CHAPTER XV.

SCINDE.

Near Mithun Kote, we steamed suddenly into the main stream of the Indus, the bed of which is here a mile and a quarter wide. Although the river at the time of my visit was rising fast, it was far from being at its greatest height. In January, it brings down but forty thousand cubic feet of water every second, but in August it pours down four hundred and fifty thousand. The river-bed is rarely covered with running water, but the stream cuts a channel for itself upon one shore, and flows in a current of eight or nine miles an hour, while the remainder of the bed is filled with half-liquid sand.

The navigation of the Indus is monotonous enough. Were it not for the climate, the view would resemble that on the Maas, near Rotterdam, though with alligators lining the banks instead of logs from the Upper Meuse; but climate affects color, and every country has tints of its own. California is golden, New Zealand a black-green, Australia yellow, the Indus valley is of a blazing red. Although every evening the Beloochee Mountains came in sight as the sun sank down behind them, and revealed their shapes in shadow, all through the day the landscape was one of endless flats. The river is a dirty flood, now swift, now sluggish, running through a country in which sand deserts alternate only with fields of stone. Villages upon the banks there are none, and from town to town is a day‘s journey at the least. The only life in the view is given by an occasional sail of gigantic size and curious shape, belonging to some native craft or other on her voyage from the Punjaub to Kurrachee. On our journey down the Indus, we passed hundreds of ships, but met not one. They are built of timber, which is plentiful in the Himalayas, upon the head-waters of the river, and carry down to the sea the produce of the Punjaub. The stream is so strong, that the ships are broken up in Scinde, and the crews walk back 1000 miles along the bank. In building his ships upon the Hydaspes, and sailing them down the Indus to its mouth, Alexander did but follow the custom of the country. The natives, however, break up their ships at Kotree, whereas the Macedonian intrusted his to Nearchus for the voyage to the Gulf of Persia and a survey of the coast.

Geographically, the Indus valley is but a portion of the Great Sahara. Those who know the desert well, say that from Cape Blanco to Khartoom, from Khartoom to Muscat, from Muscat to Moultan, the desert is but one; the same in the absence of life, the same in such life as it does possess. The Valley of the Nile is but an oasis, the Gulfs of Persia and of Aden are but trifling breaks in its vast width. Rainless, swept by dry hot winds laden with prickly sand, traversed everywhere by low ranges of red and sunburnt rocks, strewn with jagged stones, and dotted here and there with a patch of dates gathered about some ancient well, such is the Sahara for a length of near six thousand miles. On the Indus banks, the sand is as salt as it is at Suez, and there are as many petrified trees between Sukkur and Kurrachee as there are in the neighborhood of Cairo.

Our days on board were all passed upon one plan. Each morning we rose at dawn, which came about half-past four, and, watching the starting of the ship from the bank where she had been moored all night, we got a cool walk in our sleeping-clothes before we bathed and dressed. The heat then suffocated us quietly till four, when we would reassert the majesty of man by bathing, and attempting to walk or talk till dinner, which was at five. At dark we anchored, and after watching the water-turtles at their play, or hunting for the monstrous water-lizards known as “gos,”--apparently the ichneumons called in Egypt “gots,”--or sometimes fishing for great mud-fish with wide mouths and powerful teeth, we would resume our sleeping-clothes (in which, but for the dignity of the Briton in the eyes of the native crew, we should have dined and spent the day). At half-past seven or eight, we lay down on deck, and forgot our sorrows in sleep, or engaged in a frantic struggle with the cockroaches. In the latter conflict we--in our dreams at least--were not victorious, and once in an awful trance I believed myself carried off by one leg in the jaws of a gigantic cockroach, and pushed with his feelers down into his horrid hole.

Each hour passed on the Indus differs from the others only in the greater or less portion of it which is devoted to getting off the sand-banks. After steaming gallantly down a narrow but deep and swift piece of the river, we would come to a spot at which the flood would lose itself in crossing its bed from one bank to the other. Backing the engines, but being whirled along close to the steep bank by the remaining portion of the current, we soon felt a shock, the recoil from which upset us, chairs and all, it being noticeable that we always fell up stream, and not with our heads in the direction in which the ship was going. As soon as we were fairly stuck, the captain flew at the pilot, and kicked him round the deck--a process always borne with fortitude, although the pilot was changed every day. The only pilot never kicked was one who came on board near Bhawulpore, and who carried a jeweled tulwar, or Afghan scimetar, but even he was threatened. The kicking over, an entry of the time of grounding was made by the captain in the pilot‘s book, and the mate was ordered out in a boat to sound, while the native soldiers on board the flats we were towing began quietly to cook their dinner. The mate having found a sort of channel, though sometimes it had a ridge across it over which the steamer could not pass without touching, he returned for a kedge, which he fixed in the sand, and we were soon warped up to it by the use of the capstan, the native crew singing merrily the while. Every now and then, however, we would take the ground in the center of the ship, and with deep water all round, and then, instead of getting off, we for hours together only pivoted round and round. One of the Indus boats, with a line regiment on board, was once aground for a month near Mithun Kote, to the entire destruction of all the wild boars in the neighborhood.

The kicking of the unfortunate pilots was not a pleasant sight, but there were sometimes comic incidents attached to our periodic groundings. Once I noticed that the five men who were constantly sounding with colored poles in different parts of the ship and flats, had got into a monotonous chorus of “pánché----é pot” (“five feet”)--we drawing only three, so that we went ahead confidently at full speed, when suddenly we ran aground with a violent shock. On the re-sounding of our course by the boat‘s crew, we found that our pole-men must, for some time past, have been guessing the soundings to save the trouble of looking. These fellows richly deserved a kicking, but the pilots are innocent of any fault but inability to keep pace with the rapid changes of the river-course.

Another curious scene took place one day when we were steaming down a reach in which the river made many sudden twists and turns. We had on board a merchant from the Persian Gulf, a devout Mohammedan. In the afternoon, he carried his praying-carpet on to the bridge between the paddle-boxes, and there, turning to the west, commenced to pray. The sun was on his left, but almost facing him; in an instant, round whirled the ship, making her course between two sand-bars, and Mecca and the sun into the bargain were right behind our worshiper. This was too much even for his devotion, so, glancing at the new course, he turned his carpet, and, looking in the fresh direction, recommenced his prayers. After a minute or two, back went the ship, and we began again to steer a southerly course. All this time the Persian kept his look of complete abstraction, and remained unshaken through all his difficulties. This seriousness in face of events which would force into shouts of laughter any European congregation is a characteristic of a native. It is strange that Englishmen are nowhere so easily provoked to loud laughter as in a church or college chapel, natives at no time so insusceptible of ridicule as when engaged upon the services of their religions.

The shallowness of the Indus, its impracticability for steamships during some months of the year, and the many windings of the stream--all these things make it improbable that the river will ever be largely available for purposes of trade; at the same time, the Indus valley must necessarily be the line taken by the commerce of the Punjaub, and eventually by that of some portions of Central Asia, and even of Southern China. Whether Kurrachee becomes our great Indian port, or whether our railway be made through Beloochistan, a safe and speedy road up the Indus valley for troops and trade is needed.

If we take into consideration the size of India, the amount of its revenues, and the length of time during which we have occupied that portion of its extent which we at present hold, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that not even in Australia have railways been more completely neglected than they have been in India. We have opened but 4000 miles, or one mile for every 45,000 people. Nothing has been touched as yet but the Grand Trunk and great military and postal routes, and even these are little more than half completed. Even the Bombay and Calcutta mail line and the Calcutta and Lahore lines are hardly finished; the Peshawur line and the Indus road not yet begun. While at home people believe that the Euphrates Valley Railway is under consideration, they will find, if they come out to India, that to reach Peshawur in 34° N. latitude they must go to Bombay in 18°, if not to Galle in 6°. Even if they reach Kurrachee, they will find it a month‘s journey to Peshawur. While we are trying to tempt the wool and shawls of Central Asia down to Umritsur and Lahore, the goods with which we would buy these things are sent round by the Cape of Good Hope and Calcutta.

It is true that the Indus line will be no easy one to make. To bridge the river at Mithun Kote or even at Kotree would be difficult enough, and were it to be bridged at Sukkur, where there is rock, and a narrow pass upon the river, the line from Sukkur to Kurrachee would be exposed to depredation from the frontier tribes. The difficulties are great, but the need is greater, and the argument of the heavy cost of river-side railroads should not weigh with us in the case of lines required for the safety of the country. The Lahore and Peshawur, the Kotree and Moultan, the Kotree and Baroda, and the Baroda and Delhi lines, instead of being set one against the other for comparison, should be simultaneously completed as necessary for the defense of the empire, and as forming the trunk lines for innumerable branches into the cotton-and wheat-growing districts.

One of the branches of the Indus line will have to be constructed from the Bholan Pass to Sukkur, where we lay some days embarking cotton. Sukkur lies on the Beloochistan side; Roree fort--known as the “Key of Scinde,” the seizure of which by us provoked the great war with the Ameers--on an island in mid-stream; and Bukkur City on the eastern or left bank; and the river, here narrowed to a width of a quarter of a mile, runs with the violence of a mountain torrent.

Sukkur is one of the most ancient of Indian cities, and was mentioned as time-worn by the Greek geographers, while tradition says that its antiquities attracted Alexander; but towns grow old with great rapidity in India, and, once ancient in their look, never to the eye become in the slightest degree older.

In Sukkur I first saw the Scindee cap, which may be described as a tall hat with the brim atop; but the Scindees were not the only strangely-dressed traders in Sukkur and Roree: there were high-capped Persians, and lean Afghans with long gaunt faces and high cheek-bones, and furred merchants from Central Asia. It is even said that goods find their way overland from China to Sukkur, through Eastern Persia and Beloochistan, the traders preferring to come round four thousand miles than to cross the main chain of the Himalayas or pass through the country of the Afghans.

In ancient times there was considerable intercourse between China and Hindostan; at the end of the seventh century, indeed, the Chinese invaded India through Nepaul, and captured five hundred cities. It is to be hoped that the next few years may see a railway built from Rangoon to Southern China, and from Calcutta to the Yang-tse-Kiang, a river upon which there are ample stores of coal, which would supply the manufacturing wants of India.

After viewing from a lofty tower the flat country in the direction of Shikapore, we spent one of our Sukkur evenings upon the island of Roree watching the natives fishing. Casting themselves into the river on the top of skins full of air, or more commonly on great earthenware pitchers, they floated at a rapid pace down with the whirling stream, pushing before them a sunken net which they could close and lift by the drawing of a string. About twice a minute they would strike a fish, and, lifting their head, would impale the captive on a stick slung behind their back, and at once lower again the net in readiness for further action.

Sukkur, like seven other places that I had visited within a year, has the reputation of being the hottest city in the world, and the joke on the boats of the Indus flotilla is that Moultan is too hot to bear, and Sukkur much hotter; but that Jacobabad, on the Beloochee frontier, near Sukkur, is so hot that the people come down thence to Sukkur for the hot season, and find its coolness as refreshing as ordinary mortals do that of Simla. Hot as is Sukkur, it is fairly beaten by a spot at the foot of the Ibex Hills, near Sehwan. I was sleeping on the bridge with an officer from Peshawur, when the crew were preparing to put off from the bank for the day‘s journey. We were awakened by the noise; but, as we sat up and rubbed our eyes, a blast of hot wind came down from the burnt-up hills, laden with fine sand, and of such a character that I got a lantern--for it was not fully light--and made my way to the deck thermometer. I found it standing at 104°, although the hour was 4·15 A.M. At breakfast-time, it had fallen to 100°, from which it slowly rose, until at 1 P.M. it registered 116° in the shade. The next night, it never fell below 100°. This was the highest temperature I experienced in India during the hot weather, and it was, singularly enough, the same as the highest which I recorded in Australia. No part of the course of the Indus is within the tropics, but it is not in the tropics that the days are hottest, although the nights are generally unbearable on sea-level near the equator.

At Kootree, near Hydrabad, the capital of Scinde, where the tombs of the Ameers are imposing, if far from beautiful, we left the Indus for the railway, and, after a night‘s journey, found ourselves upon the sea-shore at Kurrachee.