Round the Wonderful World Part 17

Then we see a sweetmeat shop with a crowd outside and a cloud of flies bearing them company. While we look, many of the flies crawl slowly over the sticky, syrupy stuff which has just come from the pan, and get their legs entangled in it, but it doesn't seem to hinder the sale, which goes on cheerfully. There are sweets in rings and coils and fantastic shapes.

A child gets a large pink slab for two pice, and ten pice go to the penny, that is to say, the anna, so it is not dear. The buyer tucks the sticky stuff up in the corner of her garment and ties it carefully into a knot before starting homeward.

Standing a little aloof from the crowd and looking at them disdainfully is a small boy with a twisted cord slung across his left shoulder. "He be Brahman, Sahib," says Ramaswamy timidly. "Very proud and not eating anything dirty peoples touch, just having had cord." Standing where he is, so as not to approach nearer to the lad, he asks a few questions, which are answered curtly and proudly, with a glance thrown across at us as much as if to say they wouldn't have been answered at all except for our presence.

"Just two, three days he been made Brahman," explains Ramaswamy.

But he was born a Brahman, of course, and what Ramaswamy means is that up till then he was counted a child and could play and run about with other children without responsibilities; now that he has been invested with the cord he has taken up his birthright and is of the highest caste, the caste from which the priests come; he may not eat anything prepared by a lower caste, or even let others touch him, for he is set apart, and very proud of his new dignity in spite of the many difficulties it carries with it.

The child who stands staring at us with her shawl over her head is a little girl about the same age as the boy. She has been grinding corn between two stones and is a very thin and miserable little wretch. Her clothes are rags and there are no bangles on her little brown ankles.

Ramaswamy tells us she is a widow! That child? She has probably never even seen the boy-husband who was so unlucky as to die; but because he did she is scorned by everyone. The worst life in all India is that of a widow. She has no ornaments, no amus.e.m.e.nts, and is treated worse than a slavey in a boarding-house, and for her there is no escape.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A POTTER.]

Right out in the street sits a man weaving a web of wonderful colours; he throws the shuttles, carrying different coloured threads, across and across, without seeming to look at them, and all the time the web is growing into an intricate pattern under his fingers. So his father wove, and his grandfather and great-grandfather. All these crafts run in families. A little farther on is a potter spinning a wheel with his feet, while the soft lump of dull-coloured clay takes shape beneath his clever thumb as it races round. It seems to grow and swell and curve exquisitely as if it were a living thing. There are few sights more fascinating than a potter at work. You have often heard of the "potter's thumb," I expect? The thumb grows broad and flat and capable, because it is the chief instrument with which the potter works. On the floor beside him lie many of the clay jars of different sizes and shapes ready for the baking, others are being baked. There is always a good sale for them, and a potter in India flourishes exceedingly. Even now there is a woman pa.s.sing us with a pot balanced on her head and a child on her hip. She swings along in the dust with a graceful gliding step, for she has been used to carrying things on her head almost from babyhood. These pots are brittle enough and frequently get broken, and even the poorest households must have a supply of them. But what helps the potter to make a living more than anything else is the custom that when a death occurs in a family, or a new life arrives in it, all the pots must be broken and new ones bought! It is a symbol of the life that has gone out and the new life beginning.

In church you must have heard those grandly poetic lines--

"Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.

"Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto G.o.d who gave it."

Pa.s.s on to the silversmiths' quarter. Any of these men can do fine and beautiful work with very few tools. If you want anything made you pay them in a queer way. For the finished article is put in the scales and weighed against rupees thrown into the other balance, and when the rupees equal it then you give them to the workman, together with so many annas in each rupee for his work.

How can we ever take in all this varied life, so different from the life we are used to? The women sitting on the balconies above, the pariah dogs prowling for sc.r.a.ps below, the druggists and spice-sellers, the fruit and vegetable stalls? Over it all is that peculiar, scented, musty bazaar smell, made up of saffron and wood and dirt, with which we are already so familiar.

Wonderful Delhi! A city teeming with myriads of men of many races and customs, living side by side. Successor of seven cities which have stood here or hereabout in successive ages. From the earliest days a place of consequence, a place to be reckoned with, and now, by the proclamation of the King-Emperor, the first city in the land, as it is already the centre!

[Ill.u.s.tration: CLUMSY BOATS WITH THATCHED ROOFS.]

CHAPTER XIX

TO THE DEATH!

A curious building, isn't it? I mean that one right in front of us. It is something like a very large and many-sided crown, built of stone and set upon the ground. The sides are pierced with windows of the same sort as those seen in churches, and on each of the angles there is a little pinnacle. It rises up serenely against the soft blue sky of this early morning. We are far from Delhi now, having arrived at Cawnpore late last night, and we have come out here first thing this morning. It is only seven now.

Cawnpore! The Mutiny! Those two things rush simultaneously into the mind, for Cawnpore is a.s.sociated with the most awful scenes of the Mutiny, and no Briton can ever think of it without those scenes flas.h.i.+ng before him.

Come nearer and pa.s.s inside the crown and you will see in the centre a great angel of the usual sort, with high sweeping wings, holding palm branches folded across its breast. It marks the Well of Cawnpore.

You know that story, of course, and yet, as we sit here, on the very spot where it all happened, with the Indian sky above us, we cannot help recalling it once more. In telling it I shall not dwell on the agonies and bloodshed which have hallowed this place for ever; they are done with, and those who suffered have been at rest for nearly sixty years.

The deep peace around us overlies their torments and forbids us to think too much of the darker side of the picture. But the heroism, the courage, the indomitable spirit that animated these men and women, these things live for ever, rising up from the earth in a flood of inspiration for all who pa.s.s over the place.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WELL OF CAWNPORE.]

There are certain little animals called Tasmanian devils, who do not know what it is to give in; they die fighting and attack their persecutors as long as one limb hangs on to another; of such stuff were the people besieged at Cawnpore. They were encamped here on a wretched piece of flat ground, quite open except for a low mud wall, which anyone could have jumped over easily. There were about nine hundred and fifty of them altogether, some soldiers, some civilians, some women and children and a few native soldiers who remained loyal. Outside were unending hordes of natives well armed and well trained, because the greater part were the men of the native regiments who had mutinied, known by the name of Sepoys. A few huts built of thin brick were all the shelter the beleaguered people had; they were constantly under a shrieking storm of bullets and sh.e.l.ls, and were ringed around by steel.

You would have said two days at the outside would see the end of it, and that then the black hordes would sweep clean over that field, having wiped out the garrison completely; but so amazing is the power of pluck that those within held the hordes at bay for twenty-three days! They not only prevented any single Sepoy from getting inside alive, but they constantly sallied out and acted on the defensive, burning their enemies' defences and killing scores of them, while thousands fled in confusion before them! The sublime impudence of it! And all the time they were short of food; women and children were laid in holes in the earth covered with planks to protect them from the bullets. And water--ah, that was the worst--water had to be fetched from a well which was quite exposed in the midst of the encampment, and the Sepoys kept up an incessant fire on it. We are now beside it, this well where water was drawn at the price of blood, and yet volunteers were never lacking. The very ground our feet now rest upon was ringed around with the bodies of those who laid down their lives for the women and children. There was another well, a little distance off, now marked by an Iona cross, and to this, under cover of night, the British conveyed their dead for burial.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN INDIAN OFFICER OF THE CAMEL CORPS.]

Read the inscription that circles round the wall of the well now in front of us:--

"Sacred to the perpetual memory of a great company of Christian people, chiefly women and children, who near this spot were cruelly murdered by the followers of the rebel, Nana Dhundu Pant of Bithur, and cast, the dying with the dead, into the well below, on the fifteenth day of July 1857."

Yes, we have not come to the end yet!

When the bloodthirsty tyrant, better known as Nana Sahib, found he could not crack this nut, when he realised that his whole army was held at bay by a few hundreds of determined spirits--there were only three hundred fighting men to begin with, and they were daily killed--he made terms with them, promising to send the survivors safely in boats down the river if they would give in. Desperate as they were, without food or water, without shade from the killing glare of the Indian summer sun, the brave men held their heads high and only accepted on condition they marched out under arms with so many rounds of ammunition to each man.

This was granted.

Now leave the well and follow that heroic band who went down to the river on that blazing day some sixty years ago. It is about a mile away.

The little garrison now numbered some four hundred and fifty all told, the half of what they had been three weeks before. Blackened with the sun and smoke and gunpowder, so as to rival the Sepoys in complexion, tattered and worn and wounded, but yet with courage undaunted, they went down to the river.

[Ill.u.s.tration: NANA SAHIB.]

There is another building here, an arcade on the banks facing the placid stream; it has a tower behind and a broad flight of stairs, a ghaut, as it is called, flanked by walls running down to the margin. But on that day long ago there was nothing of this, nothing but a number of clumsy boats with thatched roofs to keep the sun off, native fas.h.i.+on. As the English took their places in them, suddenly a bugle rang out, and at that signal the native boatmen sprang from their places and splashed ash.o.r.e; up rose an army of Sepoys from the scrub on the banks, and death was rained on the victims of the blackest deed of treachery ever written in the annals of the world. Standing here on these smooth steps which mark the place it is difficult even to picture that scene of horror.

Many were killed outright, many mortally wounded and torn, one hundred and twenty-five were dragged ash.o.r.e and brutally killed afterwards; it was they who were thrown into the well; but three boats got away down the stream. Two went ash.o.r.e and all the occupants were killed by the merciless brutes who lined the banks. The other had men in it, men who were filled with a madness of wrath that knew no bounds. In spite of their own condition, in spite of the odds against them, they leaped like tigers on the foe whenever they got the chance. They were followed by the natives, who fired on them repeatedly from a safe distance, and again and again the dead had to be east into the stream. Yet when a Sepoy boat ran against a sandbank, twenty or so of the powder-blackened Englishmen sprang out into the water and raced with fury to kill them, though the boat contained three times their own number. It is good to read how they wiped out all but those who escaped in terror by swimming!

At last only fourteen of the English were left alive and they got hopelessly penned in a backwater. These men charged the army of Sepoys on the banks and made them keep their distance. They secured themselves in a tiny temple on the margin of the river and killed all who approached. At length, seeing preparations made for blowing them up with gunpowder, they charged out; seven who could swim made for the river, the other six (one was dead) rushed straight at the ma.s.s of Sepoys and dealt death on every side before they fell.

Four of the seven eventually outdistanced their persecutors and reached safety, and then, alas! one died.

It is good to hear that an avenging army descended on Cawnpore, though too late to save the remnant of the captives. The Sepoys were smitten hip and thigh, and thousands paid with their lives for those other lives they had spared not. Nana Sahib fled and was never heard of again.

Stripped of all his wealth and luxury he must have skulked from place to place like a plague-tainted rat, till death took him and he went to meet the souls of the hundreds he had treacherously and brutally ma.s.sacred.

It is finished! The price has been paid; the native has learnt that it is not well to meddle with white men. And we must not forget that hundreds of natives remained faithful, and gave their lives to save those of our fellow-countrymen.

As we wander back through the park in the suns.h.i.+ne, now growing fierce and strong, toward the Memorial Church showing above the trees, the chief feeling is not of bitterness but of pride. That little band, whose courage was unquenchable and untamable, were not picked men and women, but just an ordinary crowd made up of soldiers and civilians and their wives and children, yet not one act of selfishness or cowardice remains to stain their record. When the last extremity came, sloth and indifference and selfishness dropped off like sloughs and only devotion and bravery shone out. It is grand to belong to a race which holds these qualities as the highest good.

One incident more. When the tyrant had brought his handful of captives up from the river he found there were a few men among them. So before he started to ma.s.sacre the women and babies he sent for the men to come forth to instant death; he dared not leave even half a dozen men of the untamable breed, who are "little used to lie down at the bidding of any man," among them, even unarmed.

The men came forth, and among them was a lad of fourteen; he was only a year older than you, but he preferred to be reckoned among the men rather than to hide behind the women's petticoats. He chose a soldier's death and he had it, for he fell pierced by bullets with the rest.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BATHING IN THE GANGES.]

CHAPTER XX

A CITY OF PRIESTS

Surely you have never before seen anything like this, there is nothing to be seen like it anywhere else!

We are at Benares, the sacred city of the Hindus, which stands on their sacred river, the Ganges. We have taken a boat and have floated out into the current, and are looking up with amazement at the spectacle before us. The city rises high on the banks, and towers and minarets and domes of a curious long-drawn-out shape, glittering in the sun like gold, arise out of the flat roofs. Down to the river at every opening between the houses stretch stairways, as you know called _ghauts_, some broad and some narrow. We judge that they are there, though we cannot see the steps, for every inch is covered by a moving ma.s.s of people, clothed in the colours of the rainbow. You have often turned a kaleidoscope over and over, and watched the bits of coloured gla.s.s falling into strange patterns. Half shut your eyes and make a tube of your hands and see if this doesn't remind you of a kaleidoscope.