CHAPTER XV

TO INDIA AND THE HOLY LAND

1856

I sailed from Hongkong on Jardine's opium steamer, Fiery Cross. As the course we took had been gone over by me in the voyage to Hongkong from Singapore, I was not especially interested in it until we had passed the Straits and got into Indian waters. The Andaman Islands, where dwells one of the lowest races of mankind, interested me greatly. We saw only a little of these curious people, the Veddahs, but I learned of a very interesting custom followed by the widows of the islands to commemorate their deceased husbands. This consists in wearing the skull of the dead man on the shoulder as a sort of ornament and memento. It is considered a delicate way of perpetuating the memory of the husband.

I had a letter of introduction from Robert Sturgis to George Ashburner, at Calcutta, and the moment I arrived Mr. Ashburner insisted upon my becoming his guest. I spent three days with him, and have never partaken of such luxurious hospitality elsewhere. It is only man in the Orient who knows how to live fast and furious and get every enjoyment out of his little span of life. I was surrounded by a retinue of servants, who stood ready to answer every beck and call. Service in India being highly specialized, there was a servant for everything. I had a little army of fourteen serving men, four of whom carried my chair, or palanquin, with a relay, a man to serve me specially at table, a punka man, and a man for every other detail of living.

There was something to do and to see every moment of the time. I was taken to all the show-places of the city. The first sight shown to me was the famous Black Hole, where John Z. Holwell and one hundred and forty-six men were incarcerated in a dungeon twelve feet square. One can not escape being told the horrible story, if he visits Calcutta, and I suppose that every one hears the narrative with added adornment, after the true Hindu style. The special point of the story that was thrust at me was the orgy and heavy sleep of the rajah, while his servitors were trying to arouse him to answer the screams of the dying men in the Hole. In the morning, after the rajah had had his beauty sleep, he was told of the little difficulty the English had in breathing in the foul and heavy air of the dungeon, and he ordered them released; but death, lingering, and as heavy-handed and heavy-hearted as the brutal prince, had already released most of them.

One is glad to be told for the ten thousandth time, after hearing this ghastly tale, of the clerk Clive leaving his ledgers and pens and leading an army to crush the wretches at Plassy. But, like most things of the kind, the horrors of the Black Hole have been exaggerated, until sympathy, palled, refuses longer to be torn and bled over imaginary as well as real terrors. There have been many worse catastrophes, and of a nature that should appeal more strongly to the heart. Men, women, and children have gone down in flood and pestilence, free from any stain of wrong, which can not be said of the victims of the Black Hole. We can not forget altogether that they were in India not of right, but as conquerors, and that they were originally, at least, in the wrong. But the sufferers in the Johnstown flood, the thousands who died in the Lisbon, Krakatoa, and Martinique disasters, and other thousands that go down in ships at sea--these innocent victims demand sympathy much more.

It seemed that most of my sight-seeing in Calcutta was to be limited to horrible things. Indeed, the visitor is often hurried from horror to horror, as if he were in some "chamber of horrors" in a museum. I was taken to the burning ghaut, where dead bodies are cremated. I saw some five hundred little fires, which were so many pyres for the dead. I had heard much of the burning of live women in order that they should accompany their dead masters, and out of sheer curiosity asked the guard if there were men only in the fires. For answer, he took a long hook, thrust it into one of the fires, pulled it back and on its prongs brought the charred leg of a man. Immediately birds of prey (adjutants) pounced down upon the smoking flesh and bore it away. These birds are the scavengers of Calcutta, and the special guardians of the ghaut. Cremation is a great economy in India. It costs only half a cent to burn a body.

Another horror shall complete this gruesome part of my story. Being very fond of shrimps, one day I inquired, in a moment of forgetfulness--for it is a safe rule not to ask the source of anything in the East--where and how they got these shrimps. I was taken to the fishing grounds in the mouth of the river, and there saw millions of these prawns flocking, like petty scavengers, about the dead bodies that continually float down the Ganges. Human flesh was their favorite food. This was enough for me. I stopped eating shrimps in India, as I had stopped eating Canton ginger preserves in China.

On the second day of my stay in Calcutta I received cards to the reception given by Lord Dalhousie to Lord Canning, the new Governor-General. Lord Dalhousie, the retiring Governor-General, was dying. In fact he had been dying for months. I shall not go into any description of the exceedingly brilliant reception. It made an ineffaceable impression upon me because of the grouping on that occasion of some of the most splendid of the British administrators and of some of the most daring of their enemies, who were even then plotting revolution and bloodshed. I was introduced to both the passing and the coming Governor-General and to General Havelock, afterwards the gallant fighter at Lucknow. I had the rare privilege of seeing these three men talking amicably with the great Nana Sahib, the leader of the Hindus at Cawnpore.

The voyage from Calcutta to Suez was almost devoid of incident. We put into Madras, a barren, flat, and dismal place, to take on passengers, and then sailed for Point de Galle, Ceylon. At this place I saw, for the first time, elephants employed in carrying and piling heavy timbers. They go about their task with an intelligence that is nearly human, lifting heavy teak timbers and placing them in regular order in great piles. I had not before supposed that any animals possessed so much sense.

Coming down to Aden, two thousand miles from Galle, sleeping with the bulkhead open opposite my berth, one night I felt something slap me in the face. As I was all alone, I did not know what to make of it. There was no light, and I could not see. As soon as I fell asleep another slap came. I had heard about the insects of the tropics, but had no idea they were of such size as to cause these slaps. In the morning, I found out what had been the matter. Nine flying-fish lay dead in my berth.

At Aden, the most barren and gloomy place I have ever seen, we went out to the cantonments, which must have been built thousands of years ago. We hurried up the Red Sea to Suez, and then crossed over by land from Suez, eighty-four miles, to Cairo, with six hundred camels in the caravan. We had coaches carrying six passengers. I have a good idea of what the Sahara Desert is from having seen this desert between Suez and Cairo. Just before we reached Cairo, there was a cry from one of the coaches for us to look up at the sky. There were masts, minarets, and the whole city, in fact, painted on the sky. It was my first sight of the mirage I had heard so much about. We were then half-way from Suez to Cairo.

I put up at Shepheard's Hotel, and immediately arranged to go out to the pyramids, ten miles from Cairo. Fifty donkey boys rivaled one another to get my custom. My donkey started off, and the first thing I knew he was rolling over me in the sand. He had stepped in a gopher-hole, and down he went. Travelers now go out in trolley-cars, eat ice-cream and drink champagne under the shade of the pyramids, and a splendid hotel stands alongside the Sphinx.

In going up the pyramids it took three Arabs, two to push and one to pull, to get me to the top. When we got half-way up, an Arab wanted more bakshish. I talked to him pretty loud in something he didn't understand, and he consented to take me farther. The top of the pyramid of Ghizeh has been taken away, and the pyramid is now about fifteen feet square at the summit. I made up my mind, the moment I saw the pyramids, that these gigantic blocks were not stone, but had been produced by one of the lost arts in preparing concrete. It occurred to me, as the pyramids were hollow to the base, that they had been storehouses for grain, and were not built as tombs for the Rameses and Ptolemies. Humane kings had built them, I thought, in order to employ labor in time of dearth.

As all travelers are told, it was said that a man would go down one pyramid and come up on another in so many minutes. I had seen such a number of "fakes" in my travels that, as I could not tell one Chinaman from another, how should I be able to tell one Arab from another? When this trick was done for me I thought it did not follow that the man on the other pyramid was the man who had been with me.

I was surprised when I left Cairo to find a modern railway, that had been built by Said Pasha. We took the train for Alexandria. At Alexandria we took passage for the Holy Land. The Rev. J. R. MacFarlane, chaplain of Madras, wanted to see Jerusalem and landed at Joppa, or Jaffa, which has become famous for Napoleon's massacre.

In going through the Valley of Sharon, we saw orange and lemon groves, and fruits of all kinds. It was a lovely valley, but all of a sudden we struck into the most desolate country I had ever seen--a mountain, a desert, a wilderness of rocks, ravines and cañons. There were rocks to the right, rocks to the left, and rocks everywhere. My dragoman had a mule and I a donkey. One of these mules had irreverently been named Christ and the other Jesus. To the perfect horror of the clergyman--until he understood that the men could say nothing else in English--the names of the donkeys were spoken with every crack of the whip all the way to Jerusalem. The lashing of those donkeys became a medley of seeming profanity.

A few weeks before, several people had been killed by the Bedouins on the desert. Every one was talking about the dangers of the journey. After we got over this wild district, through the Valley of Jehoshaphat, we came upon a plateau and saw Jerusalem in the distance. Beautiful is that city for situation. Said my companions, at the same instant, "There are the Bedouins!" A half dozen horsemen were coming from the direction of Jerusalem. We feared danger, but Abram the dragoman showed no fear. These men were really not dangerous, being only "barkers" for the hotels of Jerusalem. Neither my companion nor myself had any idea that they were employes of that kind.

One asked if we would go to "Smith's" near Mount Calvary, to "Jones's" near the Via della Rosa, or to another house on the site of Solomon's Temple. MacFarlane said, "Don't notice these people. Leave it to the dragoman." He decided that we should go to Smith's. From that time, until we left, for three days, I saw nothing but humbug and tinsel, lying and cheating, ugly women, sand-fleas and dogs, from Joppa through Ramlah. The one lovely place was an oasis where we stopped for luncheon. Of course this was a long time before Mark Twain went there and wept over the tomb of Adam.

In going through the Valley of Jehoshaphat, up the Mount of Olives, of course I was impressed with what survived of my Biblical education. New England training was still strong in me. The women of Bethlehem, carrying baskets on their heads, with flowing robes of calico, were very beautiful and healthy-looking; but when I got to Bethlehem, and with my farm and cattle experience looked for stalls and mangers, I was, of course, disgusted at being taken down two flights and shown an old wet cave as the place where the Saviour was said to have been born. I have kept the morals of the old Methodists, I hope, but my superstitious notions were disappearing every minute I spent in Jerusalem.

Being in the Holy Land, all the stories I had heard in boyhood came back to me. I thought of Moses's life. I had been taught to obey his commandments, but as a child I saw that he had broken in his own life those which say, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery--had told Aaron, his brother-in-law, to make a golden image, and had got up a trust by means of which he might get all the gold. "Thou shalt do no murder," says the law--but he killed an Egyptian and hid him in the sand. "Thou shalt not commit adultery "--but he committed that sin.

And so on to the end. These commandments were taught by the man who had broken every one of them himself. Aaron, who wished to be included in the gold-corner into which Moses had refused him admittance, sought to make money in some other way, and said, "If we are going for forty years into the wilderness, we shall want salt provisions," and so bought up all the hogs he could find, without letting Moses into the corner. Then Moses spoiled the whole game by the law that no Jews should eat pork! In the Holy Land these things all came into my mind. You can imagine how I felt sixteen years after, when arrested and detained for six months in the Tombs for quoting three columns of the Bible (about which I shall speak later).

At night I wanted my clergyman companion to gain an idea of night scenes in the East. To make sure that we should not be disturbed, I went to the chief of police for a guide to show us Jerusalem by candle-light. We went into a dark alley, back of Mount Calvary and the Via della Rosa, when the man's movements became suspicious. I could not see why a policeman should be so careful where he went. My object had been to see the demi-monde of Syria.

When we got to the door, the policeman tried to shut the door, but I put my foot in the way. I asked MacFarlane if he was armed. He said he had a Madras dagger. MacFarlane was already in the room and I drew him out. "Those are Bedouins," said I; "I could see their pistols and swords." Intuition told me they were murderers. Sixteen persons had been killed in Nablus in '55-'56. The chief of police was the head of the gang. I immediately saw our consul, and there was a meeting of representatives of the foreign powers, and the whole traffic was exposed. In our case they found the men, and after we left they were executed.