and you have an idea of the Hindu's 
 moral law. 
 
 It is not forbidden him to lie ; it is not forbidden 
 him to steal : before the English rule, certain sects 
 commanded assassination, or honoured Siva by an 
 organised violation of women. But if the Hindu 
 sees meat eaten, if he swallows a cow's hair in a cup 
 of insufficiently filtered milk, he is lost, condemned 
 to the worst transmigrations to the hells of blood, 
 of boiling oil, of reptiles, of molten copper : more 
 than that, he has a horror of himself, for these 
 commands and these prohibitions are not addressed 
 to the outer man only ; there are sentiments corres- 
 ponding to them, deep-rooted by an observance of 
 twenty-five centuries organic, traditional senti- 
 ments, which form the very substance of the moral 
 nature, enduring through life, entirely independent 
 of changing circumstances or ideas, real categorical 
 imperatives like those which, with us, forbid murder 
 and theft. Intelligent babus, well informed as to 
 our ideas, our sciences, European in philosophy 
 and ethics, have been seen to faint dead away with 
 horror at having by accident tasted bouillon. In 
 1857 the Sepoys, having the idea that the cartridges 
 which they must tear with their teeth were greased 
 with animal fat, revolted like men in desperation 
 and mad with terror. Formerly, when the English 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 97 
 
 were careless about observing the caste rules in 
 prisons, men under sentence for murder would let 
 themselves die of hunger rather than touch the 
 polluting food. To disobey a precept of which the 
 origin and the object are alike absolutely unknown 
 is the Hindu idea of sin the abominable and deadly 
 sin. A strange sin, moreover, for which neither 
 repentance nor subsequent right action can make 
 amends ; and only to be effaced by the mechanical 
 performance of an entirely meaningless act, the 
 repetition of a syllable, a bath in the Ganges, a 
 plunge into some fetid well inhabited by Siva. 
 To touch a Brahman's ear ; to listen to the 
 story of Ganga's descent ; to eat, at certain fixed 
 times, a mixture of rice and peas these are all- 
 powerful means of redemption. Every Hindu 
 knows the edifying story of Ajamil, the assassin 
 saved by Vishnu, because, as he was dying, he 
 called for his son Narayana, and this name 
 designates one of the god's incarnations ; or of 
 Valmik, the robber whom Siva carries away to the 
 paradise of Kailasa, because he had often cried 
 out : " Mar ! mar ! " which means, " Kill ! kill ! " 
 and this word inverted (Ram) is the name of the 
 great Rama ! 
 
 If we look at certain general customs, they mani- 
 fest no less clearly the strangeness, the contradic- 
 tions, in the habitual sentiments of this people. 
 Here on every side, in the streets, are birds living 
 unmolested in the midst of the human crowd ; here 
 are blue peacocks, that wander through the city at 
 will. Observe the hospitals for sick animals, where 
 
 G 
 
9 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 are tenderly cared for all sorts of living creatures, 
 dogs, gazelles, eagles. Is it not a sign of the gentle 
 character, the radical goodness of these Hindus ? 
 But in 1857 they outdid in cruelty the aborigines 
 of America ; and though public human sacrifices 
 have disappeared under the English rule, there is 
 sometimes seen a child's dead body upon an altar 
 of the hideous Kali. Love is unknown in India. 
 Children are married to each other when they are 
 nine years old, then strictly separated till the age 
 of maturity. After that time, the woman is im- 
 mured. Except her female relatives, no person 
 sees her; no friend may make allusion to her 
 existence even in the most remote way. If the 
 husband learns that she has seen a kinsman, has 
 spoken even to a brother, he brands her in some 
 way ; he may, if he will, cut off her nose. As a 
 widow she becomes a pariah, an object of evil 
 omen, whom all avoid with disgust. The married 
 man is not held to fidelity, or even the merest ex- 
 ternal decency. Those offences against morality 
 that we surround with so much reserve and secrecy 
 are here paraded in the open day ; no religious 
 law requires their concealment. More than this, 
 there is a recognised caste of prostitutes; their 
 trade is a sacred duty ; and in the south of India 
 every temple has its troop of bayaderes. A sect of 
 Saktists, worshippers of "the energy of Siva," "the 
 force that develops the world," on their feast-days 
 are even released from all distinctions of castes 
 and ties of relationship. Men and women assume 
 a mystic character ; they are no longer individuals, 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 99 
 
 but direct incarnations of Siva and Kali. " All men 
 are myself/' says the god to the goddess. After 
 drinking wine and intoxicating liquors, eating fish 
 and meat and rice, the union of Kali and Siva is 
 celebrated with inconceivable orgies, and the wor- 
 shippers feel the limits of personality disappear ; 
 they become absorbed in Siva, identified with " the 
 soul of the world." 
 
 This cult is "the path leading to the highest 
 form of salvation " ; absorption, that is to say, in 
 the Supreme Existence. He who follows it is 
 called Siddka, the perfect one ; he who knows it 
 not is a pasu y a beast, an impure being. "For," 
 says one of their texts, "there is salvation in the 
 use of intoxicating liquors and animal food, and 
 in union with women." It is true this is only a 
 sect among the Hindus ; but the point to be noted 
 is that these ideas, which to us appear inconceiv- 
 able and incredible, dwell familiarly in their minds ; 
 that the Hindu does not possess those fundamental 
 sentiments and ideas which, with us, would oppose 
 to notions like these an insurmountable barrier 
 and throw them outside the regular action of the 
 mind; that, moreover, certain kindred notions 
 enter into the daily cult of them all; in short, 
 that, between the Saktist and the ordinary Hindu, 
 the difference is one of degree and not of kind, 
 and that in all the race there exist those germs 
 of mental and moral maladies which, in certain 
 sects, are seen in chronic form and of intentional 
 development. 
 
 Now these are souls strangely constituted, dis- 
 
100 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 turbed, perverted, vitiated from their birth. Into 
 these souls, moreover, there now fall, by chance 
 and in abundance, general ideas from all quarters, 
 like seeds of disease falling into an organism 
 already unsound. Thousands of young Hindus 
 prepare for the examinations which admit to a 
 public career ; and they fill the numerous uni- 
 versities of India. They study Sanskrit, Persian, 
 Arabic, the old Asiatic philosophies, two or three 
 literatures. They are penetrated with the English 
 ideas which are in the air, everywhere about them. 
 In the higher classes, their professors are English- 
 men. From their earliest school days, Addison 
 and Macaulay have been their classics. Later, they 
 attack the philosophers, Hamilton or Spencer. 
 They read English reviews and journals ; here 
 they find literary and political essays, miscellaneous 
 news, statistics, reports of every kind, which de- 
 scribe in detail, dissect, classify, catalogue all the 
 countless forms of English life intellectual or 
 moral, artistic or religious, commercial or social. 
 The novel gives them English types of character- 
 labourers, clergymen, sailors, young girls, squires, 
 business men ; and under all these forms lies a 
 conception of life, religion, duty, love, death not 
 merely that of another race, but of another human 
 nature. Not only are these young Hindus nourished 
 upon foreign ideas, but they live the life of a foreign 
 soul, which thinks, feels, desires, in a manner con- 
 trary to their own. It is an operation which must 
 cause anxiety, this infusion of another blood ; and 
 it may result, like the crossing of very distinct 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM IOI 
 
 animal species, in the production of monstrosities 
 which cannot live. 
 
 This morning, on the river bank, these thoughts 
 occurred to me while I was exchanging a few 
 words with a young Brahman whose intelligent 
 and amiable face had much impressed me. This 
 youth is a pupil in an English school in Benares, 
 and expects to enter the university at Allahabad, in 
 preparation for the Civil Service. He has read 
 Addison ; he is to study the Upanishads. Mean- 
 time he is preparing for the mathematical examina- 
 tions. The question of India for India came up ; 
 he is interested in the congress of Allahabad, which 
 asks for an autonomous parliament. At the same 
 time, he belongs to a caste which he must not 
 quit ; he worships the Hindu gods, pronounces the 
 syllable OM in their honour ; he holds his breath ; 
 he offers flowers to the sacred cows as part of his 
 customary devotions. It must be, of course, that 
 European culture tends to destroy his hereditary 
 faith in all these rites ; but let us not forget that he 
 lives among Hindu cults, that every morning he 
 sees the multitude devoutly splashing in the river, 
 and the Brahmans figuring with their fingers the 
 hundred and eight incarnations of Vishnu ; that 
 the first words he ever heard, those which he 
 still hears most frequently, are religious formulas, 
 sacred syllables, Vedic texts, and extracts from the 
 Puranas ; that, in his presence, his father worships 
 the five black stones, a bell, a vase ; and that this 
 spectacle, incessantly repeated, imprints on the 
 very depths of his being a stamp, upon which 
 
102 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 neither reading nor reasoning can have the slightest 
 effect ; and that, hence, all which seems to us so 
 extraordinary appears to him natural, and those 
 ideas which to us are contradictory of each other 
 in his mind belong together. It is an astonishing 
 intellectual and moral structure, too different from 
 our own to be to us sympathetically conceivable. 
 With much erudition, a European mind may be 
 flexible enough to reproduce for itself the ideas 
 and sentiments, the sequences of images and emo- 
 tions, which formed the soul of a mediaeval monk 
 or of an Athenian architect. This is because, in 
 spite of the passage of centuries, they are not 
 altogether strangers to us ; it is because they make 
 part of the same human group with ourselves ; it 
 is because they were on the path of that slow 
 evolution which has now reached us the historic 
 wave which at this moment lifts us into the light ; 
 they had their share in giving it its direction and 
 its form. The vital sap which circulates in the 
 European of to-day passed through them, as that 
 which nourishes a topmost leaf was elaborated in 
 the dark roots. Something of them survives, and 
 makes part of the accumulated inheritance which 
 the European generations hand down ; for the 
 present contains all the past. Some few men can 
 understand a Greek temple or a prayer of the ninth 
 century. Who of us can really feel a Purana, or 
 a Hindu edifice ? Granted that there was once a 
 certain tie of blood between us and these Indian 
 peoples, the crossing with black races, the secular 
 action of a different climate and different natural 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 103 
 
 phenomena, have destroyed it. Their soul is a 
 composite of a mysterious kind, not only beyond 
 our experience, but outside of what is possible for 
 us to comprehend. We note its manifestations, we 
 perceive the externals physiognomies, gestures, 
 rites, prayers, style, art, customs. The substance 
 of the soul is impenetrable. 
 
 This afternoon, some expeditions hither and 
 yon in Benares. For a very few rupees, I have 
 a barouche with two horses, a coachman, groom, 
 and a peon who accompanies the carriage, running 
 with admirable gravity. These people are naturally 
 silent, serious, with unchanging faces. The trotting 
 peon, in his tight red tunic, who clears the crowd 
 before us, is absorbed in the gravity of his function. 
 His elbows held close in, his chest dilated, his head 
 high, he runs now and then ejaculating a sharp, 
 short cry. 
 
 The division of labour is carried to a great ex- 
 treme here ; there must be the coachman to drive, 
 the groom to open the carriage door, the peon to 
 clear the road. A European in India must submit 
 to all this display. It would be monstrous for him 
 to go on foot, or to carry a package ! An English 
 officer must not go from one place to another 
 without a whole caravan of men and luggage in 
 his train. Last year in London, I heard a corporal 
 relating that in India he would ring for his servant 
 to pick up a handkerchief. Many gentlemen keep 
 a man specially to take care of their pipes. The 
 house of a civilian requires fifty servants ; there are 
 tailors, bakers, washermen, not to mention a crowd 
 
104 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 of people who come every morning for the day's 
 work. Thus at Rome, the patrician had his army 
 of servitors, clients, and freedmen. The white man 
 is here the master, the noble, and many believe him 
 a sorcerer. Secretly, however, he is despised, as 
 ceremonially impure, polluted by the daily use of 
 liquors and meats. In contrast to this serious, 
 quiet, and wily race, he appears coarse, with his 
 noisy laughter, his athletic sports, his many require- 
 ments, his vigorous movements, his activity always 
 conspicuous. His wife, seen in the streets unveiled, 
 outrages all decency. In the scale of being, he 
 ranks far below the Sudra ; a Hindu must have 
 committed many and odious sins to return to earth 
 as a European. At the same time, terror and re- 
 spect prostrate the Indian before his white master, 
 who seems omnipotent with his strength of muscle, 
 with his wealth, his weapons, and his mysterious 
 inventions. What does the Hindu think of these 
 iron threads stretched across the country, or of this 
 black veil under which we put our heads, taking 
 aim with a mysterious box at some edifice ? This 
 morning, for nothing in the world would my boat- 
 men touch a piece of my photographic apparatus. 
 My "boy" awaits my orders, bent nearly double, 
 his arms crossed on his breast, as if he were a slave. 
 All Sepoys present arms to the European traveller. 
 You respond with condescension, half scornful, just 
 moving the head, and fall back in your barouche, 
 which, for thirty cents the first hour, and twelve 
 for the subsequent hours, carries you at a gallop 
 from palace to palace, from marvel to marvel. 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 105 
 
 It is well to accept one's vocation of tourist, and 
 follow your guide with docility. Mine, who has 
 traditions, takes me to the bank of the Ganges, and 
 we cross the river on a barge. This brings us to 
 the palace of the Maharajah. Three broad marble 
 courts give access to the grand hall, furnished with a 
 luxury too conspicuous, half Hindu, half European. 
 
 There is nothing to see here except the gallery of 
 portraits, the ancestors of His Highness, all Kshat- 
 riyas, of the warrior race, the true Aryan conquerors 
 of India, very stiff, very pompous, in their full white 
 robes, one hand on the heart, holding flowers ; or 
 else armed with the strange weapon used in the 
 tiger-hunt. One ancestor standing, his chest well 
 thrown out, like the king in a comic opera, his arm 
 extended and one finger on the head of a large cane 
 recalling the attitude of Rigaud's Louis XIV. his 
 beard spread wide on both sides of the face, poses, 
 with a braggart lordliness and an air of consummate 
 coxcombry. At his side, upon the same wall, the 
 Prince of Wales, very swell and very insipid ; and 
 a portrait of the winner of the Derby in 1865, the 
 great, meagre, classic horse, with his minute jockey 
 in the yellow silk cap ; old chromolithographs that 
 you will see in any English inn, but precious bibelots 
 here in India, and framed accordingly. 
 
 This rajah, who gives a hundred rupees daily to 
 support the sacred cows and to keep up the temple 
 of Siva, was present in 1887 at the Queen's Jubilee 
 in England. It is said he was much impressed by 
 what he saw at that time, but chiefly by the great 
 height of the English horses. 
 
106 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 Opposite, on the other side of the Ganges, in the 
 vast crowd of edifices that border the river, is the 
 temple of the monkeys. There they are, the tawny 
 gods, frisking over the porticos, or hanging by the 
 tail from the notches in the stonework. At sight of 
 us, a great tumult, a great tremor of curiosity ; with 
 supple leaps they gather, chattering, winking, scan- 
 ning our faces with their anxious, piercing eyes. 
 Piously I make my offering, some grain bought 
 of the Brahman who guards the entrance to the 
 temple ; at once an angry whining, sharp outcries, 
 a scramble of hairy bodies, a confusion of sinuous 
 backs. 
 
 As may be supposed, these divinities are not in 
 confinement, like the monkeys of the Jardin des 
 Plantes. The temple is merely their headquarters, 
 whence they sally out every morning to infest 
 the city, pillaging the houses and gardens. An 
 Englishman killed some of them who were steal- 
 ing his fruit ; thereupon there was great uproar 
 in Benares ; he was besieged in his own house, 
 and it was necessary to call out the Sepoys to 
 protect him. 
 
 On Wednesday is the great monkey feast ; almost 
 all of the sacred band remain in their temple. 
 Devotees come in crowds and bring offerings 
 grain, cocoanuts, and fruits. A goat is solemnly 
 sacrificed ; an exciting spectacle, which makes the 
 hairy crests stand on end, the teeth chatter, and 
 the eyebrows draw together in a frown above the 
 sharp little eyes. 
 
 It is proper to visit the Hindu University ; for 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM I O/ 
 
 this Benares is a very ancient centre of Indian 
 culture. Of old its teachers philosophised, and 
 students came from afar to receive instruction in 
 their doctrines. Astronomy, which contemplates 
 the eternal skies, was also much in honour here. 
 This morning I visited an ancient observatory, full 
 of mysterious instruments of stone, covered with 
 strange writings ; and my mind reverted to those 
 obscure ages when this city, unknown to our 
 Europe, elaborated that old Oriental science where- 
 by the inquisitive Brahmans were able to calculate 
 the sun's declination, and the revolution of the stars 
 around the pole. 
 
 Sanskrit has continued to be the language of the 
 pandits here. They use it as the professors of 
 certain Swedish universities to this day write in 
 Latin. At Benares, the old sacred texts are con- 
 stantly explained and commented upon : the Vedas, 
 the great epics, the Upanishads, the Puranas ; 
 some of these Brahmans are known to our Euro- 
 pean Orientalists. 
 
 The English call Benares the Oxford of India, 
 and the university building which they have erected 
 seems brought from Oxford. To see these arches, 
 these square, crenellated towers, these portals, these 
 niches, these clusters of slender colonnettes, you 
 would think yourself at the doors of Oriel or 
 Magdalen. Only instead of the old granite, all 
 exfoliated by time and weather, all stamped with 
 the sadness of the wan sky, this is a stone glittering 
 with light, impenetrated with the felicity and mild- 
 ness of the blue ether. For surroundings, instead 
 
I08 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 of monotonous lawns and the fine, tremulous foliage 
 of the English trees, there are tall, stiff, lustrous 
 palms. Within, under the pointed arcades, there 
 are groups of students gathered around their pro- 
 fessors. But these are not the blond, bold heads 
 that you have seen at Oxford in a hall so similar to 
 this ; fat, gentle, effeminate, Oriental faces, and 
 slender figures draped in soft garments. The pandit 
 Bapu-Deva-Sastri, professor of mathematics, is my 
 guide, and the young men salute us as we enter, 
 with a graceful inclination of the body, the eyes 
 downcast, lifting their clasped hands to their lips, 
 with a repeated gesture. Before a blackboard 
 covered with algebraic symbols, boys are seated 
 cross-legged ; on their heads are velvet caps wrought 
 with gold ; the oval faces, the long eyelashes, the 
 colourless complexions, the beautiful curve of the 
 lips, have an enchanting gentleness and seriousness. 
 
 Further on, older students are occupied with a 
 lesson in philosophy ; two books lie on the pandit's 
 table ; they are Mansel's " Philosophy," and Herbert 
 Spencer's " Social Statics." 
 
 It is difficult to see anything in Benares beyond 
 the streets and the public buildings. Letters of 
 introduction give you access only to European 
 homes; and of the Hindu world you can see scarcely 
 beyond its exterior. However, leaving at this point 
 my guide and his catalogued lists of " sights," I was 
 able to visit two Indian houses. The first is that 
 of the babu Devi-Parshad, dealer in cloth of gold 
 and silver ; little, white, cool rooms, with very low 
 ceilings, and entirely without furniture. The stone 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 109 
 
 walls, adorned with carvings and painted flowers, 
 are recessed in square niches where abide red gods 
 quadrupeds with human faces, the monstrous 
 Ganesa, patron of commerce as well as of literature. 
 Above the gods, English diplomas, awards of ex- 
 positions, as you would see them in a Parisian 
 office. 
 
 At the end of the last room, padlocked doors, 
 which a lad opens for our gratification, keep secure 
 the riches of the house fantastic stuffs woven of 
 precious metal, laces like cobwebs, marvellous silks 
 of the " Thousand and One Nights," sun-colour, 
 moon-colour, which are cautiously displayed before 
 us. In the centre of the room, on a pile of cushions, 
 is enthroned the master of the house, effeminate 
 and nonchalant of face. Seated amid the silks 
 which cover him, he is taking his music lesson, 
 and from his long guitar rise the Oriental ritor- 
 nelles, complicated, dissonant, sad, and eternally 
 the same. 
 
 On the ground, in a corner, a scribe, in a great 
 green robe, is bent over books filled with cabalistic 
 writings. An old, shaven face, thin, compressed 
 lips, an aquiline nose supporting spectacles, the 
 intelligent and austere countenance of an Alsatian 
 schoolmaster. He shows me his sacred cord, 
 which proves him to be a Brahman; I have al- 
 ready seen among men of his caste faces singularly 
 European. Just now, on the shore of the Ganges, a 
 young man had the prematurely old, thin, fatigued 
 features of a Parisian student. Strange power of 
 type, that thousands of years are powerless to 
 
110 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 destroy the same in a Roman bust, in the 
 fldneur of a Parisian boulevard, in a Brahman of 
 Benares. 
 
 While the babu winds his eternal, plaintive scale, 
 this old scribe, who seems very learned, demon- 
 strates to me the relationship between English and 
 Sanskrit. He brings together the words pitar and 
 father, bhratar and brother, duhitar and daughter- 
 well-known parallels which are to-day in all our 
 grammars, but very impressive here, in the mouth 
 of a worshipper of Siva, who looks like one of 
 our own people. 
 
 Then, we go to see the dancing-girls. Their 
 dwelling is in the heart of the city, in the most 
 populous street, in the midst of the bazaar. This 
 endless streaming of the motley crowd, these 
 figures of all colours, this confusion of nudities 
 and floating garments, is always surprising. In 
 the middle of the street the human current flows 
 more freely ; on the side-walks, rows of men are 
 seated, carving in copper, stamping bronze ; mer- 
 chants are busy with their account-books ; others, 
 sitting on the ground negligently abandon their 
 black heads to the barber. 
 
 The street is tortuous, very narrow between the 
 projecting booths, which extend out from the 
 houses, crowded with fruit, with copper ware, 
 with jewelry of coloured glass, and embroidered 
 slippers ; and it is still further narrowed above 
 one's head by a confusion of terraces, balconies, 
 statuettes, verandas, and wooden galleries, which 
 notch the irregular strip of sky. It is an interior 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM I I I 
 
 of the Oriental ant-hill, unchanged in centuries. 
 Such must be " the quarter of the shops " in Bagdad 
 of familiar tales ! 
 
 My "boy" opens a little door which he knows 
 well, and we step into the half-light of a low hall, 
 surrounded by a quadrilateral of slender colon- 
 nettes. There is no one here : only three stout 
 little gods sit, half visible, in their niches. At the 
 end of the hall a dark staircase, up which we 
 grope our way. On the floor above, we are in 
 the abode of the dancing-girls. It is dark, and 
 the air is close, in this great room, with its thick 
 carpet and walls hung with embroidered silk. 
 For furniture, there are cushions ; and from the 
 ceiling hangs a very rich chandelier, extending 
 in innumerable branches, tufty, as all Hindu things 
 are. The atmosphere is perfumed and makes one 
 giddy. On the floor are vases loaded with the 
 inevitable yellow flowers, and there are perfume 
 boxes, whence rise, in spirals, the blue vapours 
 of incense. 
 
 Now we see that it is inhabited, this silent 
 chamber we had thought empty. Seated on the 
 carpets, resting their elbows upon a balustrade, 
 three women are looking idly down into the 
 street. Our entrance has not aroused them from 
 their torpor ; scarcely have they so much as turned 
 their heads. Bronzed faces, very pure outlines, 
 the eyelids and eyelashes singularly long, great 
 black eyes surcharged with languor and volup- 
 tuousness ; yet serious, and with a certain dignity 
 which is not at all impaired by the nose jewel. 
 
I I 2 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 This immobility, this seriousness, this Oriental 
 silence, are always disconcerting. Thus they pass 
 their days, idly reclining, wrapped in their draperies, 
 half asleep in the darkness of this hall, where the 
 perfumed vapours rise and are diffused, watching 
 through the fretwork of the carved wooden balcony 
 the crowds that are streaming past in the narrow 
 street below ; but themselves always hidden, in- 
 visible from without. Sometimes they make bou- 
 quets, they amuse themselves with their flowers, 
 or one of them takes her guitar, and the dark 
 room is filled with the rapid scratching of the 
 strings minor scales of a strange rhythm, in- 
 definitely repeated, curiously involved, ceasing on 
 notes which are not final, which make you expect 
 something further, a music strange and mono- 
 tonous as their life. This is the existence of all 
 Hindu women cloistered in the zenanas. A life 
 like this should produce souls of an extreme 
 simplicity ; but why are these faces so wonderfully 
 serious, and the great dark eyes full of a passion 
 so concentrated ? 
 
 Enters silently a tall, sly Hindu, who talks long 
 and low with my guide. It appears that it is very 
 expensive a nautch one must pay a hundred 
 rupees for it. As I hesitate upon this, it is ex- 
 plained to me that the dancing-girls will be attired 
 in precious stuffs, costumes which have cost thou- 
 sands of rupees : the coffers containing these festal 
 garments are brought for me to see. Indeed the 
 boxes are full of most beautiful things : Benares 
 silks, all stiff with silver stars, delicate gauzes on 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM I 1 3 
 
 which quiver specks of gold laces embroidered 
 with jewels and with the burnished wings of 
 scarabs. The thousand lamps of the great chan- 
 delier will be lighted, and the dance lasts the whole 
 night through. 
 
 It is a strange pleasure the greatest possible, 
 according to the Hindus. There is no festival, no 
 solemnity, without its nautch. When a European 
 of importance arrives at Calcutta or Bombay, the 
 great native functionaries invite him to witness 
 this, and expend ' vast sums to show him four 
 dancing-girls. The European invariably tires ; to 
 all Englishmen who have seen it, this spectacle is 
 an incomprehensible amusement. The foreigner 
 accepts from courtesy, and goes away after an 
 hour, sprinkled with the perfumes, wreathed with 
 the flowers that every host owes to his guest. The 
 Hindu men remain, seated like so many Buddhas, 
 cross-legged, their hands clasped, mute and motion- 
 less ; and so the entire night passes. Observe that 
 there is nothing sensual in the classic nautch ; and, 
 compared with this dance, the most innocent of our 
 ballets would seem free. The women are loaded with 
 draperies ; the more beautiful the stuffs, the more 
 expensive the nautch. Who shall explain the slow 
 intoxication, the beatified drowsiness, the vague 
 torpor, the somnolent, subtle charm which seizes 
 upon these Hindu men, sitting in a row upon their 
 heels ? The tinkling guitar goes on repeating the 
 same sad and confused phrase ; the garments of the 
 dancing-girls flash iridescent hues ; the draperies 
 
 whirl together, then separate ; the gems scintillate ; 
 
 H 
 
114 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 the arms are slowly extended ; the body swings to 
 and fro, or stops suddenly, motionless, in a pro- 
 longed shiver, of a vibration almost imperceptible ; 
 heads are thrown back as if swooning, wrists writhe, 
 fingers stiffen and quiver ; the cithern goes on re- 
 peating its slender, melancholy phrase ; and the 
 hours fly. It is a pleasure analogous to our own 
 in following the slow, graceful curling of a puff of 
 cigar smoke, or the gentle motion of a procession 
 of white clouds against the blue of a summer's sky. 
 The Me is lost for the moment, scattered into space ; 
 there is nothing left but the rhythmic scintillation 
 of those precious stones, the soft undulation of that 
 smoke, the gentle and splendid movement of those 
 clouds. 
 
 Such is my poor attempt at explanation. Ex- 
 terior resemblances to our modes of being do not 
 reveal to us what passes in the interior of these 
 souls. What effort of intelligence or of sympathy, 
 for instance, could make us understand the fact I 
 am about to mention ? On the i5th of July 1857, 
 Nana Sahib gave orders to massacre the English 
 prisoners. The men having been shot in the open 
 air, the women and children, crowded in a bunga- 
 low, were destroyed by repeated firing through the 
 windows. At the end of an hour, the cries within 
 having ceased, Nana caused the dead and the dying 
 to be brought out, and to be thrown into a deep 
 well. That evening the sahib ordered a nautch, 
 and reposing upon a sofa, he passed the night 
 satiating his eyes with the sinuous and serpentine 
 movements of four dancing-girls. 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM I 1 5 
 
 I did not go to see the nautch, finding it de- 
 cidedly too expensive. Besides, my curiosity was 
 somewhat blunted. Instead, I passed the evening 
 at the hotel, upon the verandah, lying in a chaise 
 longue y my "boy" at my side, on the ground, 
 wrapped in his rug. How calm and splendid is 
 the night, broadened by the moonlight which filters 
 through the green masses of the palms, and projects 
 short and well-defined shadows of all the plants ! 
 Overhead, two little silvery clouds repose alone ; 
 and at times the thin, far-off cry of an insect renders 
 the silence more profound. 
 
 In the slow smoke of the Egyptian tobacco float 
 to and fro many things which I have seen to-day ; 
 many images, as yet well defined, but destined to 
 lose their colour, to disappear gradually, to fall into 
 the no more. In the nocturnal peace of this solitary 
 garden, after all the fatiguing daylight, after all the 
 tumult of the Asiatic multitude, how easy to sink 
 into the reverie of the ancient Brahmans ! This 
 noisy world, these luminous visions which have 
 followed one another through the last eighteen 
 hours, how it all appears a dream, an exciting 
 dream, from which one awakens to find one's self 
 tranquil, and so alone in the silence of this broad 
 night ! A dream, the vast river which flowed this 
 morning, shining and muddy, past the rose-coloured 
 temples ; a dream, the black and white multitude 
 swarming on the bank, the wilderness of temples 
 and chapels, the narrow streets beaten hard by the 
 naked feet of the Asiatic crowd. It is difficult to 
 conceive that, at this moment, in this resonant air 
 
Il6 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 of night, the solitary river is whispering and rustling 
 obscurely on the marble stairs from which the 
 crowd has gone away. There is no longer a person 
 there in the presence of the great river. The two 
 hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants of Benares, 
 having quitted the streets, are stretched out upon 
 their braided mats. The Brahmans are at rest 
 from their ceremonial observances. The two thou- 
 sand and fifty-four temples are empty, and the rays 
 of the moon light up the innumerable chapels now 
 deserted, in which the bronze bulls and all the 
 ancient idols are now left alone. Yes, it is difficult 
 to believe that all this is real, river, palace, 
 people, idols, occupying its point of space on 
 a vast globe, eighteen hundred leagues in radius, 
 covered in many other places with other human 
 mildew ; and that this globe bathed on its other 
 side in sunshine, here, in the paler light of this 
 gentle planet is revolving very rapidly and noise- 
 lessly in space ! 
 
 I have before me two sacred pictures which I 
 bought this morning in a booth. They are very 
 childish ; they are rude, and yet carefully finished. 
 The paint, which is used very thick, is applied upon 
 a layer of plaster with which the paper is covered. 
 The personages are represented in profile, but the 
 eyes are as if in a front view, like the ancient mural 
 paintings of Egypt. 
 
 The first represents a beatified Brahman seated 
 on the ground ; his plump body half naked, his 
 hands clasped upon his crossed legs, his rosary 
 around his neck, girt with the thread of the twice- 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM I I/ 
 
 born ; he is looking upon the ground. The head is 
 shaven, the brow bent forward, marked with three 
 horizontal lines ; the moustache white and heavy ; 
 the eyes half closed. There is nothing Oriental in 
 the face, which might be that of a German professor. 
 Only the development of the cranium is enormous, 
 and the expression of immobility is striking. It 
 appears that this man has been dreaming thus for a 
 very long time, and that he will never arouse him- 
 self. All around is a vague green expanse, ending 
 far off in the red of the sky. The man is alone in 
 the immensity of the country. 
 
 The second picture is finer, illuminated in crimson 
 and gold. A Brahman reposes beneath the palms 
 of a forest, his legs folded under him upon a rug 
 and draped ,in yellow drawers ; he is still more 
 plump than the other, with the same soft, inert 
 flesh, which lies in folds and fat ridges. The face, 
 less dull, is not weighed down by meditation, but 
 lighted with serene beatitude. One of his bare 
 arms disappears within the red bag, where his 
 fingers make the sacred figures ; the other holds 
 daintily, between the thumb and fore-finger, a white 
 lotus flower. A golden halo proclaims him freed 
 from future migrations, for ever absorbed in Brahma ; 
 at his feet his disciple, in the white robe of a neo- 
 phyte, with hands respectfully clasped together, 
 listens, kneeling. 
 
 What are they, the solemn words that the blessed 
 one is speaking under the green roof of the palms ? 
 The Upanishads tell us what they are ; and this 
 evening, as I turn over the leaves of the sacred 
 
I I 8 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 books, I seem to understand my two pictures : I 
 can follow the meditation of my first Brahman ; I 
 can hear the religious discourse of the master to 
 his pupil. 
 
 The recluse meditates, his eyes half closed, his 
 massive head inclined toward the ground : 
 
 " Hari ! Om ! This light shining above the sky, 
 higher than all else, in the highest world, beyond 
 which there is no other : 
 
 "This light is also the light which is in man. 
 
 "All things are Brahma. I meditate upon this 
 visible world as beginning, as ending, as breathing 
 in Brahma. 
 
 "This Intelligence whose body is spirit, whose 
 form is light, whose thoughts are true, whose nature 
 is like the ether, omnipresent and invisible, from 
 whom proceed all works, all desires, all sweet per- 
 fumes ; he who envelops all things, who never 
 speaks, who is never understood : 
 
 " He is also the Me'within my heart, smaller than 
 a grain of rice, smaller than a mustard seed, smaller 
 than the kernel of a mustard seed ; 
 
 " He is also the Me within my heart, greater than 
 the earth, greater than the sky, greater than all 
 worlds. 
 
 "As fire, the element, after it has entered the 
 world, while remaining one, becomes many, accord- 
 ing to what it burns ; so the one Existence at the 
 bottom of all things becomes diverse, according to 
 that which he penetrates, and he also exists with- 
 out, in appearances of things. 
 
 " He is the eternal thinker, whose thoughts are 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM I 1 9 
 
 not eternal ; who, although himself but one, satisfies 
 the desires of all. The wise, who recognise him 
 in the depth of their own Me, eternal peace is with 
 them, but not with others. 
 
 " In him does not shine the sun, nor the moon, 
 nor the stars, nor the lightning, still less this fire. 
 When he shines, all shines after him ; by his light 
 all things are enlightened. . . . 
 
 " Beyond the world is the Undeveloped ; beyond 
 the Undeveloped, there is nothing ; this is the end, 
 the limit. 
 
 "This Being is concealed in all things, and is not 
 visible on the outside, but the subtle seers perceive 
 him by their acute and subtle intelligence. 
 
 " He who has known That which no man can 
 hear, or touch, or taste, or feel; which has no 
 form, which does not pass away, eternal, without 
 beginning, without end, unalterable ; that man is 
 saved from the jaws of death. 
 
 "The wise man who knows this Being, as bodi- 
 less among bodies, as immutable among things 
 that change, as omnipresent, this wise man is freed 
 from grief. 
 
 "But he who is not calm and subdued, whose 
 spirit is not in tranquillity, he will never know this 
 Being. 
 
 "Who knows where he dwells, He to whom 
 Brahmans and Kshatriyas are only food,* to whom 
 death itself is but an aliment ? " 
 
 Thus goes on the reverie of the recluse, on his 
 way toward the perfect condition. He has not yet 
 
 * In whom are absorbed the races and generations. 
 
I2O ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 attained it, for he thinks ; and immobility is not 
 yet established in his brain. When the five "in- 
 struments of knowledge " (the five senses) are inert, 
 when the mind acts no longer, then the man is 
 delivered. Then the qualified Brahma which is 
 himself, enfranchised from mode, change, and illu- 
 sion, again becomes the neuter Brahma, the abso- 
 lute, "which is neither cause nor effect, nor this 
 nor that, nor past nor future." Formerly, polluted 
 by ignorance, the man manifested himself in ap- 
 pearances. Now "he is as pure water poured 
 into pure water, remaining the same." As a wave 
 of the sea, losing its form and its impulse, sinks 
 into the sombre depths of the motionless waters ; 
 so the man, emptied of the desires and emotions 
 and thoughts which made up his personality, sinks, 
 disappears, in the calm, black depths of being. 
 
 This is the same doctrine which the Brahman 
 with the golden halo, seated under the palm-trees, 
 unveils to his kneeling disciple, and the following 
 story,* also from the old Upanishads, may serve 
 as a commentary upon my second picture : 
 
 " Hari ! Om ! In those days lived Svetaketu 
 Aruneya. His father Uddalaka said to him : 
 ' Svetaketu, go now to school, for there is no one 
 of our race, my beloved, who, not having studied 
 the Vedas, is Brahman by race only.' 
 
 " Having begun his training at the age of twelve, 
 Svetaketu returned to his father when he was 
 
 * The word Upanishad indicates, according to Max Miiller, the 
 attitude of the disciple, with hands clasped, and eyes fixed upon his 
 master. 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 121 
 
 twenty-four, having studied the Vedas, vain, believ- 
 ing himself very learned, and proud. 
 
 " His father said to him : ' Svetaketu, since thou 
 art so vain, hast thou ever sought that instruction 
 whereby we learn to hear what is not audible, 
 to see what is invisible, to understand that which 
 is incomprehensible?' 
 
 " ' What is this instruction, my lord ? ' the young 
 man asked. 
 
 " The father replied : ' My dear son, as, from a 
 piece of earth, we know all earth diversities being 
 but names and arising from language, the truth 
 being that all these things are earth likewise, 
 my dear son, is that which we learn by this in- 
 struction.' 
 
 " The son said : ' Surely these venerable men 
 know it not. For if they had known, why should 
 they not have taught it to me ? Instruct me then, 
 my lord ! ' 
 
 "< So be it/ said the father. 
 
 "Then, in the forest, the disciple kneels, clasps his 
 hands, and remains motionless. The father, seated 
 on the ground, holding in his left hand the slender 
 stem of the lotus, speaks as follows : 
 
 " ' In the beginning, my dear son, there was only 
 that which is, that alone and nothing second. 
 
 "'Others say that in the beginning there was 
 only that which is not, alone ; and that from that 
 which is not came forth that which is. 
 
 " ' But how could this be so, my dear son ? How 
 could that which is come forth from that which is 
 not ? No ; only that which existed in the begin- 
 
122 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 ning ; that only, and nothing second (that is to say, 
 since there is something rather than nothing, being 
 exists from all eternity). 
 
 "'And That thought : " May I be many ! May I 
 extend myself ! " And from him came forth fire. 
 
 " ' And the fire thought : " May I become many ! 
 May I spread ! " And from it came forth water. 
 
 " ' This is why we see that when a man is warm, 
 he perspires. For water appears upon his body 
 and it comes from fire. 
 
 " ' And the water thought : " May I become many ! 
 May I spread ! " And from the water came forth 
 earth, all solid things, and food.' " 
 
 In the five subsequent Khandas, the disciple 
 learns that all things are made from the union of 
 fire, water, and earth. " In these things also man 
 has his root. 'By means of digested food, this 
 scion, the body, is formed and grows. And what 
 could be its root except the earth and food ? And 
 since earth and food are scions, seek their root. It 
 is water. And the root of water is fire. And the 
 fire is also a scion. And its root is the True One. 
 
 "'Yes, all things have their root and dwelling- 
 place, and place of rest in the True One. 
 
 "'When a man leaves this world, his speech is 
 absorbed into his mind, his mind into his breath, 
 his breath into heat, heat into the most elevated of 
 beings. 
 
 "'And this thing, this subtle essence, the root 
 of all in this, all that exists has its being. It is 
 the True. It is the Being; and thou thyself, O 
 Svetaketu ! art this Being.' 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 123 
 
 "'My lord, deign to instruct me further/ said 
 the son. 
 
 " ' So be it/ the father answered. 
 
 "'The rivers, my son, flow, some to the east, as 
 the Ganges, others to the west, as the Sindhu. 
 
 "'They go from the sea to the sea (that is, they 
 rise from it as clouds, and return to it as rivers). 
 They again become truly the sea. And as these 
 rivers, when they are in the sea, no longer say : " I 
 am this river, or I am that river " ; so, my son, all 
 creatures, when they go forth out of the True, know 
 not that they go forth out of the True. 
 
 " ' In this thing, this subtle essence, all that exists 
 has its being. It is the True, it is Being, and thou 
 thyself, O Svetaketu, art this Being.' 
 
 " ' My lord, deign to instruct me further/ says 
 the son. 
 
 " ' So be it/ replies the father.* 
 
 " ' A man was carried away from his own 
 country by robbers. His eyes being bandaged, he 
 was led into a forest, full of terrors and dangers. 
 And not knowing where he was, he began to weep, 
 hoping to be delivered from his bonds. Then a 
 passer-by had pity upon him, cut his bonds, and 
 sent him back, rejoicing, to his own country. 
 
 "'Our country is Being, the king of the world. 
 This body, made of three elements, fire, water, and 
 earth, subject to cold and heat, is a forest in which 
 we wander. And the bandages upon our eyes are 
 our desires for many things, real and unreal, our 
 wives, our children, our cattle ; and the robbers 
 
 * Here the text has been expanded by a commentator. 
 
124 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 who have brought us into this forest are our actions. 
 (The actions of preceding life which have caused 
 us transmigration, instead of the absorption into 
 Brahma.) 
 
 " 'Then we weep, and we say : " I am the son of 
 such a one, I am happy, I am sad, I am foolish, I 
 am wise, I am righteous, I have been born, I die." 
 These are the bonds which fetter us (individuality). 
 Sometimes we meet a man who knows the Me of 
 Brahma, and whose bonds have been broken. He 
 has pity on us, and instructs us that we are not the 
 son of such a one, that we are not happy or sad, 
 wise or foolish, that we have not been born and do 
 not die, but are only That which Is. 
 
 " ' In this thing, this subtle essence, all that exists 
 has its being. It is the Being, the True, and thou 
 thyself, O Svetaketu ! art this Being.' 
 
 " And Svetaketu understood what his father said ; 
 yes, he understood it. 
 
 "And knowing him who is one, who animates all 
 germs, in whom all unites and all separates, the 
 adorable lord, the dispenser of benefits, Svetaketu 
 entered for ever into peace'' 
 
 This pantheism, which was taught for two thou- 
 sand years, is not the doctrine of an isolated 
 thinker or of a school. It describes in philosophic 
 language the special vision of the world which, more 
 or less clear, has been that of all this race. To 
 understand it, observe the spirit of another human 
 variety, and, together with these old philosophic 
 poems of the Brahmans, read the Bible. What do 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 125 
 
 you find there ? It is lyric poetry : angers, despairs, 
 enthusiasms, hatreds, violent emotions, shocks of all 
 kinds ; all possible feelings of the soul, expressed 
 in brusque metaphors and brilliant imagery, in an 
 abrupt style, in a simple language, incapable of fol- 
 lowing the undulations of speculative thought, but 
 exactly made to render an emotion by a cry. Now, 
 what is the effect upon man of lasting and vehement 
 emotion, but to cause him to fall back upon his own 
 thoughts ? When he suffers, when he hates, he is 
 occupied altogether with himself ; he perceives him- 
 self as distinct from the exterior world which causes 
 him suffering. In an emotional soul, the coherent 
 Me declares itself, stands alone ; and when the man 
 essays to conceive of that which stands behind all 
 things, he conceives of it also as a Me, distinct and 
 omnipotent. 
 
 With these Brahmans the opposite faculties have 
 arrived at opposite results. What do we find in the 
 Vedas ? Poems upon Nature, hymns to the Sun, 
 the Rain, the Clouds, Fire, the Sky, the Earth, the 
 Wind, the Storrn, the Dawn of Day. No subjective 
 personal poetry. Instead of permanent emotions, 
 there is a changeful play of images. The soul is no 
 longer a distinct being, but a reflection of nature, 
 a changeful reflection of its events which change. 
 It becomes the cloud floating in the blue ; it be- 
 comes the sun which rises in the East. When an 
 emotion penetrates the soul, it does but pass through 
 it. It does not remain ; it does not develop slowly 
 into interior, concentrated passion. It is at once 
 projected beyond the man himself, who thus lends 
 
126 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 to the external world his ever-changing and fleeting 
 emotions. If he is joyous, it is the gaiety of Agni, 
 sparkling amid the vine branches ; if he is timorous, 
 it is the timidity of the Auroras veiling themselves 
 in cloud, like blushing girls. In short, instead of 
 concentrating himself in one substance a Me, who 
 wills, acts, bleeds, cries out the Vedic poet is scat- 
 tered abroad through the world ; he diffuses himself 
 in things, his soul is filled with the forms, sounds, 
 colours of nature, and nature is animated with his 
 thoughts and desires. 
 
 These living and divine forces of nature he adores ; 
 but there is something peculiar in his polytheism. 
 Indra, Varuna, Agni, Surya are souls, elemental 
 souls not rigidly shut into a few fixed attributes, 
 not conceived of as distinct, unchanging personali- 
 ties, but varying, floating, capable of reciprocal 
 transformations. This Aurora is also the Sun, the 
 Sun is also Fire, Fire is also Lightning, Lightning 
 is Tempest, Tempest is Rain. Varuna becomes 
 Agni, Agni becomes Surya. They all unite, blend, 
 mutually interpenetrate. There is no permanence, 
 either in the human person, who does not conceive 
 of himself as a person, or in the external world, 
 which is all change. Nothing remains in the whole 
 universe but a whirl of ephemeral thoughts and 
 forms, an ever-flowing stream. The germ of this 
 conception is in the Vedas, but it is in the old phil- 
 osophic poems of the Brahmans that it grows, 
 matures, and attains its full development. In read- 
 ing these poems, we are stupefied at the discovery 
 that the most rooted of our European notions, the 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 127 
 
 idea of the me-substance, does not exist for them. To 
 understand such a mental condition as this we need 
 to recall certain rare and very fugitive moments of 
 our own lives. Every man knows those moments 
 of morbid dream in which the me seems to melt 
 away. One speaks his own name aloud, and it 
 seems to be a meaningless sound, designating no 
 one ; one questions anxiously, " Is there any my- 
 self? " " What does it mean, myself? " 
 
 This strange sensation, with us so transient, is 
 permanent with them. Their personality appears 
 to them only as a point where visions cross each 
 other ; they feel nothing permanent within them- 
 selves. Everything about them is transient, and 
 the doctrine of the universal flow becomes syste- 
 matic : " The body comes from food, that is to say, 
 from the earth ; it attracts to itself external elements," 
 rejects them and attracts others ; thus it grows, and 
 subsists, in a life made up of changes. That their 
 enumerations heap together " water, sky, earth, 
 ether, fire, birds, grass, trees, worms, moths, ants, 
 thoughts, abstractions, the Vedas," is due to the 
 consideration that all these things blend in the 
 universal whirl. As these vapours exhaled from 
 the soil, the sea, animals, plants which, just now, 
 were a part of the soil, the sea, the animal, the 
 plant are mingled, rise, are lighted up in the sky, 
 float, traverse space at random, grow cool, fall, and, 
 as chance wills, become once more soil, sea, plant, 
 animal, things thus unite and separate which we 
 believe to be distinct. "The priest, having become 
 air, becomes smoke ; having become smoke, he 
 
128 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 becomes fog ; having become fog, he becomes cloud, 
 and falls in rain. Then he returns into life as corn, 
 rice, grass, tree, millet." 
 
 Between this view and pantheism there is but a 
 step ; and this step they take in two ways. Since 
 all forms pass, and do but appear, they are illusory. 
 If we take away qualities and modes of being, what 
 remains ? " Nothing," say the Buddhists, " Nada ; 
 the world is not ; nothingness is the only reality." 
 " That which is" says the orthodox Brahmans ; that 
 which is, and of which nothing more can be said 
 than it is; the that, void of all quality ; which is 
 neither this nor that, neither cause nor effect ; in 
 short, the neuter Brdhma, indeterminate, unde- 
 veloped, " which thinks not, wills not, sees not, 
 knows not," Being, pure and abstract. On the 
 surface of this neuter BrahmS, which is attained by 
 pure thought, is the masculine Brahma, living, tan- 
 gible, having colour. For, after considering the 
 one substance which is hidden under the whirl of 
 forms, one may consider the power which organises 
 and keeps up this whirl. Since all is motion in the 
 world, there is a power which guides this motion. 
 Since the world is not inert like a stone, but living, 
 like a tree,* there is a soul which sustains and 
 develops it. This soul is Brahma, the universal 
 germ, " the living and incarnate Me." Since he is 
 living, he has qualities, and is not the same with the 
 neuter Brahma, of which he is only the first mani- 
 festation. He is Brahma, but Brahma now veiled 
 
 * A favourite metaphor with the Brahmans. Often the world is 
 designated by the single word, " the tree." 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 1 29 
 
 by the illusory Maya, Brahma subjected to time. 
 " There are two forms of Brahma : he who knows 
 time, and he wJw knows not time /he who knows 
 time has parts. Time matures and dissolves all 
 beings in the great Me, the living soul ; but he who 
 knows in what time itself is absorbed, he compre- 
 hends the Vedas." 
 
 We must conceive, then, in the beginning and at 
 the root of all things, the absolute Being, pure and 
 void, which is at the bottom of all forms and all 
 germs. Developing itself outward, it is subjected 
 to Maya, illusion. " Like a spider wrapped in 
 threads drawn from her own substance, it assumes 
 qualities coming from itself," and its first projec- 
 tion is the living Brahma, the soul, or subtle and 
 universal idea, "which acts within the world and 
 diversifies it. This soul is neither male nor female, 
 yet neither is it neuter." This it is, which, "be- 
 coming this and that," takes millions of ephemeral 
 forms, all emerging from itself, all falling back into 
 it ; itself fugitive, like all this visible universe, and 
 condemned, after these myriads of millions of cen- 
 turies which to Brahma are as a day, to be absorbed 
 in the neuter Being "which has neither shadows, 
 nor body, nor colour." 
 
 Let it be conceived that the world is an immense 
 tree, solidly rooted in the ground. Whence do 
 they come, these innumerable leaves that rustle in 
 the wind, that glisten in the light, these widespread 
 branches, this delicious fruit, this solid column of a 
 trunk, ever growing stronger, all this lustrous and 
 perfumed vegetation ? They come from a primitive 
 
130 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 germ, now diffused, but still vital and active, alike 
 in the deep, dark roots and in the impalpable dust 
 which gives the petal of the flower its colour and 
 smoothness. Bark, leaves, flowers, cells, all change 
 they die and are renewed, like everything in the 
 world. But the primitive force which reared the 
 tree subsists through all these deaths and births ; 
 gives their form and their order to the ever new 
 and fleeting elements. Whence, then, does it come, 
 this active force which is like the living Brahma 
 that animates the universe ? From the soil, the 
 inert ground, of which one day a portion became 
 organic. This soil is the image of the primitive 
 Brdhma ; from it all proceeds ; to it all returns ; 
 and when, after centuries, the force which sustains 
 the tree shall be exhausted, changes ceasing, de- 
 velopment being arrested, the tree will return to 
 the earth, and again all will be motionless. 
 
 "At this moment, thou art a woman, a man, a 
 child, a young girl, an old man leaning upon a staff ; 
 thou art born with thy face turned on all sides. 
 Thou art the blue honey-bee, the red-eyed green 
 parrot ; thou art the thunder-cloud, the seasons ; 
 thou art the seas. Thou art without beginning, 
 being infinite, thou of whom all worlds are born. 
 But as the flowing rivers which go toward the 
 ocean are absorbed and swallowed up in it, losing 
 their names and their forms, so the sun and moon, 
 the Kshatriyas and Brahmans, mosquitos, bees, 
 flamingos, the devas, Vishnu, Siva, and time itself 
 in which lives the second Brahmd, will be absorbed 
 in the inconceivable existence, and their names and 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 13! 
 
 their forms will be no more." And in reality, at 
 this moment they are not, these forms ; they are 
 only appearances. Brahma, regarding himself in 
 the mirror of time and of illusion, perceives himself 
 as multiple and mutable, but in reality there is only 
 that which is. 
 
 This is no mere theory, no scholastic thesis, no 
 philosophy framed by idle speculation, but an 
 active, practical, deeply-rooted belief, elaborated 
 by solitary and concentrated meditation. Thrown 
 back upon himself, absorbed in reflection, the 
 Brahman no longer distinguishes the real world 
 from that of his dreams, and sees it floating to 
 and fro like a vapour. Hence the tie which 
 attaches him to this world has no strength. How 
 can a man love that which is known to be unreal? 
 Why seek to grasp what must inevitably slip from 
 the hand ? 
 
 " O holy one ! what profits it to be happy in 
 this vile and fragile body, an accumulation of bones 
 and blood and skin, of nerves, marrow, flesh, tears ? 
 What profits it to be happy in this body, which is 
 assailed by hatred, covetousness, envy, deception, 
 fear, anguish, jealousy, the separation from friends, 
 hunger, thirst, old age, death, disease, suffering ? 
 And we see that all is perishable, flies and moths 
 and other insects, grass and trees, which grow 
 up and decay. Look back toward those who are 
 no more ; look forward to those who as yet are 
 not. Men ripen like grain, they perish ; and, like 
 grain, they spring up anew. There have been 
 powerful men, strong to draw the bow, chiefs of 
 
132 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 the people, Sudyama, Asvapati, Sasabindu, and 
 kings, who, with their families about them, have 
 abandoned their great felicity, and gone forth out 
 of this life ; and what has become of them ? The 
 great oceans dry up, the mountains fall, the polar 
 star changes its place, the earth will be submerged, 
 the gods also will pass away. In a world like 
 this, why desire to be happy ? Oh, bend toward 
 me ! In this world I languish, as a frog in a 
 dry well ! " 
 
 Thus the King Krihadhrata bewailed himself, 
 who, cutting off the root of desire in his heart, 
 had taken refuge in the forest. For a thousand 
 years he remained there, with lifted arms, look- 
 ing at the sun, motionless like his brethren, the 
 gymnosophists, who sit solitary in the Indian 
 jungles. For to immobility all Hindu philosophy 
 practically leads. Illusion being recognised as 
 such, what is more natural than a wish to escape 
 from it ? And how succeed in doing this, unless 
 by destroying in one's self all that makes part of 
 this illusive and fugitive world, namely, desire, will, 
 sensation ? Meditation has made a void within 
 the soul ; there remains to him no further motive 
 of action ; he understands that nothing is worth 
 the trouble of a motion, and that he himself does 
 not exist ; he seats himself upon his heels and 
 meditates. 
 
 Upon what does he meditate ? Upon Brahma. 
 The knowledge of Brahma is enfranchisement. 
 The Brahma who is one's self, and who perceives 
 himself to be diverse and mutable by the very 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 133 
 
 fact that he recognises himself as Brahma, turns 
 away from the magic mirror of Maya. Let us 
 repeat " I am Brahma," " for he who knows that 
 he is Brahma, is one with Him who is One." 
 Beyond the misty veil of appearances, let us strive 
 to behold Him who is : immediately all barriers 
 of our limited being falling, we become again the 
 eternal and infinite, returning finally into that 
 whence we came forth. It is a singular fact that 
 here, for the first and possibly for the last time, 
 the human being attaches salvation, not to acts, 
 not to faith, not to emotions, not to ceremonies, 
 but to knowledge. 
 
 "Those whose conduct is good, who read the 
 Vedas and perform the sacrifices, will ascend after 
 death to the abode of the devas, but the fruit of 
 their good works being consumed, they return into 
 this world, for they are without knowledge. They 
 are born in new forms, they have will and power 
 and sensation, they live again. This is the worst 
 suffering, and can only be escaped by becoming 
 absorbed into the unconsciousness and inertia of 
 pure Being. The man who sees a difference be- 
 tween Brahma and the world goes from change 
 to change, from death to death." That is to say, 
 he will for ever be reborn. 
 
 That a man may enter into calm, he must hold 
 his breath, fix his attention, destroy his senses, 
 cease from speaking. He presses his palate with 
 the tip of the tongue, breathes slowly, looks fixedly 
 at a point in space, and thought ceases, conscious- 
 ness is abolished, the feeling of personality vanishes. 
 
134 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 " We shall cease to feel pleasure and pain, having 
 attained immobility and solitude." The human 
 existence, recognising itself as the absolute Being, 
 is rid of time and space, of number, limit, and 
 quality. " As a spider rising by means of its own 
 thread gains the open space, so he who meditates 
 rises by means of the syllable OM, and gains in- 
 dependence." "That which is without thought, 
 though situated at the heart of all thought ; * that 
 which is hid, though at the foundation of all things 
 let a man plunge his soul into this, and his being 
 will go forth free from its bonds." Thought and 
 will being abolished, the whole phantasmagoria of 
 Maya disappears : " We become like a fire without 
 smoke, or like a traveller, who, having left the 
 carriage which brought him, watches the revolution 
 of its wheels." " Grief can no longer live in us ; he 
 who knows Brahma is for ever consoled." That 
 is to say, we comprehend that we are nothing but 
 a spark of the one absolute Being ; henceforward, 
 what suffering could reach us ? " We no longer 
 say : this body is myself, I am such a person ; but 
 / am Brahma, I am the world'' " Pure, unde- 
 veloped, tranquil, unbreathing, bodiless, eternal, 
 immutable, imperishable, firm, passionless, unborn, 
 independent," I have forever entered into peace, 
 for I have thrown off conscious existence. Such 
 is the supreme felicity, reserved for the adepts 
 of the mysterious doctrine celebrated by the 
 Upanishads with a solemnity of language which 
 gives an idea of the fervour, the enthusiasm, the 
 
 * Cf. Spinoza. 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 135 
 
 tremor of restrained hope wherewith the Brahman 
 is thrilled, as he looks forward to that day of de- 
 liverance after which he will never again say Me y 
 of himself. " He who, knowing the Vedas and 
 having repeated them daily in a consecrated place, 
 having made no creature surfer, concentrates his 
 thoughts upon the Existence, and is absorbed 
 therein, attains the world of Brahma, and returns 
 no more ; no y he returns no more'' 
 
 Thought, cast into a metaphysical vertigo and by 
 its own effort abolishing itself, and the annihilation 
 of the will, are intellectual and moral effects of 
 the Brahmanic philosophy. We see this philosophy 
 emerge from a primitive tendency manifested far 
 back in the Vedic age, and unroll the series of 
 these results. That they are inevitable appears 
 clear, when we observe that elsewhere the same 
 causes have produced the same effects. We can- 
 not consider nations for the case of India is 
 unique but we may individuals, for it is surely 
 legitimate to compare the average soul of a race 
 with some individual soul, observing in both the 
 same structure and the same ties. We have had 
 Hindu minds in Europe. In England, where man 
 is so valiant and so active, where personality is so 
 strong and stable, where poetry is so subjective, 
 where religion is a monotheism so Hebraic, Shelley 
 was almost such. Critics have long since noted in 
 him faculties analogous to those which wove the 
 Vedic myths. No poetry is more impersonal, no 
 sympathetic imagination more capable of repro- 
 ducing the elemental sensations of elemental beings 
 
136 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 the gladness of the earth revolving in the light 
 of space, with its girdle of seas and continents, its 
 forests, its clouds, its humid blue atmosphere ; the 
 peace of the splendid cloud floating in the warm 
 ether, then laughing in the thunder and falling in 
 the rain, mother of future harvests ; the ecstasy of 
 the lark, intoxicated with the sight of the luminous 
 plains, quivering with joy, throbbing invisible in 
 space, 
 
 " Like an unbodied joy whose race has just begun," 
 
 and the timid affection of the fragile plant dream- 
 ing of its future buds. Shelley became earth with 
 the earth, a flower with the flower, a brook with 
 the brook, and his poetry is a changeful reflection 
 of changeful nature. He was destitute of that 
 durable emotion on which personality is founded ; 
 the sensation of the Me, with him, was reduced to 
 its minimum. He is always speaking of that 
 ecstasy in which the observer becomes one with 
 the object contemplated. His soul is not distinct, 
 isolated in nature, but is all scattered through it. 
 Hence, all natural objects appear to him to be 
 alive and to have a soul ; to be capable of sensa- 
 tions ; and, moreover, to be constantly in motion, 
 ever changing, always undergoing transformation. 
 The sensation of Life of Life at the same time 
 one and multiple this is what his poetry ex- 
 presses. He recognises a soul of the universe, 
 a soul of which we are the thoughts, into which 
 death absorbs us, which quivers in the worm 
 and in the star; a soul of which nature is the 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 137 
 
 mystic garment, hidden under the things which 
 are seen, and, at rare moments, shining through 
 beautiful and noble forms, as a pale flame within 
 a vase of translucent alabaster. Let a man re-read 
 " Prometheus Unbound," where all beings unite in 
 chorus, and especially that marvellous dialogue of 
 the Earth and the Moon, and let him say if the 
 poet were not intoxicated with that universal, 
 eternally-upspringing life which circulates through 
 all things ; if he were not transported by the vision 
 of the living Brahma displayed in sounds, and 
 perfumes, and colours. Beyond this, Shelley never 
 went. He never perceived the neuter Brahma, 
 motionless, without qualities. Of the two stages of 
 Hindu intelligence and feeling, he passed through 
 the first only. He knew the dream, the gaiety, 
 the ecstasy of the Vedic poets ; he never attained 
 to the inertia of the gymnosophists. A pantheist 
 he was, but with a joyous pantheism, and he re- 
 mained valiant and sound. 
 
 Amiel is a case more nearly complete. He pene- 
 trated beneath the living Brahma, he became be- 
 numbed with the torpidity of the "enfranchised" 
 Brahman, and his aptitude for reverie and specula- 
 tion, the paralysis of his will, had exactly their 
 point of departure in the plastic faculty which we 
 have noted as the origin of the Hindu pantheism. 
 "My mind," he says, "is the empty frame of a 
 thousand effaced images. It is without substance, 
 being now form only. To return into the body 
 has always appeared to me singular, an arbitrary 
 and conventional thing. I appear to myself as a 
 
138 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 receptacle of phenomena, as a subject without fixed 
 individuality, and hence, resigning myself only with 
 an effort to the role of an individual, the inhabitant 
 of a certain city, in a certain country." 
 
 From this habitual sensation of seeing in the 
 universe only a misty dream wherein appearances 
 come and go, the distance is short to pessimism 
 and immobility. Hindu inertia, Hindu pessimism, 
 Hindu pantheism, these three stages, of the will, 
 of the emotional nature, and of the intellect, Amiel 
 traversed. He recognises himself as akin to the 
 Brahmans : " This mental phantasmagoria lulls me 
 as it does the Indian yogi ; to me, everything is 
 smoke, illusion, vapour, even' : my own existence. 
 I attach so little importance to all phenomena that 
 they pass over me like gleams of light, and are 
 gone without leaving a trace. Meditation is like 
 opium ; it intoxicates, and reduces to transparent 
 vapour the mountains and all that is." This is 
 the hallucination of the solitary Brahman, who, 
 concentrating his thought, sees the procession of 
 the worlds rising like a mist, for thousands of 
 centuries, out of the empty darkness of being. 
 Amiel's reverie embraces the whole world. " Each 
 civilisation," he says, "is like a thousand years' 
 dream, in which heaven and earth, nature and 
 history, appear in a phantasmic light, performing 
 a drama invented by the hallucinated soul." He 
 seems to himself no longer a solid substance ; he 
 melts, and becomes a vapour like everything else. 
 " I am fluid as a phantom, which is seen, but 
 cannot be grasped. I resemble a man to the same 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 139 
 
 extent that the manes of Achilles, the shade of 
 Creusa, were like human beings. Without having 
 died, I am a ghost. Others appear to me as a 
 dream ; I am a dream to others." Such is the 
 strange sensation which, repeated upon successive 
 generations, has produced not only Hindu philo- 
 sophy, but many of the characteristics of Hindu 
 civilisation. Observe that there is not a fact noted 
 in these two volumes of Amiel's " Confessions," not 
 a detail of real life. Naturally, when one is de- 
 voted to the contemplation of the infinite, and 
 occupies himself with the absolute, how should he 
 be interested in the accidental and the limited ? 
 When the whole world seems a vapoury illusion, 
 why should a man care to study it, in the view 
 of finding for himself the best place there ? The 
 solid foundation upon which we rest our seventy 
 years of human life disappears all at once, and 
 the individual, losing his interest in the real and 
 visible world, loses also his hold upon it. 
 
 This is the case in India. With the exception 
 of philosophy and astronomy, which treat of what 
 is eternal, the Hindus have had no sciences. They 
 have not had, as the Greeks had, the curiosity 
 to seek out the laws which govern facts ; they 
 have not enlightened their obscure vision of nature. 
 Certain of the Upanishads seem written by chil- 
 dren or insane persons. Dogs and flamingos con- 
 verse and philosophise. There is no history. This 
 abundant literature is all reverie and metaphysics. 
 Not a date, not an anecdote, not a serious gene- 
 alogy. Almost all that we know of the greatest 
 
140 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 religious event of Asia reaches us through the 
 accounts given by Chinese pilgrims. Of Buddhism 
 we are told neither when it begins, nor how and 
 when it disappears from India. But what more 
 foolish than to study social conditions, civilisa- 
 tions, the history of mankind, if mankind, society, 
 civilisation, are, as Amiel says, only dreams pro- 
 jected by the soul, only waves rising for an instant 
 on the surface of Brahma ! As a matter of fact, 
 there is here no effort at social organisation, no 
 precise grouping in states or nations, no consti- 
 tution definite and secure. Once Brahmanism is 
 established, and the philosophic dream begun, there 
 is no resistance to attacks from without. Her civil, 
 military, and political organisation being rudimen- 
 tary, India, incapable of definite form, is gelatinous, 
 so to speak ; vague, incoherent, powerless, at the 
 mercy of the first aggressive comer, Musalman or 
 English, what does it matter to her, provided only 
 she is left to her dream of that which is durable, 
 that which truly is, a knowledge of which enfran- 
 chises from sorrow ; provided only that she is 
 permitted to intoxicate herself with Being, in the 
 repetition of the syllable OM which gives peace ! 
 
 December 2. 
 
 This morning I return to the river bank. To 
 understand Brahmanic India, no spectacle is so 
 useful as a sight of this people in their out-of- 
 door life on the bank of the sacred Ganges. Here 
 they pray, they loiter, they converse, they eat, 
 they fall asleep, they die. Upon litters the sick 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 
 
 and the dying lie extended, some of them brought 
 from great distances to end here. Even the form 
 that was once a living being is destroyed in the 
 presence of the river ; for here is the place of 
 cremation. There are the funeral piles, and near 
 them the unconcerned crowd continues splashing 
 in the river, praying, drawing water, performing 
 its ablutions. A few steps distant from the sad 
 spot, men turn their backs to it, and dry them- 
 selves calmly, sitting in the sun. Like a natural 
 and familiar occurrence, the dissolution of the 
 individual goes on amid the general life of which 
 it is but an incident. There is nothing frightful 
 about it. Certainly, to the Hindu, the Me has 
 not that strength of coherence which makes us 
 believe in its inevitable permanency, which gives 
 to us will to live, and will not let us think without 
 horror of annihilation. After a body has been 
 burned, the relatives do not weep, but sing : " Is 
 it not folly to wish anything lasting in man ? Is 
 he not fleeting as a bubble on the water, frail as 
 the stem of a flower ? Earth, ocean, and the gods 
 must perish. Why, then, should not the world 
 of men, evanescent as foam, be seized by universal 
 death, and perish also ? " 
 
 I watched it take place, this disappearance of 
 a human form. A Brahman presides over the 
 cremations, ensconced in a dark rectangular niche 
 at the top of a small square tower, impassive, a cap 
 on his head, the meagreness of his body visible 
 through his yellow garment. At the foot of the 
 tower are heaps of wood, and here and there, as 
 
142 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 if thrown down carelessly, tightly strapped in pink 
 or purple coverings, secured within four green 
 bamboos, lie rigid figures. Two fires are burning : 
 on one the corpse is still intact, the limbs secured 
 with cords as if trussed for the spit ; the other pile 
 has just ceased blazing, and tiny rose-coloured 
 flames are quivering over the ashes and charred 
 wood and calcined bones. Then the horrible 
 heap is thrown into the Ganges, and floats slowly 
 away on the tranquil current. The brown stain 
 broadens, then disappears, on the smooth surface 
 of the heavy water. All around there is a vague 
 dazzle of colour in a mist of light, a confused 
 rustling, and the splendid flight of screaming birds. 
 
 Every day this scene is repeated. There is noisy 
 music of gongs when an old man is burned ; but 
 if the person is very young there is wailing, and 
 a mourning procession walks round the pyre. 
 
 Between the palaces which crown the ghats, the 
 flights of stairs ascend broad at the water's edge, 
 and growing narrower till they vanish under dark 
 doorways. On the steps, women, statuesque in 
 their blue draperies, very upright, support grandly 
 with lifted arms the vessels full of river water, the 
 heavy copper jars that they carry on their heads. 
 Others carry baskets full of white flowers, and 
 place them in front of tranquil cows. 
 
 I make my way upward through narrow lanes, 
 full of white light, where the shadows are sharply 
 outlined on the pavements. On the walls blue 
 elephants are marching up, loaded with gods. At 
 the corners of the houses are altars or little temples, 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 143 
 
 where the ceremonial flowers are in heaps before 
 grotesque images. Through windows somewhat 
 of the indoor life can be seen ; always the same 
 low square rooms with their range of colonnettes ; 
 dark courtyards, sculptured walls. Around us there 
 are more and more monsters and chapels, crowded 
 and heaped one upon another ; there is an orgy 
 of sacred figures, shrines, altars, in the tortuous 
 lane. The white eyeballs of gods gleam in the 
 shadow, their multiplied arms writhe, their mouths 
 grimace frightfully. This one is Mahakal, or the 
 Great Fate ; this is the god Bhaironath, chief 
 policeman, who keeps order in Benares, and his 
 club is also a divinity, represented by a stone 
 covered with a mask ; this is the genius of the 
 planet Saturn, whose silver head emerges from a 
 platform; this is Anupurna, "the good goddess," 
 who feeds all her worshippers ; and here, as every- 
 where else, is the son of Siva, the astonishing 
 Ganesa, seated, his legs crossed, his stout waist 
 girt with the Brahman's sacred cord, and his red 
 elephant's trunk lying on the ground in volumi- 
 nous folds ; while, at the feet of the huge clumsy 
 divinity, is the tiny mouse, bridled and saddled, 
 which serves him as a courser. Across gratings I 
 catch a rapid glimpse of a Brahman seated on the 
 ground before the idol whose guardian he is, his 
 eyes fixed, his meagre limbs motionless. In dark 
 corners are sacred wells, into which the crowd 
 throw flowers the well of Fate, that of Science, 
 that of Mankarnika. 
 
 As we advance, it is with difficulty that we force 
 
144 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 our way through the crowd. The narrow lanes 
 are made still narrower by projecting stalls where 
 there are masses of rosaries and statuettes, and, 
 especially, great yellow heaps of jasmine. The air 
 is thick with the odour from all these people, these 
 flowers, and these wells of stagnant water ; we 
 make our way onward through the noise of prayers, 
 confused, elbowed, crowded, carried by the multi- 
 tude, pushed against by a hundred screaming 
 beggars ; and always there are rows of idols, and 
 chapels whose porches are guarded by motionless 
 fakirs. Finally an odour more nauseating, [of fetid 
 mud as from a cow-yard, together with decomposed 
 flowers, announces the great temple of Siva. Here 
 is its gilded dome, here are its towers, not isolated 
 in an open space, but crowded close by houses, 
 encroached upon by shops, rising in the very heart 
 of these lanes. This is the centre of the Hindu 
 ant-hill ; and, like an ant-hill, it is in feverish, dis- 
 orderly agitation. There is no common action on 
 the part of this multitude ; each is going his own 
 way, regardless of every one else. Old women 
 of Brahmanic race, white-faced, in their white 
 draperies, toothless, stumbling, muttering, go by 
 like sleep-walkers ; with hysterical gestures they 
 throw flowers upon the ground, or sprinkle it with 
 Ganges water. In the presence of all this multi- 
 tude, priests, with sanctimonious air, sit drowsing 
 in the sun, at the entrance of the temple. There 
 are men running rapidly around two trees; there 
 are others calling upon Siva, and striking bells 
 hung in a row before his sanctuaries. There are 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 145 
 
 files of trembling old Brahmans, grey-haired and 
 ill-shaven, who, leaning against each other, advance 
 with difficulty ; there are mendicants with white 
 skin, of a wan white, entirely white hair, and a 
 sort of collar of greyish beard. Many faces quite 
 European catch your eye for a moment, then are 
 lost in the crowd. You recognise very rapidly 
 the fellow-Aryan, the man of our own race, but 
 brutalised or enfeebled in mind by successive 
 invasions, by tyrannies, by the burning climate, 
 by centuries of suffering. The look is strange, 
 fevered, or idiotic. There is an air of insanity 
 everywhere. 
 
 Within the temple, on the black pavement, 
 slippery with mud and the crushed flowers, this 
 eddy of the human tide carries us at random, 
 under colonnades, past infected wells, where men, 
 leaning over, are anxiously seeking to see their 
 own image in the water ; past a colossal statue of 
 a bull in red stone, into a sacred cow-house, where 
 the animals, their mouths filled with flowers, their 
 eyes shut, regally accept the worship of the insane 
 multitude ; and, suddenly, a shiver of terror I 
 have brushed against an indescribable object, a 
 naked creature of uniform grey colour, rigid as 
 stone a fakir, covered with ashes, who seems to 
 be dead, and does not even start at the collision ; 
 and now, hustled by the crowd, suffocated, terrified, 
 I find myself, without any idea how, again among 
 the little lanes where the flowers are sold. From 
 here I see the human wave flowing slow, a dense 
 crowd around the pagoda. The portico is guarded 
 
146 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 by mendicant Brahmans, old bald-heads nodding 
 with stupor. Above them, the painted image of 
 the lord of Benares, the ascetic god, Siva, who 
 creates and destroys, emblem of the Power which 
 reproduces all beings, and, from millions of deaths, 
 calls forth millions of lives. 
 
 December 3. 
 
 After a few days passed in this Hindu world, the 
 mind begins to be filled with Hindu impressions. 
 To-day, in leaving the temple of Siva, it seemed 
 to me that, under these diverse images, I begin to 
 make out a fundamental idea, as, in the different 
 notes of a musical instrument, you recognise the 
 same timbre. 
 
 Observe this vase of Benares brass. You admire 
 the lustre of the metal, the fineness of the chasing ; 
 but these are only peculiarities of brass vases. 
 Observe another characteristic more interesting, 
 because very general : what does all this chasing 
 represent ? At first sight, you scarcely know ; it 
 seems only a confusion of lines, curving, interlaced, 
 entangled by chance. By degrees, vague forms 
 are discernible gods, genii, fish, dogs, gazelles, 
 flowers, grass ; not grouped after any design, but 
 thrown together, piled one over another in a con- 
 fused living heap, like the slimy mass brought up 
 in a net, where, amid the seaweed, you can discern 
 claws that move, scales that glitter, and the twisting 
 and writhing of soft creatures. So, every one of 
 these chasings is endlessly complicated ; these gods 
 have their six arms ; these plants extend in every 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 147 
 
 direction with stems and leaves ; these flowers are 
 entwined and twisted into each other. In short, 
 nothing is simple ; everything is multiple, tufty, 
 and this complexity, for want of leading lines, 
 remains irregular. 
 
 Accumulated number, without order or propor- 
 tion, is the characteristic to be discovered here at 
 every moment : in this inundation of divinities who 
 overflow their temples and fill all the streets with 
 their multitude ; in this ant-hill of men of every 
 colour and caste, which rustles in the morning 
 on the river bank ; in this human wave which just 
 now swept around the images of Siva ; in this con- 
 fusion of chapels, altars, sacred wells, statues of 
 animals ; not forming simple, geometrical figures, 
 as in ancient Egypt, where avenues of sphinxes, 
 ending in pyramidal pylons, gave access to rec- 
 tangular courts, but scattered at random, in 
 tortuous lanes, amid shops and houses. This 
 characteristic appears, again, in the strange archi- 
 tectural constructions, where stone grows out of 
 stone, as a leaf out of a leaf; and torsos, heads, 
 arms, legs of gods innumerable, bodies of quadru- 
 peds and of snakes abound, crushing each other, 
 rising in a confused pyramid of living forms. 
 Spontaneously, owing to a special construction of 
 the Hindu mind, things appear to these people 
 as infinitely complex. While the Greek was espe- 
 cially sensible of the correct and the well-ordered, 
 the Hindu perceives chiefly the multitudinous and 
 the diverse. External nature does not seem to 
 him a harmonious and limited whole, but 
 
148 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 rather an immense vegetation, with ever-increasing 
 branches, an inextricable network of offshoots, all 
 growing vigorously and unrestrained. 
 
 To understand the Hindu point of view, contrast 
 it with our theistic position. These people of 
 India never conceived of an intelligent and moral 
 architect of the universe, who made man in his 
 own image, by intelligence and reason, sovereign 
 of the creation which, in perfect order, in classes 
 and species and genera, lay below him. They do 
 not feel themselves separated from creation, but 
 brothers of all living things, making part of Nature, 
 born of her, and yet oppressed and crushed by 
 her grandeur and multiplicity. They fix no date 
 of six thousand years ago for the beginning of 
 things. Consider those gigantic poems, those end- 
 less enumerations, those prodigious accumulations 
 of figures, those myriads of millions of centuries, 
 those frantic metaphors prolonged beyond all pos- 
 sibility of the mind's following them, by which 
 Hindu authors strive to figure the immensity of the 
 universe, the infinity of space and time ; and you 
 will perceive that they have had,, carried almost 
 to vertigo, the sensation of the illimitable ; not an 
 abstract, mathematical infinity, which can be ex- 
 pressed by a symbol, but the living illimitable, 
 wherein grow, unite, contend, all forms and all 
 forces, and to symbolise which all their work, in 
 its extravagance and disorder, aims. 
 
 The present religion of India is a Hindu work, 
 as complicated, irregular, and multitudinous as a 
 pagoda-roof or the chasing of a Benares vase. It 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 149 
 
 was developed out of Brahmanism, as leaves, 
 flowers, seed, grow out of a straight and simple 
 stem. First, say the old Brahmans, there is one ; 
 then he becomes three ; then five, then seven, then 
 nine ; then they say he is eleven, and a hundred 
 and ten, and a thousand and twenty. It is these 
 thousand and twenty forms of Being, that is to say, 
 the infinite variety of these forms, which Hinduism 
 adores. As they are of every kind, vague and 
 diverse, so the religion will be diverse and vague. 
 Its sects, its rites, its divinities, its doctrines are 
 innumerable. It is impossible to grasp it, to dis- 
 cover its dogmas and fundamental articles of faith, 
 to disentangle its great general outlines. There is 
 everything in Hinduism. Take all the beliefs of 
 the human race, all the religious observances 
 which express these beliefs, Christianity, Islam- 
 ism, Buddhism, ancient polytheism, fetichism ; the 
 worship of the forces of nature, the worship 
 of ancestors, of demons, of the sparrow-hawk, 
 of animals ; plunge all this into a philosophic 
 pantheism, and you will have that extraordinary 
 whole, made up of contradictions and incohe- 
 rences, which is called Hinduism. 
 
 The Brahman who, concentrating his thought, 
 strives to lose himself in Brahma ; this inert fakir 
 who, with arms stretched for years toward the sky, 
 aspires to the paradise of Siva ; this rajah who, in 
 honour of Vishnu, the charitable god, devotes three 
 hundred rupees daily for the support of the poor ; 
 this Saktist, who plunges into mystic orgies ; this 
 Sudra, kneeling before a round stone these all 
 
150 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 are members of the great religious community of 
 India. Between the different sects there is no 
 profound separation. The worshipper of Siva calls 
 the worshipper of Vishnu a brother. Not that he 
 sees in Vishnu a second divinity, equal or inferior 
 to Siva, but that he considers Vishnu as also mani- 
 festing Siva, as himself contained in Siva. Each 
 god is so varied in his forms and his attributes that, 
 in certain forms and certain attributes common to 
 all, they all meet and blend. Siva, who is lord of 
 death, is also lord of life. He is love, and terror ; 
 harmful, and benignant ; he is the great ascetic ; 
 he is a scholar and a philosopher ; he is a moun- 
 taineer, merry and wild ; a Bacchus, drunken and 
 dancing, followed by a troop of intoxicated buffoons. 
 His images express the diversity of these attributes ; 
 he has five faces, six* arms, three eyes, a thousand 
 and eight names. Hence, his cult is within the 
 reach of all. The Hindu professor who was my 
 guide yesterday in the University bore on his fore- 
 head the three horizontal lines of the Sivaists. 
 Probably he adores in Siva, " the producer and the 
 destroyer " ; that is to say, the eternal activity of 
 Being which, unfolding itself with this double 
 rhythm, organising and dissolving all beings, may 
 be simply a supreme God, personal and creative. 
 On the other hand, when the black worshipper 
 expels demons by covering his cabin with the 
 excrement with which Siva's bull has furnished 
 him ; when he sprinkles the stone which symbolises 
 the god ; when he rings a bell to awaken it ; when 
 he dresses this stone ; when he covers it with 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 15! 
 
 food, with cream, with curry, with rice, with 
 cakes, when he deluges it with perfumes, he 
 practises only the savage cult of the stone and 
 the bull. 
 
 Nor have they any system of morals, anterior 
 to religion and of higher range, that is present 
 to guide in any one direction the mass of beliefs 
 and ceremonials. The orgies of certain sects and 
 the self-torture of the fakirs are two forms of 
 the cult of Siva. It matters not that they are 
 mutually contradictory ; the series of sacred texts 
 extends over a period of time so long, they were 
 composed at periods so different in the social 
 development, they form a mass so enormous, 
 that they authorise all morals and all dogmas, 
 and the religion of each sect forms a system 
 as vague, as inconsistent, as the Hindu religion in 
 its entire mass. 
 
 For instance, what is Vishnuism ? Originally, 
 Vishnu is "the preserver." Between Siva who 
 organises and Siva who dissolves there is a space 
 for a power that supports. This plant, which has 
 sprung out of the soil, will presently return into 
 the soil ; meanwhile, by the effect of an interior 
 force, it lives and retains its form. This force, 
 which thus sustains the entire world, is Vishnu, 
 whose ordinary symbol is very appropriately a tree. 
 Becoming popular, the abstraction becomes also a 
 distinct being, a personal divinity, without whose 
 aid the world would perish ; hence, a divinity who 
 is charitable and kind, and, in ten successive incar- 
 nations, as a fish, a tortoise, a wild boar, a lion, 
 
152 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 a dwarf, Rama, Krishna, Buddha, has come into 
 the world for its salvation. 
 
 Thus multiplied and developed, Vishnu disap- 
 pears, as a stem is concealed by its own vegeta- 
 tion ; and nothing further is seen of him but his 
 incarnations. Two of these, Rama and Krishna, 
 are especially popular, and the cult and doctrines 
 of their worshippers go on changing and multi- 
 plying, extending their ramifications through the 
 centuries. Sects produce other sects ; and, around 
 the central stem, such a mass of them have budded 
 forth that only this confused mass can be per- 
 ceived. In the eleventh century, in the twelfth 
 and thirteenth, twice in the fifteenth, again in the 
 sixteenth and eighteenth, and once more, very 
 recently, religious leaders have arisen who have 
 added to the extension of Vishnuism. Some of 
 these teachers, pantheists, recognise only one sub- 
 stance in divers manifestations ; others distinguish 
 two irreducible principles. Madhava accepts all 
 the gods, but subordinates them to Vishnu, who 
 alone is immortal. Some do not concern them- 
 selves with metaphysical speculations. They make 
 no address to the intellect; they appeal only to 
 the heart. One thing only is important, faith in 
 Krishna, who has loved mankind ; and, with this, 
 goodwill and love to our brethren, all living 
 creatures. Besides these teachers, who are the 
 greatest, there is an infinity of others. As soon 
 as, amid the suffering multitude, there stands up 
 a man as a messenger of God, he finds disciples ; 
 a sect gathers around him. Meanwhile legends 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 153 
 
 grow and multiply ; a thousand rude images trans- 
 late to the ignorant masses the fervent ideas of an 
 inspired few. In turn, these men are venerated 
 as gods, as partial incarnations of divinity. It is 
 singular that, instead of being mutually hostile or 
 destructive, these different beliefs add themselves 
 to one another, subsist together upon the trunk 
 of Vishnuism, as last spring's offshoot grows 
 beside the older branches. A doctrine of the 
 eleventh century will have adepts who live as 
 brethren with the disciples of a master not fifty 
 years dead. Like a living thing, the religion of 
 Vishnu retains all the forms through which it has 
 passed, all the scions which it has thrown out in 
 the different centuries. Like a living thing, also, 
 it contains in itself the principle of its develop- 
 ment, while it draws material from its environment. 
 The idolatry of the black races, Buddhism, the 
 religions of Islam, Christianity, have in their turn 
 furnished elements which it has assimilated. 
 
 To-day, destitute of precise dogma, of regular 
 hierarchy, formed by a hundred groups living one 
 beside another, it suggests those primitive organ- 
 isms, those pulpy creatures with tentacles innumer- 
 able, destitute of vertebrae or bony system, capable 
 of resisting any mutilation exactly because they 
 are composed of independent centres, of which 
 each could be wounded to death without the 
 destruction of the whole. Such is also Hinduism, 
 of which this religion of Vishnu, so varied and 
 so comprehensive, is nevertheless but a part. At 
 Calcutta, an Englishman was expressing in my 
 
154 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 presence his regret at the meagre success of the 
 Protestant missions. A few Hindus are converted, 
 frequently from interested motives, to obtain em- 
 ployment from Europeans. After some years they 
 return into their caste and their sect. The Brah- 
 mans listen with patience, toleration, and curiosity. 
 Their own religion is a thing too fugitive and 
 multiple to be encountered hand to hand. It 
 cannot be refuted, as English missionaries seek to 
 refute the Muhammadan faith. Instead of being 
 destroyed or arrested by the obstacle which the 
 apostles of Christianity oppose to it, so powerful 
 is the vitality of Hinduism, so great its adaptive 
 faculty, that it surrounds, envelops, absorbs the 
 obstacle ; and pursues its growth, enriched by a 
 new philosophic and religious idea. Thus the 
 Brahman teachers offer to receive the Christ among 
 the three hundred and thirty million divinities of 
 the Hindu pantheon, provided it be permitted them 
 to consider him as one of the forms of Vishnu, 
 incarnated for Europeans. Thus, at Calcutta, the 
 new sect, the Brahmo-Somaj, adopts the moral 
 theism of English liberal Christianity. The exist- 
 ence of a personal God, eternal, distinct from 
 creation ; the paternal government of the world ; 
 the distinction of soul and body ; future rewards 
 and punishments all these general ideas of that 
 moderate and reasonable philosophy now cur- 
 rent in England, this sect freely adopts. In the 
 same way, formerly, Hinduism, not rejecting, but 
 only eliminating slowly the dogmatic elements of 
 Buddhism, fed upon its substance. Gentleness, 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 155 
 
 universal kindness, extended even to animals, asceti- 
 cism by all these traits the soul of Sakya-Muni 
 still inhabits the peninsula. 
 
 Thus lives and grows the religion of India, the 
 most plastic of all religions, the most capable 
 of adapting itself to circumstances ; so complex, 
 made up of elements so dissimilar and changeful, 
 so uncertain in form and direction, that it does 
 not seem to be a religion ; and still it may be 
 called such, as we give the name of India to this 
 geographic whole, made of countries and climates 
 so diverse ; as we call Hindu this human group 
 where are mingled races of all colours and all stages 
 of civilisation, and yet, not without a certain unity. 
 At first, clear, at its pantheistic source ; then made 
 obscure by the religious ideas of conquered and 
 conquering peoples ; extended over thirty cen- 
 turies, of which each one has modified its form 
 and added to its contents ; to-day the Hindu re- 
 ligion is spread out as an immense network of 
 beliefs, observances, morals, philosophies, sects, in 
 which the eye no longer can recognise any general 
 outlines. So the Ganges, broad and turbid, swollen 
 with the incessant afflux of tributary rivers, loaded 
 with vegetable debris as it flows through jungles, 
 through ancient cities, through English cities, over- 
 flows its banks, spreading out in undefined sheets, 
 covers great extents of country with its milky 
 water, then slackens its current, deposits its mud 
 and fertilising slime ; and thus extending its length 
 and its undefined delta, divides, ramifies, is lost in 
 a thousand obscure and tortuous mouths. 
 
156 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 Half seen, half guessed at in its great features, 
 I leave this religious world of India. This evening 
 I bid adieu to great Benares, and I have come 
 once more to the sacred shore of the old Ganges, 
 where, for the first time, in the morning light, I 
 felt the rustling, palpitating life of this ancient 
 race of mankind. 
 
 I have sent my guide away, and wander along 
 the bank alone. The crowd is gone from the 
 palaces and the great pyramidal stairs. I hear 
 the little sound of the water against the marble 
 the quivering water, on whose surface a faint rose- 
 colour still trembles, which now dies, giving place 
 to pale lights, wan gleams. In the peaceful atmos- 
 phere of evening, things come out clearer and more 
 solid than in the glitter of the day. Opposite me, 
 across the great slow river, there is the pallid 
 stretch of barren sands. Between the desert and 
 the lofty pagan edifices the Ganges describes its 
 gradual curve. 
 
 I wander at random over the pavements, among 
 the blocks of a ruined temple, between red columns, 
 in front of imposing palaces. The last women 
 coming up from the river, laden with their water- 
 jars, pass, slow and stately. Great lean dogs lie 
 stretched out on the steps; and here and there 
 between the chapels of pink granite, the cow, a 
 living idol, reposes from the day's adoration. A 
 few Brahmans, their followers all gone, remain 
 solitary, seated upon their stone tables ; two of 
 them are murmuring with modulations as of a 
 plain-chant, the last prayers of the evening ; three 
 
BENARES BRAHMANISM HINDUISM 157 
 
 others are silent in the presence of the grey water 
 the grey water, rippling and flowing eternally. 
 
 And now, above, from a terrace resound deep, 
 heavy strokes of a gong, whose vibration strikes 
 through me, and then the solitary voice of a 
 trumpet arises, nasal and strident, in the vast 
 silence minor scales, simplified and rapid, with 
 the sharp timbre of a bagpipe plaintive notes, 
 prolonged, repeated with insistence, like a grief 
 that one cannot leave alone ; unexpected modula- 
 tions, almost discords, which disturb and torment ; 
 a peculiar rhythm, a Hindu music, made for the 
 soul of a different humanity, so sad in its very 
 strangeness, that, without comprehending it, one 
 shivers at the sound. 
 
 Darkness has invaded all the space ; the long 
 row of temples has disappeared into the night. 
 The three Brahmans are still there, seated on their 
 heels, their heads bent toward the dark water. 
 
 And still I hear this bagpipe voice. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 L UCKNO W CA WNPUR AGRA 
 
 December 6. 
 
 THIS India is very varied. At seventy leagues 
 from Benares, the great pagan city, begins another 
 world. Lucknow is a Muhammadan and English 
 city. Sumptuous hotels, elegant white villas in 
 their luxuriant grounds, broad avenues, vast, well- 
 kept parks where trot well-appointed riders, com- 
 panies of Scots Greys, with blond soldierly faces, 
 factory chimneys smoking on the horizon these 
 are what I have already seen in Calcutta. The 
 Saracenic architecture of the mosques is beautiful 
 and simple, tranquillising after the Hindu frenzies. 
 But the material is poor ; the buildings are plaster, 
 for which reason one has no desire to see them 
 again. 
 
 The most beautiful thing here is nature, happy 
 and peaceful, not lawless and oppressive, as in 
 the humid South. The sky is of a pale blue ; 
 the air is stirred with a light breeze that is 
 almost cool ; instead of endless tall palms, there 
 are slender trees with delicate rustling foliage. 
 Oranges and mandarins shine golden in the groves ; 
 and great fragile roses, more splendid than ours, 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA 159 
 
 spread a familiar perfume. Such must be Persian 
 nature, in the poems of Firdausi. 
 
 There is the same tranquil beauty, the same 
 happy blossoming of flowers, in the cemetery of 
 Lucknow where lie the dead of 1857. The Resi- 
 dence, which Sir Henry Lawrence with his handful 
 of soldiers so long defended, is a heap of ruins, 
 blackened by fire, torn by cannon-shot, all covered 
 now with the green of climbing plants, where 
 flame great drooping clusters of yellow flowers. 
 
 I have been re-reading the story of the siege. 
 What impresses one in this narrative is the senti- 
 ment that supported the defenders. There was 
 something besides courage and love of country 
 or desire of glory ; I mean, first, a certain grave 
 pride and tenacity ; and then, a religious sentiment 
 very serious and very lofty. Every morning the 
 officers and soldiers, with the women and children 
 who had been brought into the Residence for 
 shelter, sang psalms those which their persecuted 
 Puritan ancestors had sung to strengthen their 
 courage and support them ; and the grand Biblical 
 verses gave them that grave and silent enthusiasm, 
 that fervour, which makes men able calmly and 
 coolly to sacrifice their lives. "Here lies Henry 
 Lawrence, who tried to do his duty. May the 
 Lord have mercy upon his soul ! " says a slab in 
 the little fragrant cemetery. 
 
 To-day, in Cawnpur, I have seen the well into 
 which Nana Sahib flung the still palpitating bodies 
 of the women and children massacred at his com- 
 mand. All around it is now the silence of a 
 
l6o ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 great park, and the calm of flowers. A marble 
 angel with folded wings stands on the edge of the 
 well, which has been surrounded with a Gothic 
 balustrade. The downcast eyes have a divine 
 serenity, the clasped hands droop with a gesture 
 of forgiveness. 
 
 December 7. 
 
 We are on our way toward the Musalman 
 country, going straight to the North-west. I much 
 admire the Indian railways. In the cabinets de 
 toilette you can have a douche; there are little 
 beds that can be pulled down if you wish to re- 
 cline; and, by night, every traveller of first or 
 second class has a right to one of these little beds. 
 If you wish to have your meals on the road, you 
 notify the conductor, who orders them by tele- 
 graph, and the table is ready at the stations where 
 the train stops, in the morning, for breakfast ; at 
 one o'clock, for tiffin ; at six, for dinner. Thus 
 you traverse, without fatigue, distances of a thou- 
 sand miles ; and you think with pity of those poor 
 travellers who, leaving Paris by evening train,, 
 reach Marseilles or Brest, tired to death, and 
 feverish with the sleepless night. 
 
 Among my travelling companions I observe 
 always the same friendly and social disposition. 
 Officers, missionaries, business men in fifteen 
 minutes you have made the acquaintance of them 
 all, and there is the courteous conversation of 
 gentlemen, almost always instructive. They are 
 interested in public affairs, they have ideas as to 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA l6l 
 
 the future of India, as to the progress of Russia. 
 One of them said to me that in fifty years India 
 would have its autonomous parliament. He is an 
 advocate of this. "Our duty," he says, "is the 
 education of India." Observe, to make an English- 
 woman of her the old Asiatic queen ! "When 
 this education is completed, we shall have nothing 
 further to do but to withdraw. We shall have 
 done our duty by India." His daughters listened, 
 two charming English girls, all fresh and pink, in 
 their simple gowns of light flannel. The calmness 
 and gravity of their faces were striking. These 
 are not adventurers, these English colonists, but 
 honest, energetic fathers of families, who live in 
 all the peace and happiness of an English home. 
 
 " England is doing her duty toward India ; " 
 she is civilising India. For instance, to destroy 
 caste prejudices, she is employing a very effectual 
 method : she makes the Hindus travel. By tra- 
 versing different regions of the peninsula, by 
 elbowing each other in railway trains, they learn 
 much, and their minds must needs be enlarged. 
 For this reason the railway companies keep their 
 prices as low as possible. The ticket on which my 
 " boy " travels three thousand miles, from Calcutta 
 to Calcutta, by Delhi and Bombay, costs forty- 
 four rupees (twenty-two dollars). Consequently, 
 the third-class carriages are always crowded with 
 Hindus, a motley and picturesque load. 
 
 This line, constructed and owned by an English 
 company, is worked by the native people. Hindu 
 are the engineers, Hindu the conductors and the 
 
l62 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 station masters, which is at once apparent by the 
 way the service is carried on. There is none of 
 the automatic precision, the calm exactitude, the 
 gravity and determination of English employes. 
 At Benares I desired to send my luggage at once 
 to Bombay. Thereupon the station was thrown 
 into confusion ; there were colloquies between 
 the stationmaster and the various clerks and 
 ticket-sellers, and my " boy " ; colloquies quite 
 undignified, abounding in gestures and outcries, 
 a great flux of words. We were twenty minutes 
 belated in starting, and I had been obliged myself 
 to paste the labels on my boxes. No, India is 
 not yet altogether anglicised ; no, her " education " 
 is not yet complete. 
 
 At the stations my " boy " gets down quickly 
 from his carriage to see if I desire fruit. He 
 is forty-eight years old, short, thin, puny, a 
 real Bengali, delicate and sickly. Very precious, 
 this "boy" at once a guide, servant, interpreter, 
 and companion. Only it is understood that he is 
 not to serve at table. To see a Christian hog eat- 
 ing, to inhale the odour of meats this would be 
 a pollution not to be thought of. As he knows the 
 English language well, and is familiar with the 
 country we traverse, he requires thirty rupees a 
 month ; on this he feeds himself, very frugally, it 
 is true : a little rice, which he boils in his brass 
 jar, and eats sitting on his heels on the ground ; 
 and a little water to wash his mouth, according to 
 ceremonial : he requires nothing more. His duty 
 is to have the luggage registered, to know the 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA 163 
 
 number of my packages, to be perpetually count- 
 ing them, to see that nothing is lost. Not a 
 handkerchief can go astray but in three minutes he 
 knows it, and obliges me to rummage in all my 
 pockets. Hindu by race and by religion, in sect a 
 Sivaist, he seems particularly to venerate cows and 
 monkeys. When once I endeavoured to rally him 
 on this subject he smiled mysteriously, but would 
 not speak. 
 
 Cheddy belongs to the Sudra caste, which was 
 created from the feet of Brahma, we are told : 
 " Pure, in body and mind, the humble servitor of 
 the higher classes, gentle of speech, never arrogant, 
 seeking shelter with the Brahmans," such is, says 
 Manu, the true Sudra. This one, who is about as 
 stout and strong as a grasshopper, would sink 
 under the weight of a satchel ; and it is agreed 
 that he shall carry nothing. To make amends, he 
 follows me like my shadow, sleeping across my 
 threshold like a little faithful dog, and fights like 
 a lion with the beggars who assail me. He knows 
 a few words of Sanskrit, also English, Bengali, 
 Hindustani, and the history of the rajahs, the 
 shahs, and the khans ; and in the evening, by the 
 light of a lantern, seated outside my door, he reads 
 in some mysterious volume. But notwithstanding 
 all this knowledge, his heart is humble, a truly 
 timid and pure Sudra' s heart. 
 
 We converse. Although a pupil of Protestant 
 missionaries in Calcutta, he is not a convert. He 
 is very fond of the English : " English judge says 
 to poor man, ' You are right ; ' and to rich man, 
 
164 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 ' You are wrong ! ' " Here we have the little fact 
 which, often repeated, secures English rule in 
 India. Under this regime the peasant is unmolested. 
 He is no longer hunted down and harassed by all 
 the functionaries of the native or Musalman govern- 
 ments : he pays a small regular tax, and he is 
 master of his earnings. He has a feeling entirely 
 new to the Hindu peasant, that of security. 
 
 On the other hand, Cheddy Lai does not love 
 the British soldier. " Too proud," he says to me ; 
 " poor Hindu carry all their luggage." This single 
 sentence suffices. You see the arrogance, the 
 haughty silence of him, of Tommy Atkins realising 
 in India the dream of the English lower classes to 
 treat himself as " a gentleman," and have himself 
 waited on. How often have I seen him as he steps 
 from a train, proud and calm, his head held high, 
 his fair hair well pomatumed, correctly gloved, 
 switch in hand, making his spurs clink, and with 
 his lofty, big-chested stature dominating the crowd 
 of coolies who stagger under the weight of his 
 travelling-bags ! 
 
 Ever toward the North-west we run, toward the 
 land of the Musalman. The country is beautiful : 
 interminable, solitary plains, all silvery with the 
 white shiver of tall reeds. To the horizon's edge 
 they crowd, one upon another, lifting out of its 
 sheath a tall dry stem, at whose summit trembles 
 a plume pale and light as smoke. Sometimes ante- 
 lopes come in sight at a little trot, then stop and 
 look, one foot held up, the slender head turned 
 anxiously toward us. Storks and herons, very 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA 165 
 
 serious, watch us as we pass. The great sky is 
 vaporous with light ; before us the rails stretch 
 in shining, rigid lines, meeting in the distance, at 
 a point that we shall never reach ! By night, the 
 darkness and solitude in these desolate plains are 
 solemn, and now and then an almost imperceptible 
 cry, guessed at in the great silence, the far-off yelp 
 of a jackal, is vaguely sad. 
 
 December g. 
 
 I am in the capital of the ancient Moguls ; and 
 there are many things to see, especially in archi- 
 tecture, palaces, and tombs. For they struggled 
 against time and death, these Musalmans. They 
 did not accept being totally abolished. While the 
 peaceful and meditative Hindu returned without 
 a struggle, without leaving any trace behind him, 
 into the bosom of that being which, for an instant, 
 had thrown him out upon the surface of this 
 illusory world they, the passionate and self-willed, 
 asserted themselves after death in jasper and 
 marble, as they had impressed themselves, during 
 their lives, with fire and sword. 
 
 Akbar was one of these; and his tomb stands, 
 intact as on its first day, in the silent country. 
 Four great gates, facing toward the four cardinal 
 points, four triumphal arches, flanked with minarets, 
 crowned with bell-towers, give access to a solitary 
 garden, where golden fruit hangs amid the foliage. 
 From each gate leads a broad road with red pave- 
 ment, and all converge toward the central monu- 
 ment. It is at once Chinese and Saracenic, this 
 
I 66 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 tomb, consisting of a succession of terraces, re- 
 treating as they rise, surmounted by Mongol kiosks. 
 Here the solid rests upon the open : upon rows 
 of colonnettes rise marble walls incrusted with 
 precious stones, which are set with absolute regu- 
 larity, and blaze upon the perfect white of the 
 surface. Each terrace is a quadrilateral, paved 
 with mosaic, framed in its slender columns, con- 
 nected with each other by Saracenic arches. Be- 
 hind these marble columns a corridor surrounds 
 the terrace, closed on the outer side by a lace of 
 white stone, exquisitely relieved against the pale 
 blue of the sky. Light and delicate as it is, this 
 architecture of perfect stone seems indestructible 
 in this youthful, luminous atmosphere which pene- 
 trates it from every side. 
 
 Within the centre of the building, at the mathe- 
 matical point where the diagonals of the square 
 intersect, is the great tomb of Akbar, a rectangle of 
 marble, on whose surface are only a few lotus 
 flowers in relief, the frail stems creeping over it 
 very timidly and gently. There in the shadow the 
 Mogul has been sleeping for two hundred years. 
 Outside, to glorify him in the light, there are the 
 graceful curves of the carved marble, the splendour 
 of the coloured paving-stones, the profusion of 
 mosaics, the purity of perfect lines, the consum- 
 mate art which cost the labour of an uncounted 
 multitude of workmen. They are all dead ; but 
 this perfect architectural work, one of the noblest 
 achievements of their race, stands here under the 
 sky in the peaceful country. 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA 167 
 
 There are sounds of accordions floating in the 
 air. Some English soldiers, lounging on the 
 terrace, are playing their national airs. Leaning 
 upon this exquisite balustrade, four of them are 
 smoking their briarwood pipes ; and the smoke 
 curls upward, tranquil and calm, like the rest of 
 the scene. 
 
 It is good to note with accuracy the details of a 
 vision that one will never see again. To-day, the 
 9th of December, at half-past eleven, this is what 
 I have under my eyes, from the summit of the 
 tomb of Akbar. Outside of the lacework of stone 
 and the white kiosks that bound it, lies a vast 
 square carpet, the great park, with its dense clumps 
 of trees and the brilliancy of its flowers, girt with 
 a bastioned wall. To the north, south, east, and 
 west, fifteen hundred feet away from the tomb, are 
 the four imposing gates, four angular surfaces of 
 red granite, brightened with white marble, each 
 with its immense Moorish archway. Beyond, in 
 every direction, lies the great tawny plain. Domes 
 of trees make spots of verdure upon the withered, 
 yellow grass. On the east there are ribbons of 
 blue water. Here and there, in the desolate 
 country, columns and towers rise among the 
 shrubs and trees, the ruins of a city which has 
 left only these few imperishable monuments ; and, 
 standing quite by itself, the pale splendour of the 
 marbles of the Taj, bluish in the misty light, like 
 heaps of distant snow. 
 
 At the citadel. A curious fortress of red sand- 
 stone on the shore of the Jumna. On the summit 
 
I 68 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 of the rugged walls and massive bastions, made 
 to resist assaults and rising like cliffs out of the 
 river, there runs the most delicate embroidery of 
 faintly-tinted marble, rendered more exquisite by 
 contrast with the huge rough masonry on which 
 it rests. It is a rock crowned with lacework, in 
 which cannon-balls have made pitiful rents. In 
 the fortress there is everything mosques, harems, 
 palaces, halls of justice, gardens, a whole marble 
 city, hidden behind the lofty crenellated walls, a 
 whole royal city, or rather, it is an entire camp,* 
 whose chief, sheltered behind the thickness of the 
 accumulated stone, surrounded by his ministers, his 
 counsellors, his generals, his poets, his musicians, 
 his wives, fulfilled his duties as emperor and 
 Musalman, enjoying, meanwhile, the refined de- 
 lights, the consummate luxury, of an artistic and 
 amorous tyrant. 
 
 Crossing a drawbridge, passing under a fortified 
 gateway and in front of a guard-house, past loung- 
 ing European soldiers, one comes to a broad paved 
 road, which rises between the bastions and gives 
 access to the interior, where edifices are crowded 
 together like the tents in a camp. 
 
 First, the Moti-Masjid. Around the three sides 
 of a square court with marble pavement, stands 
 the marble mosque. Fifty-eight stout columns, 
 united by Saracenic arches, carved in floral de- 
 signs, support the heavy flat roof, and in this 
 deep gallery the marble has the soft, warm tints 
 
 * The forts of Delhi and Agra are permanent camps copied from the 
 Mongol camps of the steppes. 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA 169 
 
 of old ivory. There is nothing more, neither 
 painting nor woodwork two colours only, the blue 
 of the sky, the white of the marble ; and this 
 sumptuous simplicity, this splendour of sunlight 
 on the pure stone, express better than anything 
 else could the spiritual ardour, the enthusiasm of 
 the Musalman soul. 
 
 Upon the roof, three pointed domes expand 
 their glittering balls, outline their admirable curves 
 against a pale sky, which is so light, so pure, that 
 it seems devoid of air, a mere ether containing 
 nothing but light. 
 
 Then there is a succession of great courtyards, 
 closed on three sides : the Court of Tournaments, 
 where horses pranced, and tigers and elephants 
 fought in the presence of the emperor ; the Diwan- 
 i-Khas, where, from his throne of black marble, 
 Akbar pronounced his sentences of death ; the 
 Diwan-y-Am ; the Jahangir Mahal ; then corridors 
 whose walls are incrusted with birds and flowers, 
 parrots of emeralds, lotus flowers of lapis-lazuli, 
 whose windows are made of a single slab of marble 
 cut out in open-work. And with all this wealth 
 of display, these incrustations of gems, the outlines 
 and tones and lights are harmonious ; all is simple 
 and perfectly proportioned, as in a Greek temple. 
 This was a spontaneous efflorescence of art, per- 
 fect like that of the free cities of Hellas, testify- 
 ing to a no less refined education of taste and 
 intellect, reaching its climax under religious despots 
 who, masters of the lives and of the labour of a 
 great people, crushed and kneaded the human 
 
170 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 material, that they might render eternal their own 
 vision of beauty. 
 
 What modern poet has ever had a dream so 
 delicious as that Mogul who built the zenanas and 
 the women's bathrooms ? In rooms to which the 
 daylight has no access, cool with the coolness of 
 marble, there are great basins of jade, the running 
 water dripping from one to another of them. 
 Upon the translucent white of the walls and 
 columns, ten thousand little facetted mirrors gleam 
 like diamonds in the darkness, and reflect the light 
 of innumerable tiny lamps burning in niches. The 
 "Thousand and One Nights" has conceived no 
 such vision ; it is a palace of fairies or genii, 
 situated underground, far from our world, remote 
 from sunlight, built of precious stones, full of 
 darkness, yet lighted up by the inner fire of these 
 gems. 
 
 Within, imagine what Akbar used to see the 
 graceful crowd of Circassian and Arab, and Hindu 
 women, the pick of all Asia chosen by a tyrant's 
 caprice ; the indolent girls, lying along a basin's 
 edge, dipping a bare foot in the water ; the sleepy 
 girls, lulled by the cool murmur of running stream- 
 lets ; girls bathing, wringing their heavy, wet hair, 
 reflected in the shadowy, liquid mirror; and the 
 whole wrapped in a vague, mysterious light : verily, 
 for Akbar, after affairs of state, in the oppressive 
 heat of noonday, this was a cool, peaceful, deli- 
 cious place. 
 
 In the upper part of the fortress, separated by 
 gardens from the emperor's palace, on a terrace 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA 171 
 
 overhanging the river and commanding a view 
 of the whole plain, is the women's apartment 
 six chambers of spotless marble, whose walls, of 
 open fretwork, or simply with rectangles here and 
 there cut out, allow free passage to light and air. 
 This harem is the dainty pearl crowning the red 
 bastions of the fortress. Literally, these dwelling- 
 places are made of precious stones ; all the walls 
 are jewels. Over the twelve sides of each of the 
 slender columns creep delicate, twining stems, 
 whose flowers are amethysts and turquoises. Along 
 the marble walls, other flowers in marble, rows 
 of lilies and tulips whose wide-spread petals 
 droop with careless grace, are in low relief. The 
 rooms are shaped like gems ; octagons whose 
 surfaces, polished by the workman, repolished by 
 time, play with the light, imprison it, softened 
 and tempered. The ceilings rise in cones, cut 
 in facets, ending in an acute point of crystal. 
 Through them all floats a cool half-light in 
 which gleam the arabesques and flowers, inter- 
 twined and involved in a design past all dis- 
 entanglement ; while here and there, the entire 
 thickness of the stone has been tenderly cut out 
 in open-work, making a delicate lace upon the 
 white light of the sky. 
 
 Around these rooms are terraces, not edged 
 with balustrades, but surrounded with air only, 
 ending off suddenly at the vertical drop of the 
 high red walls, perpendicular to the river's edge. 
 How often idle queens and odalisques, for ever 
 immured in this gleaming white paradise, have 
 
172 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 stretched themselves out along this marble surface, 
 to watch the sunlight die, and the slow waters 
 of the Jumna grow pallid, their languid eyes filled 
 with the self-same vision which is mine at this 
 moment ! A rosy radiance floats in the immense 
 plain, enwraps all the vague forms. Before me, 
 on a marble cornice, a parrot sits motionless ; 
 all is silent in the slow waning of the day. Below, 
 the cold current keeps a little light in motion, 
 among the shallows. There are camps on the 
 shore from which the smoke rises straight. Along 
 a dusty highroad, oxen are drawing heavy wains, 
 whose massive wheels turn slowly. Farther off, 
 a line of camels are moving along with a proud, 
 timid undulation of their swan-like necks, a melan- 
 choly procession, half hidden in clouds of dust, 
 half lost in the vaporous light which floods the 
 whole picture. 
 
 December n. 
 
 The Taj, as everybody knows, is a mausoleum 
 erected by the Mogul Shah Jahan to the Begum 
 Mumtaz-i-Mahal. It is an irregular octagon (a 
 square with the corners cut off), surmounted by 
 a Persian dome, and having four minarets at its 
 angles. The building itself, which stands upon a 
 marble platform eighteen feet high, having at its 
 angles four tall, cylindrical minarets, is made of 
 blocks of white marble, and rises to a height of 
 two hundred and ten feet. We alight from the 
 carriage in front of a noble portico of red sand- 
 stone, pierced by a lofty Moorish archway, covered 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA 173 
 
 with white arabesques. We pass under the arch, 
 and the Taj appears in sight, some seventy-five 
 rods away. Probably no masterpiece of architec- 
 ture produces an equal effect. 
 
 At the farther extremity of a marvellous garden, 
 reflected in all its whiteness in a canal of dark 
 water which lies motionless, with clumps of black 
 cypresses and great mounds of crimson flowers on 
 its banks, the perfect structure rises like a vision. 
 It is a floating dream, an aerial thing without 
 weight, so accurate is the balance of the lines and 
 so faint the shadows on the virginal, translucent 
 stone. These black cypresses framing it ; these 
 masses of verdure, through which here and there 
 the blue sky is seen ; this turf in the strong sun- 
 light, with the sharp, black shadows of the trees 
 falling across it all these solid things render 
 more unreal the white vision which seems ready 
 to vanish into the light of the sky. I walked 
 toward it along the marble bank of the dark canal, 
 and the mausoleum assumes relief. Approaching 
 nearer, the eye takes more and more delight in 
 the surfaces of the octagonal monument. These 
 are rectangular expanses of polished marble, on 
 which the light rests with a soft, milky lustre. One 
 had no idea that a thing so simple as mere surface 
 could be so beautiful, when it is broad and pure. 
 Then the eye follows the graceful and well-ordered 
 intertwining of great flowers, flowers of onyx and 
 turquoise, incrusted along a projecting part of the 
 building, and the harmony of the delicate chasing, 
 the marble lacework, the springing arches, the 
 
174 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 notched balustrades, the infinite play of the simple 
 and the decorated. 
 
 The garden is the complement of the building, 
 both uniting to form the one artistic conception. 
 The avenues leading to the Taj are bordered with 
 funereal trees, yews and cypresses, that render still 
 whiter the far-off whiteness of the monument. 
 Behind their slender cones, trees of luxuriant 
 foliage are massed, adding depth and opulence 
 to the more sombre growth. The stiff, dark trees, 
 relieved against this light foliage, stirred by the 
 wind, rise, solemn, out of the thickets of roses and 
 the great masses of unknown, perfumed flowers 
 of this solitary garden. Combinations like these 
 are the work of an artist. Broad, open lawns, 
 the crimson cups of flowers, petals of gold, swarms 
 of humming-bees and parti-coloured butterflies 
 bring light and joy into the gloom which befits a 
 cemetery. The place is at once luminous and 
 serious ; it has all the rapture of a Musalman 
 paradise, amorous and religious ; and the poem 
 in verdure unites with the poem in marble to tell 
 of peace and splendour. 
 
 Inside, at first all is darkness, a profound night, 
 with the faint gleaming of a grating of ancient 
 marble, a mysterious lacework around the tombs, 
 extending on and on, with a sepulchral glimmer, a 
 yellowish lustre, as if the light itself were ancient 
 and had been absorbed centuries ago. And the 
 interlacing lines and curves of pallid marble con- 
 tinue, until they vanish into the darkness. 
 
 In the centre are the tombs of the lovers, two 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA 175 
 
 small sarcophagi, on which rests a faint light from 
 some unknown source. This is all. There they 
 lie in the silence, surrounded by these perfect 
 things which celebrate their love lasting into death, 
 isolated from all the world by the mysterious 
 marble lace which enwraps them and seems to 
 float around them like a dream. 
 
 High above, as if through dense smoke, one 
 sees the dome rise in the darkness, rise and never 
 end ; and its walls seem vaporous, the marble 
 blocks unsubstantial. All is aerial here, nothing 
 is real and solid; this is a world of visions. 
 Sounds even are no longer of the earth. A 
 musical note uttered here is repeated, above one's 
 head, in regions which we cannot see. Pure as 
 the voice of an Ariel, it grows fainter, then dies ; 
 and suddenly is heard again, far off, glorified, 
 spiritualised, multiplied indefinitely, repeated by 
 countless, remote voices, by an unseen choir of 
 angels who carry it up, ascending higher and 
 higher, until it loses itself in a faint sound which 
 remains continuous, hovering on like the music 
 of a soul over the tomb of the beloved. 
 
 I visit the Taj again at noonday. Under a 
 vertical sun the melancholy phantom is dead, 
 the gentle sadness of the mausoleum has disap- 
 peared. The great marble table upon which it 
 stands has a blinding glitter. Reflected back and 
 forth from all sides the sunlight multiplies its 
 effect a hundredfold, and some of the facades 
 are like white-hot metal. The incrustations are 
 sparks of living fire, and their hundred red flowers 
 
176 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 glow like burning coals. The sacred texts and 
 hieroglyphics set in the black marble blaze, as 
 if written by the finger of an angry god. All the 
 mystic rows of lotus and lily, in relief, which before 
 had the softness of yellowed ivory, are now like 
 flames upon the surface. I retreat to the edge 
 of the inclosure, and, dazzled, I see for an instant, 
 relieved against the sky, the incandescent lines and 
 surfaces of the edifice, implacable in its virgin white- 
 ness. Certainly this strict simplicity and the inten- 
 sity of this light have something Semitic in their 
 effect, like "the flaming sword" of the Bible. The 
 minarets rise into the blue like columns of fire. 
 
 All around it is the cool darkness of the over- 
 arching trees, where I linger until twilight. This 
 garden is the work of a worshipper, who desired 
 to glorify Allah. It is a place for religious joy : 
 "Let no man who is not pure in heart enter the 
 garden of God," says the Arab text graven above 
 the gate. There are parterres which are heaps 
 of velvet, some of the strange flowers are like 
 bunches of crimson moss. Trunks of trees rise all 
 blue with convolvulus; elsewhere great red stars 
 gleam amid the dark foliage. Among the flowers 
 countless butterflies make a perpetual cloud. Many 
 beautiful little living things, tiny striped squirrels, 
 and birds in abundance, green parrots, brilliant 
 paroquets, a whole little world, splendid, happy, 
 and secure ; protected against vultures and hawks 
 by white-clad guards, who with their long pea- 
 shooters keep away all mischief and cruelty from 
 this place of peace. 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA 177 
 
 Upon the surface of the motionless water, water- 
 lilies and the lotus outline their stiff petals, seem- 
 ing to rest solidly upon the dark mirror. Between 
 the dense masses of foliage there are glimpses of 
 English lawns all flooded with sunlight, and of 
 spaces of blue sky sometimes traversed by a tri- 
 angle of white storks ; and now and then the far- 
 off vision of the phantom tomb, a sad, virginal ghost. 
 How calm and splendid is this solitude, full of a 
 pleasure at once intoxicating and serious ! It is 
 the beauty, the love, the sunlight of Asia, of which 
 Shelley dreamed ! 
 
 December 12. 
 
 After three days devoted to marble palaces, one 
 wearies of exquisite things. And so, this morning, 
 instead of taking the railway train, I take a carriage, 
 that I may go to see a big bit of country, the 
 real Hindu land, not merely from a railway train, 
 but loitering along the roads at pleasure, through 
 the villages, far from the marvels that tourists 
 visit. We drive slowly, and are the whole day 
 in making the thirty miles between Agra and 
 Muttra. 
 
 There is nothing very noticeable in the appear- 
 ance of the country ; the palms have disappeared ; 
 there are little bushy trees, suggestive of the apple 
 orchards of Normandy ; and the plain is spotted 
 with patches of russet grass and tall yellow reeds. 
 This December morning is like the very early 
 hours of one of our beautiful June days, still and 
 bright. A herd of meagre buffaloes goes past us, 
 
 M 
 
178 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 their long black heads bent resignedly toward the 
 ground, and for hours these are the only living 
 creatures that we see. 
 
 Later we come to a group of little huts, one of 
 those Hindu villages whose aspect has not changed 
 in three thousand years, where there has been 
 always the same calm, primitive life since the 
 beginning of history. These villages would be an 
 interesting study, for they have kept the ancient 
 traditions of our Aryan races. Their organisation 
 is like that of the primitive Greek and Germanic 
 communes. There is no written law : all is regu- 
 lated by immemorial and unexplained custom ; 
 the whole political life is instinctive, as in an ant- 
 hill. It is a natural grouping, the true form of 
 grouping of Hindu society. The Mongols, and, 
 before their time, the Pathans, were able to destroy 
 the native monarchies and establish everywhere 
 their own rule. But the village was a molecule too 
 minute to attract attention, too small and coherent 
 to be broken up ; and it is this which has enabled 
 the Hindu world, the Hindu spirit, Hinduism itself, 
 to subsist, through centuries of tyrannies and 
 exterminations. 
 
 I can see in passing only the outdoor aspect : 
 these are scenes of other days which carry one's 
 thought back to the Homeric age. A group of 
 women around a well, " each bearing the amphora, 
 one hand on the hip," naked babies wallowing in 
 the dust, little girls clad with a single piece of red 
 stuff, which leaves half the childish figure bare ; 
 with the timid, frightened mien of kittens they 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA 179 
 
 run back as we come near. The potter, seated on 
 the ground, is kneading his clay ; old wrinkled 
 women, with skins like parchment, are pounding 
 rice in a mill of rough stone ; a little naked group 
 of scholars are gathered around the master, who 
 is humming in a kind of plain-song, as he unrolls 
 a manuscript. At the threshold of a door, a man 
 sitting on his heels, with the air of a patient martyr, 
 has given himself into the hands of a barber, who 
 is tenderly shaving his head. There are beggars, 
 who might be centenarians, wretched, fleshless 
 creatures, tottering on their sticks, squealing as 
 they hold out a black paw. In the midst of the 
 road, shoemakers, sitting in a ring, ply the awl, and 
 smoke at a hookah whose mouthpiece is passed 
 from hand to hand. At the end of the village, 
 very neatly arranged on little tables, are a few 
 dainty bits of sugar-cane, and fresh leaves of green 
 betel twisted into horns. 
 
 Soon it is left behind us, this little world, some- 
 what stirred by our passage, and we are again 
 upon the highroad which cuts the plain with its 
 straight line. Occasionally we pass a string of 
 camels ; they move along with a soft, haughty 
 step, turning from side to side their meagre, thick- 
 lipped heads at the end of the long, flexible necks, 
 which curve and undulate, with the rider pitching 
 about on the top of the backbone. Then, bands of 
 peasants, the head and the waist wrapped with white ; 
 and women, whose arms and ankles are cuirassed 
 with porcelain bracelets ; and little donkeys, in- 
 visible under their huge loads. Sometimes there 
 
l8o ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 are enormous rude wains with heavy wheels ; the 
 pole, a little tree roughly squared, like those which 
 the barbarian peoples must have used in their migra- 
 tions. These are drawn by great white oxen, big 
 hunchbacked oxen, with short muscular necks, their 
 horns painted gold colour or blue. Tranquil amid 
 the buzzing of the eager flies, their eyes half closed, 
 they move along with a stupid air of triumph, as if 
 they knew very well that they were gods. 
 
 On every side are the great, shining fields full 
 of green harvests ; and the brilliant garments of 
 the women who are reaping seem like scattered 
 poppies and violets just visible in the dense 
 growth. 
 
 December 13. 
 
 Last evening by moonlight we reached the dak 
 bungalow of Muttra. It is an abrupt return into 
 the world of Hinduism. Here Vishnu was incar- 
 nated under the form of Krishna, and the city is 
 consecrated to the worship of this hero. By turns, 
 Hindu, Greek, Buddhist, Musalman, and then Hindu 
 again, Muttra has always been one of the religious 
 capitals of Asia ; it is celebrated in the Baghavata 
 Purana. In 404 a Chinese pilgrim counted here 
 twenty monasteries and three thousand Buddhist 
 monks. Five hundred years later the Musalmans 
 invaded the country, and the Brahmanic pagodas 
 which had been reared upon the ruins of the Bud- 
 dhist monasteries were destroyed by the conquerors. 
 From 1017 to the date of the English conquest, 
 incessantly trodden down by the Muhammadan 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA l8l 
 
 chiefs, Hinduism, like a sturdy and deep-rooted 
 plant, never ceased to spring up again ; and no 
 destruction could put an end to its incessant 
 efflorescence in temples and chapels. 
 
 In the eighteenth century Aurungzebe levelled 
 them all to the ground, and built mosques out 
 of the material. Fortunately the French traveller 
 Tavernier had seen the chief pagoda, and his 
 description reminds one of the temples of the 
 south, those of Madura and Trichinopoli. " From 
 base to summit the exterior is covered with figures 
 of rams, monkeys, and elephants in stone, with 
 niches in which are monsters, and with windows 
 up to the height of the domes and balconies. 
 Statues of monsters are in a ring around these 
 domes ; this collection of hideous images is fright- 
 ful to see." Having paid two rupees, he was 
 permitted to behold the god himself. "The Brah- 
 mans opened a door, and I saw a kind of altar 
 covered with old brocade, on which stood the 
 great idol. The head was of black marble, and 
 the eyes appeared to be rubies. The body and 
 arms were entirely hidden by a robe of red velvet. 
 Two smaller idols, white -faced, were placed at 
 the two sides." 
 
 He is to be seen everywhere here, Krishna,* 
 the dark god, the blue god. All the religious 
 pictures adorning the stalls represent him, sur- 
 rounded by his women, playing on the pipe, a 
 smile in his enamelled eyes. He is the popular 
 
 * Probably a god of the black, pre-Aryan races, absorbed by 
 Hinduism. 
 
I 82 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 divinity of India, the good-humoured, laughing 
 god, friendly to men. He was born of a woman, 
 and countless poems relate his marvellous child- 
 hood, the wickedness of the king who sought him 
 out among the other children to destroy him, the 
 humility of his life as a little shepherd, his flute 
 songs during the rains and in the hot season, the 
 instruction that he gave the Brahmans while yet 
 a child, his sports in the sacred waters of the 
 Jumna, his dances with the gopis the young and 
 charming cow-herd girls of Muttra his amours in 
 the tropical forest Meanwhile, miracles proclaim 
 his divinity. He destroys dragons and demons. 
 One day, as he is dancing with his young com- 
 panions, he becomes multiple, and each girl has him 
 in her arms. He raises a mountain for a shelter 
 to the human race against aerial genii. He charms 
 all things, movable and immovable, the entire 
 creation. " At the sound of his flute, the young 
 girls hastened hither, happy and also sad with love. 
 The cows, hearing this flute, stood motionless, 
 the grass in their mouths ; the little calves with de- 
 lighted faces forgot to feed. The gazelles stretched 
 their necks ; the soft melody disturbed ascetics 
 and wise men. Rivers turned back like snakes, and 
 ceased flowing. Arrested in their flight, birds 
 perched at his side, jealous of his music, and, with 
 closed eyes, listened to the sounds of his flute." 
 Later, he preaches gentleness and self-abnegation ; 
 forbids pride and selfishness ; fights against " the 
 Me sentiment" ; defends the weak, and teaches the 
 brotherhood of all mankind. 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA 183 
 
 This is a singular divinity, with traits of Orpheus, 
 Adonis, Hercules, and of Jesus, at once ascetic and 
 sensual. To die to the world, to forget one's self 
 for love of the divinity or of one's neighbour, this 
 is his doctrine ; a teaching which would seem more 
 fitting for the austere and gentle Buddha than for 
 Krishna ; but on the other hand, with an inexplic- 
 able contradiction, he teaches a free abandonment 
 to all the gratifications of opulent nature. A poor 
 humpbacked creature, having poured lotus per- 
 fume upon Krishna's feet, rises, erect and beautiful 
 as a queen, and all the pollution of her heart is 
 washed away. 
 
 Then men proclaim him divine ; and, in the 
 universal homage which hails him, Krishna, the 
 shepherd, disappears ; his human form is dissolved, 
 the " illusion " which concealed him vanishes ; 
 through the veil which covered him appears a 
 vague, radiant, pantheistic idea, a universal power 
 which the whole choir of nature adores : " Thou 
 art he who Greatest ; thou art the creating force, 
 O sacred Master ; it is thou, O Lord, who makest 
 the succession of births and deaths ; thy incar- 
 nations have revealed thee to man ; thou art the 
 productive force, thou art Brahma. The fourteen 
 worlds are in thy mouth, as fruit is between the 
 teeth of a monkey. If thou withdrawest them, 
 who can compel thee to emit them anew ? If 
 thou hidest thyself, all becomes confusion, and 
 the destroyed bodies have no longer a covering 
 to enwrap them. As water dwells in the lotus-leaf, 
 as the perfume in the flower, as fire in the wood, 
 
184 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 as water in milk, thus them, in thine own form, 
 art in the depths of all being." 
 
 These pantheistic flashes strike abruptly through 
 the descriptive luxuriance of the poem ; and then 
 the veil, for a moment lifted, falls ; the metaphy- 
 sical world, of which there was a glimpse, is again 
 shut away ; and around us closes in " the illusion " 
 of nature, all full of light and life. "The green 
 buds of the santal tremble at the extremity of the 
 branches like limpid drops of ambrosia. When 
 they heard the sound of his flute, the lotus, the 
 jasmine, the pandanas, and the champak quivered 
 in their hearts. The flowers became the colour of 
 the ointment of antimony and of red lead; they 
 shivered, they were afraid, the blue and white 
 flowers." The simplest of these idyls, the most 
 ardent and splendid, represents the young divinity 
 with the shepherd girls of Muttra. They cannot 
 behold without rapture his beautiful dark brow, 
 they languish for love of him ; " and like white 
 lotus flowers whose root is wounded under the 
 water, the moonlight of their downcast faces shines 
 with pallid splendour." It is a poem like one of 
 the luminous, voluptuous nights of India. It is 
 like a southern jungle, where, in an air dense with 
 stupefying perfumes, butterflies, strangely splendid, 
 fly heavily, and impenetrable tropical climbers 
 bar your path, all rustling and throbbing with 
 unseen life. Here and there, the strong upward 
 thrust of a cocoanut - palm leads your glance 
 upward, and through a gap in the dense foliage 
 you can see for an instant the dazzling, creative 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA 185 
 
 orb which fills all the sombre forest with its heat, 
 and from the inert slime calls forth this world of 
 living things. 
 
 December 14. 
 
 Upon the Jumna. I arrive too late to witness 
 the sacred dip of all the population. The men 
 have gone, and only a few groups of women re- 
 main. Young girls, the slender torso rising out 
 of a blue drapery which falls from the hips, their 
 arms lifted, the wrists crossed upon the head, 
 standing erect on the steps that lead down into 
 the water, watch our boat as it passes. Others, 
 stooping, are entirely concealed by the harmonious 
 folds of some ample material ; only the dark face 
 is visible beneath the light drapery resting on the 
 curve of the head. One little girl, throwing off 
 her garment, stands quite nude ; she stoops toward 
 the water, half bent over it. Another child, still 
 younger, clasps close with her slender arms the 
 pink muslin drapery enveloping her from the head 
 to the silver-banded ankles. It is graceful and 
 charming. Some have risen and slowly lift to 
 their heads the heavy copper vases filled with 
 river water, and the movement of the arms and 
 the torso is noble and graceful. The faces are of 
 a pure oval, a little rounded, of a beautiful bronze 
 tint, caressed by the blackness of their waving 
 hair ; with something serious and sombre, almost 
 classic, in their features, yet not without warmth 
 and tenderness. They are here in great numbers, 
 small and large, chattering and laughing, playing 
 
I 86 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 with the water much like their predecessors, the 
 Hindu girls beloved of Krishna ; washing their 
 hands and arms, and their hair ; taking off and 
 putting on their great veils ; spending the whole 
 day in the coolness of the broad, deep river. In 
 this light, with these simple draperies, the motion 
 or gesture of these young girls gives one pleasure, 
 a bare arm lifted, the head slowly turning upon 
 the young neck, a bent figure becoming erect It 
 is indeed a very simple and quiet pleasure to watch 
 this play of noble colours and of human outlines 
 on the bank of the translucent water, upon the 
 luminous marble. 
 
 An hour's drive brings us to Bindrabun, which 
 is also a sacred city. Holy places are numerous 
 in this classic corner of India. The shores of the 
 Jumna at all these points are celebrated in the 
 great epics. 
 
 At Bindrabun, as at Muttra, the monkeys swarm ; 
 they frolic in the streets and accompany the inhabi- 
 tants to their matutinal dip. Now they gather, 
 mingling with the inquisitive human crowd, to see 
 us arrive ; and the rapid winking of their eyes is 
 much more intelligent than the slow, stupid gaze 
 of these Hindus. 
 
 Men and monkeys live here the same idle and 
 abstemious life. They eat the same cereals, they 
 dwell in the same houses ; the former usually 
 established inside, the latter more commonly cling- 
 ing to the balconies, or perched upon the roof, 
 where they are quite at their ease, the lucky rascals ! 
 teasing each other, or cleaning each other in the 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA 187 
 
 sunshine ; the theories of Darwin are put in 
 practice in Bindrabun, and the human being is 
 peacefully domesticated with his " poor relations." 
 
 Two great temples are in process of building, 
 at the expense of the rajah. One is nearly done, 
 and will be completed in two years ; the cost is 
 estimated at twenty-five lacs of rupees. The archi- 
 tect, the workmen, the sculptors, are all natives. 
 He is the greatest independent prince in India, 
 this rajah of Jaipur, who supplies the money ; and 
 the god, with his hundred million worshippers, is 
 the most popular of divinities. Without any doubt, 
 Hinduism is very much alive, as any man may see 
 who regards these thousands of labourers hewing 
 stone for the greater honour of Krishna. 
 
 The architect, delighted to receive a European 
 visitor, shows me his plans, which appear very 
 scientific and geometrical. He explains to me, 
 later, the detail of the inferior divinities whose 
 niches will surround the statue of Krishna. I 
 observe that he says, God, not the god, in speak- 
 ing of the latter. " This," he says, " is God's dining- 
 room. Every day the value of a hundred or two 
 hundred rupees in food is served to him here, by 
 the rajah's order ; and it is then distributed among 
 the poor." 
 
 But this is an interesting rajah ! He is a civilised 
 person, I am told, and to him Jaipur owes its Uni- 
 versity. Why, then, does he build this temple to 
 Krishna ? What idea, vague or distinct, does he 
 have of this divinity and his incarnations ; of the 
 entire multitude of the Hindu gods ; of their avatars 
 
I 88 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 and of their sacred animals ? Is his faith in any 
 degree sincere ? Does he go beyond the mere 
 conformity to custom and to the religion of his 
 country ? Is he conscious of any lack of harmony 
 between his ideas and his religious needs ? 
 
 I am glad to see how the buildings of Agra were 
 constructed. These workmen are making a marble 
 lacework, in imitation of those airy balustrades, 
 that exquisite guipure which gives the lightness of 
 a dream to the Mongol edifices. Fifteen men, 
 bending over a block of stone, are cutting it out 
 with jewellers' tools, copying a complicated design 
 of interlaced leaves and stems. This being com- 
 pleted, they turn the stone, and work from the 
 other side, to meet the first work ; with what care, 
 with what infinite precision, may be understood 
 when you reflect that on the two sides the flowers 
 and stems must perfectly correspond. Work like 
 this is done only at great loss ; one block of marble 
 in three is spoiled. I also saw the incrustation 
 with gems ; they use the lamp, as jewellers do in- 
 setting precious stones. 
 
 There are four thousand workmen. The average 
 wage is four annas a day. The temple will have 
 been five years in building. Notwithstanding the 
 expense, and the length of the labour, it is already 
 evident that this structure will not equal the perfect 
 edifices of the Mongol emperors. The marble here 
 is used only as a facing ; the Mongol work, on the 
 contrary, was absolutely sincere, made of the same 
 rare material, polished with the same care, in the 
 invisible portions of the building as in its exterior. 
 
LUCKNOW CAWNPUR AGRA 109 
 
 It was not done for the purpose of being admired ; 
 it was an end in itself, like a prayer or like a grand 
 psalm. Provinces of men were laid waste to pro- 
 vide means ; at it, nations wore out their hands 
 and their knees. The labour lasted a half-century ; 
 and the building was reared at what a cost of 
 human suffering ! But the work was absolutely 
 beautiful. In like manner there is required the 
 long and silent labour of a thousand invisible roots, 
 of all the obscure vessels and concealed tissues, 
 a slow elaboration from the juices of the whole 
 plant, to expand a flower and give to it its subtle 
 perfume. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 DELHI JAIPUR 
 
 December 1 5. 
 
 You perceive at once the great capital. The 
 English city lies among the trees : broad avenues, 
 elegant villas, vast gardens. In the distance, 
 crowded blocks of houses, minarets, Hindu cones, 
 rise on every side, bristling against the sky ; this 
 is the native city. 
 
 One begins with the public edifices. Probably 
 my eye is blase ; I see nothing approaching the 
 perfection of Agra. The fort has been spoiled 
 by the English occupation ; in many places the 
 precious stones have been dug out, and their place 
 supplied with red or green wax. In general, the 
 plan is the same as that of the fort at Agra. Very 
 high exterior walls, extensive courts for parades 
 and shows with elephants, sumptuous halls de- 
 corated with gold scrollwork, their walls incrusted 
 with jewelled birds and flowers, harems which are 
 exquisite as a dream : all this I have already seen 
 in Akbar's capital. " If Paradise can be found in 
 the world, it is here ! " says a Persian inscription. 
 
 No doubt this fortress, also, shelters a paradise 
 of idle delights ; there is the same abundance of 
 
 mosaic work, of marble trellises, of sinuous lotus 
 
 190 
 
DELHI JAIPUR igi 
 
 stems and flowers in relief ; there are the myste- 
 rious, shadowy bathrooms, and the terraces without 
 balustrades, whence you will see the sun go down 
 across a reedy plain, all resembling Agra. The 
 little mosque for the women is a jewel in marble 
 that would seem to have been cut from a single 
 block ; the three domes are like pearls. The 
 whole thing should be kept in a jewel-case. 
 
 Better still, however, do I like the great mosque, 
 the most beautiful in India, it is said, and, probably, 
 in all Asia. Broad stairs that, with a single oblique 
 bound, fall in sheets of marble ; above, a court 
 paved with polished alabaster, white, dazzling, which 
 looks as if it were made from one immense lustrous 
 stone ; on three sides of this court a deep gallery, 
 sustained by three rows of pillars ; at the right 
 and left, stiff slender minarets : this is the grand 
 Muhammadan style. An astonishing severity and 
 simplicity of lines : a general effect of something 
 dominant and supreme. The towers in their sim- 
 plicity rise high above the city, imperious as a con- 
 queror. It was here that the emperor, attended 
 by his nobles and his people, standing upon the 
 pavement, facing a white wall, used to listen to 
 the harsh sentences of the Koran, the fierce and 
 ardent law. Thereafter, he would order the sack 
 of a Hindu city ; then, build mosques, with the 
 materials of the destroyed pagodas ; and then 
 glorify in his heart the proud name of Allah. 
 
 The priests of Allah are not proud. The high- 
 priest, with silent gravity, showed us relics of 
 Muhammad, a sandal, a hair of his beard. As I 
 
192 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 bent my head before him, full of respect and 
 gratitude, suddenly he held out his hand. Cheddy 
 Lai, who has charge of the baksheesh, presented 
 him with three annas. Silent as before, the high- 
 priest bowed, thanking us with a dignified gesture. 
 However, he keeps up appearances. The Hindu 
 dealers are more demonstrative. At the railway 
 station, twenty shawl-merchants worry the unlucky 
 traveller. They accompany him to his hotel, run- 
 ning beside the carriage, climbing on the step, 
 clinging to the door, gesticulating, assailing him 
 with a hail of cards, inundating him with a never- 
 ending flow of obsequious speech. At the hotel, 
 one is not rid of them. They install themselves 
 upon the verandah, they mount guard outside your 
 bedroom, outside the dining-room : you come out, 
 they rush upon you ; it becomes a scuffle, you 
 show your fists, brandish your stick to get through. 
 The first encounters being over, you suppose 
 yourself at peace ; take notice that all the time 
 piercing eyes are on the watch for you. At six 
 in the morning, you awaken. Instantly, at the 
 other end of the great white bedroom, a door is 
 set ajar a few inches ; five arms are pushed 
 through, brandishing stuffs, slippers, caps. They 
 saw you fall asleep ; they saw you wake. Some 
 conceal themselves, following you in the street 
 on the opposite side-walk, waiting till you are 
 tired, alone, unprotected, and seize the oppor- 
 tune moment to present themselves. 
 
 A few minutes ago, sauntering in the great bazaar, 
 I accompanied Cheddy to a shawl-dealer's, who this 
 
DELHI JAIPUR 193 
 
 morning very nearly got himself crushed by my 
 garry in his endeavour to obtain the promise of a 
 visit. We find a fat man, of gentle face, seated 
 upon cushions, drinking coffee with some friends. 
 Upon our entrance he springs to his feet, he runs 
 back and forth, he whirls about me, he envelops 
 me in his gesticulations. In the twinkling of an 
 eye, before I know how he has done it, we have 
 each had a cup of coffee, and are seated before a 
 bale, which he unrolls with the agility of a monkey ; 
 out of it emerge, as if by magic, rare silks, em- 
 broideries in gold, which he holds up in the light, 
 with which he drapes himself, with which he drapes 
 me, with all sorts of feminine airs and graces. " I 
 want you, sir, to see this beautiful thing. What do 
 you think of it ? Is it not beautiful ? Put it aside. 
 You look at me. Don't you think it will do for 
 the young lady at home ? " The abrupt English, 
 the colourless accent, are something amazing ; 
 but the short sentences accumulate with deafen- 
 ing ardour. In three minutes it appears that I have 
 made my selection : a shawl, a little rug ; only a 
 hundred and fifty rupees. I know Hindu dealers, 
 and I have sense enough left to offer half. Almost 
 before I have mentioned the sum, my man cries : 
 " Let's toss up ! " That is to say, the price shall 
 be a hundred and fifty rupees if the coin falls head 
 up ; seventy-five, if tails. I refuse. At once the 
 things are mine, and the transaction is so promptly 
 made that it is clear the Hindu is not the loser. 
 
 Now, satisfied, he becomes calm ; and, in another 
 tone of voice, enters upon a new subject. It appears 
 
 N 
 
194 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 that this evening, at the hotel, I am to have the 
 honour of meeting a duchess. All the shawl-dealers 
 have been on the alert since her arrival ; and each 
 one, watching her, keeps watch upon his rivals as 
 well. My man begs that I will speak of him at the 
 table d'hote. " Give and take," he says ; and to per- 
 suade me, offers as a present a cap whose silver he 
 exhibits in the light. Treating me as a friend, he 
 confides the fact that he has a stock of shawls worth 
 three lacs of rupees, showing me also diplomas from 
 English Expositions. 
 
 It is easy to see that these Orientals do not know 
 the feeling of shame. It appears that honour and 
 conscience are products of the West, which cannot 
 be elaborated here. All beg for baksheesh with 
 clasped hands; and in the most serious and the 
 richest of them, you may find a beggar and a thief. 
 
 December 16. 
 
 Taking a carriage, I go to visit the Kutab-Minar, 
 the great tower which is ten miles distant from 
 Delhi. 
 
 Our road is an Asiatic Appian Way. Ruins from 
 every century, left by three races and three reli- 
 gions, strew a great, melancholy plain. Fragments 
 of ancient Hindu Delhi, of Afghan Delhi, of Mongol 
 Delhi, cover a dead extent of seventy miles square. 
 Slowly, in the course of centuries, the city has 
 changed its site, as a river changes its bed. As far 
 as the eye can see, among the withered brushwood, 
 rise ruinous domes and broken columns. These 
 yellowish heaps are the remains of Indra-Partha, 
 
DELHI JAIPUR 195 
 
 the city of Indra, for which the five brothers of 
 Mahabarata fought, three thousand years ago ! 
 Farther on, a granite pier, covered with faded 
 characters, proclaims the edicts of the Buddhist 
 king Asoka. Everywhere, like tombs in a cemetery, 
 are heaped the fragments of Mongol art, monu- 
 mental mausolea, domes surrounded with kiosks, 
 all discoloured by time, brought to a uniform tint 
 with the sad and withered vegetation, all taken 
 back by nature. A few tombs are as imposing as 
 Akbar's at Secundra, and rise solitary amid the 
 arid steppe. The blue peacocks wandering about 
 them are the only living things that haunt the spot. 
 Generations have swarmed here, and of their dead 
 life there remains this imperceptible residue ; as it 
 takes centuries of forest growth to make a thin 
 stratum of coal. The Vedic age, the Brahmanic 
 age, the Buddhist age, the first Musalman dynasties, 
 the Mongol epoch each historic period has left, 
 so to speak, its small deposit. 
 
 This is the history of the Kutab : four ancient 
 Hindu forts, still quite recognisable, once inclosed 
 a great city with its Buddhist temples, where monks 
 in yellow robes with shaven heads went peacefully 
 to and fro ; of this period there remains a huge 
 iron post, having on it Sanskrit inscriptions. About 
 the year 1000, over the Himalayan wall came the 
 first Musalman hordes. The city was razed, and 
 from the stone of its great temple was built a 
 mosque, whose ruins lie around us.* Here is a 
 
 * About 1193. 
 
196 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 triple colonnade in which have been recognised 
 the old Buddhist piers and the patient, complicated, 
 confused labour of the poor Hindu workman. 
 These stones are very deeply cut, and are loaded 
 with chasing, half effaced by time. Here and there 
 symbolic figures have been mutilated by the higher 
 morality of the conquering race. By degrees you 
 accustom yourself to read what the blurred stone 
 has to say, the lines grow clearer. You can discern 
 processions of gods surrounded by guards and 
 worshippers ; then animals, tigers, monkeys, and 
 elephants, which very early seem to have greatly 
 attracted the Hindu mind. These thousands of 
 blocks of stone, once forming irregular chapels and 
 grooved roofs, the Musalmans, later, employed in 
 colonnades, rectangular galleries, simple geometric 
 rows. Upon the great bare walls, cabalistic figures, 
 letters like birds' tracks, thundered against the 
 blasphemer. Above it all, dominating the immense 
 cemetery of the plain, inviolate by time, the Kutab 
 sends up, two hundred and fifty feet high, its shaft 
 of red stone and white marble. From its top, six 
 centuries ago, when yonder sun sank behind that 
 horizon, the sharp cry of the muezzin was wont to 
 break the silence of the great plains. 
 
 JAIPUR, December 17. 
 
 At eight in the morning I take the Rajputana 
 express ; a curious phrase that, and significant of 
 many things ! The exteriors of this civilisation 
 of English India are very brilliant. Except at 
 Benares, where you see exactly the same spectacles 
 
DELHI JAIPUR 197 
 
 that were to be seen two thousand years ago, in all 
 the cities that I have visited so far, in Calcutta, 
 Lucknow, Cawnpur, Agra, the beauty and neatness 
 of the avenues, the wealth of the villas, the luxury 
 of private and public gardens, the comfort and 
 number of hotels, the multitude of carriages, the 
 grand scale of the railway stations, would do 
 honour to a great European city. The question 
 remains to what depth this English life has pene- 
 trated the Hindu world. 
 
 All around is the same vast plain, where slender 
 grasses grow feebly in the sand. This is the limit 
 of the vegetable world. A few 7 leagues westward 
 the desert, the gloomy, yellow waste, begins. 
 
 And now, the sharp and simple outlines of sandy 
 mountains rise here and there from the level of 
 the plain like precipitous islets emerging from the 
 sea. There are no spurs, no preliminary undula- 
 tions of the ground. I observed in the Red Sea 
 a similar effect ; the promontory of Sinai, emerging 
 on the edge of the blue horizon designed in the 
 arid air an outline no less clear and hard. From 
 time to time, long lines of camels announced that 
 the nomad world, the world of the tent, was near. 
 
 About two o'clock, at Ulwar, the aspect of the 
 country becomes more fresh and animated. Great 
 grey monkeys are playing in the grass. Near the 
 station are the eternal blue peacocks, which seem 
 to people all the North-west of India. While the 
 train stops, I observe a group of women leaning 
 against a gate. The youngest, wrapped in a red 
 garment, has the beautiful oval face and the colour- 
 
198 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 less complexion of a Florentine of the Renaissance. 
 The features are of classic regularity, with that 
 inexpressible gravity and dignity we meet so often 
 here among low-caste women. There is nothing 
 savage or inferior in these types, of the purest 
 Aryan stamp. This one stood motionless, so calm, 
 so serious, her great sombre eyes full of concen- 
 trated passion. 
 
 Two British soldiers, of the Scots Greys, came 
 into my compartment. The fine types of race ! 
 Each man as tall and stout as two Hindus ; solid, 
 well set-up, buttoned tight in his grey jacket. 
 Nor are they simply fine, healthy animals. This 
 flesh is all muscle, hardened by training. Their 
 faces, under the Scotch caps, are full of frankness 
 and honesty. Features strong, well cut, expressive, 
 complexions clear, gestures to the point, and made 
 quietly. Their moral and physical training has 
 given them a certain repose of manner, a certain 
 dignity, a stamp of "the gentleman." During the 
 eight hours' journey from Ulmar to Jaipur they 
 remained silent and impassive, speaking once only, 
 to refuse a glass of wine ! Evidently they are 
 "teetotalers." 
 
 I was looking over a book by a Bengali on the 
 English establishment in India, and from time to 
 time my eyes left the book to observe the two 
 Scots ; they aided me in understanding it. In 
 that peculiar mental condition, stimulated and yet 
 slightly confused, which is caused by sleeplessness 
 and continuous, rapid motion on the railway ; in 
 that half-fever which accelerates at the same time 
 
DELHI JAIPUR 199 
 
 that it blurs the associations of ideas, their faces 
 interested me strangely. 1 seemed to see, in these 
 soldiers that chance had thus thrown in my way, 
 not individual personalities, but the type itself of 
 the race now mistress in the peninsula the pure, 
 complete, developed type ; and their faces were 
 to me as a living expression of the British soul. 
 I could read in them the calm, decided will, 
 the tenacity, the habit of self-control, the enthu- 
 siastic pride underlying the other qualities, and 
 those practical aptitudes which, in England, have 
 doubled the active force of the human being and 
 his grasp upon realities. 
 
 And with this, whiffs of England came into my 
 head ; separate, simple images coming, one by 
 one : a November evening, in a little chapel on 
 the Devonshire coast; outside, the black water, 
 splashing in the darkness ; here, the whole village 
 crowded into a hall of bare pine boards, all heads 
 turned toward one of their own people who is 
 preaching ; hard faces, ploughed with wrinkles ; 
 rows of old fishermen clasping their Bibles with 
 gaunt, trembling hands : then, the yellow atmos- 
 phere of the city, at the hour when the streets are 
 black with the crowd : again, young men in white 
 flannel throwing balls in greyish fields : long lines 
 of great misty vessels on a dull-coloured river, 
 whose leaden mirror gleams dolefully through a 
 fog : brick cities, drowned in a sluggish smoke 
 rising from ten thousand factory chimneys. 
 
 Then these confused images blend and dis- 
 appear ; and, without transition, as if one turned 
 
200 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 the mental stereoscope, in a rosy light, a great 
 muddy river appears ; the divine Ganges is flow- 
 ing past its two thousand pagodas, at Benares, 
 and on its banks the inert crowd of Brahmans, 
 sitting on their heels. 
 
 The Thames below London, the Ganges at 
 Benares in the presence of this contrast one 
 measures the abyss separating the two races which 
 here we see placed together. In the depths of the 
 English soul, as great Englishmen have made it 
 visible to us Cromwell or Milton, Wordsworth or 
 Carlyle and as we see it still more clearly in their 
 works of art, where the type, pure and clear, is 
 thrown into stronger relief than in the real world, 
 in Robinson Crusoe or in Tom Tulliver, one per- 
 ceives a strong and almost changeless personality ; 
 a steadfast will, supported by a few permanent 
 and powerful sentiments, a solid axis, on which 
 everything rests. They all conceive life as a series 
 of prescribed acts, whose aim is to ameliorate the 
 condition, to augment the well-being, and to per- 
 fect the moral nature. This ideal, with an admir- 
 able enthusiasm, and with a narrowness of mind 
 which seems the penalty of her active virtues, 
 England sets before India ; multiplying schools 
 for boys and girls, colleges, and universities ; and 
 ruining herself with missionaries. It is said that 
 the results are meagre, and that English culture 
 produces only miserable failures : Chunder Dutt, 
 the Bengali whom I have just now been reading, 
 is a specimen of the converted babu ; he imagines 
 no other model than the English. Hence, he 
 
DELHI JAIPUR 201 
 
 demands the complete application of the English 
 moral code ; he denounces feminine dress and the 
 promiscuous dip in the sacred rivers. Here is the 
 idea of this Bengali, who aspires to be the English 
 clergyman : to have the sacred shore of the ancient 
 river divided by barriers and placards, " Ladies on 
 one side, gentlemen on the other." But this in- 
 vention denotes a lack of culture and the critical 
 faculty. Chunder Dutt, who has read Macaulay, 
 has not read Renan. However, this scandal is not 
 about to cease. The success of the missionaries 
 in India is really very small. It has been esti- 
 mated that every Hindu conversion costs England 
 a thousand pounds sterling ; and however sincere 
 the convert may be, and however hard he may 
 strive to make himself as an Englishman, it is 
 certain that all he can do is only to assume a 
 disguise. For the intellectual and moral habits 
 of a people, like the organs of a plant, are condi- 
 tioned upon a certain combination of circumstances 
 which is infinitely complex, and in which the 
 principal element is the entire series of its ante- 
 cedents. All their past has made them what 
 they are. 
 
 Ah ! ancient ascetics, profound dreamers, who 
 sought, twenty centuries ago, to tear away the 
 rainbow-hued veil which illusion weaves over the 
 dark reality ; who renounced all personal desire, to 
 shelter yourselves in indifference and immobility ; 
 with what a smile of disdainful pity would you 
 regard that Western race which now rules in your 
 land ! They do not believe that the world is a 
 
202 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 dream, these new-comers. They have not ceased 
 from saying : " I am." They rejoice in their 
 strength, and their will obtains its gratification. 
 They act, they build upon this world which they 
 believe of rock, and you believe is shifting sand. 
 What would you say of their haste and fever ? 
 What would you say of these ships loaded with 
 this world's goods ; of these trains which devour 
 the distance, as if it were of any consequence to 
 change one's place, to go any whither ? But, above 
 all, what would you say of this meagre English 
 philosophy, which vegetates lin yonder land of fogs 
 where there is no luxuriance of nature ; and of 
 this theistic heresy, which they propose to natu- 
 ralise in the home of broad speculation ? This, at 
 least, is certain : you would make no attempt to 
 enlighten them, blinded by Maya. You would 
 leave them to their ignorant goings to and fro, to 
 their pride ; and, slowly closing your eyes, you 
 would return with delight to your solitary dream, 
 to your tranquillising contemplation of the eternal 
 and motionless ! 
 
 It is certain that the English stratum is greatly 
 in evidence in India, even in the states which are 
 independent. There is always an "English Church," 
 severe and unadorned, like those which keep guard 
 over the country in England. At the spacious 
 railway stations, colonists in shooting jackets are 
 reading eight-paged " papers." Placards announce 
 "a match between the cricketers of Lucknow 
 and the champions of Allahabad " ; or races at 
 Ahmedabad and Baroda. Other placards advertise 
 
DELHI JAIPUR 203 
 
 a machine which turns out ten thousand bottles 
 of soda-water daily. Ouida's romances and those 
 of Walter Besant lie on a counter. 
 
 Meantime women, clad as were the Hindu 
 contemporaries of Homer, their ankles, ears, and 
 noses adorned with rings, carry stoneware jars. 
 Warriors go by, bristling with sabres, loaded with 
 bucklers ; and we are upon the territory of a 
 prince who, at Bindrabun, is erecting a pagoda to 
 Krishna. 
 
 December 18. 
 
 At Calcutta, English India ; at Benares, the India 
 of the Brahmans ; at Agra, the India of the Grand 
 Moguls ; here, the India of the rajahs, the India 
 of novels and the opera fairy-like and incredible. 
 The Rajputana is a very ancient Hindu kingdom, 
 resembling those which covered the peninsula 
 before the Musalman establishments in the early 
 centuries of our era. It has never been conquered. 
 Against the diverse races who have ruled in India, 
 the Rajputs have maintained their independence. 
 They are still the Aryan people that they were in 
 the fabulous time of the Ramayana. Across a 
 hundred and thirty-nine generations, the rajah 
 claims descent from the sun, who was father of 
 the great Rama ; and he still governs according 
 to the law of Manu, as did the Hindu kings, his 
 ancestors, who lived before Caesar. The nobles 
 are of a race equally good, like himself descendants 
 of the sun and moon, and the early history of the 
 great Rajput families is lost in the night of time. 
 
204 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 The population, organised, as in the primitive days, 
 in clans, in tribes, is of noble race, of white race. 
 Every Rajput is by birth a Kshatriya, belonging to 
 that caste of Aryan warriors who recognise no 
 superiors but the Brahmans. Hence a man of 
 the country esteems himself the equal of his princes. 
 He is called "the king's son." His character is 
 proud, manly, honourable ; he has a horse, a lance, 
 and a shield ; in battle he follows the chief of his 
 clan, and loyally stands by his father, the king, in 
 defence of the gods and the country. 
 
 Even from the hotel, outside the city, you re- 
 cognise a very original world. Low, yellowish 
 hills, all crowned with strongholds and crenellated 
 towers, encircle the horizon. A mediaeval stage- 
 scene was not a thing to be expected in the tropics. 
 Along the road, through the crowd of little donkeys, 
 past troops of women who sing as they walk, horse- 
 men, mounted on fine Arab steeds, a round buckler 
 at the belt, a sabre at the side, coiffed with red 
 turbans, their great beards parted in the middle 
 and spreading out, flattened and bristling, at the 
 right and left, prance with an air of the most 
 audacious courage. Nothing of that gentle, in- 
 dolent, dreamy expression which I have so x)ften 
 seen in India. This is a very active world : people 
 on foot, horsemen, camels, elephants, heavy carts, 
 small donkeys, crowd the roads, and all this 
 crowd is noisy, and glittering in the dust and 
 sunshine. 
 
 After half an hour on the way, we arrive at the 
 postern of the fortified wall surrounding the city. 
 
DELHI JAIPUR 205 
 
 I pass under high bastions, cross a drawbridge, 
 then a little inner courtyard, where kneeling camels 
 are waiting to be unloaded, and of a sudden I 
 emerge into the scenery of an opera, misty, light, 
 fantastic, charming, indescribable. 
 
 The first thing you are conscious of is the pink 
 colour of the picture. Let the reader supply this 
 colour as I attempt to describe what I beheld. 
 Let him imagine a street a hundred and twenty 
 feet wide, and two miles long, bordered with pink 
 houses, pink temples, pink palaces, pink bell-towers, 
 and pavilions, the pink a most delicate rose-colour, 
 and this street so straight that to its very end you 
 see the houses, shops, fa9ades, in perfect alignment 
 succeeding each other, growing indistinct in the 
 distance, vanishing in a mist of this same extra- 
 ordinary pink. There is not a spot of dark colour 
 anywhere, not a European carriage, nothing but 
 the multi-coloured twinkling of the crowd. On the 
 side-walks to the right and left, as far as you can 
 see, it is a bazaar in the open air, a row of dealers 
 seated on the ground, and, upon blue and red rugs 
 which are spread out upon the pavement, a great 
 display of shining objects slippers embroidered 
 with silver, piles of oranges and bananas, painted 
 images, stuffs splashed with sunshine. To right and 
 left all is graceful and luminous ; one could spend 
 a day walking through the streets, and it would 
 be a pleasure to retain an exact memory of each 
 detail. The eye cannot be satisfied with seeing. 
 Vainly I cry to my coachman : Hasta / hasta f 
 (Slowly ! slowly !) we still go too fast ; and to his 
 
206 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 great disgust I leave the carriage, that I may saunter 
 at will. 
 
 Rajput nobles and functionaries, adorned as for 
 a play, clothed in embroidery, loaded with feathers 
 and jewels, their imposing beards skilfully spread 
 out fanwise ; handsome, well-groomed horses; 
 romantic soldiers, with shield and sword ; students, 
 guards, women of the people, sometimes carrying 
 a naked baby astride on the hip : all go by in a 
 light mist which is the evaporation of the heavy 
 dew. 
 
 From the edge of their stalls, the little dealers 
 stretch out their arms to me, offering, with a pretty 
 smile, marble statuettes, pictures of gods hastily 
 daubed, yet not without spirit and expression. 
 The walls are all tattooed with designs in blue : 
 elephants, leopards, trees, locomotives, Europeans 
 very stiff, buttoned tight in ridiculous frockcoats. 
 There are grown men flying kites and running 
 about the streets like schoolboys. And all this 
 whimsical people, laughing and playing, this boyish, 
 artistic people, seem created by a poet's comic 
 caprice, in a dream-world where all must be light, 
 droll, gay, airy, and none of the sad and hateful 
 realities of life should remain. 
 
 In this world men live like brothers with the 
 animals, those good souls that are more simple 
 and more tranquil than we. See the strings of little 
 donkeys with their little trot, the gentle camels 
 of slow and undulating gait, lifting their long, 
 womanish necks above the crowd ; the flocks of 
 grey monkeys upon the roofs ; the peaceful cows 
 
DELHI JAIPUR 207 
 
 with great greenish horns, themselves white, statu- 
 esque, as if carved in marble. There are small 
 dogs, coloured yellow, blue, or pink. Further, in 
 a large open square, a crowded population of 
 pigeons, lighting by myriads, cover the ground 
 with a dense, undulating, bluish floor, which opens 
 as the heavy bulk of an elephant, caparisoned 
 with red, passes through. Among all these living 
 animals, here and there are altars for their wor- 
 ship ; tiny tabernacles filled with little bulls, little 
 elephants, little monkeys. This square is at the 
 intersection of two streets, which meet at right 
 angles, the other street just as broad, as straight, 
 as pink as the one we have followed. Here, at 
 the foot of temples guarded by elephants in stone, 
 there is a great confusion of passers-by, of flowers, 
 of donkeys, camels, horsemen, and dealers. Among 
 the crowd of pigeons picking up their food, there 
 are a hundred cows peacefully reposing, indifferent 
 to all the stir around them ; boys, standing, hold 
 up tall branches that fill the space with verdure : 
 these the worshippers buy, and lay them before 
 the cows, who accept this homage as their due, 
 and munch serenely. From the tops of trees hang 
 earthen vases green with moss, on which alight 
 flocks of parrots, their pretty round heads ringed 
 with red. 
 
 Suddenly a prancing of horses. What is this 
 proud cavalcade which comes into the square ? 
 The fine animals with their lustrous coats, the 
 handsome cavaliers with glittering weapons ! This 
 is the brother of the rajah, followed by his barons, 
 
208 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 preceded by his men-at-arms, who run on foot, 
 carrying halberds. A velvet cap over one ear, in a 
 green embroidered tunic, the prince manages his 
 capering horse. For an instant I see him, a bold 
 and noble face, which shows the grand ancestry, 
 the good blood, the instinct of command. He is 
 a true Kshatriya, lineal descendant of the first 
 conquerors of India. 
 
 Meanwhile, the elephants come back to their 
 stable. Here are seven, rugged and sombre colossi, 
 taciturn philosophers, full of slowness, superior to 
 all the beings who are scurrying about them. One 
 by one they disappear under a porch, brushing 
 the ground with their trunks, each with three 
 cornacs on his massive head, with its huge flapping 
 ears. Bending the knee, as with a human gait, 
 gently setting down their big, soft feet, they pass, 
 silent as shadows. What profound thought in 
 those sad, heavy heads, and how they ignore this 
 inferior population of men and beasts who scatter 
 before them ! It is comprehensible, as you see 
 them, that Ganesa, the wise god, should have an 
 elephant's head. 
 
 At every instant the pictures change ; I try to 
 note this one as it flies : before a lofty door of the 
 palace, into which disappear pachyderms, camels, 
 a whole city full of men, the air is thick with 
 falcons. They whirl and scream before the red 
 image of the elephant god, which sleeps in a 
 niche over the porch ; and shrill trumpets make 
 a Hindu music. 
 
 All around the square are temples, monuments, 
 
DELHI JAIPUR 209 
 
 university, palaces ; one, among the rest, of a 
 singularly vivid rose-colour, rising in the form of 
 a pyramid, bristles with a nine-storied fa$ade, 
 composed of a hundred bell-turrets, and sixty-four 
 projecting windows, adorned with colonnettes and 
 balconies, pierced in open-work with countless 
 flowers cut out in the stone ; a vaporous, airy, 
 impossible construction. This is the palace of the 
 Wind the palace of the Wind ? How enchanting 
 the name ! There is, also, on a beautiful little hill 
 outside the city, the palace of the Clouds ; and on 
 another hill the temple of the Sun. The rose- 
 coloured gate at the other end of Jaipur is called 
 the gate of Rubies. This is clearly the city of a 
 fairy tale. A trumpet-call ! A brazen voice which 
 makes one look around. Running very rapidly, 
 comes a merry funeral train ; comes the corpse 
 closely wrapped in white gauze ; come the bearers 
 who carry it, slung from bamboos; comes the 
 family, leaping, clashing cymbals, screaming out 
 the sacred syllable : " Ram ! Ram ! " They have 
 all gone by, disappeared, the noisy troop ! Now 
 there are greyhounds in a leash, with crimson 
 blankets, from the royal gardens where, on camp- 
 beds, lie asleep the hunting leopards and lynxes 
 of his Highness. Strange, lean, supple creatures, 
 these greyhounds ; very noble, with a keen light 
 in their piercing eyes, as, with rough tongue, they 
 lick the hand their attendant holds out to them. 
 Not far distant I see a wedding party; fifty women, 
 clothed in silky yellow, seated on the ground, are 
 chanting, and the bride, a slip of a girl, ten years 
 
210 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 old, stands alone in the centre. At the end of 
 the street, behind a grating, which makes a fagade 
 upon the side-walk, in the presence of the pass- 
 ing crowd, ten man-eaters, ten royal tigers, with 
 lowered heads, measure with long, gentle steps 
 the cage to which, after due form of law, they 
 have been sentenced. They well deserve their 
 title of sahibs, " lords," these beasts. The greatest 
 beauty of them all is the assassin of sixteen women. 
 I have the same feeling at sight of the formidable, 
 gloomy head, the sinuous, gliding back, the supple- 
 ness of the thick muscles, the possible snap of 
 the terrible jaws, the tawny splendour of the coat 
 made of living light, that I had in Ceylon, before 
 the sheaf of bamboos springing up into the flaming 
 sky. 
 
 Among this multitude of images crowding one 
 upon another, a sight which is incessantly repeated 
 never loses its charm. You are never tired of 
 admiring the suppleness and freshness of nude 
 youthful figures. The slender, curving torsos of 
 the children, both boys and girls, are adorable. 
 The long black tresses fall over the pretty, wild, timid 
 face, and over the delicately-modelled chest. You 
 are conscious of the strength and health of the 
 young muscles and the pure blood. It is something 
 perfect. The light and shade are harmoniously 
 blent upon the smooth bronze of the skin, all en- 
 veloped in sunshine and atmosphere. The young 
 women, half nude, know how to adjust their 
 drapery with extreme grace. There is nothing 
 more delightful to the eye, more simple and 
 
DELHI JAIPUR 2 1 I 
 
 tranquil, than these folds of soft stuff. In the 
 little girls, who are extremely slender, you can 
 see the peaceful undulation of the interior frame- 
 work. They also, even the very youngest, carry 
 upon the head handsome round jars, which they 
 hold with stretched arms, lifted as high as possible, 
 the chest dilated with the effort, and the bronze 
 skin all lustrous in the sunlight. 
 
 I enter a temple whose broad steps descend 
 into the square. Below, kneeling camels are asleep, 
 and dogs lie upon the steps, stretched out in the 
 sun. I ascend and enter a court, where cows 
 wander freely over the marble pavement. In a 
 corner are the two sacred trees, the male and 
 female banian, the latter called the pipala. An old 
 woman is running rapidly around the first one, 
 and another woman is pouring a little water upon 
 the leaves of the second. On one side, a second 
 courtyard has a gallery supported by columns. 
 There, in the shadow, a red group of seated 
 women listen quietly to the nasal chant of a priest 
 reading the Ramayana. The pretty, regular faces, 
 seen under their wraps, scarcely look absorbed in 
 meditation. Every creature is perfectly at home 
 in the temple : the priest seated on his heels, 
 garlanded with flowers, swings his body to and 
 fro to the rhythm of what he reads. Quantities of 
 sparrows are pecking here and there, and large 
 crows hop awkwardly upon the backs of the 
 drowsy cows. Strictly characteristic of Hinduism 
 is this worship in the open air, this sacred place 
 which is at once a cow-house, an aviary, and a 
 
212 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 temple. An intense light strikes upon the walls, 
 on which are rudely set forth in blue paint the 
 adventures of five hundred gods. Behind the 
 priest, at the end of the gallery, is a dark taber- 
 nacle wherein the idol is visible, a small, black- 
 faced doll, Paravati, attired in red, and guarded 
 by two lions. Beneath, her husband, the formid- 
 able Siva, is represented only by his emblematic 
 stone. Here childless women come to pray, and 
 young girls who desire to be married. 
 
 Opposite the temple, on the other side of the 
 great square, with its seething crowd of men and 
 beasts, stands the maharajah's college. I was 
 admiring its facade, eccentric and rose-coloured 
 like that of the palace of the Wind, when a student 
 invited me to enter. I was introduced to the 
 principal, whom I found seated in a little dark 
 cabinet surrounded by books. A Hindu face 
 very gentle, refined, a little anxious-looking the 
 air of a student, thin, stooping, clad in a long 
 black tunic. With quiet gestures, and in a few 
 words of perfect English, he made me welcome, 
 and conducted me to the class-rooms. The higher 
 examinations being near, the students who were 
 preparing for them had remained at home, and we 
 saw only the pupils of the first and second year. 
 In great pillared halls, little groups of these boys 
 were gathered around their instructors. There 
 were neither chairs nor benches nor desks. All 
 rose at our entrance, and bowed low, twice touch- 
 ing their lips with a graceful and eager gesture. 
 In one hall, however, the boys remained seated ; 
 
DELHI JAIPUR 2 1 3 
 
 these, the principal explained to me, are the sons of 
 the rajah and of his nobles; and, being descended 
 from Rama and the sun, are not expected to salute 
 a visitor. 
 
 The whole instruction here is gratuitous, and the 
 examinations give entrance to government careers. 
 The students are taught mathematics, the English 
 language and literature, the dialects of India, and 
 the Persian language. For the higher classes there 
 is also instruction in Sanskrit, Pali, the Brahmanic, 
 Buddhist, and Persian philosophies and the philo- 
 sophies of modern Europe. Spencer and Stuart 
 Mill are read as classics. 
 
 The principal, who is a Bengali, is ready to 
 converse, and seems well informed as to what 
 is going on, not only in England but in the rest 
 of Europe. He speaks admiringly of Burnouf, 
 of Barthelemy St. Hilaire, of Bergaigne, of the 
 great French Sanskritists. As a rule, he says, India 
 knows Europe only through England. " A young 
 student who enters on the higher studies begins 
 with the English classics : Shakespeare, Milton 
 (a good beginning for a Hindu brain), then, and 
 especially, Addison, Pope ; later, the philosophers 
 and economists, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, 
 Burke; all the thinkers of the eighteenth and 
 nineteenth centuries, down to Herbert Spencer, 
 whose influence is very great. In respect to France 
 and Germany, we know them only at second hand. 
 In general we do not know the languages of these 
 two countries. And still we are beginning to 
 admire something outside of England ; and if 
 
214 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 Hegel and Fichte are unfamiliar to us, we study 
 the Oriental philosophies, especially the Upani- 
 shads, the ancient Vedantism, where we find 
 included all Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Schopen- 
 hauer." 
 
 By degrees he becomes animated, and I seem 
 to detect in him a fund of enthusiasm for the old 
 metaphysics of his country. "Within the last 
 five or six years," he says, " there has been a re- 
 action in its favour. Under English influence, 
 writers in Calcutta (the school of the Brahmos) 
 have denounced the immoralities and follies of the 
 Hindu religion. We now begin to recognise that 
 under its extravagances is hidden a profound idea, 
 and you will see that it is defended by our scholars 
 and thinkers. We aspire to be ourselves. Observe 
 the maharajah, who has introduced English ideas, 
 has given us a college in Jaipur, a museum, and an 
 industrial school; he does nothing against Hinduism. 
 In his palace at Amber, there is always the sacrifice 
 of goats to Kali. But beneath the symbol, he sees 
 the idea ; we distinguish the spirit beneath the 
 letter, the thought contained in the religious forms 
 which appeal to the multitude. There is a reaction 
 against the English theism which young Bengal, 
 that is to say, the intellectual lite of India, had 
 welcomed with too great enthusiasm. We feel 
 that we have something of our own, original 
 and more profound. That we read and admire 
 Herbert Spencer is because he criticises the idea 
 of a personal God as one of the forms of anthropo- 
 morphism." 
 
DELHI JAIPUR 2 1 5 
 
 Does this Hindu speak truly ? Is it possible that 
 India, becoming once more conscious of herself, is 
 throwing off the intellectual yoke of England ? 
 Does she propose to bring forward her idea of 
 life and the world, in opposition to the English 
 conception ? Is it possible that in the peace en- 
 joyed under English rule, the Hindu brain, so 
 long paralysed by Muhammadan oppression, once 
 more begins to work ? And if so, what will come 
 of it? 
 
 Meanwhile it is interesting to see the poles of 
 humanity thus brought face to face English 
 energy, practical will, and positive sense, and 
 Hindu speculation and tendency to the meta- 
 physical dream which makes thought triumphant, 
 sovereign over desire and illusions, and kills the 
 active faculties. 
 
 December 19. 
 
 A day devoted to the gratification of the eye, 
 first, wandering alone through this astonishing 
 pink street, filling the soul with the delight of 
 colour, intoxicating myself with the whimsicalities 
 of this Jaipur. Then, outside the town, we take 
 the road leading to Amber, a pretty white ribbon, 
 lying amid the verdure of strange thick -leaved 
 plants, as tall as little trees. With their spiny, 
 fat tennis-rackets of leaves, they cover the ground 
 for a great distance ; a stiff, immovable vegetation 
 which seems that of some other planet. From 
 the midst of it arise ancient structures, innumer- 
 able kiosks and pavilions of marble, shining in 
 
2l6 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 the good sunlight. Red and blue troops of men 
 and women are gaily moving along the road. 
 
 I have never seen so many and so handsome 
 peacocks. They wander in the road, the sap- 
 phire in their plumage gleaming softly in the 
 light. These birds are wild, yet perfectly tame ; 
 they belong to no one, and live unmolested among 
 the human beings. Like all harmless creatures, 
 they are sacred to the good Hindus, who count 
 it a religious duty to feed them. "They do no 
 harm," Cheddy says to me soberly. " English very 
 naughty, throw stones at them." 
 
 Farther on, a deserted palace, green with wild 
 vegetation, seems to rest upon the mirror of a 
 stagnant pond, whose black, infected water gives 
 back a dull reflection. On its shore crocodiles 
 lie motionless, asleep. All about us the graceful, 
 sunny hills are relieved against a tranquil blue 
 sky. The sun is not too hot, the air subtle, light, 
 exhilarating. 
 
 Six P.M. We make a hurried visit to the maha- 
 rajah's palace, the stables where a hundred Arab 
 horses paw the ground, the kennels, the chained 
 elephants, the greenhouses ; and then it is time 
 to say good-bye to the pink city. Near the rail- 
 way station, a little Rajput schoolboy, loaded with 
 his Hindustani books, bids me a delicious "Good 
 afternoon ! " 
 
 In the train, at once repossessed by the European 
 environment, one has a feeling of having come 
 out from a brilliant theatre, from a spectacle made 
 to amuse, to divert from real life, like one of Shake- 
 
DELHI JAIPUR 217 
 
 speare's comedies, or like a pastoral of Watteau. 
 An operetta-world, the world of a dream : this 
 patriarchal community, these clans, these caval- 
 cades of nobles, the children of the sun ; this wise 
 king, beloved by his little nation, tyrannical for 
 instance, one may not photograph at Jaipur without 
 the rajah's express permission and paternal ; these 
 warriors, with lance and shield, with their whimsi- 
 cal beards and showy dress ; the happy, laughing 
 people ; the blue dogs, the hunting leopards and 
 lynxes. It is the stage-scene of an operetta, these 
 streets crushed-strawberry colour, the pink houses 
 which you cannot believe are really stone, the 
 crenellated castles on the hills, the light, fantastic 
 structures, the palace of the Wind, the palace of 
 the Clouds, the gate of Rubies, the hall of Splen- 
 dours, the humid greenhouses full of a fresh 
 odour of vaporous ferns, the fields covered with 
 thick - leaved plants, the blue peacocks popping 
 out from thickets, the deserted kiosks on the 
 shore of dark pools. It is an operetta-existence 
 where nothing is serious, or heavy, or sad, that 
 is lived by this laughing, artist-population, who 
 do no other work than carve little gods and little 
 beasts in marble, embroider slippers with silver, 
 illuminate their walls with blue designs, bestride 
 Arab horses, feed the birds of the air, fly kites, 
 and enjoy in full security the light of day 
 and the goodness of things. Yes, a happy, sim- 
 plified, childish life, which lacks only its orchestra, 
 chorus, and ballet, and whose dazzling poetic 
 vision clings in one's memory, as he turns away 
 
21 8 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 toward the darkness and the sadness of our 
 Europe. 
 
 The hills have closed in about the charming 
 city. Now a golden dust floats in the air. A 
 solitary heron stands motionless on the edge of a 
 lake, which is all rose-colour and blue in the twilight 
 radiance. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 BOMBAY 
 
 December 21. 
 
 THIRTY-SIX hours of railway. As we advance 
 southward, toward the great English city, the train 
 becomes crowded : fat babus, important native 
 merchants, encumber the carriages with their 
 travelling-bags, loll indolently and insolently upon 
 the cushions. The third-class are crammed with 
 a Hindu crowd, chattering, laughing, and con- 
 versing. For luggage they have only their brass 
 jars, engraved with figures of Krishna and Ganesa. 
 At the stations Brahman s, loaded with leathern 
 bottles, come to refill these jars. Only the Brah- 
 mans can perform this duty, for a Kshatriya 
 travelling would be defiled by drinking water 
 which a Sudra had poured out. But everybody 
 can touch what the Brahman has touched. Be 
 his duties ever so servile, the Brahman remains a 
 Brahman, preserving his supernatural virtue ; the 
 superiority of caste remains, whatever the in- 
 feriority of occupation. 
 
 There is little to notice. In these long journeys 
 the mind, blurred by the multitude of images 
 lately perceived, becomes somnolent, and is in- 
 terested in nothing. Cities rapidly seen, Baroda, 
 
 219 
 
220 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 Ahmedabad, great railway stations, tiffins, break- 
 fasts with the everlasting curry, the simple outlines 
 of blue mountains. Athwart all this, the same arid 
 country ; and, perpetually, the amazing troops of 
 monkeys leaping in the tall brush. 
 
 The second morning, as I awake, there is a 
 surprise. Suddenly you seem to be in Ceylon 
 again. Again the moist region, hot, stormy ; the 
 great equatorial vegetation. Everywhere there is 
 water. Dense forests of palm-trees descend to- 
 ward lagoons, mirror their slender colonnades in 
 the blue estuaries, and their great green leafy 
 coronets, rising in the moist air, make shadowy 
 arches, under which small houses find shelter. 
 The ground is black, marshy, abounding in pools 
 of water. Thousands of large-footed birds people 
 the edges of the marshes and of the salt-water 
 inlets. Here and there, on the west, the water 
 is continuous ; roads form and increase in extent, 
 immense spaces of a calm and splendid blue, 
 spotted with islets that seem half-sunken forests, 
 and bordered here with cocoanut groves, there 
 with low hills, which their dense vegetation covers 
 like a thick bluish mist. Now, a great space of the 
 Indian Ocean appears ; the space seems to broaden 
 to contain all this light. 
 
 Then a clattering of iron ; a great uproar ; a 
 huge railway terminus ; we come into the station 
 of Bori-Bunder ; this is Bombay. 
 
 Five P.M. It is extremely warm, with a moist 
 heat as of a greenhouse, very fatiguing and ener- 
 vating. One has not strength to select and group 
 
BOMBAY 221 
 
 impressions, and, indeed, it is all too varied. This 
 city is composed of several cities, spread out over 
 five islands. It would seem that all the races, all 
 the religions, all the forms of architecture, all the 
 industries of the globe are blended and confused 
 here into an extraordinary mixture, seething and 
 smoking in the sunlight. 
 
 I am sitting on the terrace of a cafd on the 
 Esplanade. Here, the island is contracted into a 
 very narrow tongue of land, the sea visible on both 
 sides, on the right a great harbour, girt with forests 
 on the remote edge ; on the left a broad yellow 
 beach which, curving slightly, stretches away to- 
 ward a promontory, and dark, shiny clumps of 
 palm-trees. Upon this beach, two miles or so of 
 straight road, which is bordered on the left by 
 immense buildings, Gothic or Venetian, separated 
 from the city by lawns and gardens. 
 
 Along this road by the sea, all the commercial 
 aristocracy of Bombay is now on its way to the 
 Esplanade to enjoy the evening breeze. Here, 
 facing the harbour, the carriages are standing 
 in a crowd, while the Sepoy band plays European 
 airs. Beside the fat Hindus in their white tunics 
 and pink turbans, many Englishmen and Parsis, 
 the latter dressed in European style, but grotesquely 
 coiffed with a mitre of starred pasteboard; also, 
 European and native officers are gathered outside 
 the cafes, sipping their lemonade or cocktails. 
 There are, moreover, many ayahs, Hindu nurses 
 with their babies, adorned like shrines covered 
 with velvet and brocade. 
 
222 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 In the carriages, motionless as at a race, the 
 Parsi ladies sit in state. This is the first glimpse 
 of feminine "society" in India. The high-caste 
 Hindu women are all mysteriously shut up in the 
 zenanas, and you must go to the dealers to see the 
 silks and costly embroideries of Benares and Delhi. 
 But here they may be seen in the open air and 
 sunlight, draped about the supple and living figure : 
 yonder old lady is clad in one piece of material 
 which enwraps her from head to foot ; but the 
 material is a heavy crimson silk, fringed with gold. 
 As she moves slightly, it falls in great lustrous 
 folds. They are all thus attired, in Greek style, 
 and have veils of muslin, or of mauve or blue silk, 
 which follow the pure outline of the head, and 
 with their strong, simple colour set off the gentle- 
 ness of Aryan features and the whiteness of soft 
 faces. Languid, leaning far back in their carriages, 
 they await, these opulent Oriental women, with 
 half-closed eyelids, the evening breeze which shall 
 reanimate them. 
 
 And there is a marvellous light upon this showy 
 assemblage, a light of a kind that one never ob- 
 serves except in the neighbourhood of great spaces 
 of tropical seas, coming from the water, as well 
 as from the sky. I have seen nothing like the 
 sky here, either in Egypt, Ceylon, or the interior 
 of India. It is not at all blue, but is all white, 
 liquid light, full of heat and moisture. 
 
 Now the sun sinks behind Malabar Hill, and in 
 this air, peculiar to Bombay, there are very curious 
 effects of radiation. A rose-coloured vapour in- 
 
BOMBAY 223 
 
 vades everything, encircles sea and land, and 
 covers the remote forests, which are not relieved 
 against the golden horizon, but vanish into it and 
 disappear. The sun seems to melt as it sinks, and 
 to sink in front of the trees. 
 
 Soon a light breeze springs up, and the roseate 
 water quivers. The great black steamers in a row 
 seem dead things in this universal faint stir. Out 
 toward the open sea, clouds of vessels have spread 
 their wings, and in the silence and the light fly like 
 a dream, so tranquil that they seem to be borne 
 away upon some broad current, as if the whole 
 water were slipping away with them ; and in 
 following them you forget the Sepoy band, and 
 the parti-coloured ground, and the languid Parsi 
 ladies, until the little pink swarm is so far, so far 
 away that it seems to be going out of our world, 
 to be rising into space, into those blessed regions 
 where is nothing but the calm of ether. 
 
 December 23. 
 
 Certainly it is not easy to describe the aspect of 
 this Bombay, diverse and confused as it is. The 
 eye cannot arrange in order the images which fill 
 it. I write them at random, as they recur this 
 evening after a day spent in the streets. Perhaps 
 this is the only way to give an idea of the whirl 
 of forms and colours, the confusion of races and 
 of religions. 
 
 Everywhere, and at every hour of the day, there 
 is the streaming crowd, more dense than in 
 Benares, a motley crowd wherein are blended all 
 
224 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 the costumes of Asia; wherein all types of humanity 
 elbow one another ; Europeans in coats, the Arab 
 with his fez, Persians, Afghans, thick-lipped negroes, 
 slender Malays, effeminate Cinhalese, Parsis and 
 Jews, Chinese in robes of silk. Probably, since the 
 time of Alexander, there has been no such epitome 
 of the entire world, no city so cosmopolitan. There 
 are bits of London here, bits of Benares, bits of 
 Shanghai. Underneath this flux of foreign races, 
 there is a native substratum of half-naked humanity : 
 fakirs grey with ashes ; letter-writers kneeling on 
 the side- walk ; schools receiving instruction in the 
 open air; worshippers bending before sacred images, 
 covering them with native flowers ; coolies who run, 
 balancing packages at the end of a long bamboo ; 
 naked barbers who are shaving their customers ; a 
 whole population of women who serve as porters, 
 girls of low caste, almost negresses, dripping with 
 sweat, their legs bare to the thigh, sitting on the 
 ground in the shade of the walls, a crowd of them 
 together, miserable-looking objects, stupefied by 
 hard labour; and over everything an atmosphere 
 loaded with vapour. 
 
 I see ancient carts dragged by heavy, patient 
 oxen, amid tram-cars, victorias, palanquins, sedan- 
 chairs. I see walls covered with blue elephants, 
 with placards, in English, Persian, Urdu, Hindu- 
 stani ; mosques, Christian churches, Anglican, 
 Wesleyan, Catholic, Hindu temples, Parsi temples. 
 Railways run along the boulevards, past pagodas 
 bristling with their hundred thousand monsters, 
 past the statue of Her Majesty the Queen, past the 
 
BOMBAY 225 
 
 Gothic buildings of the University, past the blue ex- 
 panse where sleep at anchor the great steamships. 
 
 From this mass of images repeated all day long, 
 melting one into another, I essay to detach a few 
 salient pictures. Here is the great market, six 
 o'clock in the morning ; in a fog, shot through 
 with sunlight, three or four thousand men, 
 women, children, naked or clad in beautiful colours, 
 struggle with each other among the oranges, 
 bananas, pine-apples, flowers, amid a deafening 
 clamour which rises from cages of monkeys and 
 baskets of birds ; and, before soft heaps of silvery 
 fish, there are rows of half-nude women with 
 lustrous dark skins, kneeling upon tables. Here 
 are the offices of the railway station at Bori- 
 Bunder, an immense hall, where two hundred 
 employes, leaning over their desks, are blackening 
 paper ; or, pen over ear, are searching registers. 
 It might be a great banking house or a public 
 office in Paris ; but these men are all Hindus, all 
 worshippers of Siva and Vishnu, marked on the 
 forehead with the religious sign, the three lines 
 drawn with ashes. There is the sea, visible at every 
 street corner, blue, motionless, as in a painted 
 picture. There is the native city a city in a forest, 
 a crowd of narrow, tortuous streets, under an 
 uninterrupted roof of palms. There is a little 
 street, where a marriage festivity is in progress, 
 crowded with half-clad humanity, which flows slowly 
 like a glutinous wave among the sumptuous crowd 
 of guests whose silk garments are richly lustrous. 
 There are rows and rows of little girls, draped in 
 
 p 
 
226 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 splendid stuffs, and these small dark faces, with 
 smooth, lustrous bands of hair, so black that it has 
 a blue gleam like a raven's wing, are strangely 
 grave and childish. The crimson and orange of 
 the sinuous satins flame against a whitish back- 
 ground of smooth limbs and fat torsos of Brahmans, 
 and against innumerable nude figures. And all 
 this crowd makes an eddy in the narrow street, 
 sending out a suffocating heat under the palm- 
 trees which shelter the houses, and the sacred fig- 
 trees, where squirrels run and parrots chatter, as 
 many as the figs. 
 
 At the end of this Hindu city, near the sea, is 
 the hospital for animals. There are kennels of 
 mangy dogs ; one very feeble old eagle ; some 
 pigeons and parrots ; peacocks dragging through 
 the courts the splendours of their tails ; a con- 
 sumptive porcupine whose dull eyes are pitiful 
 to see ; a small crippled deer ; and halls filled 
 with blind cows. Through this curious menagerie 
 wander idly many Brahmans, perpetually chewing 
 betel, and living as brothers among these sufferers, 
 these animals who are sacred because they mani- 
 fest for an instant Siva the Indestructible, because 
 they are sparks in the vibrating flame of life. 
 " Health, O cow ! " says a powerful mantra, " thou 
 mother of Rudra, sister of Aditrya, source of 
 Ambrosia ! " 
 
 Returning through the broad streets of the 
 business town, you observe a very curious blend- 
 ing of English and Hindu life. Great walls are 
 covered with placards like these : " Theistic Bombay 
 
BOMBAY 227 
 
 Temporary Relief Association." "Hindu Cricket 
 Club." " Parsee Cricket Association." I should 
 like to see a game played by these Orientals. 
 They would scarcely put much ardour into their 
 game, the Hindu cricket-players. Clubs of native 
 " sportsmen " are quite the most amusing copy of 
 England that I have seen in India, more comic 
 even than an article on English morals signed by 
 a babu. Very English also, this union of a theistic 
 society and a cricket club a compound of athletics 
 and philanthropy. Probably the cricket-players 
 are theists, and the theists are cricket-players. 
 Similarly, in a London shop, I saw the photograph 
 of an Anglican bishop with this note appended : 
 " One of the Oxford Eight, in the University race 
 of 18 ." In England this exploit completes an 
 episcopal personality as much as would an edition 
 of Euripides or a volume of sermons. Every- 
 body has heard of an ideal type, the " muscular 
 Christian." 
 
 Elsewhere, red flags are flying above the heads 
 of a Hindu crowd. "Hallelujah!" say the flags. 
 " Are you saved ? Are you fighting ? If not, 
 why not ? When do you intend to get saved ? " 
 Sandwich-men are going about announcing "the 
 arrival of the Salvation Army from Canada, and 
 a general attack upon the Devil by Captain Halle- 
 lujah Smith, formerly a circus clown." In the 
 midst of the Hindu crowd, the English Salvationists 
 form a little ring : they are all barefooted, clad in 
 Oriental costume, the women draped in red, their 
 blonde faces surrounded with orange muslin, the 
 
228 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 men in Bedouin mantles and turbans. Curious, 
 these English faces, the soft pink and white skin, 
 in Asiatic costumes ! 
 
 A kind of little Hindu monkey makes a confes- 
 sion in a nasal voice. Then, successively, the 
 English Salvationists testify, each holding an um- 
 brella as parasol. Then a drum, castanets, and a 
 key-bugle. The Englishwomen stand quietly, their 
 hands drooping and clasped, and sing hymns to 
 polka tunes, while the men accompany with accor- 
 dions. One of them makes an exhortation in 
 Hindustani, a very young girl, in Oriental drapery, 
 her bare feet in the dust, the eyes of an angel, a 
 lily complexion untouched by the Indian sun, a 
 pensive expression, so serious, calm, and maidenly, 
 one of Burne-Jones's Madonnas. 
 
 There is something at once comic and touching 
 in the energy and sincerity of these evangelists. 
 Their great lack is of that sympathetic imagination 
 which makes it possible to conceive modes of soul 
 foreign to one's self. How much superior were 
 the Jesuits who, in the eighteenth century, had such 
 success in China ! With what skill they adapted 
 Christianity to the faculties and needs of the 
 Chinese soul ! These people here employ the 
 same procedure to touch the heart of a poor day- 
 labourer in the East End, moving about in the black 
 mud, the stinging fog of the Docks, and to reach 
 these Hindu souls of which we are so ignorant ! 
 The grand Wesleyan hymns sung to tunes from 
 the dance hall, what emotion can they awaken in 
 these Asiatics ? Are they touched at sight of young 
 
BOMBAY 229 
 
 women who have come so far, to mingle with the 
 Bombay populace, to wear the same clothes, to 
 live the same life with them, to be their sisters, to 
 love them in Jesus Christ ? 
 
 On this point, Cheddy Lai, whom I have con- 
 sulted, says : " The other missionaries are liked 
 better. These do not come in a carriage, as 
 Europeans should ; they dress as we do ; they are 
 thought to be poor, and they are despised." 
 
 I returned by the beach, which is not on the 
 edge of the harbour, but of the open sea. Not a 
 boat to be seen. From here the city is hidden, 
 and there is only this yellow sand, wet from the 
 retiring tide, and the soft blue of the ocean. 
 There are familiar perfumes of seaweed inhaled, in 
 childhood, on Breton sands. Inland, there must 
 be great cliffs, sombre ridges of moorland, lighted 
 by pale yellow broom. This landscape, the same 
 in Europe and in India, tranquillises the mind, 
 discomposed at sight of great ethnic differences, 
 this seething mass of foreign peoples. 
 
 Little waves are running in ; they rise with a 
 pale transparency, tremble in a silvery gleam 
 and break with a soft splash. A Parsi has come 
 down to the edge of the water, and, his lips 
 moving in prayer, watches the sun, whose throbbing 
 disk is about to disappear. Just as it touches 
 the water-line, the Parsi bends his head twice, 
 and then stretches out his arms toward the great 
 rosy radiance which floats in the west. 
 
230 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 December 24. 
 
 This morning, after the chota hazri, I went up 
 to Malabar Hill, a green promontory covered with 
 villas and palm-trees ; between them is seen the 
 vague, shining blue of the sea, and the sparkle 
 of charming, misty Bombay. The morning dew 
 is evaporating in a thin mist whose white veils 
 float, waver, are torn like gauze, and out of 
 which the tall, fresh palms lift their heads. On 
 the ground are flowers, as in Ceylon, flowers 
 of azure and crimson, on which tremble big drops 
 of water. 
 
 Farther on, a garden where this vegetation is 
 growing regularly with a studied order ; a garden 
 like that of the Taj, solemn in its light and silence 
 and beauty. Among the clumps of trees rise three 
 towers, white, low, extremely massive, that are not 
 temples, or habitations of man, enigmatic, disturb- 
 ing here in the solitude. Around, great birds hover 
 in the air. 
 
 It is the Parsi cemetery ; this garden is a funereal 
 spot ; upon these towers the dead are exposed and 
 are devoured by vultures ; a priest came to explain 
 these things to me. 
 
 Clothed in white, he says, two by two, each 
 couple holding the two ends of a muslin scarf in 
 token of their common grief, through the streets 
 of Bombay, along the shore, under the palm-trees, 
 among the flower-beds, the Parsis slowly follow 
 their dead, whom two bearers carry, wrapped in 
 a shroud. When they reach the foot of the tower, 
 
BOMBAY 231 
 
 a little door opens, the body is received, and the 
 door closed again. Then the procession disperses. 
 No man has ever seen what takes place behind the 
 closed door, except the two mysterious guardians 
 of the cemetery. 
 
 The platform on the summit of the tower is 
 divided into three concentric zones, inclined toward 
 a central well which communicates with a vault. 
 The dead are laid in these great circles, the men, 
 the women, the children. Each body is taken 
 from its shroud, for, says a text of the Zend Avesta : 
 "Naked thou earnest into the world, and naked 
 shalt thou go out from it." 
 
 At ten o'clock in the morning, and at six in the 
 evening, the great tawny vultures come flying from 
 all the points of the sky, and take up their position 
 upon the towers. In less than fifteen minutes not 
 a trace of the human form is left except a skeleton, 
 which the extreme heat of the sun soon separates, 
 and the rain carries down into the well. Here at 
 the bottom, where the dust and dtbris accumulate, 
 there are filtering stones, which purify the rain 
 water, so that no human particle enters the ground. 
 Saith the Zend Avesta : " Thou shalt not defile the 
 earth, thy mother." 
 
 As we stood in the garden more than fifty 
 vultures were sitting gravely on the edge of a tower, 
 and I could plainly see their strange, fierce eyes, 
 those fixed eyes where shines a flame fed on human 
 fuel. An admirable sepulchre, those birds' bodies ! 
 No sooner dead than to live again, to return 
 at once into a whirl of life, more rapid and brilliant 
 
ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 by far than the preceding. To have been a poor 
 Parsi grande dame, one of those languid women, 
 in her sumptuous drapery, waiting indolently for 
 a breath of air to come, and now to cleave the 
 glowing sky, with impetuous, strident flight ! 
 
 Around us, the calm and splendour of the tropi- 
 cal garden. The warm air is full of perfumes, and 
 the perpetual little striped squirrels run merrily 
 through the avenues. 
 
 From here the view over the city is very beauti- 
 ful. The sea is of a very soft, dull blue, under the 
 sky white with its heat, vaporous, pale by reason 
 of the moisture which it draws up. At the left, on 
 the shore of this water, is another sea of dark 
 and lustrous green, whose waves are motionless, 
 a sea of palm-trees, out of which rise turrets and 
 Gothic belfries and roofs of pagodas. This world 
 is beautiful. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 BLUR A 
 
 December 26. 
 
 NEARLY two hundred miles on the Great Penin- 
 sular by moonlight, among weird silhouettes of 
 mountains rising in vast flocks. Forests, houses, 
 cliffs, all the details of the landscape disappear, 
 and the great silent shapes, misty as phantoms 
 under the pallid moon, seem the sole inhabitants 
 of the dark globe. Then thirteen hours in a cart, 
 over a bad road, along with the driver, in the 
 Nizam, in the heart of the Dekkan this may well 
 have tranquillised one's mind, after the heat and 
 uproar of Bombay. 
 
 A savage deserted country, carpeted with moor- 
 land and jungle. Sometimes a little Hindu hamlet, 
 a small pyramidal pagoda, grotesque, complicated, 
 like all pagodas, and a sacred pool where the 
 peasants bathe in the morning, according to the 
 ceremonial. 
 
 Upon the road, not a person, except, about nine 
 o'clock, a troop of men, children, women, following a 
 string of heavy, antique wains drawn by big white 
 oxen. Whither are they going ? It looks like the 
 migration of a tribe, after the most primitive fashion. 
 
 This nomad horde is soon out of sight. About 
 233 
 
234 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 noon, southward, is outlined against the sky a 
 tawny line of hills. It is a vast amphitheatre 
 opening into a great plain, lying north and south, 
 pierced with caves by the men of earlier times. 
 Here, in the heart of the peninsula, are the silent 
 haunts of the divinities who, for three thousand 
 years, have succeeded each other in this Indian 
 land. There sit the Vedic gods, Indra and Surya ; 
 then, the inert Buddhas, with closed eyes and 
 crossed legs ; and then, the Brahmanic Pantheon 
 Siva, Paravati, Vishnu, and the whole train of their 
 incarnations ; then, the twenty-four Sages of the 
 Jains ; all hewn in the ancient rock, cut out in the 
 mountain of which they still remain a part, alone 
 in the solitude, in face of the unchanging land- 
 scape ; intact as on the first day. 
 
 At twenty rods' distance from the mountain, 
 nothing is distinguishable. All is covered with a 
 forest of impenetrable brushwood, the sombre 
 jungle which seems thrown down from the hill-top 
 to guard the secret of the place. It grows in the 
 glowing sand in the dry and terrible heat, all in a 
 mass at the foot of the cliff. There are no flowers 
 here, none of the luxuriance and beauty of the 
 vegetation of Ceylon or Bombay. All is arid and 
 burning. We advance cautiously. Under the 
 thorny shrubs, upon the glowing mica, gleams the 
 gliding of formidable cobras. They debar access 
 to the temples of Siva ; and one remembers that, 
 in images of the god, they are multiplied around 
 his neck and his waist, mystic symbols of all- 
 destroying Time. 
 
ELURA 235 
 
 We reach the foot of the cliff, which rises a 
 perpendicular wall. Just in front of us, it yawns 
 apart, disclosing within an isolated grey mass of 
 rock about as high as the cliff itself ; but there is 
 something peculiar about this mass of rock : it is 
 hollowed out, recessed, its surface is rough with 
 scales and little spires, like a granite cliff tortured 
 by the eternal gnawing of the sea. Suddenly you 
 recognise the entangled lines of a pagoda. This 
 is the Kailasa, " the Paradise " of Siva, a Hindu 
 temple made of a piece of the mountain : pavilions, 
 terraces, pyramids, bell - towers, stairs, obelisks, 
 guardian elephants, all out of one block, all hewn 
 in one enormous stone, which has been detached, 
 cut out, chased, like a piece of ivory in the hands 
 of a Chinese workman. On each side and behind 
 it, like the case to contain a precious object, three 
 rough, perpendicular walls of rock rise to the height 
 of more than a hundred feet, as if hewn by three 
 strokes of a magic sword, to isolate the rock which 
 glorifies Siva. The open space where the Kailasa 
 stands is two hundred and seventy-six feet in length, 
 with an average breadth of a hundred and fifty-four 
 feet ; the nearly isolated rocky mass itself is a 
 hundred and sixty-four feet long, a hundred and 
 nine broad at its widest, and rises to a height of 
 ninety-six feet. 
 
 As you stand looking at this Kailasa, a strange 
 feeling comes over you, at first entirely inexplicable. 
 Is it because of the surrounding silence and desert ; 
 is it because there is nothing constructed in this 
 pagoda I mean to say, no stone laid upon stone ; 
 
236 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 or is it because the uniform tone of colouring is 
 that of rock weathered since the beginning of the 
 geologic epochs, that of the brown wall, which from 
 north to south, as far as the eye can see, bounds the 
 plain ? One cannot say, but the singular fact re- 
 mains that nothing here suggests the idea of human 
 labour. There is no inscription, no detail suggest- 
 ing a daily ceremonial, no place where the priests 
 could be lodged. This is a work of Nature, in 
 praise of the divinity who symbolised her ; this 
 pagoda, which makes part of the solid strata of the 
 earth, is like an eternal, indestructible thing not, 
 however, inert, but still alive with the life of the 
 great earth itself. For its roof of massive rock 
 is still covered with all the primitive stratum of 
 vegetable growth, bristling with grasses and with 
 great stiff plants which seem to be sacred cande- 
 labra. All around, the heated atmosphere quiver 8 
 in white waves, and animal life palpitates : flocks 
 of parrots whirling in the air like green flames ; 
 crows hopping over the ancient statues ; squirrels, 
 which seem at home here, running over the steps, 
 trotting in and out through the tabernacles. Inside 
 the Kailasa, in the darkness of the sanctuaries dug 
 into the living rock, in the mysterious bare 
 chambers with their mystic symbols of Siva, bats 
 fly in silent circles. 
 
 I walk around outside the monolith, and am 
 overwhelmed by the enormous size of the stone 
 box in which it stands, of the wall which shuts it 
 in and overhangs it, recessed at its base, hewn out 
 in a black groove, a sombre gallery going entirely 
 
ELURA 237 
 
 around it, and supported by rough pillars. Above 
 this gallery, the cliff drops plumb, like a heavy, 
 voluminous mantle of rock, striated with blue lines 
 by the eternal drip of water. On the three sides, 
 facing this perfectly naked clitf, the Kailasa pre- 
 sents its tangle of figures of gods and animals ; it 
 lifts its pyramids, it unfolds all its complication of 
 outlines. There could be nothing so impressive as 
 the contrast : remove this pagoda out of the brute 
 mass from which it was hewn, set it up in the open 
 air, and you would lose the feeling of the blind, 
 crushing labour which separated it from the cliff, 
 in order to carve it. Especially, you would detach 
 it from nature ; it would no longer be a part of the 
 earth itself, thus expressing the fundamental idea 
 of the Siva-worship. 
 
 The power, the constant energy, itself invariable 
 amid the motion or the pause of its dispersed mani- 
 festations, the Being, unknowable and absolute, 
 who displays himself in the incessant production of 
 individual beings, from whom comes, into whom 
 is absorbed all life, could by no symbol be so 
 well expressed as by this rock which, rising out of 
 the solid strata that form the substance of the 
 globe, elsewhere crops out in cliffs, but here 
 follows geometric lines of terraces ; then becomes 
 supple, complicated, undulating, in organic forms : 
 represents all manifestations of life : first, an 
 army of gigantic elephants, almost completely 
 detached from the rock, but still making part of 
 the brute mass ; then, higher up, among entangle- 
 ments of tropical creepers, among processions of 
 
238 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 monkeys and of tigers, rises, yet still caught at its 
 sides, in the animal world ; displays after this, 
 human forms, unfolds the epic of the Ramayana, 
 relates the conquest of the inferior races by the 
 nobler races ; higher still, multiplies figures of genii 
 and secondary gods ; then is excavated in mysterious 
 halls where, in the darkness, centre and root of all 
 this flowering of life upon the outer walls, is the 
 mystic symbol of Siva ; and, at last, slender, light, 
 airy, lifts its sharp, pyramidal point into radiant 
 space. 
 
 Right and left, as we leave the Kailasa, there are 
 sacred caves piercing the side of the hill, along a 
 length of nearly two miles. 
 
 First are Sivaist crypts, difficult of access, in- 
 visible from without. We are obliged to cling to 
 projections of the cliff, and creep over masses of 
 dtbris bound tight by the jungle to the face of the 
 rock. These caves are the secret places where the 
 old Brahmins concealed their religious mysteries, 
 and he who penetrated here ignorant, would indeed 
 emerge initiated. 
 
 Deep galleries lead into the hillside, made visible 
 at first by a wan, cold light, which lies pallid on 
 the grey stone ; then plunging into an ever-deepen- 
 ing darkness, between rough pillars hewn out of 
 the rock. In this darkness, where there is no 
 sound but the rush of bats, you see gleaming eyes 
 of gold in giant bas-reliefs of monstrous gods, 
 dancing or sitting enthroned. The farther you 
 advance, the more indistinct becomes this row of 
 forms, at first visible in the grey light from the 
 
ELURA 239 
 
 mouth of the cave, but all the time growing fainter, 
 until they are lost in the distant darkness. Why 
 are they all so much alike ; why have they all the 
 same attributes ? This is Siva, in the entire series 
 of his incarnations. Yes ; all these mystic outlines, 
 sinuous and flexible as life, are those of his various 
 bodies ; and each of these huge bas-reliefs has one 
 of the god's faces. 
 
 Here he is, Siva, the Destroyer, and his three 
 eyes, which behold the past, the present, the future, 
 shine with a white light, that light which reduces 
 all creatures to ashes ; his six arms brandish swords, 
 whereon hang transpierced corpses, his feet trample 
 upon skeletons. Elsewhere, he reposes, contem- 
 plative, girt with serpents about his neck and body, 
 emblems of his eternity. Again, Siva, with soft, 
 confused outlines, mysterious, androgynous, smiling. 
 From his side emerges a soft-outlined female figure, 
 and above his head, very faint, in much lower 
 relief than the figure, a cloud of human forms rise, 
 floating, as the smoke ascends from a flame. It 
 is still Siva, who, far back in the dark gallery, 
 smiles at Paravati ; it is he who dances merrily, 
 surrounded by his buffoons ; it is he who, again, 
 tierce, with teeth set in fury, transpierces a child. 
 And skeletons, signifying death, alternate with 
 bulls, which signify life. And in the depths of 
 the gallery a nude stone represents the eternal 
 Siva emblem. 
 
 Before all this transparency of symbol, this 
 revelation of the god, one stands astonished. The 
 idea radiates from these images and transfigures 
 
240 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 them. This Siva is no longer a foreign divinity, 
 peculiar to a certain race and a certain epoch, to 
 be observed and studied as such. We know this 
 power, ourselves. It is Nature expressed in these 
 changeful forms, outlined here on the walls in this 
 subterranean solitude. This is the divinity mani- 
 fested as well in the perpetual coming forth of 
 young and brilliant life, as in its frightful destruc- 
 tion ; the eternal and impassive, who knows not 
 the suffering nor the joy of the created. The 
 Brahmanic religion conceived the destroying and 
 the renewing force as two aspects of the same 
 power ; it made of the Destroyer and the Re- 
 generator one divinity ; and in this lies its great 
 originality. 
 
 While other races, powerless to rise above the 
 human point of view, regarded good and evil, 
 the beautiful and the hideous, as distinguishing 
 attributes, and classed their gods in accordance 
 with characteristics strictly relative to human sen- 
 sibilities, the Hindus conceived that, from the 
 eternal point of view, there was neither god nor 
 devil, but an absolute Power which, whether 
 creating or destroying, remains itself the same. 
 More definitely, death appeared to them as one 
 of the changes whose succession makes a life. 
 For, according to them, as according to modern 
 science, La vie, c'est la mart, says Claude Bernard, 
 the living being is but a form, a mode of group- 
 ing ; its material is for ever passing away ; we live 
 by the periodic death of the cellules whose associa- 
 tion makes our body. We are eddies, at every 
 
ELURA 241 
 
 moment composed of new substance ; as each 
 eddy gives up a certain quantity of matter, it 
 absorbs and carries off a certain other quantity 
 of matter, equivalent to what it has lost ; and 
 deaths are perpetually made good by births. 
 
 It is the same with all the groups everywhere 
 in the visible world, they are forming or separat- 
 ing, but separating only to form new combinations, 
 under whose variety persists a diffused being, itself 
 one and imperishable. The world may be com- 
 pared to an ocean, in which are moving millions 
 of waves. Each wave which rises and sinks is 
 a life which begins and ends, no sooner falling 
 in foam than an irresistible impulse lifts it again 
 toward the light. But who does not see that these 
 rythmic undulations are only appearances, since 
 at each moment their material is different and in 
 each one of them there is nothing real except the 
 single, general force, which blindly, indifferently, 
 without regard for local shocks or interferences, 
 keeps all this sea in its murmurous motion ? An 
 individual being is but a momentary fragment 
 of this force. The individual changes, grows, 
 dies ; but the force remains unaffected. It is 
 the same Siva, radiant in the candid young fore- 
 head of the girl, in her firm delicate cheek with 
 its tint of rose, who reduces to nameless liquids 
 this corpse upon which we dare not look. It is 
 the same Siva who acted in our primitive nebula, 
 and who now is sun and planets, and the con- 
 tinents, seas, mountains of the globe, its organic 
 forms, its races of men, its communities and cities, 
 
 Q 
 
242 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 It is the same Siva who, transforming visible 
 action into molecular, by the slow destruction 
 of planets, returns to his primitive condition of 
 abstract energy, whence may emerge a new sun, 
 planets, seas, continents, vegetation, a whole mul- 
 tiple and luminous life. 
 
 Let us go further : this energy of our solar 
 system, even, is not an isolated power ; it is 
 but part of the total energy, since throughout 
 the universe, all stars or, to speak more exactly, 
 all particles of matter make their attraction felt. 
 Our system moves, as a whole, toward a cer- 
 tain point in the firmament. Who knows if it 
 is not describing an immense circle, lessening 
 slowly ; if it may not fall, and all the other systems 
 also, into a certain central point, as its own 
 planets fall into its sun, and if the whole universe 
 does not tend to return to homogeneity, to the 
 undifferentiated ? This possible law Hindu wis- 
 dom may have grasped, in speaking of those 
 " days of Brahma," those incalculable periods, 
 during which the neuter Brahma expands, develops, 
 throws out beings, attains consciousness, contracts 
 again, returns into its primitive condition; be- 
 comes again the neuter Brdhma. Had not the 
 Sivaist this idea, in saying that, at the end of each 
 kalpa, Siva destroys men, gods, demons, all created 
 things ? 
 
 Whether or not science, at the present day, con- 
 siders probable these alternations ot development 
 and of universal dissolution, certainly she makes 
 known to us a universal and permanent power, 
 
ELURA 243 
 
 acting at every moment, and at every point of the 
 universe, and of which we can say nothing except 
 that it manifests itself to us above and below, in 
 the general and the special, in movements, in cycles 
 of organisations and dissolutions, in phenomena 
 of local groupings and of separations of matter, 
 which are each other's complement, appearing, 
 according to the point of view, as lives or deaths, 
 as ends or beginnings. How better personify this 
 power than as the Hindus have done ? How 
 better represent it than by this Siva whom they 
 call "the Destroyer-Organiser" "he who brings 
 life out of death ? " 
 
 In a sacred picture which I found at Jaipur, he 
 is seated at the bottom of a cave, in the depths of 
 the earth. Above him is a rich country, luxuriant 
 in vegetation. His beautiful feminine limbs repose 
 inert : his serene lips are parted in a mysterious 
 smile. Upon his forehead the crescent of the new 
 moon measures time ; around his neck a snake 
 signifies the endless revolutions of the years ; other 
 serpents, entwined about his loins, tell of the circle 
 of births and deaths. His braided hair supports 
 the fruitful Ganges ; his trident announces his 
 triple power to create, to destroy, to re-create. 
 He holds a bow, a thunderbolt, and an axe, the 
 weapons surmounted by skulls. A bull sleeps 
 at his feet. All these symbols are here in these 
 carvings of Elura. He is the reproductive force, 
 " the eternally blest," with its emblem, the mystic 
 stone ; he is the power which dissolves, symbolised 
 by skeletons and swords ; he is " the great ascetic," 
 
244 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 passionless, immovable, immutable, " rooted in the 
 same place for millions of years." He is the god 
 of Brahmans, of grammarians, of scholars ; that is 
 to say, he is intellect, order, language. He is 
 the lord of the dance and wine ; that is, of gay 
 and brilliant life. He is bi-sexed ; and vaguely- 
 outlined figures rise about him in vaporous pro- 
 cessions. 
 
 In the obscure depths of the hill, upon the rude 
 walls of rock, one grasps the meaning of these 
 images left there for all time far from cities, far 
 from the tumult of human life by men hidden 
 from us in the darkness of the past, of whom we 
 know absolutely nothing except that they were the 
 contemporaries of our barbaric ancestors, and that 
 they lived at this point in space. But him whom 
 they perceived behind all things, we, to-day, also 
 perceive ; we hear him also ; in our " Faust " we 
 hear his voice : 
 
 " In the stream of life, in the whirl of action, I 
 float, I rise, I sink, I move hither and thither. 
 Births and tombs, eternal sea, changeful motion, 
 ardent life ; I work at the noisy loom of time and 
 weave the mantle of divinity." 
 
 All the religious history of India is concealed in 
 these caves of Elura. There is a succession of 
 Sivaist halls, overloaded with the same wealth of 
 sculptures and bas-reliefs. 
 
 Here is a very unadorned cave sunk far into 
 the rock, supported by rude pillars whose sole 
 ornament is a symbolic circle. The walls are 
 rough-hewn, and it would seem that this sanctuary 
 
ELURA 245 
 
 was left unfinished. As we advance the light from 
 the entrance grows faint, and it is all blackness 
 before us. We are about to turn away, with the 
 idea that there is nothing to see, when I become 
 aware of a huge phantom somewhere in the dis- 
 tance, an apparition which nails me to the spot. 
 My eyes have become accustomed to the darkness ; 
 and there, a hundred and twenty feet from the 
 cave's mouth, a giant figure, a white, colossal 
 Buddha, seated with crossed hands, a smile frozen 
 on the lips, formidable in its rigidity, is vaguely 
 outlined, at the very end of the cave, against the 
 blackness of a niche. This is all ; he sits alone 
 in the darkness, in this silence as of a tomb ; in 
 this great excavation, hewn out of the rock, remote 
 from all outside life. At his feet a pool of black 
 water, motionless like himself, reflects his smile 
 and his immobility. 
 
 There are several caves like this, occupied by 
 solitary Buddhas, who, with half-closed eyes, have 
 entered into serenity. A strange contrast with the 
 Sivaist caves, overflowing with all forms of life, 
 expressive of all the exuberance of the Hindu 
 imagination. Yet, notwithstanding their difference, 
 they translate conceptions which are each other's 
 complement. Those lead to this, as an orgy of 
 metaphysical speculation leads to the paralysis of 
 the will and complete inaction, as his meditation 
 upon the one Existence has led the Brahman to 
 forget his own personal being, and showing him 
 illusions everywhere and destroying desire within 
 him has set him free from all temptation to effort 
 
246 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 or action. Siva and Buddha sit side by side, as 
 Brahmanism and Buddhism have been able to live 
 in harmony, one appealing to the mental powers, 
 the other dictating the practical life ; and these 
 caves may have been contemporary. At the same 
 time, the extreme difference of the styles would 
 seem to indicate that long spaces of time separate 
 them, and that the hill remains sacred to successive 
 cults, not merely to the Sivaists and Buddhists, but 
 also to the Jains, who have in their turn excavated 
 sanctuaries in these cliffs ; and that all the Indian 
 religions, one after another, have inscribed them- 
 selves here. 
 
 They may pass, and reappear ; and the races 
 themselves may vanish ; but the Buddha will never 
 relax his smile this smile which has been upon 
 his lips for two thousand years. How peaceful 
 the cool darkness of the cave, at the feet of the 
 great tranquil figure ! What happiness it must be 
 to feel one's self at last enfranchised ; to be no 
 longer conscious of the flight of life, of the inces- 
 sant fall into the sad past of all beloved objects ; 
 to conquer time as he has done whom twenty 
 centuries leave untouched ! As I stand leaning 
 against his solid knee, under the deathless gesture 
 of his wan hand, I can see the calm gaze which 
 has filtered between his eyelids ever since the day 
 when a nation of labourers vanished how long 
 ago detached him from the rock. Out there, at 
 the other end of the gallery, there is daylight, a 
 luminous rectangle, framed in the sombre stone, and 
 cut by black columns ; there is a far-off, splendid 
 
ELURA 247 
 
 landscape, a vast country, quivering in the over- 
 heated air. Flocks of birds make a streak across 
 the torrid sky. In the distance glitters a small 
 pagoda, dominating a hamlet where, for many 
 a year, lives of men have silently followed one 
 another. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE VOYAGE 
 
 December 28. 
 
 AT seven in the morning we leave Bombay. You 
 go on board the steamer, select your cabin, study 
 the faces of the people with whom you are to 
 spend the next three weeks, go to look at the 
 engine and suddenly become aware that you 
 are off. In the blue of the water, a great, rigid 
 white furrow broad as a road, whispering and 
 pulsating leads back to the already misty hill- 
 sides and the glittering roofs half hidden by 
 trees. The watery space rapidly increases behind 
 us ; all the low ground soon vanishes. Only the 
 mountains long remain visible, as on any remote 
 shore. 
 
 It is always sad, this sudden disappearance of a 
 world in which one has lived for some time. 
 Abruptly these things, which just now were pre- 
 sent, enter into the past, and take on the halo of 
 an inexpressible regret for that which is no more. 
 These memories at present a part of one's self 
 are destined to lose their colour ; the feeling 
 which now accompanies them will let them go ; 
 presently, they will die : and you feel a great 
 
 indifference it would be a great aversion, if these 
 
 248 
 
THE VOYAGE 249 
 
 memories were more dear for this future self, 
 this stranger, who will be composed of sentiments 
 at this moment unknown. The Buddha was right 
 in teaching that grief comes of time. 
 
 All passes away with marvellous rapidity ; this 
 ocean, this sun casting the shadow of the rigging, 
 this ship, seem to be the only realities. It is diffi- 
 cult to conceive clearly that there is a pink Jaipur, 
 a real city of solid structures, or a seething Benares 
 upon which this light is shining. 
 
 With what facility one returns into the native 
 environment ! European things recover their hold 
 upon you so rapidly that you seem never to have 
 left them. Almost immediately it becomes amus- 
 ing to observe one's fellow-travellers. There are 
 a dozen, differing widely from each other, whose 
 lives are thrown together here for a few days. 
 The perpetual contact establishes intimacy so com- 
 plete that we soon seem to have known each other 
 always. There are no reserves ; after five days 
 one has more "human documents" than after a 
 season of balls and dinners in Paris. 
 
 Here is an Englishman, an officer of hussars. 
 I attempt to describe him, because he seems to 
 me a specimen of a very important class. Twenty- 
 six years old : " a splendid young fellow." Fair 
 and freckled, with clear-cut features ; his blue 
 eyes brilliant, straightforward, bold, and kind ; a 
 happy face, lighted with rapid smiles ; sometimes, 
 abruptly, a great burst of laughter. You can see 
 the enthusiasm of youth, high spirits, the constant 
 joy of a free and generous existence. In the 
 
250 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 afternoon he pitches quoits with the ardour and 
 vivacity of a boy. He puts his heart into the 
 game, and his movements show the suppleness of 
 the fresh young figure. In repose, he has the alert 
 and simple bearing of a man perfectly at his ease, 
 master of himself, habituated to independence, 
 with a reserve of gravity under the sparkle of 
 animal spirits. 
 
 His young wife admires him as Desdemona, 
 Othello : to her he is the steadfast, strong, and 
 faithful man, who is the young English girl's 
 ideal, the hero of all the English novels. And 
 indeed there is in him a grave and solid substratum 
 of character. Upon religion and duty, and the 
 family relations, he is endowed with hereditary 
 ideas, extremely well defined and deeply rooted. 
 Physically and morally he is a "gentleman," by 
 race and education. " My ancestors," he says, 
 with a certain pride, "came into Ireland with 
 Cromwell." Born upon the paternal estate, he is 
 the heir of a line of " squires." 
 
 His first years of childhood, spent in the country 
 among the farmers who loved and respected him 
 as " the young master " ; the generous home life in 
 the great manor-house ; the first riding to hounds, 
 with his father and grandfather, they in red coats 
 on their big hunters, he mounted on a little 
 pony ; the study of the Bible, and the firm fixing 
 of religious sentiment, from the nursery, by pic- 
 tures, by texts which decorate the walls, by family 
 prayers, where all the servants are also present, 
 by long and solemn services, listened to in "the 
 
THE VOYAGE 25! 
 
 squire's pew " of the parish church. Then Rugby, 
 the sense of freedom and self-respect acquired, the 
 contact with " the other boys," whose good opinion 
 must be gained ; much cricket and football. After 
 this, preparation for the army examinations, the 
 military career having been chosen as most worthy 
 of " a gentleman." He is now lieutenant in " a 
 crack regiment," and speaks proudly of his corps : 
 " My regiment was at the battle of Quatre-Bras. 
 Three times they charged the Poles, but without 
 being able to reach them. Every one of the 
 officers was killed. We have the whole story of it 
 in the regimental Gazette" 
 
 In India his life had three great interests : his 
 wife (with whom he is in love), the service, and 
 sport. A liberal, expensive life : that of a gentle- 
 man among his equals. I saw the photograph of 
 his house, a great airy villa, with Doric columns, 
 standing in a broad lawn ; his wife in an English 
 cart, before the portico. " You can't be an officer," 
 he explains, "without resources of your own." 
 His pay is a hundred and seventy-five rupees a 
 month. The mess table alone, with wine, costs 
 two hundred. Horses and uniforms are expen- 
 sive ; the club, the dinners, are costly. In short, 
 they live as aristocrats, as nobles ; and in general 
 they are nobles, in pride and courage. A noble's 
 duty is to be a leader ; and these sons of squires 
 are well fitted to lead. The sentiment of duty, 
 backed up by self-respect, will easily make heroes 
 of them. On this point, see what they did at 
 Lucknow : remember the conduct of Sir Henry 
 
252 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 Lawrence, their devout resignation, their calm and 
 serious valour. 
 
 "What does the Indian officer do when he is 
 not occupied in military duty ? How does he 
 kill time ? " " Why, play games, of course," he 
 says, with a flash of his blue eyes, in his quick, 
 frank voice. "We play cricket, and hunt, and 
 play polo. My regiment are famous polo-players. 
 Our champions went out to America, and chal- 
 lenged the whole United States. The old Yankees 
 couldn't touch them ! We were proud, I can tell 
 you." " Is the game rough ? " " Oh yes ! " he 
 says ; he himself has had his skull cracked, and a 
 young officer of his regiment was killed at this 
 game. Then they have football and tennis. 
 
 Three or four conversations with my hussar 
 upon all the great topics religion, morals, politics. 
 He talks with admirable frankness, as Englishmen 
 often do when you speak their language and they 
 feel at their ease. He conversed with enthusiasm, 
 with no effort to shine, and with no attempt to 
 study my ideas inquisitively or critically. He had 
 much to say, speaking with great sincerity, of 
 what he considered "vital subjects." His ideas 
 are very simple ; he makes no attempt at philo- 
 sophy. At once he speaks of God, the personal 
 English divinity, with a mysticism singular in a 
 creature so healthy and active. " Don't you know," 
 he says, "it is only a matter of feeling, and it is 
 impossible to prove that I am right, but I can't 
 think that God doesn't take care of us. I am 
 certain that God loves us. Just so a man can't 
 
THE VOYAGE 253 
 
 prove that his wife loves him, and still he is sure 
 she does. About the soul, I think it is a kind of 
 double, inside the body. When a man dreams, 
 his body is weighed down with sleep, but his 
 soul lives, remains active, goes about. What do 
 you suppose becomes of the human body, when 
 it decays ? Do you suppose it disappears en- 
 tirely ? No ; this body contains a subtle essence, 
 which may have the same form ; and this essence 
 lasts." These are the primitive notions of man- 
 kind, which, according to Herbert Spencer, mark 
 the very earliest stage in the idea of a spiritual 
 world. It is singular to meet them, so fervently 
 expressed, in an English army officer. "Take 
 the parable of the seed," he says. "The seed 
 develops, becomes a plant ; it is the same that it 
 was at first ; and still it is different. I think the 
 soul develops like this, after death." He quotes 
 Scripture, and speaks of Jesus Christ with affec- 
 tion and enthusiasm. " How can any one com- 
 pare the Buddha with Christ ? " he says. " What 
 did Jesus gain by His teaching ? Nothing but to 
 be crucified." 
 
 To-night he put to me this question, which a 
 Frenchman has to answer constantly in an English 
 country : " Your novels give a very sad idea of 
 France. Why are they so smutty ? And how 
 can we judge you, except from the descriptions 
 your own people give, your Daudets and Zolas ? 
 It seems to me," he says, "that the proper work, 
 the mission of the novelist, is to raise the level 
 of morality, to be an educator. But yours are 
 
254 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 corrupters." I seek to explain to him the theory 
 of the roman experimental, the scientific method. 
 "I don't understand this/' he says. "What is 
 the aim of science, if not to render mankind 
 better and happier ? Your people degrade it. 
 Besides, if they must paint reality, why need they 
 stir up all this mud ? George Eliot, who is more 
 realistic than the French, remains pure, all the 
 same, and her novels give one strength. Life is 
 not filthy ; or, at least, such has not been my 
 experience." 
 
 I believe it ; his life is one of those successes 
 in which the labour of a hundred generations 
 results. An American writer has said that the 
 English gentleman, developed in the open air, 
 quietly established upon a few strong moral ideas, 
 is one of the perfect specimens of our human 
 nature, in his nobleness and in his happiness. 
 This Englishman has behind him a wholesome 
 and merry youth ; he respects himself, he is a 
 master of others ; his beliefs are clearly defined, his 
 activity and energy are overflowing. He married 
 an innocent, merry little girl, a " child-wife," who 
 reveres him as a hero, and with whom he is in 
 love. He has scarcely seen anything that was not 
 good and beautiful ; the literature with which he 
 is familiar is serious, moral, pure, and intentionally 
 silent as to the dark lower levels of humanity. 
 Certainly, he is not complex ; he has not the 
 quivering sensibility, the subtle perceptions of the 
 heroes of our romances ; but neither is he a 
 saddened and nervous sceptic. His candour, his 
 
THE VOYAGE 255 
 
 optimism, his freshness of nature, his happy and 
 intact vitality, are those of a strong and virgin 
 soul whose free development has been in no way 
 checked or distorted. 
 
 The same is true of the three other officers on 
 board, who are all going home on a year's leave- 
 In the morning after their douche, attired in 
 whimsical pajamas, they pace the dripping deck. 
 Then, in short light coats and cloth caps and 
 flannel trousers and canvas shoes, all day long 
 they talk, they laugh, they eternally fill their short 
 straight pipes with smooth English tobacco, they 
 read inoffensive novels of simple morality and 
 complicated plot. D. is the youngest, the most 
 " boyish " of the four. But Captain M. is the 
 most seriously, profoundly, and constantly cheer- 
 ful. He also is a squire's son, and grew up in a 
 corner of that patriarchal, bucolic England, now 
 fast disappearing. " I liked the old farmers," he 
 says; "they had a nice way, when they were in 
 trouble, of coming to ask a bit of advice from my 
 mother." In the morning, when he is dressing, 
 we hear him singing like a blackbird in his cabin. 
 He talks with everybody, and his radiant smile 
 makes you happy to the bottom of your heart. 
 At dinner, in evening dress, his big chest strains 
 the broad starched surface of his shirt-front. 
 Seated at the end of the table, where he carves 
 huge "underdone" slices of roast beef, he is 
 happier and grander than ever. To-day, January 
 ist, as he had beside him at table two young Italian 
 girls, with whom he is carrying on the customary 
 
256 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 flirtation, he proposed : " Queen Margherita ! " but 
 in his everyday voice, and with a smile. Then 
 he stood up ; and this time, his face all lighted 
 up, looking slowly around him, solemnly he said : 
 " Gentlemen, the Queen ! " and I shall never for- 
 get the youthful enthusiasm with which the lieu- 
 tenant of hussars rejoined : " God bless her ! " 
 
 Miss M., of the Wesleyan missions, resides at 
 Jaipur, w r here her duty is to visit the zenanas and 
 make the acquaintance of the Hindu ladies as a 
 friend, a missionary, and a teacher. Small, dry, 
 flat, strong, with thin lips, with eye-glasses perched 
 upon her aquiline nose, she walks the deck like 
 a grenadier, in the company of one of the officers, 
 or of Professor M., from the University of Bom- 
 bay. At first sight, she is most unattractive. I 
 think of those great, dark, timid eyes of the Indian 
 women, of their silent grace and gentleness. One 
 perceives them to be imaginative and impas- 
 sioned, sensuous and dreamy. It is easy to under- 
 stand how shocking to the Hindu must be the 
 independence and the mannish ways of the English- 
 woman. 
 
 She has described to me her life in Jaipur. She 
 lives with another lady of the missions in a com- 
 fortable house furnished with punkahs, tatties,* 
 and all English comforts. There is riding, with 
 a groom in attendance, accompanied by dogs, and 
 there is tennis-playing with the English residents. 
 Here we have an English Sister of Charity, devoted, 
 
 * The tatty is a machine for producing a vapour of perfumed water 
 in order to cool the room. 
 
THE VOYAGE 257 
 
 like our own, to a religious idea, toward which all 
 the acts of her life converge, but preserving the ex- 
 terior, the habits, the tone, of an Englishwoman 
 of the middle class, the wife of an official or a 
 doctor. Celibacy increases her freedom of action. 
 She is not in any way secluded from the world. 
 She surrounds herself with all the comforts of life. 
 Her personality is not enfeebled under the action 
 of a uniform rule ; on the contrary, she has an indi- 
 viduality which would be remarkable in any woman. 
 You feel her to be mistress of herself, and entirely 
 secure ; she respects herself, and is able to make 
 herself respected by others. " I have never," she 
 says, "been insulted by any Hindu; and yet I 
 often go out alone on horseback. It is under- 
 stood that I am a lady, and every one treats me 
 as such." 
 
 She has had a Puritan education, without superior 
 instruction and without broad intelligence. Narrow 
 of mind, uncompromising, destitute of the sympa- 
 thetic faculty what does she know of the Hindu 
 women to whom she has consecrated herself ? 
 What does she understand of the circumstances 
 which have determined the condition of the wife 
 and the widow in India ? This religion which she 
 labours with all her strength to destroy, "which 
 we must eradicate from the country," she con- 
 fuses with all the religious forms which are not 
 her Protestant Christianity : " idolatry," the one 
 word suffices to designate it. But the good woman 
 is full of her subject: "We want to make these 
 poor Hindu women happier, to get a little liberty 
 
258 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 for them, to teach them to think for themselves." 
 That is to say, to make them European and 
 English. She is always ready to talk about her 
 "missionary work," her hopes, her methods. With 
 what emotion she quotes the words : "Who is 
 He, Lord, that I might believe on Him ? I that 
 speak unto thee am He." A text which, she says, 
 produced a great impression upon a Musalman. 
 The Hindu tolerance surprises her ; it saddens her 
 also, as proving their indifference. No husband 
 has ever forbidden her visits to his wives. She 
 is much beloved in the zenanas. "Come and see 
 us," the Hindu ladies say to her, "we have need 
 of you. Tell us about this Jesus, of whom the 
 sahibs talk so much." They sing hymns : but, after 
 all, these are only diversions from the monotony 
 of imprisonment ; they do not dream of becoming 
 converted ; all the moral and psychological con- 
 ditions necessary for the establishment among 
 them of a faith like Miss M.'s are entirely want- 
 ing. It would require generations, and a complete 
 change of environment, to bring this about. One 
 of them, to whom Miss M. had given two dolls, 
 placed them at the foot of the Krishna, and bowed 
 before them. 
 
 Miss M. talks religion to me ; she lends me reli- 
 gious books ; she demonstrates to me the "idolatry" 
 of the Roman Catholic faith : she predicts to me 
 the future extension and the supremacy of Wesleyan 
 Protestantism ; she speaks with pride of the useful- 
 ness and grandeur of her "work." The excellent, 
 courageous woman ! She is now on her way to 
 
THE VOYAGE 259 
 
 Scotland for a year's rest, after seven years of 
 labour. Then she will return to resume the harness 
 in Jaipur. When she becomes too old for service 
 the missionary society will give her a comfortable 
 pension. Meanwhile, alone, she leads a contented 
 life ; her existence is wholesome, industrious, and 
 worthy of respect, resting upon a grand, serious 
 idea. She aids in spreading civilisation, the civili- 
 sation of England. She labours for the ideal which 
 her race has conceived. Life has a meaning for 
 her. It is a combat with evil. When her last hour 
 comes, she will fall peacefully asleep, "and God 
 will gather His servant unto Him." 
 
 January 2. 
 
 It is a strange curiosity this, to interest one's 
 self in the differences among the races of mankind, 
 and their diverse fashions of looking at the world 
 and regarding life, when one has the constant 
 presence of this great monotonous sea, on which 
 we have been borne forward for now eight days. 
 After these conversations, perhaps as a result of 
 them, one recurs easily to the Hindu thought, the 
 Brahmanic dream. 
 
 At seven o'clock, after the bath, with bare feet in 
 yellow grass slippers, you saunter upon the deck, 
 now just washed down. A fresh, subtle air slips 
 under the light clothing and enfolds you deliciously. 
 You abandon yourself to the caress, and are happy 
 in the happiness which all things diffuse. The 
 spaces of sky and sea are full of a calm, broad 
 radiance : the vast water is all penetrated with light, 
 
260 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 as with a great deep joy. Surely this water is not 
 insensible ; it rejoices or it is sad, as the sun 
 broods upon it or deserts it. This universal motion, 
 this vague, incessant sound, this light breath which 
 stirs its surface, all declare it alive. It is a great 
 divine being, for it is happy, very ancient, the 
 simplest of things ; for it is solitary, and its pres- 
 ence fills the world. Beyond the horizon, far in 
 the south, spread boundless, following the curve 
 of the globe, it shines the same, tranquil or astir, 
 alone under the sky, unseen. No eye looks upon 
 it; but it is there. What is it, then, in itself? 
 Perchance a great elemental soul, limited to the 
 world of feeling, scarcely capable of reverie, tra- 
 versed by emotions very simple and very obscure, 
 a delight in being alive, sadness, anger, depression, 
 affection, desire, effort. 
 
 Close by the ship flame little green wavelets: a 
 thousand little lives play on the surface of the 
 great solitary being. They spring from it, are made 
 of its substance. They rise, expand, quiver, run, 
 whirl, sparkle, and are no more ; and others rise 
 in multitudes, in generations ; and there is an 
 incessant shiver of coming into existence, appear- 
 ing and disappearing, without an instant's per- 
 manence, since at each imperceptible fraction of 
 time, each little moving wavelet is composed of 
 new water, so that, for the few moments of its 
 life, nothing in it is permanent but its form. And 
 yet, notwithstanding its nothingness, each is a 
 distinct little individual, taking existence in its 
 own way. There are idle ones, giddy ones, violent, 
 
THE VOYAGE 26 I 
 
 rebellious, capricious ones. In front there is a 
 bright sparkle of merry foam ; along the ship's 
 side a rapid running of murmuring water ; behind 
 it there are placid undulations of sinuous crystal, 
 smooth surfaces as of great mirrors, which writhe 
 slowly and noiselessly, where vague orange gleams 
 shine, twist, and disappear ; and beneath this 
 moving diversity sleeps the dull water which has 
 never risen to the surface, which knows not what 
 it is to glitter in the sunlight. And yet, these 
 mornings, even this is penetrated all through with 
 light an equal, motionless light, not disturbed 
 by agitations of shadows like that of the quivering 
 surface. And the whole ocean throws out a strong 
 and gentle radiance which comes from its great 
 inner spaces. 
 
 Overhead, the sky is very pale, whitish, with a 
 lustre of molten opal. A peaceful troop of little 
 clouds is moving across it very slowly. By degrees 
 the space grows empty, the universal light traverses 
 it, dwells in it, and fills it. Sometimes you feel 
 passing over yourself, like a vague sadness, the 
 shadow of the little mists that glide across the sun. 
 No other event. Thought has put an end to itself ; 
 and so you forget that you are, and return into 
 the quietude of that which is enduring, which 
 never changes. 
 
 PORT SAID, January 7. 
 
 After the Hindu East, this Egyptian East is a 
 very poor thing. Where are the bare bronzed 
 skins of the swarming crowd under the Indian sun ? 
 
262 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 These people are too much clad, too much covered 
 up, in their green petticoats. 
 
 Ugly, regular streets laid out at right angles, 
 bordered with square shop-fronts covered with 
 placards. An unpleasant odour rises from the 
 brown sand underfoot. Cafes-concerts, shops of 
 vile photographs, dry-goods establishments, suc- 
 ceed one another. A population of villainous 
 Levantines. The place is a cosmopolitan hotel, 
 where all ships set ashore their passengers ; and 
 it is abundantly supplied with all those pleasures 
 which the sailor may desire after long voyages. 
 There is nothing so sad and so unsightly as these 
 hackneyed cross-roads which have no existence 
 of their own, and only live by the continuous 
 passage of strangers in search of amusement. 
 There is nothing here but a little European scum 
 flung down upon the edge of the desert, in which 
 all the streets come to an end so strangely. 
 
 At the very extremity of the town, in the Arab 
 quarter, we go to see some dancing-girls from 
 Upper Egypt. Tobacco smoke, torn into bluish 
 clouds, envelops in a low, close hall a curious 
 crowd of various nationalities : Arabs, negroes, 
 Europeans, Copts. An Abyssinian woman, a kind 
 of Hottentot Venus, whose stout brown figure 
 shows through the transparency of her white gar- 
 ment, advances on tiptoe, with a negro smile, 
 following the incomprehensible rhythm of the 
 music. Suddenly she stops, entirely motionless. 
 Then a horrible thing, indescribable : slowly her 
 back begins to shiver under her white garment, 
 
THE VOYAGE 263 
 
 trembles, is agitated by successive shocks, vibrates 
 strangely ; then, with writhings of the hips, sinking 
 to the ground, half-rising, she sways to and fro, 
 like some creeping beast that has been wounded 
 and is about to die. 
 
 Then appears upon the scene, with unnoticed 
 entrance, a very young Arab girl. A strange, cold 
 smile upon her haughty lips, her eyes half closed, 
 slowly and disdainfully throwing back her head, 
 her slender young figure rigid, the chest advanced, 
 she stretches out both arms, all the fingers quiver- 
 ing. Meanwhile, noiselessly, with a rapidity of sin- 
 uous motion that is like a snake, a third spins 
 around the hall, describing complicated circles. 
 Closely draped in red velvet, her black hair drawn 
 tightly around her flat head, her outlines angular 
 and precise, the body very long, impassive, with 
 sphinx-like smile, she has the figure, the aspect, the 
 features of the old Egyptian drawings. Throwing 
 herself to the left with an abrupt jerk of the hips, 
 throwing herself to the right, monotonously she 
 glides in circles with ever-increasing rapidity a 
 sombre being whose silence and gravity are enig- 
 matical ; sometimes stopping suddenly, while some- 
 thing like a slow spasm runs over her whole figure, 
 then moving forward, in a kind of magic circle, 
 around the two almehs. At last, in the stupor 
 which the monotony of Oriental music causes, you 
 cease to distinguish the three dancing figures ; you 
 only see the endless intricacy of lines, which they 
 describe, yourself hypnotised, as at sight of a long- 
 continued juggling with glittering balls. 
 
264 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 Next door, a caft chantant. Seated in rows 
 upon cushions, cross-legged, the musicians are 
 scraping on their strings, swaying backward and 
 forward to the rhythm. One of them I notice : 
 he has the strange, gentle, sleepy eyes of the 
 dreamer, and a faint, unchanging smile. I feel 
 that he could sit there all night, smiling always, 
 and drawing from his cithar the same eternal 
 Oriental phrase. 
 
 Upon a platform three women are seated. In 
 the centre, a fat and slatternly Syrian, with banged 
 hair. At the right, a Copt, in a shabby dark 
 garment, loaded with brass necklaces, feeble-look- 
 ing and depressed, in an attitude of inexpressible 
 fatigue and sadness. At the left, a very young 
 Arab girl, slender, wrapped tightly in her white 
 drapery, extremely erect, her long-fringed eyelids 
 cast down, an air at once imperious and savage. 
 At certain cadences in the chant which the cithars 
 are repeating, her voice is heard, her whole figure 
 grows more erect still, it stiffens, and there is an 
 almost imperceptible shiver from head to foot ; 
 the thin nostrils dilate, and even the finger-tips 
 vibrate. In this frail form, as in the chant, there 
 is harshness, there is sensuousness, and, most of 
 all, unutterable pride. And an hour long this 
 music trembles, complicated and childish, with- 
 out recognisable motif, made of subtle discords, 
 quarter - tones, that could not be written out. 
 After twenty minutes of it, you feel its strange, 
 sad, sensuous charm. It is absorbing and mono- 
 tonous, like those Saracenic designs and mosaics 
 
THE VOYAGE 265 
 
 in whose complex and infinite interlacing you lose 
 yourself ; like those dances of almehs whose slow 
 entanglements and undulations the Orientals can 
 follow through a whole night. It is like the in- 
 toxication of opium or of hashish ; and one could 
 stay for hours, spell-bound by the succession of 
 chants and the slender music, following, as in a 
 confused dream, the sudden growing erect and 
 shivering of the Arab figure. 
 
 There is no spectacle, no book, no study, which 
 brings you so abruptly and so far into the soul 
 of a stranger race as do ten notes of its music. 
 Nothing gives so fully the sensation of the dis- 
 tance which separates us from them. A Musalman 
 chant, heard suddenly in the evening, as you pass 
 by a mosque ; a Buddhist chime, flinging out its 
 call in the abrupt twilight, in the depths of an 
 amazing Cinhalese forest, where the serried trunks 
 of the cocoanut-palms mirror themselves in the -red 
 water of stagnant ponds ; Hindu gongs, heathen 
 trumpets, vibrating upon the high terraces of 
 Benares, as the sun is sinking beyond the roseate 
 Ganges : all these are sudden openings, they are 
 abrupt flashes, which for an instant throw a strong 
 light and reveal everything. In recollections of 
 these are summed up, are fused, all the sensations 
 of a journey. And here one feels the Arab life, 
 the encampments and the marches of ancestors in 
 the silence and monotony of the desert, and the 
 Semitic soul, dominant, traversed by sudden shocks 
 and by impulses of violent will. 
 
266 ROMANTIC INDIA 
 
 January n. 
 
 Yesterday evening, about ten o'clock, we came 
 into bad weather. All night long, tossing in my 
 berth, I hear the uproar of the black water out- 
 side, and of objects pitching about within. At last 
 it benumbs and stupefies one, this tumult which 
 enters one's dreams ; and with eyes open, in an 
 odd condition of somnolence, one submits, like an 
 inert thing, to the action of the tremendous power 
 which is at work in the darkness. 
 
 At daylight the air has grown cold and we shiver. 
 We are off Crete. A sea tumultuous and livid like 
 the sky ; ragged clouds hanging low, waves rising 
 from the deep, mingle, rush, fly, in a grey fog, a 
 salt vapour, with a clamour of wind and water. And 
 all day long the ship falls, falls into black valleys ; 
 rises staggering under a mass of blue-green dripping 
 foam ; gets above the horizon, which has lost its 
 level, above the great circle of pallid sea, which 
 oscillates upon the wan sky as if shaken in its very 
 depths. 
 
 In the evening there is a little peace overhead, 
 but the heavy seas are running as madly as ever. 
 In the distance crests of waves shine, like whitish 
 lightning, upon the grey tumult of the water. 
 
 A northern twilight, interminable and cold ; a 
 red bar, a gleam fixed in the horizon, which lingers 
 there sadly for hours, which seems as if it would 
 never disappear, and toward which we advance 
 steadily. A sad return into sombre Europe ! 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 ADEN, 4-6 
 
 Agra, Mogul capital, 165 ; tomb of Akbar, 165, 166 ; citadel, 
 
 167-72 ; Taj, 172-77 
 Akbar, Mogul emperor, Musalman, 165 ; his tomb, 165, 166 ; his 
 
 palace, 168-72 
 
 Allahabad, its worship of snakes, 94 
 Almehs, Egyptian, at Port Said, 262-65 
 Amiel, a Hindu mind, 137-40 
 
 Animals, Hindu worship of, 93, 94, 96, 105, 106, 145, 156, 176 
 Arab dancing-girls, 263-65 
 Architecture, Cinhalese, 21 ; Hindu, 78, 147, 148, 187-89, 208, 
 
 235-38 ; Musalman, 82, 158, 166-76, 191 
 Aurungzebe, 181 
 Autonomy of India, possible, 17, 67, 100, 160, 161 
 
 B 
 
 BABUS (native merchants), 56, 96, 108, 109, 200, 219 
 
 Bayaderes, at Pondichdry, 48 
 
 Benares, sacred city of Brahmanism, 74-76 ; first impressions 
 
 of, 76 ; scenes by the river in the morning, 78-82, 140-42 ; 
 
 palace of the Maharajah, 105 ; temple of the monkeys, 
 
 106 ; the University, 106 ; shop, 109 ; dancing-girls, 110-14 ; 
 
 street scenes, 142-45 ; temple of Siva, 145-48 ; last look 
 
 at, 156, 157. 
 
 Bengalis, appearance and character of, 53-55 
 
 269 
 
270 INDEX 
 
 Bindrabun, sacred city, abounding in monkeys, 186 ; temples in 
 
 honour of Krishna, 187 
 Bo, the sacred tree of Ceylon, 22 
 Bombay, cosmopolitan city, 219-23; atmospheric effects, 222, 
 
 223, 229 ; street scenes, 223-26 ; hospital for animals, 
 
 226 ; English placards, 226 ; Salvation Army, 227-29 ; 
 
 Parsi worship, 229 ; Parsi cemetery, 230-32 ; point of de- 
 parture for Europe, 248 
 Brahma and Brahma, 120, 128-32, 242 
 
 Brahmanism, its ceremonials, 79-92 ; theology, 92-97, 148-55 ; 
 ethics, 94-100 ; vision of the world and of life, 116-31, 
 146-48 
 
 Brahmans, highest caste of Hindus, 74-76, 84-93, 116 
 Brahmo-Somaj, new sect of "Young Bengal," 154, 214 
 Buddha (Gautama), Sakya-Muni, statues of, in Ceylon, 22, 31 ; 
 
 a Brahman of Benares, 75 ; his statues in cave temples 
 
 of Elura, 244-47 
 Buddhism in Ceylon, its ceremonial, monasteries, characteristic 
 
 features, 21-26, 30-38 ; in India, its date unknown, 140; 
 
 absorbed by Hinduism, 154 ; perpetuated in the caves of 
 
 Elura, 244 
 
 CALCUTTA, arrival at, 52 ; first impressions of, 52-54 
 
 Caste system of India, 91 
 
 Cemetery, English, at Lucknow, 159 ; Parsi, at Bombay, 230-32 
 
 Ceylon, approach to, n ; first impressions, 12-16 ; aspect of the 
 
 country, 12, 15, 16, 18-21 
 Cheddy Lai, the Sudra "boy," 161-64, 192 ; his opinions of the 
 
 English, 163, 164, 216; of the Salvation Army and the 
 
 missionaries, 229 
 
 Chunder Dutt, converted babu, 201 
 Cinhalese, their appearance and character, 12, 15-18, 28 
 
INDEX 271 
 
 DARJILING, arrival at, 63 ; English character of the place, 
 
 63-68, 73 
 Delhi, a great capital, its fortress, 190, 191 ; its mosque, 191 ; 
 
 its shawl merchants, 192-94 
 Dupleix, statue of, at Pondiche"ry, 49 
 Durga, a Hindu divinity, 81, 92, 93 
 
 ELEPHANTS, 20, 28, 204, 206-208 
 
 Elura, cave temples of, 233-47 
 
 English authors studied in India, 100, 101, 108, 213, 214; 
 English conviction of duty toward India, 66-68, 160, 201, 
 257 ; English influence, effects of, in Ceylon, 17, 18 ; 
 and in India, 67, 200, 202 ; English judges in India, 
 their impartiality, 163 ; English life and manners trans- 
 planted into India, 52, 53, 63-68 ; English officers, met on 
 shipboard, 249-56 ; English soldiers in India, 66, 164, 198 ; 
 Englishwoman, a missionary, met on shipboard, 256-59 
 
 GANESA, Hindu divinity, 77, 81, 90, 93, 143, 208, 219 
 
 Ganges, the river, below Calcutta (the Hugli), 50-52, 78-81 ; at 
 
 Benares, 140-42, 156, 157 ; an object of worship, 84, 89; 
 
 "the divine Mother," 90 ; an image of Hinduism, 155 
 
 H 
 
 HIMALAYAS, the, first sight of, 58 ; backbone of the earth, 59 ; 
 forests of, 60 ; mixed population of the foot-hills, 60-62 ; 
 change of temperature on approaching, 61 ; seen from 
 Darjiling, 62, 63, 68, 69, 72, 73 
 
272 INDEX 
 
 Hinduism, a development of Brahmanism, 148 ; its complicated 
 
 character, 148-55 
 Hindus, their peculiar ethics, 94-99 ; their souls a mystery to 
 
 us. 99-103 ; their relations to the European races, 103 ; the 
 
 nautch their greatest pleasure, 113, 114; peculiarities of 
 
 their mental organisation, 139, 148 
 
 I 
 
 INDRA, Vedic divinity, his statues in cave temples of Elura, 234 
 Instruction in India, 99, 100, 106, 107, 212-15 
 
 J 
 
 JAHAN, Shah, builder of the Taj, 172 
 
 Jains, Hindu Buddhists, their sanctuaries in the caves of Elura, 
 
 235, 2 44 
 
 Jaipur, capital of Rajputana, 203 ; street scenes, 204-208 ; 
 buildings, 208 ; tiger cage, 210 ; temple of Siva, 211 ; col- 
 lege, 212-15 ; scenic effect, 215 
 
 Jews, at Aden, 4 
 
 Jumna, the river, "the divine Mother," 90; at Agra, 167; 
 scenes on its banks, 184-86 
 
 K 
 
 KAILASA, the Himalayan paradise of Siva, 76, 97 ; the great 
 
 temple of the caves of Elura, 235-38 
 Kali, Hindu goddess, 77, 92, 98, 99, 214 
 Kandy, ancient capital of Ceylon, 21-31 
 Kasi, name for Benares, 75, 76 
 Kelanya Ganga, river of Ceylon, 19 
 Krishna, incarnation of Vishnu, 1 52 ; specially worshipped at 
 
 Muttra, 1 80 ; "the blue god," divinity of the pre- Aryan 
 
INDEX 273 
 
 inhabitants of India, 181 ; story of his life, 181-84 ; poem 
 concerning him, 183 ; his temple at Bindrabun, 186, 187, 
 203 
 
 Kshatriyas, warrior caste of Hindus, 105, 130, 204, 208, 219 
 Kunchain-Junga, a peak of the Himalayas, 62, 63 ; seen at sun- 
 rise, 68, 69 
 Kutab-Minar, tower near Delhi, 194-96 
 
 LAMA'S temple near Darjiling, 66, 71, 72 
 Lawrence, General Henry, tomb of, at Cawnpur, 159 
 Lucknow, a Mohammedan and English city, 158; siege of, 
 159,251 
 
 M 
 
 MADHAVA, Hindu author (fourteenth century), 152 
 
 Malabar Hill, 230-32 
 
 Maya, the goddess, 129, 134, 202 
 
 Meditations, the five Buddhist, 24, 25 
 
 Missionary, Wesleyan, to Jaipur, 256-59 
 
 Monastery, Buddhist, in Kandy, 21-26 
 
 Mongol types in Northern India, 58, 61 
 
 Monkeys, 106, 197 
 
 Monks, Buddhist, their rules of life, 23-26 
 
 Mosques in Benares, 82; in Lucknow, 158; in Delhi, 191, 
 
 195 
 
 Mumtaz-i-Mahal, her tomb, the Taj, 172 
 Music, Oriental, its strange character, 264 
 
 N 
 
 NANA SAHIB, 114 
 Nautch, the, 111-14 
 Negroes, at Aden, 4, 5 
 
274 INDEX 
 
 PANTHEISM, Hindu, 124-32 
 Parsis in Bombay, 221, 222, 230 
 Parvati, Hindu goddess, wife of Siva, 92, 212, 239 
 Peacocks, blue, 195, 197, 216, 217 
 Peradinya Gardens, 40, 41 
 Perusha, 94 
 
 Pictures, two Hindu, 116-24 
 
 Pondiche'ry, arrival at, 44 ; French element in, 44-46, 49 ; 
 aspect of, 46 ; statue of Dupleix in, 49 
 
 R 
 
 RAILWAYS in Ceylon, 18 ; in India, 56, 161-65, 200, 219, 220, 
 
 233 
 
 Rainfall of Northern India, 59 
 Rajputs, very ancient Aryan people, 203 
 Rama, incarnation of Vishnu, 97, 152 
 Rig- Veda, 86 
 
 SAKTISTS, a Hindu sect, 98, 99 
 
 Sakya-Muni (Gautama), see Buddha 
 
 Salvation Army in India, 227-29 
 
 Samunda, Hindu goddess, 92 
 
 Sanskrit, 100, 107, 213 
 
 Scots Greys, in India, 158, 198 
 
 Sepoys, 96, 1 06, 221 
 
 Shawl merchants of Delhi, 192-94 
 
 Shelley, a Hindu mind, 135-37 
 
 Shipboard, life on, i-io, 44, 49-52, 248-51, 258 
 
 Sikkim, the, 64, 69, 73 
 
 Siliguri, 58 
 
INDEX 275 
 
 Siva, Hindu god, Si, 90, 92, 93, 96-99, 105, 130, 143, 146, 150, 
 
 151,225,226, 234-47 
 
 Soldiers, English, at Aden, 4 ; in India, 66, 158, 164, 167, 198 
 Sudra, low caste of Hindus, 78, 91, 104, 163, 219 
 Surya, Hindu god, 90, 126, 234 
 
 TAJ, the, tomb of Mumtaz-i- Mahal, 172-77 
 
 Tavernier, French traveller in India (1641), 181 
 
 Tea-planters in Ceylon, 42 
 
 Temples : Buddhist, in Kandy, 21, 22, 31, 32, 38 ; Hindu, at 
 Villianur, 47-49 ; Lama's, at Darjiling, 70, 71 ; in Benares, 
 80, 105, 144-46 ; at Muttra, 181 ; in Bindrabun, 186, 187 ; 
 in Jaipur, 211 ; in caves of Elura, 234-39, 244-47 
 
 Tigers, caged, in Jaipur, 210 
 
 Trichinopoli, pagodas of, 48, 181 
 
 U 
 
 UPANISHADS, the, 86, 107 ; extracts from, 117-24 ; meaning of 
 the word, 120, note; singular character of, 139; contain 
 much modern thought, 214 
 
 VEDAS, the, 125, 126, 129, 130 
 
 Vegetation, tropical, of Ceylon, 11, 12, 15, 16, 18-21, 26-30, 
 
 39-42 ; of India, 50, 60, 69, 220 
 Villages, their organisation in India, 178 ; picturesque aspect, 
 
 178 
 
 Villianur, pagoda of, 47-49 
 Vishnu, Hindu god, 85, 86-90, 93, 97, 130, 149-53, 180, 225, 
 
 234 
 
276 INDEX 
 
 W 
 
 WALES, the Prince of, in Ceylon, 26 ; his portrait in Benares, 
 105 
 
 ZENANAS, 112, 256, 258 
 Zend-Avesta, quoted, 231 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by BALLANTYNK, HANSON & Co. 
 Edinburgh ami London 
 
TIMBUCTOO 
 
 The Mysterious 
 BY FELIX DUBOIS 
 
 With 155 Illustrations from Photographs and Drawings made 
 on the spot, and 1 1 Maps and Plans 
 
 In One Vohtnie, demy 8vo^ price 123. 6d. 
 
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 write of ' Timbuctoo the Mysterious ' could not have fallen on a better man 
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 style, the information, and the illustrations, make this the most important 
 book of travel that has appeared for many a day." 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 
THE NEW AFRICA 
 
 A Journey up the Chobe and down the 
 Okovango Rivers 
 
 BY AUREL SCHULZ, M.D. 
 
 AND 
 
 AUGUSTUS HAMMAR, C.E. 
 
 In One Volume^ demy 8vo, with many Illustrations 
 
 Dr. Schulz's work deals with a portion of South Africa hitherto 
 unexplored. The interesting description of the Chobe and Okovango 
 rivers, with a navigable water connection between them, is a feature of 
 much importance to the future development of the country, while the 
 adventures with unruly natives and sporting episodes vary the story of 
 his doings in a pleasant manner. 
 
 ACTUAL AFRICA 
 
 Or, The Coming Continent. 
 BY FRANK VINCENT, 
 
 Author of "The Land of the White Elephant," &c. 
 With Map and over 100 New Illustrations. Demy 8vo, 243. 
 
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 safely be consulted by students anxious to inform themselves on the actual 
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 the years 1891-93." 
 
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 book is the excellence of its illustrations, of which there are over a hundred ; 
 they testify very powerfully to the possibilities of the camera in experienced 
 hands." 
 
 LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 
THE OUTGOING TURK 
 
 Impressions of a Journey through the Western 
 Balkans 
 
 BY H. C. THOMSON 
 
 With many Illustrations and Maps 
 In One Volume, demy 8vo, price 143. net 
 
 THE CHITRAL CAMPAIGN 
 
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 and Bajour 
 
 BY H. C. THOMSON 
 
 With over 50 Illustrations, reproduced from Photographs, and 
 Important Diagrams and Map 
 
 In One Volume, demy 8vo, price 145. net. 
 
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 The Standard. "The general reader will be glad to find within the 
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 warfare." 
 
 The Dally Graphic. " The incidents of the siege are described with 
 great spirit. The story of Colonel Kelly's famous march and of the battles 
 high up among the mountains is told with graphic power. The enormous 
 difficulties of the march are to be appreciated by a glance at these interesting 
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 LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 
THE LAND OF THE MUSKEG 
 
 BY H. SOMERS SOMERSET 
 With a Preface by A. HUNGERFORD POLLEN 
 
 With 1 10 Illustrations from Sketches by A. H. POLLEN and 
 Instantaneous Photographs, and Four Maps 
 
 Second Edition, demy 8vo, cloth, price 145. net 
 
 The Times . ' ' Mr. Somerset may be credited not only with having 
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 plied us with an attractive volume of travel in British North America." 
 
 The Globe. "Very easy reading is Mr. Somers Somerset's record of 
 experiences in the Land of the Muskeg. He and his friend Mr. Pollen did 
 not go as missionaries to convert the Braves, or as traders to steal a fortune 
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 knowledge." 
 
 CO RE A, OR CHO-SEN 
 
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 BY A. HENRY SAVAGE-LANDOR 
 
 Demy 8vo, with 38 Illustrations from Drawings by the Author, 
 and a Portrait, i8s. 
 
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 should have this latest account of a journey through the country, and we 
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 distinctive features of Corean life." 
 
 The Morning Post. "The book contains a great deal of matter 
 which is entirely new, and cannot fail to attract considerable attention at 
 the present time, when so little is known about Corea and the Coreans." 
 
 LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 
OOO^rJ 
 
 M309551