The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, volume 2 (of 2) / By His Wife, Isabel Burton

CHAPTER II.

INDIA.

We embarked at once for India. Baron D'Alber, my husband's best friend, the local Minister of Finance in Trieste, and the Captain of the Port, came in the Government boat to take us to the Austrian-Lloyd's Calypso, Captain Bogójevich. H.R.H. the Duke of Wurtemburg, who was our Commander-in-Chief, so distinguished in the Bosnian campaign; Baron Pascotini, a kind, clever, philanthropic old gentleman of eighty-four, and all the great people, came to see us off, to do honour to Richard. How touched we were at so much kindness! We steamed down the Adriatic with a fresh breeze. The day after, Richard began to dictate to me the biography which forms the beginning of this book. We read the life of Moore and the "Veiled Prophet of Khorassán," called by Moore Mokanna, whose real name was Hassan-Sabah, or Hassan es Sayyah. When we got to Zante it blew very hard. Our chairs were lashed on deck, and we read daily "Lalla Rookh," the "Light of the Haram," and Smollett's "Adventures of Roderick Random" and "Memoirs of a Lady of Quality." At Port Sáid, which is a sort of an Egyptian Wapping, we ran over the sands to see an Arab village. We met a lot of old friends, Consul and Mrs. Perceval, Mr. Buckley, F.O., Colonel Stoker, Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Cave, and the grand old Baron de Lesseps, and Salih Beg, Mr. Royal, Mr. Webster, Mr. Fowler, and other gentlemen at dinner at the Consulate. We much enjoyed the Canal, seeing once more an Eastern sunrise over the desert, but it made us sad contrasting our old days with our present. We had a glorious moonlight, blue sky, clear green water, cool balmy air, golden sands to the very horizon, troops of Bedawi camels and goats. It is a wild and dangerous track.

We had the north-east monsoon dead against us the whole way after going out of the Canal, which made the ship pretty lively. In the Red Sea there is much to be seen for those who know the coasts, and my husband pointed out the far-off sites of his old Meccan journey, and the land of Midian and Akabeh, which would be a future journey. On the thirteenth day we serpentined through twenty miles of mostly hidden reefs and slabs to Jeddah, the Port of Mecca, which can only be done in broad daylight, one ship at a time, and no lighthouses. We collided with an English ironclad ship, which did us considerable damage, so we had to remain some time, before we were repaired, and our pilgrims continued to arrive from Mecca, as we were a pilgrim-ship about to carry eight or nine hundred to Bombay.

To the far east we had a gladdening glimpse of the desert, the wild waterless wilderness of Sur on the Asiatic side, which looks like snow under the moonlight. I have not enjoyed myself so much with Nature for four and a half years as now, once more smelling the desert air and the usual Eastern scenes. The Nizam (regular soldiers), negroes, Bedawi draped in usual cloak and kuffíyeh, and women in blue garments, not changed a hair since the days of Abraham, except that they now carry matchlocks instead of spears; the tawny camels squat upon the ground; the black sheep and goats huddle in knots, vainly attempting to shade their heads from the sun; the seedy dahabíyyeh rolls past, and is hustled aside by the fussy high-pressure mouche, which carries the mails daily to Ismailiyyah, a pretty mushroom town with palaces, Consulates and gardens, with telegraph and railway. It contained then two thousand souls, and hoisted nine various national flags. The land of Goshen is immediately north-west. There are plenty of foxes on the Asiatic side, and one sat like a dog on the sandbank and stared at us. We passed the village called Serapeum, which communicates with a Bedawi village in Asia. To the south and westward rise the sandy cliffs of Jebel Jeneffeh, and towering above all, Jebel Atakeh. As we got near Suez, the children run along, crying, "Bakshish!" The soldiers threw them a bit of bread, but as we threw them nothing the petition changed to the curses with which the Orientals are so familiar, "Na'al Abukum ya Kilab!" ("Drat your fathers, O ye dogs!")

At Suez, if you leave your ship—and it is only going to anchor for a few hours in the bay, an hour's steam from the town, and much more by sail—there is a great danger, if a contrary wind springs up, that you are not able to join it. From being a town of importance, Suez was ruined by the opening of the Canal. She has become a big village of three thousand natives, and about seventy-five Europeans, employed in telegraph, post-office, steamers, and railways. She sits solitary under the sky in the sand on the borders of the sea, far from all civilization or progress. She has had a past, and Richard says she will have a future. The troops were then collecting at Masáwwah; three thousand camels were being shipped. One would think that this regular wall of Asiatic mountain, now painted pink and plum blue by the last flood of sunlight, which begins far north of the Lebanon, and which extends southwards to Aden, a counterpart of the Moab range, would have served Holman Hunt for a background to his famous "Scape-goat." Richard knew all this ground twenty-five years before, and he showed me where the Israelites are supposed to have crossed the Red Sea, and where they did cross. Christians have three places, and the Arabs two.

The Red Sea to starboard, where Africa rises wild and grim, is a dangerous shore, requiring lighthouses, which it has not. The morning after, we could see Mount Sinai lone in the Tih Desert. In my husband's Arab days, he landed at Tur, and bathed at Hammam Musa on his way to Mecca. On the other side is the Gulf of Akabah the stormy, and Richard at this time (1876) was brewing his project of the Midian mines, whose gold he had discovered twenty-five years before. He then pointed out to me Yambu, the Port of Medinah, where he was in his pilgrimage, and the winding valleys that lead to it, and Richard asked the pilot about Sa'ad, the Shaykh of the Harb Bedawi, the robber-chief of the Jebel el Fikrah, who attacked Richard's caravan going to Mecca, and he replied that "that dog has since gone to Jehannum."

Jeddah is the most lovely town I have ever seen, and by moonlight quite ghostly. It looks like an ancient model carved in old ivory. It was here my husband came by land from Mecca, after the pilgrimage, and embarked in 1853. Mecca lies in a valley between those high mountains at the back. Mr. Gustavus Wylde, the Vice-Consul, the son of our old friend Mr. Henry Wylde, of the F.O., sent a boat and a kawwás to bring us off, and insisted on our remaining, the eight days that we were to anchor there, at the Consulate, which we gladly accepted, and I think it was the pleasantest eight days I ever remember. It was a bachelor house, consisting of five men. The Consulate was made of white coralline, with brown wood shutters; jalousies and balconies of fanciful shape, mostly all crooked, but as finely carved as delicate lace. There was a room at the top, a sort of belvedere with windows opening to all sides with delicious views, which I called "The Eagle's Nest," and everything was a combination of Eastern and European comfort. They always mounted us, and we used to ride out into the desert by the Hajj way. It was very tantalizing to find one's self so near Mecca—on one occasion about twenty-five miles—and to have to turn round and come back; but two Americans and two English had gone up for a lark, and had got into trouble. Richard could have gone, but it was not exactly the time to show my blue eyes and broken Arabic upon holy ground, so we returned through the Meccan Gate and the bazars, which are half-dark and half-lit.

Turcomans wearing huge mushroom-like caps of Astrachan wool, Caucasians, Central Asians with wadded skull caps, retail to crabbed-faced and spectacled scribes. The tall sinewy Kurd, with gold-threaded kuffíyyeh veiling his dark face, shaven chin, and up-twisted moustachio, is a sheep-dealer and wrangling with the lamb-sellers. The tall, lanky Sawakin Moslem, with sphinx-like curls hanging to his shoulders and over his brow, the upper hair forming a mighty tuft, is selling the mother-o'-pearl fished on the coast. An Egyptian Fellah urges a small, neat horse through the crowd, crying his price—twelve napoleons. The savage Somali offers little parcels of gums, incense, and myrrh, the produce of the wild hills.

Strings of camels, from the high-bred delúl to the diminutive charity-made beast laden with grain and led by an equally miserable Bedawin, who dresses in a long blouse stained yellow with saffron or acacia bark, and kerchief bound to the head with ropes. They all wear the jambíyeh (dagger), either long and straight or short and curved. They carry the crooked stick of the wilderness and the dwarf spear with tapering head. Skeleton donkeys, holed with many a raw, and laden with water-skins, are cruelly driven along by a peasant lad in blue rags; but through the whole crowd we can detect our Shámis, or Damascenes, by the animal of better breed, ridden well by a huge Haji, whose peculiar aba, or cloak, proclaims him to be an Abu Shám, or father of Syria.

There is the surly, rough Slav Turk from Europe, in the Slav garb, swaggering, with his belt full of weapons, past the natty sneering Hejazi, who testily mutters "Ghásim" (Johnny Raw). This dandy affects tender colours—a white turban bound round an embroidered surah cap, a cashmere shawl, a caftan of fine pink cloth, a green worked waistcoat of silk and cotton, a silver-hilted dagger, and elaborately embroidered slippers. There is the pauper Javanese with his pock-marked face, Chinese features, and crooked-bladed Malay dagger; the Jedáwi, selling at auction white soft coral, the produce of the Red Sea, bought by pilgrims in memoriam of their pilgrimage, and black coral-like bog oak, found in thirteen fathoms of water some way down the coast. And lastly brushed by us four brawny Hayramis, the hammals, or porters, of these regions—men even stouter and stronger than the far-famed Armenian porters of Constantinople, who carry a lean corpse, whose toes are tied together; and close by us are seven little negroes with oil-black skins, dressed in snowy sheets, who cast yearning looks at us, for they are for sale.

The bazar at this moment is a panorama of Eastern life, whose costumes, various types, difference of language, manners, and customs form a veritable kaleidoscope. The dry heat of the tropical sun darting through the plank joints, makes the pleasant "coolth" of the coffee-houses and the bubble of the water-pipes refreshing. Every rug and perfume of the Orient, of pipe and kitchen, assail the nose; the sounds of the grunt of the camel, the howl of the trampled dog, the chaff of the boys, the chant of the fakir, the blare of the trumpets, the roll of the drum, the blessing, the curse, the shrill cry, the hoarse expostulation, the babel of tongues, distant voices like the hum of insects on a drowsy summer noon. Every one is armed to the teeth, but no one ever draws a weapon.

At sunset the crowd melts away. The bazar when they light up at dusk is wonderfully picturesque; then the wealthy pilgrim retires to his caravansarai, the middle class to their tents, the majority to their carpets and rugs and coffers, spread in the open street. By eight o'clock the bazar is as silent as the desert, the moon rises, and the prayer cry of the Muezzin charms the ear (this one is peculiar to Jeddah). Richard and I went to the khan, where he lived as one of these very pilgrims in 1853, and stood under the Minaret he sketched in his book, to hear the "call to prayer."

There is a long reef near Jeddah, which we just shaved, but another ship that went out at the same time (I will not name it) had taken three hundred pilgrims, and she dashed on to it; the ship foundered, and all hands were lost, except one or two who clung to the spars and were picked up. They affirm that the English captain and officers were drunk, that the fanaticism of the pilgrims was aroused, that they combined and lashed them to the masts, and took charge of the ship themselves. We saw her, and we wondered to see her apparently managing herself, but there were no distress signals up. She ran on to this long bank of rock, upon which breakers foamed higher than a ship. I do not like to cumber my book with an account of the cause or source of the cholera, nor the Jeddah massacre (the same that my husband foretold, was officially snubbed for, which impolite letter he received in the depths of Africa in early 1859, and by the same post the account of the massacre); but I will do so either in the Appendix or in a future book—"Labours and Wisdom of Richard Burton."

It is a great experience to have been in a pilgrim-ship, but I am quite content with one experience—they suffered horribly, especially in very wild weather.

On the twenty-seventh day the north-east monsoon actually set in, and destroyed all our peace. The pilgrims howled with fright, and many died; they called "Allahu Akbar" day and night. The ship danced like a cricket-ball. When the storm was at its height Richard was smoking behind a shelter in the bow of the vessel, in the quarters where the sturdiest of our pilgrims had established themselves—Afghans, and all tribes from the north of India, men from Bokhara—when he saw coming amongst them one of two Russian spies we had taken on board at Suez. We had Somalis, Hindis, Arabs from Bokhara, Kokand, Kashgar, Turcomans, Persians, Tashgand (these last Russian subjects), and to those he addressed himself. Richard heard him telling them, in broken Hindustani, that if any accident happened to the ship, that they should aid him to overpower the Austrian captain and officers, and that they and he would cut away the boats and escape, then batten down the remainder of the pilgrims under the hatches, and escape.

As soon as he was gone away, Richard came out to them, and he spoke to each set of men in their own dialect, and he told them that he was an Englishman, and an officer of the Bombay army, and that that man was a Russian spy; and he told them that the Russian had only told them that, in order to get them into trouble when the ship got into Bombay, that they might be looked upon as traitors in the sight of the British Government, and on no account to follow him or his councils. "If anything happened," he said, "everybody will be safely provided for; but I shall follow that man about, and never leave him until the Authorities in Bombay know all about him." The men quieted down at once, and it made the Russian very uneasy to find that they would not listen to him any more. And on arriving at Bombay Richard was as good as his word.

I spent a great deal of my time amongst them, because their misery made me suffer horribly. We lost twenty-three in twenty-three days, not of disease, but of privation, fatigue, hunger, thirst, opium, vermin, and misery. No one would believe it unless they saw the dirt and smelt the horrible effluvia. They have two insatiable wants, and no ship ought to be permitted to carry them unless they will give them a copious supply of fresh good drinking water, and wood to cook with. Many a dying pilgrim embarks without a penny, relying on charity; if there is no charity—which sometimes occurs—the wretch dies. They only want rice, but the ship does not give it, and I have seen a man with three hundred rupees in his belt die of starvation sooner than spend it. They never move out of the small space or position assumed at the beginning of the voyage. The richer ones are all right; the poor are skin and bone, half naked, with a rag round the loins at most. They won't ask, but if they see a kind face they speak with the eyes, as an animal does.

From light till dark, unless writing the biography, we were staggering about our rolling ship with sherbet and food and medicines—we carried no doctor—treating dysentery, fever, diarrhœa; but if I had the misfortune to touch anything, they would not eat it, dying as they were, because they would lose caste. But I made more progress with them than most Europeans, because I could recite the Bismillah in giving it to them. The first funerals made one very serious. I have alluded to them in my "Arabia, Egypt, and India." What struck me was the jolliness with which they were executed—it seemed no more than heaving the lead; but I had never seen a funeral at sea, and I kept saying to myself, "That poor Indian and I might both be lying dead to-day; there would be a little more ceremony for me, and, excepting for my husband, it would cast a gloom over the dinner-table for one day only. The sharks would eat us both, and perhaps like me a little the best, because I am fat and well fed, and do not smell of cocoanut oil. Then we both stand before the throne of God to be judged, he with his poverty, hardships, privations, sufferings, pilgrimage, and harmless life, and I with all my sins, my happy life, my luxuries, and the little wee bit of good I have done, or ever thought to obtain mercy with—only equalled that our Saviour died for both." All are laughing because it is only a poor, ugly old skeleton of a "nigger;" not one of them thinking, "Supposing that were me! My turn will come, and then the rest will think it jolly fun to see me thrown over the side."

Richard at Aden inquired after all his old party in his exploration to Harar. Mohammed el Hammál died only a year ago. Long Guled and the two women, Shehrazade and Deenarzade, are still alive; the former in camp, the latter in Somali-land. Abdo (the End of Time) died a natural death; Yusuf, the monocular one, was murdered by the Isá tribe; Hasan Hammad, the boy, is now sergeant to the water-police. The Egyptians, who took possession of Berberah and Zayla, entered Harar without fighting, and the Amir died under suspicious circumstances. Rauf Pasha is invested on all sides by Gallas and Somali, and is in considerable danger. Hasan procured for us the coins of Harar, which Richard brought to England in 1878.

Aden is a wild and desolate spot, made of fiery rocks. One cannot imagine any one living here; but Richard's old friend, Dr. Steinhaüser, so often mentioned in these pages, lived here for twenty-five years, and dropped down dead in Switzerland. On the thirty-first day I have the following entry:—"A charming day, and no one died. Have seen the prettiest sight possible, late afternoon. Thousands of dolphins playing leap-frog under our bows, and keeping up with the ship." If it had not been for Richard we should have been put into quarantine, through the captain not knowing English, and not being able to explain why he had had twenty-three deaths on board. The yellow flag was already hoisted up; the pilgrims were in despair; but on Richard explaining to the pilot, he pushed off to fetch the doctor, and we were allowed to land, running into Bombay. The last we saw of the holy mob was as a stream of black ants trickling down the ladders and the ropes, hardly able to wait for the boats, and giving us something like a cheer.

The Bhendi Bazar is the best sight of all. In its way, it is almost as striking and various as the bazars at Jeddah, so picturesque with its coloured temples, irregular coloured houses, and its wares to sell. There one sees something of native life in its native town. Malabar Hill is very pretty, with its picturesque bungalows and vegetation. Mr. Arbuthnot took us to Bandora, which was to him what Bludán was to us in Syria, or Opçina at Trieste. He had there a charming bungalow and stables by the sea, on Salsette Island, a cool, refreshing, rural, and solitary place. The drive there took us through the bazar, and the beautiful Máhim woods, a cocoa-palm forest, and across an inlet of the sea, which looks like a lake, and divides Bombay from Salsette. On a rising country, with wooded hills and the Ghauts for a background, there is a romantic church, built by the old Portuguese two hundred and fifty years ago, called Nossa Senhora do Monte. It commands a beautiful view, and the water (like a lake in the depression) surrounds it. We always went to Bandora every Saturday to Monday during our stay in Bombay, and always met charming people—the late Duke of Sutherland, Admiral Reginald Macdonald, Admiral Lambert; and Mr. Albert Grey arrived.

Sind.

Everywhere he goes (as he recounts in "Sind Revisited," which he wrote from our journal on return) he visits the old scenes of his former life, saluting them, letting the changes sink into his mind, and taking an everlasting farewell of them. He was very apt to do this in places where he had lived. He notices the ruin of the Indian army—the great difference between his time and now. He said, "Were I a woman, I would have sat down and had a good cry." There was only one of his joyous crew still breathing. The buildings had grown magnificent, but everything else had changed for the worse; the old hospitality was gone; there was no more jollity, no more larking boys; everything so painfully respectable, and so degenerated. He went to visit the old alligator tanks, where they used to go and worry them with their bull-terriers, and the boys used to jump on them and ride them. "No such skylarking now," he remarked. Then he waxes sentimental at the place where he had a serious flirtation with a Persian girl. There is the shop where he used to write with phosphorus on the wall. He had three shops in Karáchi, where he appeared in different disguises, and was considered a saint when he was so disguised and appeared in such or such a character. Then we went back to Baroda, where he was quartered so long, and to see the Goanese church, to which he transferred himself in 1843, and to Gharra, where he had to live so miserably. He traces the foundation of the lines of his old regiment, where he says, "None of us died, because we were young and strong; but we led the life of salamanders." He says, "There lies the old village, which saw so many of our 'little games;' a cluster of clay hovels, with its garnishing of dry thorns, as artlessly disposed as the home of the nest-building ape. How little it has changed; how much have we!" He next goes to Nagar (everywhere pronounced Nangar), and to Thathá, and Kalyan Kot, and the Mekli Hills (holy places), where he composed the following poem:—

"LEGEND OF THE LAKKÍ HILLS.

"In awful majesty they stand,
Yon ancient of an earlier earth,
High towering o'er the lowly land
That in their memories had birth;
And spurning from their stony feet
The rebel tides, that rush to beat
And break where rock and water meet.
Hoar their heads and black their brows,
And scarred their ribbèd sides, where ploughs
Old Age his own peculiar mark
Of uneffaceable decay;
And high and haughty, stern and stark,
As monarchs to whose mighty sway,
A hundred nations bow—stand they.

"Within the deep dark cleft of rock dividing,
Two giants taller than their kin,
Whence the sharp blade of piercing torrent gliding,
Here flashes sudden on the sight, there hiding
'Mid stones all voice with crashing din;
Where earthborn shade with skylight blends,
A grot of grisly gloom impends
The source from which the wave descends.

"Upon its horrid mouth, I ween,
The foot of man hath never been;
The foulest bird of prey would shrink
To nestle on that noisome brink.
Now the warm cauldron's sulphury fumes upseething,
As sighs that Stygian pit exhales,
The cavern's pitchy entrance veils,
Then in the wind's cold breath the vapours wreathing,
Dissolve—again the eye defines
The dripping portals' jagged lines.

"A glorious vision from that cave
Glittered before my gazing eye;
A seraph-face, like one that beams
Upon his sight, when blissful dreams
Round holy hermit's pillow fly.
A form of light, as souls that cleave
The darksome dungeon of the grave,
When awful judgment hour is nigh.
And oh, that voice! Can words express
The fulness of its loveliness,
Its rare and wondrous melody?
Ah, no! no mortal tongue may be
So powerful in poesy!

"Might I but gaze upon that brow,
Might I but hear that witching strain,
The joys that all the Seven Climes[1] know,
The charms that all the heavens show,
Were mine—but mine in vain.

"A moment pass'd the sound away,
Faded the vision from my sight;
And all was as it was before—
Vapour and gloom and deaf'ning roar.
Then soft arose that sound again—
Again appeared that form of light
Athwart the blue mist, purely white;
As from the main, at break of day,
Springs high to heaven the silvery spray.

"She beckoneth to me,
And in that smile there is
Promise of love and bliss,
Enduring endlessly.

"Whirled my brain, my heedless foot
Already left the verge
Where the water-spirit pours
His bolts of feathery surge,
Where iron rocks around, beneath,
Stand quick to do the work of death.
When, swift as thought, an icy arm
Against my falling bosom prest;
Its mighty touch dissolved the charm,
As suns disperse the mists that rest
On heathery mountains' dewy crest.

"I heard the angry waters rave,
I saw the horrors of the grave
That yawned to gulf its prey;
And started back in such dismay,
As wretch that, waked from midnight sleep,
Descries through shadows, glooming deep,
The ghost of murdered victim glide,
In gory robes, his couch beside.
I looked towards the darkling cave;
No more the vision glittered there,
No music charmed the echoing air—
That strain so sweet! that face so fair!—
And, but for one shrilly shriek
Of fiendish rage that smote mine ear,
And, but for one horrent thrill
That seemed with ice my veins to thrill;
Well had I deem'd 'twas Fancy's freak,
That scene, whose vivid features lie
On Memory's page typed durably."

"What a change! Some twenty-five natives, mostly negresses, haunt the houses which lodged our corps. The Mess-house, to which many recollections attach, still stands, thanks to its foundation of baked brick, but the front is converted into an open stable for human beings. There lived the actors in the famous Phuleli Regatta; there W—— hatched all the troubles which prevented us from feeling too happy. There is the house which fell down, nearly crushing me and my moonshee; the fireplaces are half filled up; the floor is grown with camel thorn. How small and mean are the dimensions, which loom so large in the picture stored within the brain! There I temporarily buried the 'young person'[2] when the police-master gave orders to search the house. There T—— played peeping Tom upon his father and mother-in-law. How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserves the merest trifles! And how very unpleasant to meet one's self, one's 'dead self thirty years younger'! Adieu, old home! I shall not perhaps see you again, but it is not in my power ever to forget you."

We go on from Hyderabad to Sakhar and Shikárpúr, but first he recognizes the old artillery lines, the billiard-room, and John Jacob's house built on a graveyard, and then goes to the Tombs of the Kings at Kalhóra and Talpúr, which are very like those of Golconda (Jaypur marble, which the Rajput artists seem to handle like wax). The flutings of the open work are delicate in the extreme, and the general effect is a lacery of stone. We then visit New Hyderabad, and he is surprised at all the new buildings. He is very much distressed at the state of the Army; the Beloch element has gone out, and the Pathán, or Afghan, is taking its place. The men are no longer what they were, and the military authorities have only to thank their own folly. He says—

"There is a medium between the over-long and over-short service. A term of three years may make an intelligent and well-educated Prussian soldier, but the system has become a caricature as adopted by other nations. Before 1848 the Austrian army was the finest in Europe; see what the three years' service has done for it."

He dives into the Eastern mind, and shows you that the moment you begin to intrigue with an Oriental, he has you on his own ground, he beats you with your own weapons, and that the only way that you have the Oriental at your mercy is by being perfectly straightforward and honest. He shows you what value they set on good manners. Then we visit the field of Meanee. He describes the brisk way that Sir Charles Napier fought—a fierce mêlée, no quarter asked or given. He said the way to fight an Indian battle is to shake the enemy's line with a hot fire of artillery, charge home with infantry, and when a slight hesitation begins, to throw all your cavalry at the opposing ranks, and the battle is ended. Such was the battle of Meanee, when our 2800 thrashed 22,000 men. He greatly blames the yielding up of Afghanistan. Then we go to Husri, where, in old days, he surveyed and amused himself with cock-fighting—the scene of the death of "Bhujang," his favourite cock—and from thence to Sudderan Column, from whence he visited Mir Ibrahim Khan Talpur's village;[3] and then he goes on to the "Jats" country (the Gypsies), with whom he affiliated himself, and where he worked with the camel-men, levelling canals in the old days. Then we go on to Badhá and Unarpúr, Lakrá, and Sibt, wells in the desert, and here he translated the tale of Bári and Isa (Jesus). Whilst among the Belochs he wrote—

"THE TALE OF BÁRI AND ISA.

"Give ear, O ye sons of the Beloch,
Whilst I recount to you a true tale!
As Isa, the prophet of Allah,
Was travelling, Fakir-like, over the earth,
Seeing its wonders and its wastes,
He came into a desert land
Where no river nor Káríz was,
Nor green fields, nor waving crops.
Dreadful mountains rose on all four sides
Round a plain of sand and flint,
On which stood a stump (of tree) one cubit high,
And propped against it sat Bári, the hermit,
Meditating, with his shroud[4] over his head,
Upon the might of Rabb Ta'álá.[5]
Isa considered him awhile,
Then, advancing, he touched his shoulder,
Saying, 'Tell me truly, how dost thou live?
What eatest thou in this grainless place,
And what drinkest thou where no water is?'
Bári raised his head from his breast;
He was old and stone blind,
His knees were sore by continued kneeling.
And his bones, through fasting, pierced his skin.
Yet his heart was as the life of the seed
That dwells in a withered home.[6]
He comprehended the question, and thus replied,
Weeping and exclaiming, 'Wá wailá![7]
How can man doubt the Creator's might?
Sit down by me for awhile,
I show thee the power of Allah.'
Then the stump shot up till it became
A noble towering tree;
At morning prayers it began to grow,
And (presently) shadowed the ground beneath.
At midday berries appeared upon it,
Hanging in festoons like the young brab's fruit.
In the afternoon they became brightly red,
As the date when it falls from the tree;
Before the sun set they were ripe.
From each bough the bunches hung
Cool as water in a cavern,
Sweet as the sugar[8] in Paradise,
Fit for prophets and martyrs to eat.
Then said Bári, 'Thou seest Allah's might,
How he can feed His children in the waste!
Fruits grow upon the (withered) stump,
Waters flow from the rugged rock,
All things obey the Lord of all;
It is (only) man that doubts and disbelieves.'
As it happened unto him,
So, by my head! may it happen to me.
Such is the tale of the Dervish;[9]
Gentles, my song is done."

Leaving Unarpúr, we pass out of the Unhappy Valley into Sindia Felix, beginning at Gopang, Májhand, Sann, and Amiri, and here in 1876 rails have been laid and trollies were working. Thence we go to Lakkí, where he composed the poem on the "Legends of the Lakkí Hills," given above, and then to Séhwan. The road was a precipitous corniche, very narrow, with camels marching in Indian file. Séhwan is an important military and religious place, commanding the passage of the Indus, but intensely hot, with deleterious and deadly climate. This was the place where Richard in old days buried an old Athenæum sauce-pot, which he had painted like an Etruscan vase. He treated it with fire and acid, smashed it, and buried it in the ground, and took in a lot of antiquaries, who never forgave him; and when he was travelling in the land of the Turanian Brahúis, he drew up a grammar and a vocabulary, with barbaric terminations, and the Presidency rang for nine days with the wondrous discovery. That was in his boyhood, and he writes, "I now repent me in sackcloth and ashes, and my trembling hand indites 'Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.'"

We then go along the Aral stream for two days to Lake Manchar, and visit the Kirthár Mountains, with their two sanitaria, Char Yaru and the Danna Towers. Then to Lárkána, an Eastern influent of the Indus—eight stages. Lárkána is the centre of Sindia Felix. We go to Sakhar, to Bakar, and lastly to Rohri, and then make our way to Shikárpúr across a kind of desert, south of the Bolan Pass, and which is the main entrepôt of the Khorasán and Central Asian caravan trade with Sind and Western India, where, as usual, he visited everything and found the usual changes.

The bonne bouche of Shikárpúr is the Great Bazar, about eight hundred yards long and branching out. It was as striking in its way as the Bhendi Bazar. The women and the men are superb animals, a perfect combination of strength and symmetry and absolute grace, and they outstrip in intellect as in physical development all the other inhabitants of the plain. They are respected, and are called the sons of the Aughán. We enjoyed the hospitality of Dr. Salaman, whom he told that in his day the cantonment contained two regiments, whereas in 1876 it looked as if it had suffered from siege, pestilence, and famine. The railway, Richard said, will retrieve its fortunes, the banking business will revive, with increased facilities for transit and traffic. It will be wealth to the Great Bazar, and the position of the town will make it supply the railway. It will recover its garrison as soon as "Common Sense" takes courage to withdraw its troops from pestilent Jacobábád, twenty-six miles north-north-west of Shikárpúr. When the choice of a frontier post rested upon General John Jacob, he pitched upon the best he could; now it is the very worst.

The Indian Army.

Richard's Remarks on Changes in Indian Army.

"Karáchi is still the capital village of the local Government, and the head-quarters of the European regiment. Under the Conquistador the camp usually numbered about five to eight thousand men, both colours and all arms included. This strong force has been greatly reduced. The 'boss' is now a brigadier-general, commanding the station (where he resides) and the Sind district, no longer a division; it may, however, recover its honours when annexed to the Panjáb. He has no adjutant-general; only a brigade-major and a quartermaster-general. The single white corps is the 56th, and the 'Pompadours' detach two companies to Haydarábád. Here we have no cavalry. Three corps of the Sind Horse (about 1480 sabres) are stationed at Jacobábád, their head-quarters; they also man all the adjoining outposts. The arms are carbine and sword; the uniform is almost that of the Cossack, the old Crimean Bashi-Bazouks, and the irregular cavalry in general: green tunics and overalls; turban, riding-boots, and black belts. The native infantry at Karáchi is now the 2nd Beloch Regiment (29th Bombay Native Infantry). They wear light serge blouses in working costume, and green tunics with red facings for full dress; loose blue 'pagris;' madder-stained knickerbockers—'cherubim shorts' are excellent for wear—and white, which should be brown, gaiters covering blucher boots. Their weapons are those of the Sepoy line generally. At Jacobábád, on the north-western frontier, are also Jacob's Rifles (30th Regiment Bombay Native Infantry), averaging some seven hundred men armed with sniders, and habited in khâkí, or drab-coloured drill. Haydarábád, besides its two white companies, is garrisoned by the 1st Beloch Regiment (27th Bombay Native Infantry), known by its looser turbans.

"The artillery of the Sind district is now commanded by a lieutenant-colonel, residing at head-quarters. Under him are two field batteries of white troops; one stationed here, the other at Haydarábád. Finally, at Jacobábád there is a mountain train, about a hundred and fifty men, with two mortars and as many howitzers (all 4½-inch), which are to be exchanged for steel breech-loaders weighing two hundred pounds, and drawn by the sure-footed mule. A move has lately been made in the right direction as regards the 'gunners,' and presidential jealousies have been abated by appointing a Director-General of Ordnance for all India. Still, the mountain train is left almost inefficient, the complaint of universal India; fourteen mules are short, and the commanding officer, Captain Young, an officer of twelve years' experience in Sind, 'passed' also in the native languages, could hardly take the field in full force without great delay.

"Thus, you see, Mr. Bull, Sind has utterly 'eliminated' the Sepoy, whilst India has reduced her Sepoy army to a mere absurdity. The claims of economy, the delusive prospect of peace, and last, not least, the loud persistent voice of Prophet and Acting-Commissioner, General John Jacob, and his 'silahdar system,' prevailed against the old organization and common sense. He was in many ways a remarkable man, endowed with that calm and perfect confidence in himself which founds 'schools,' and which propagates faiths. Accustomed to base the strongest views, the headstrongest opinions, upon a limited experience of facts, he was an imposing figure as long as he remained in obscurity. But, unfortunately, one of his disciples and most ardent admirers, Captain (now Sir Lewis) Pelly, published, shortly after his death, an octavo containing the 'Views and Opinions of General John Jacob,'[10] and enables the world to take the measure of the man.

"General John Jacob's devotion to his own idea has left a fatal legacy, not only to Sind, but to the whole of India. Sir Charles Napier, a soldier worth a hundred of him, had steadily advocated increasing, with regiments on service, the number of 'Sepoy officers,' then six captains, twelve lieutenants, and four ensigns. The Conqueror of Sind protested that the 'regulars' were not regular enough, the best men being picked out for staff and detached appointments. The 'butcher's bill' of every battle, I may tell you, gives nearly double the number of casualties among the 'black officers,' as we were called, and at Miyáni (Meanee) we were six deaths to one 'white officer.' The reason is obvious; the 'pale faces' must lead their companies, wings, and corps, otherwise the natives, commissioned, non-commissioned, and privates, will not advance in the teeth of too hot a fire. We are already made sufficiently conspicuous by the colour of our skins and by the cut of our uniforms, while the enemy is always sharp enough to aim at 'picking' us 'off.'

"General John Jacob proposed, in opposition to the Conqueror of Sind, to supplant the Regular system by the Irregulars, which means diminishing the number of Englishmen. Having the pick and choice of the Indian army at his disposal, he succeeded in fairly drilling and disciplining his Sind Horse; argal, as the grave-digger said, he resolved that the Sind Horse should become a model and a pattern to the whole world. He honestly puffed his progeny on all occasions, even when it least deserved praise. During our four months' raid on Southern Persia, the Sind Horse was pronounced by all the cavalrymen present to be the last in point of merit; the same was the case in Abyssinia; and during the Mutiny many of his men were found among the 'Pándís.' Yet he puffed and preached and wrote with such vigour that the military authorities, worn out by his persistency, and finding that the fatal measure would save money, gave ear to the loud, harsh voice. In an inauspicious hour the whole regular Sepoy force of India was not only irregularized: it was, moreover, made a bastard mixture of the Regular and the Irregular.

The Indian Army.

"The result is the ruin of the Indian army. The system itself is simply a marvel. The corps have either too many officers or too few. For drilling purposes you want only a commandant, an adjutant (who should also be musketry instructor), and a surgeon; or at most the three combatants who led the old Irregular corps. For fighting, you require, besides the field officers, at least two Englishmen, or better still, three per company. It is, I own, possible to increase the normal complement by free borrowing from the staff corps, and from the rest of the army, but every soldier will tell you that this is a mere shift; the officers must know their men, and the men their officers.

"Again, under the present system, which effectually combines the faults of both the older, and the merits of neither, your infantry corps with its full cadre, of which half is usually absent, theoretically numbers nine European officers. One, the surgeon, is a non-combatant, and two, the adjutant and quartermaster, are usually represented by the wing subalterns. An English regiment, with its cadre of thirty, mounts only its field-officers and adjutant. An Indian corps—would you believe it?—mounts the lieutenant-colonel commanding; the major, second in command; the two wing officers, the two wing subalterns, the adjutant, and the quartermaster. The result is to incur the moral certainty of their all being swept away by the first few volleys. True, you have sixteen native commissioned officers, forty havildárs (sergeants), and the same number of náiks (corporals)—a total of ninety-six. But the belief that Sepoys will fight without Englishmen to lead them, is a snare, a sham, and a delusion.

"A host of other evils besets the present state of things. Your cavalry corps are so weak in officers, rank and file, that a six months' campaign would reduce them each to a single troop. Your infantry regiments, eight companies of seventy-five bayonets each, or a total of six hundred and forty, have not been reduced to the form now recognized as the best tactical unit. Again, officers are still transferred, after six and even seven years' service, from the white to the black line, thus bringing them upon the Indian pension list without having served the full time. They also want esprit de corps; they dislike and despise 'Jack Sepoy,' and their chief object in life is to regain something more congenial than the out-station and the dull, half-deserted Mess. Again, at the other end of the scale, field officers of twenty-five to thirty years' Indian service are made to do subalterns' work. Regimental zeal is being annihilated; and the evil of senility is yearly increasing. Let me relate a case, which you shall presently see for yourself. Major A——, who has served in a corps for nine years, who has seen three campaigns, and who for three years has acted second in command, lately finds himself superseded by a lieutenant-colonel, when he himself expects to become lieutenant-colonel within six months. What is the result? He is utterly weary of the service, he has lost all heart for its monotonous duties. 'An old subaltern,' says one of your favourites, 'is a military vegetable, without zeal as without hope.'

"Again, the new furlough regulations, after abundant considerings, have turned out so badly, that all who can cleave to the old. Why grant leave, with full pay and allowances for six months, to Kashmir and to the depths of the Himálayas, and yet refuse it to the home-goer, under pain of English pay? Why should the Civil Service have, and the military lack, 'privilege leave'? Why thus adhere to old and obsolete tradition, so as to make the soldier's life as unpleasant as possible? Why——But at this rate, sir, 'Whys' will never end.

"Sir Henry Havelock's truthful statement in the House of Commons, that the Anglo-Indian army is 'rotten from head to foot,' has surprised the public mass which puts trust in Pickwickian and official declarations. We, who know the subject, declare that the Indian is, perhaps, in a worse condition than the home force; and we assert that the idea of opposing regiments, so officered and so manned, to the Russians, or even to the Afghans, is simply insane.

"Do not disbelieve me, Mr. John Bull, because my language is not rose-watered. The Old Maids' Journal (Spectator)—ancient, but not very pretty, virginity—has lately been berating me for seeking 'cheap credit' by 'pointing out how much better duties might be done by persons whose business it is to do them.' But officials are ever in trammels, whilst we critics, who look only to results, are not; moreover, a man is hardly omniscient because his work is in this or that department, or even because he holds high rank in this or that service. And did not Voltaire think and declare that, 'of all the ways of Providence, nothing is so inscrutable as the littleness of the minds that control the destinies of great nations'?

"Some have distinction, you know, forced upon them; others win it by means which honest men despise. They never report the truth unless pleasant to the ear; they calculate that, possibly, the disagreement will not occur; and that, if it does, their neglect will be slurred over and forgotten. Plausible and specious, 'they can preach and they can lecture; they can talk "soft sawder," and they can quote platitudes ad infinitum. These superficial specimens of humanity, who know which side their bread is buttered, owe their rise, their stars and ribbons, their K.C.B.'s and pensions, not to the sterling merits of courage and ability, of talents and manliness, but to the oily tongue that knows so well how to work the oracle, and to a readiness of changing tactics as the chameleon changes colour.' In short, these gentlemen have mastered the 'gospel of getting on;' the species, 'neglected Englishmen,' has not.

"Thus you have no right to be surprised, as you often are, when some notorious incapable, entrusted with an office of the highest responsibility, comes to grief. His 'Kismet,' his 'Nasib,' his star, have been in the ascendant, and he has done nothing to obscure them by personal merit, by originality, by candour, or by over-veracity. These qualities are sure to make enemies, and the millenium must dawn before your friends—private, public, or political—will look after you with the vigour and the tenacity of your foes.

"But so rotten is the state, so glaring is the inefficiency, of the Indian army, that you will not be astonished to hear reports of 'organic changes' and fundamental reforms, or even to see a return to the old system. Strange to say, Lord Northbrook, the civilian, saw the necessity of reorganization. Lord Napier, the soldier, who, during the Abyssinian campaign, sent for officers to every Presidency, ignored it. Perhaps the Napierian clique took the opportunity to oppose, tooth and nail, the efforts of another service. The Shí'ahs, who, you know, abhor the Sunnis bitterly, as Roman Catholics hate Protestants, when any mode of action left to private judgment is proposed, always choose the line opposed to that taken by their heretic enemies—raghman li-'l-Tasannun, 'in adverse bearing to Sunniship,' as the religious formula runs.

"Briefly, the sooner we convert Jacobábád into an outpost, connect it by a decent road with Shikárpúr, and station the troops at Sakhar, the better. No man in his sane senses would station his whole force upon the skirts of a province, where a troop or two suffices, without a single soldier, for support or reserve, nearer than some three hundred miles.

"The defective dyke has depopulated a fine tract of country; it threatened old Sakhar, and it may even cause a complete shifting of the irrepressible river. Any exceptional freshet may burst the 'Band' and insulate Sakhar Camp, below which the inundation used to discharge; and seriously damage the working of the railway, upon which all the prosperity of the Upper Province now depends.

"But dull, desolate, decayed, miserable-looking Sakhar has a future. Bad as the climate is, men live longer in it than at Shikárpúr or Jacobábád. The railway, which the engineers seem trying their hardest not to make, must some day be finished; it will not only connect Sind with India, but it must also attract to itself all the outlying settlements. 'Common Sense,' again, will presently withdraw the Sind Horse from wretched malarious Jacobábád, a prison with the chance of being drowned. The occupation of Kelat will give poor old Sakhar an excellent sanitarium, and the annexation of the Unhappy Valley to the broad and fertile plains of the Panjáb will make it, I venture to predict, one of the principal stations upon the highway of commerce.

"The present antiquated arrangements date from the days of General and Acting-Commissioner John Jacob, who, after eighteen years' service in Sind, died on October 5, 1858; and his rules endure, I have told you, whilst all the conditions that favoured them have changed. They were originally intended for the benefit of the Jekránis, the Domkís, and the Bugtís; but these robber tribes have long ago become peaceful cultivators. They are perpetuated by the old school of Sind soldier, that sat at the feet of his Gamaliel, John Jacob, and that ever held and still hold him a manner of Minor Prophet. He was, I have told you, a remarkable man, and so you may judge by the entire devotion of his followers and successors. He used to base the most decided views upon the shallowest study of the 'Eternal Laws of Nature,' of 'Principles,' and so forth.

"General Jacob could not play whist; ergo, whist was banished from the Mess of the Sind Horse, and even now, nearly a score of years after his death, it is still, I believe, under interdict. A 'practical mechanic,' that is to say, a mere amateur, he tried to force upon the army a rapier-bayonet and a double-barrelled, four-grooved rifle, which reached the climax of impracticability. Incapable of mastering native languages, he hated linguists, and never lost an opportunity of ridiculing and reviling them. Moreover, he dignified his deficiency by erecting it into a principle—namely, that all English subjects should learn English; and here, for once, his prejudice ran in the right line. He knew nothing of the sword beyond handling it like a broomstick; therefore he would not allow it to be taught to his men, many of whose lives were thus sacrificed to his fatal obstinacy. He utterly condemned the use of the point, which is invaluable throughout India, because the natives neither make it nor learn to guard it. His only reason for this dogmatism was the danger of the thrust by his own inexperienced hand. In a few single combats, after running his man through the body, he had risked being disarmed or dragged from his horse. He probably never knew, and, with characteristic tenacity, he would not have changed his opinion had he known, that Lamoricière proposed to take away the edge from the French trooper's blade; that the French heavies still use the straight sword, best fitted for the point; and that the superiority of the latter to the cut is a settled question throughout the civilized world. His prejudices were inveterate, and they were most easily roused. He hated through life a native of Persia, who, not understanding his stutter, a defect imitated by his admirers, wrote his name J-J-J-J-J-Jacob, thus:—

At last his obstinacy killed him. When advised by the surgeon not to ride his final ride home, he asked, with a sneer, if the young man knew his constitution better than he did himself, and he died examining a new rifle."

He continues—

And Sind.

"Kasmor is our northernmost village, but it is one hundred miles of winding road, a deadly uninteresting series of seven marches, and is of no interest; but we will, on returning to Sakhar again, visit the ruins of Aror. Issuing from Rohri by the Multán road, we shall pass on the left the Aroráwáh, and east of it the new Nárá supply canal, and then we will drop down the Indus to Kotri. We have now inspected and studied Sind and its river Indus, and you must marvel at the complete physical resemblance, and the absolute intellectual difference between this and Egypt—there Meroe, Philæ, Thebes, the Pyramids; here nothing. Yet this is one of the nurseries of the Indo-Aryan race, whose occupation of the Panjáb learned Pandits placed before the sixth century before Christ; this is the home of the Vedas, the scene of the Puránas; the traditions of Ráma and Sitá's travel in Lower Sind. Why is this mighty contrast in the works of Art, where the gifts of Nature are so similar? My theory is that Old Egypt has always been the meeting-place of nations, the common ground upon which the Orient and the Occident stood front to front, where Eastern man compared himself with Western man, where mind struck mind, where the Promethean spark resulted from the impact of Northern or Southern thought. Indus-land stood in a corner far from the outer worlds of the North and the far West; she led to nothing, she was of scant service to racial development. Indus-land was compelled to work out her own destinies in a mean and humble way, while the monuments of Nile-land still instruct and astonish humanity."

"There is an imperative demand for a sanitarium, and the nearest and best is Kelat. Kelat requires protection, and would be an admirable outpost in case of hostile movements from Merv upon Herat (1876). A couple of troops would amply suffice that abominable Jacobábád. A single corps of Sind Horse should support them from Shikárpúr, and the reserves, or body of the force, should occupy Sakhar, where the climate is supportable and locomotion easy. Sind is virtually unconnected with North-Western India, whose prolongation she is. From Kotri-Hyderabad to Multán (570 miles) is a long steamer voyage of twenty days, which should be covered by twenty-four hours of rail-travel.

"The military political has had his day, and Sind, after a fair trial of seventy-five years, has shown herself impotent to hold the position of an independent province. She should be annexed to the Panjáb, and then, as in the ancient days of the Hindú Rajahs, her frontiers will extend to Kashmír. Already the papers tell us that the Trans-Indine districts, from Pesháwar to near Karáchi, will be formed into a Frontier Government, or an agency purely political, and will be placed directly under the Viceroy; while Cis-Indine Sind, including also Karáchi, is to be transferred from Bombay to the Panjáb, in exchange for the Central Provinces. These sensible measures will be, to use a popular phrase, the making of Young Egypt or Indus-land. She will become the export-line of the rich Upper Valley, and the broad plains of the Land of the Five Rivers, and increased wealth will enable her to supply many a local want; for instance, water and gas to Karáchi, a branch railway to Thathá, and so forth. Finally, when Karáchi becomes the terminus of the Euphrates or Overland Railway, so much wanted at this moment (February, 1877), then 'The Unhappy' will change her name, and in the evening of her days shall become 'The Happy Valley.'"