Romantic India. Translated ... by William Marchant

Front matter

The Novel of the Indian Mutiny ON THE FACE OF THE WATERS By FLORA ANNIE STEEL In One volume crown Svo, price 6s. Twentieth Thousand The Spectator. — " We have read Mrs. Steel's book with ever-increasing surprise and admiration — surprise at her insight into people with whom she can scarcely have been intimate, admiration for the genius which has enabled her to realise that wonderful welter of the East and West, which Delhi must have presented just before the Mutiny. We know in literature of few sketches better than those which reveal to us Buhadur Shah, the last great Moghul ... or that of Zeemet Maihl, the evil Queen, ... or ofthe Moulaire, who roused by his preaching the war against the English, ... or of Tiddu, the hereditary juggler-actor, ... or of Soma, the haughty, sullen Sepoy. And the best evidence of Mrs. Steel's genius is that those who can scarcely conceive the society will feel certain that it is truly drawn.

There is many an officer who would give his sword to write military history as Mrs. Steel has written the history of the rising, the siege, and the storm. It is the most wonderful picture. We know that none who lived through the Mutiny will lay the book down without a gasp of admiration, and believe that the same emotion will be felt by thousands to whom the scenes depicted are but lurid phantasmagoria." The Academy. — " All that relates to the natives, whether to the sepoys, or the Court, or the town, is admirable; and the sketches of British military and civil life are absolutely convincing. Mrs. Steel sees detail everywhere, and records it minutely ; but she is full of humanity, and can give us the mysticism of the Oriental as faithfully as the easy-going morality of the Anglo-Indian. Each incident, almost each chapter, is a picture by itself, revealing an extraordinary wealth of descriptive power, and a masterly insight into character."

A.T.Q.C. in The Speaker.— " It certainly is a remarkable book. The native intrigues are brilliantly handled. Alice Gissing may claim to stand beside the really great women of fiction. The whole book has the high seriousness which, until quite recently, few people dreamed of as possible in an Anglo-Indian novel." The Saturday Review. — " Many novelists and spinners of tales have made use of the Indian Mutiny, but Mrs. Steel leaves them all a long way behind. Major Erlton and Alice Gissing challenge comparison with Rawdon Crawley and Becky Sharp. ' On the Face of the Waters ' is the best novel of the Great Mutiny, and we are not likely to see its rival in our time." The St. James's Gazette. — "Of the familiar incidents of the early Mutiny, how vivid and full of dramatic effect are the scenes as she paints them !

Chapter I

A T SEA Off Massouah, November 3. For three days we have been going straight toward the South, and, the other morning, just as the faint outline of Sinai was vanishing upon the horizon, we came into the regions of excessive heat. It is a moist, close heat, in which the muscles are re laxed, the whole body seems melting and sinking away — a heat oppressive, prostrating by night as well as day. At times one's clothing seems to burn the skin and to become unendurable. There is no going below for meals : all day long we lie inert in our deck-chairs. A double tent shuts us in, completely hiding both sea and sky ; and still the eyes become inflamed with the excess of light. Coleridge's weird poem of the " Ancient Mariner " comes to my mind. Thus he sailed, oppressed with a strange numbness, a kind of torpor, that cannot be shaken off.

There is not the slightest breeze ; our speed outruns the light wind which follows in our A wake ; the fiery air is heavy and motionless ; we are not conscious of the ship's advance. There is something unnatural about a sea like this ; it seems under a spell, struck by a malediction ; it has not the fluidity of water. Sometimes a glimpse of it can be seen through a rent in the canvas shelter, and it is a sheet of molten glass, inert, dense, heavy ; nothing could be more dismal than its monotonous glare in the sunlight. At a distance it steams, and this whitish, quivering haze, this tremulous fog, shuts us in, hiding the sea a few miles away. Beyond, the imagination depicts fiery wildernesses, terrific solitudes void of all life. By night the sensation of rapid motion, of slip ping away into some unknown world, recurs.

The constellations are seen to be leaving their familiar places. In each twenty-four hours they have gone so many degrees farther northward. The Great Bear is plunging downward to the horizon : now he has lost two, now three, of his big stars : now he is gone completely ; and in front of us rise, sparkling, the four points of the Southern Cross, while slowly the great belt of the Milky Way is pushed back. Lying upon the deck, which by night is de serted, one hears the incessant rustling of the water ; looking fixedly at the stars, you feel con scious of an ascent toward the equator, of a going up over the convexity of the globe, over this great dark ball that hangs in space ; and at certain moments you seem to see the measured movement of the heavenly bodies — those eternal beacons, AT SEA 3 millions of leagues away, in inconceivable depths of space.

One o'clock A.M. — The mercury stands at ioo°, and still it is a moist heat. One falls into a strange drowsiness interrupted by feverish awakenings, when the swarms of stars that suddenly appear frighten one. Then follows heavy sleep, a sinking away into black darkness, wherein the brain gropes confusedly, amid flashes of sharp pain and sudden swoons, dropping abruptly off into unconscious ness, or, again, feebly striving against the crushing torpor. After this, a sort of fevered excitement, a singular lucidity of mind, crowds of recollections, whole periods of life appearing entire ; and, of a sudden, around you, the wondrous tropical night, large and luminous, deep blue between the stars which, low on the horizon, blaze as bright as those in the zenith. Nor is the sea dark now, but full of a deep light, illumined in its depths by all the absorbed sunshine of the day, and on its surface by countless splashes of starlight.

Four o'clock. — The white stellar dust overhead is gone. Only the great stars still throb with a pale light, and a faint rose colour flushes in the east, so faint one can but just see it. Suddenly it has gone all round the edge of the sky, like some pervasive fluid of infinite tenuity, melting by exquisite grada tions into the pallid spaces overhead. The blue of the sea becomes visible, a chaste, dull, neutral blue, not yet touched by the sun. The horizon retreats, becomes defined, and the watery space broadens in the daylight. November 5. We reached Aden last night. Awaking, in the morning, the coast is visible. How describe it ? It is a negro land, nude and black, under a blazing sun — a huge bank of coal, rising out of the sea ; no vapour, no vegetation softens the sharp silhouette of the gloomy volcanic rocks outlined with implacable hardness against the blue of the sky.

Contrasted with this landscape of Erebus, the sea again seems liquid, cool, of a delicate greenish tint. On the left lies the Arab coast, a dazzling white wilderness, melting in the distance into white undulations of the heated atmosphere. We shall be off again almost immediately, and have no time to go on shore. Looking from the deck, I see upon a road groups of superb negroes draped in red — a red victorious and brutal in the sunlight, flaming against the blackness of the landscape ; meagre, withered camels, moving their slender, thick-lipped heads from side to side with gentle, haughty undulation ; files of little Scriptural asses ; lastly, two English soldiers with tennis rackets. They are all coming down toward the shore on a road of cinders along below the carbonised rocks. On our deck some oily Jews, with greedy, piteous faces, weep, endeavouring to persuade us to buy ostrich feathers.

Invincibly persistent, they cling to us, they surround us with their timid yet eager gestures. What a contrast between their lament able aspect, as of whipped dogs, and the gaiety of these supple negro boys with their broad, white AT SEA 5 laugh ! The well-developed, active bodies are lustrous in the sunlight. A very small black boy, scarcely a five - year - old baby, with irresistible grimaces, with the graceful clumsiness of a young kitten, is determined, at all hazards, to sell me an old East India Company rupee. He forces it into my hand, and the touch of the little paw, dry and parchment-like, reminds me of a monkey's. We throw small coins into the water, and the whole little crowd dive for them. They jump off like frogs, their heads cleaving the lustrous surface of the water, and the eye follows the black kicking until it disappears in the green depths.

Other boys paddle around the ship, astride upon tree-trunks, urging themselves on with a smacking of the lips and with strident cries like the chirping of crickets. They are the offspring of the sea, rejoicing in life and movement, like insects hatched in the sand and hopping about upon the shore. Now and then a shark snaps one up, but what does it matter ? What matter if a swallow darts upon a fly ? One of these children has had an arm taken off by a snap of the powerful jaws ; you find yourself wondering that the arm has not grown again, like a lobster's claw. Four English ships, arriving last night, have sailed again immediately ; and our steamer, long, slender, lying low on the water, its two raking funnels smoking all the time, seems like a runner detained against his will, eager to get away, im patient to resume his race and arrive on the farther coast of Japan !

At nine o'clock I hear begin that motion of the screw which is now to last uninterruptedly for a week. November 6. Under the double tent the evenings are disagree able, with stale odours of tobacco, of cooking, of oil from the engine-room. It has become tiresome to pace the deck with one's fellow-passengers, exchang ing commonplaces on European politics — this is to endure all the boredom of civilised life. One would gladly escape being elbowed by this crowd moving about under the electric light, like any crowd in Hyde Park or the Champs-Elysees ; tall, correct Englishmen, mindful of their digestion, and at this hour making the fifth mile of their constitutional ; French functionaries who smoke, leaning against the quarter-nettings ; yawning loungers extended in deck-chairs ; bare-legged children who drive hoops, while their mammas embroider or read the latest novel.

From the ladies' cabin come waltz tunes, as of hand-organs in London or Paris streets : " The Beautiful Blue Danube," or " Sweet Dream Faces," or that eternal " Kathleen Mavourneen," which, with all its foolish sentimentality of words, has the irresistible charm of an old French chan son — how hackneyed it all is ! And yet how hard it is to put all these commonplace things com pletely out of the mind ! In truth, it requires a great effort of the imagination to grasp the strange reality : to be conscious of the black expanse upon which we lie, itself moving in the darkness outside AT SEA 7 of all these human noises ; the ten thousand feet straight down between us and the submarine ground weighed upon by this black watery mass — these unknown depths where things have remained changeless through eons.

But go quite aft, and put your head out from under the tent : the people who are walking the deck disappear, the waltzes cease, the Edison light goes out. A strong wind smites you in the face, taking you by surprise. At first you see nothing but the empty blackness of space ; suddenly the tall masts with the crossed yards lift their immense geometric lines, swaying slowly against the bright stars and the swarming cosmic dust ; a pervasive low noise fills the darkness. At your feet, under a black whirl, phosphorescent masses, bluish globes, fly, and, beaten madly by the screw, make a broad milky path — a great undefined furrow in the dark ness. And you feel yourself alone upon the huge thing which is running blindly on, lost in the night, between the mystery of the sea, brooding a luminous life, and the mystery of the sky, where shine, in whitish patches, suns as yet unformed — between these two overwhelming blacknesses in which float, coming one knows not whence, the beginnings of worlds, and the beginnings of life.

November 7. In the morning, but few passengers on deck. All day long the ship rolls heavily : she lies down slowly to starboard, recovers, lies down to port, and her three masts describe their regular oscillation against the sky. The huge creature, whose dull heart throbs one feels, quivers all over, exults in this slow, mighty movement, in this profound rhythmic oscillation, in this going forward through the heavy blue seas which lift the surface in vast glassy domes, in all this disturbance which comes to us from the South, from the great watery spaces which cover the austral hemisphere. Separated from us only by the bulwarks there is a liquid tumult, a merry uproar of glittering foam falling back into the blue, there is a white water-dust spread in sheets, dazzling with light, and running off in sinuous furrows with a great noise as of tearing silk.

Beyond is the immense disk of the sea, of a marvellous blue, and on the starboard side burning like molten metal ; the barren sea, burning under the fury of the blazing sun — the lord who from on high devours the heavens and fills all space with his shin ing ; only an infinite, gloomy splendour, only these brute forces of heat and light, only these eternal things whose indifference crushes us — and no life at all, for the little flying-fish, springing back and forth over the angry surface, seem but flames thrown out from it like arrows of white fire. After a time this great blaze of light makes one sad, and weighs down the heart with an extreme depression. It is easy to understand the homesick ness of men of the North condemned to sail these Southern seas. Here the infinite has no vague gentleness, no melancholy charm, alluring and tempting, no subtle sadness whose very pang is a pleasure.

It crushes and stupefies, and the whole AT SEA 9 being sinks under it, incapable of any effort to rally. As one thus lies inert, a whole inner world of memories awakens ; it grows, and fills the mind. It is an enfeebling besetment, but one has not strength to fight it off ; it is a half-dream, very simple, yet weighted heavily with emotion. A scene appears as through a mist torn apart, then closing in again : through heavy masses of foliage falls a greenish light, there is a muddy bit of road between patches of yellow broom ; sad little trees writhe against a grey sky. There are cottage-roofs, lustrous, wet with rain. Why can I not to-day dispel this vision of a little place near the gloomy harbour of Brest ? Still I see it. The place is not far from Portsic. There is complete solitude ; bare fields, sad and wintry, divided into wan squares, and bounded by low, black hedges.

The wind is coming up, and clouds come with it ; they rise higher, and gradually weave a pallid veil over the sky. Three trees graze each other with their slender branches. Behind is the Goulet ; how cold and grey the water, fretted by a slight ripple which is touched at one point by a trembling ray of pallid sunlight ! This ripple frets the stream between banks the colour of rusted iron. On these banks not a detail, not an accident of colour, only the hard, rough outline. There is a profound sensation of melancholy, bitter, and not temporary but en during. These rocks, this gorse, this stream, this little icy wind — all this has suffered thus for ever, rigorously and patiently. Long, long has this grey water shivered between its walls of rusty iron. Presently, something strange is noticeable ; upon this rough promontory of rock, high up against the pale sky, there is what seem like splashes and trails of blood ; there are reddish lights, mysterious gleams, motionless, dismal.

Then one is aware that this also is water, but infinitely remote, as in another world. And beyond lies darkness, ashen, cold, dense — where a distant sea, crimsoned by an invisible sun, fades away, vanishes, ends — like suf fering absorbed in nothingness.

Chapter II Ceylon Buddhism

Yesterday, as we were playing quoits, a little English girl, pale and discontented-looking, pro mised the captain a smile, if we should reach Colombo this evening. The captain will win his smile : at five o'clock foggy stains appear on the horizon ; about six, under a lowering sky, heavy with great violet-coloured clouds, a grove of cocoanut-trees becomes visible. Drawing nearer, we are able to distinguish a host of tall, stiff, slender trunks, bursting, by an oblique impulse, into a foliage of palm-leaves above. It is a vast forest, which seems to rise out of the sea. Even within two miles of land it is impossible to see the ground : there is only the dense growth upon it, — in every direction, this mighty vegetation over flowing with strength and sap, — the great equatorial vegetation, which springs out of ground soaked with rains and spreads wide its enormous leaves in the furnace-heat of the air.

We have not yet reached the land, and still, the sensation of this equatorial world is already very distinct. There is not the limpid, liquid blue of the classic East. Here, both sea and sky are violent, surcharged, so to speak. You feel that this is a place of storms and typhoons, a region situated on the girdle of the globe, looking toward a hemisphere of ocean — an overwhelming nature, under the vertical sun. Meantime the sea grows dark ; there are flushes of red across it, and spaces of undulation. These disappear, and there remains only a dull purplish lustre, pulsating under the tumultuous sky. Over head, a chaos of light and colours; in the west, a vague radiance of a soft rose-tint ; in the east, enormous cloud-masses rolling up, piling themselves high, then breaking down into fantastic shapes, in violets, greens, and flaming orange.

Then all be coming colourless, there remain only black heaps, masses of gigantic dead shapes. But the heavy, oily water still gives out a mysterious light which projects itself into the wan space. On the surface, a swarm of black objects — crawling among the waves, in pirogues, upon gliding trunks of trees — gather around the ship's side with deafen ing outcries. Then, of a sudden, in two minutes' time, all this disappears into the night, an impene trable, stifling night, later filled by a heavy, violent, warm rain. Having landed, I can see nothing, so dense is the darkness. Farther on, by the gaslight, I conjecture broad, straight avenues, with red soil, bordered by great gardens and palm-groves. The heat, endur able upon the water, is overwhelming here. The air, motionless and laden with the disturbing per fume of invisible flowers, weighs upon the mute city.

Figures in narrow white garments, moving very quickly, barefooted, silent, graze us in passing, and disappear. This is altogether a new world, very different from the East as we know it in Egypt. Yes, one is very far away from home in this silence, this darkness, these heavy perfumes, this moist heat. The Oriental Hotel is a large and comfortable building. The proprietress, a most correct English woman, installs me, giving brief orders that servants receive with silent inclinations of the head. I have a great whitewashed room, entirely without furniture, except a little iron bedstead covered with a mosquito netting, and a deep arm-chair of cool straw, in which I recline during the silent, oppressive hours ; on the ceiling is an odd-looking spot — a little, motionless lizard ; then two, three little lizards, watching me with very sharp eyes.

In the long corridors crowds of Bengalese and Cinhalese servants, slender and gentle -looking. They glide noiselessly, with timid gestures, very respectful in the presence of the tall, solid Euro peans, the handsome, muscular Englishmen, who, in evening dress, with shining white shirt-fronts, and the air of superior and unapproachable beings, make their way into the great dining-room. It is a very handsome dining-room, full of passing Europeans, black stains in the white Asiatic crowd. It is like a great restaurant, situated where the highways of the world cross. At these tables are travellers from the opposite sides of the globe ; passengers on the Paramatta, which sails to-morrow for Australia and New Zealand ; French army officers ; passengers on the Caledonian, which goes on to-night to Singapore and Saigon ; Chinese on their way to Europe ; English civilians going out to administer India.

Opposite me at table four Frenchmen, rich bourgeois, who, having had enough of Scotland and Switzerland, are on the way to Japan : Parisians by birth and race, flaneurs du boulevard, readers of the Figaro, habitue's of the Palais Royal, admirers of M. Sarcey, republicans and liberals after the school of M. Thiers ; one a laureate of the Acade'mie des Sciences morales ; all four typical of French education, of the Lyce'e and PEcole de Droit, and of the boulevard. Two of them are well versed in literature and philosophy — the philosophy of Victor Hugo and of M. Paul Bert. With this, a raciness somewhat cynical but brilliant, — a clear head, visibly bewildered, however, at sight of a world which seems to be able to do without Paris. A third is more simple, of a stronger and sturdier growth, more sanguine and rugged, more frankly cheerful, getting more pleasure out of life, noisy, and "a ladies' man " ; not quite so much the epicure, a little more the glutton ; precisely M. Zola's repre sentative of the middle class, the plump bourgeois who, seated on his hearth-rug, digests his dinner.

There they are, flushed, rapid in word and gesture. Mobile in face, in contrast with the blond, tranquil Englishmen and the graceful Cinhalese— two of them agreeably excited, the third man on his high horse, full-blown, expanded, his heart open ; happier, more jovial, more simply egotistical than ever. He cries : " Bring us some good wine ! And the party drink champagne from goblets. Two hundred guests are at dinner. The great punkahs swing slowly back and forth with regular and ample sweep, red, between high, whitewashed walls. Upon the lustrous tablecloths a profusion of blood-red flowers ; and all around us in motion a multitude of Cinhalese servants, very serious, very gentle, a yellow shell comb at the top of the chignon, dark in their narrow white garments, mute, moving noiselessly on naked feet among the tables with their floral decorations and their crowd of guests.

November 10. In the morning we walk about the city — a marvellous city, in which there is nothing to be seen but verdure, the plants hiding the houses. The atmosphere is damp and very hot, and penetrated through and through with moist light. The streets are the avenues of a vast tropical garden. Palm-trees, ferns, ebony-trees, sandal wood, cinnamon-trees, camphor-trees, pineapples — plants with strong sap; the most prized hot house flowers are at home here, growing without cultivation ; and all this vegetable world gives out a strong, heavy perfume. You feel that this is a summer which lasts for ever ; that every month in the year, without interruption, the dark crests of the great cocoanut-palms are covered with their heavy fruit ; that this red soil produces incessantly, that it is always bringing forth these swarms of great flowers, that these trees have always the same green and supple magnificence.

They crowd each other and are all entangled ; there is not a sugges tion of the regular, slow growth of European trees. These cocoanut -palms look fresh and soft, like enormous annuals, like some giant cereal, — frail, bending, soaked with sap, — which has grown out of all measure in a hot night of June. Some spring to a very great height, lifting far above the others, with a flexible curve, a strong, graceful impulse, their lofty crest of leaves, spread wide in the warm atmosphere. And the red road goes on and on, between lustrous heaps of drooping palms, masses of dark vegetation, from which the great sword-like leaves, springing out, flash with green light. Here and there are large ponds of black water — water which is almost invisible, so distinctly and perfectly is the surrounding vegetation reflected in it.

Broad bands of pink lotus trail over this water, and seem no more real than the green of the palms' reflection. Here and there, gleaming white, far within a fabulous garden, some handsome villa, crowned with palm-trees — its galleries, verandas, balustrades, steps, all loaded with enchanted flowers. Timid, frail, the Cinhalese glide past, a delicate, gentle race, with masses of ebony-black hair worn long like a woman's, a race made languid by perpetual summer and the constant moist sunlight. They move slowly, their serious and tranquil faces, strangely exotic, ex pressing an uncomprehended soul — the soul formed by this world so remote from our own. Going by train to Kandy, on the way I made the acquaintance of a Cinhalese gentleman. Very civilised, this gentleman — altogether correct in his tweed coat with a gardenia in his button-hole, only that his legs were sheathed in a very narrow white petticoat.

His physiognomy almost European — like an Italian, but more delicate, feminine, and sun burnt : features, bony and salient ; a strong lustrous beard, black and curly. After fifteen minutes of silence, conversation be gins as in a European railway carriage. He offers me a match and remarks that the weather is very warm. A sentence as to the temperature is, in English countries, the indispensable preliminary rite by which human beings enter into communi cation with each other. After this, in a few very definite words, he gives me information concerning the population of the island, its government, its religions. As he talks, I feel how deep is here the English stamp : he speaks the language with singular purity, without the least accent. He is a Christian, a lawyer, a member of the legislative council.

His disdainful pity for "the ignorance and idolatry" of the poor Cinhalese peasant is worthy of an English colonist. But, in fifty years, he says, all this will be changed ; the railways have already done much good ; before them, the savage country retreats. " At Colombo, we hope to found a great university, like that at Bombay or Benares, and later, when we are worthy of it, to have our parliament — a national assembly elected by suffrage of various grades ; all this, of course, by degrees, B and without separation from the great British Empire, from England, to whom we owe our entrance into the world of civilisation." He adds that he is " Aryan " ; this is as clear and certain to him as it is certain and clear to me that I am French ; consequently he esteems himself the equal of any European ; and certainly he is the superior of many Europeans in intelligence, education, and manners.

But he is somewhat too English ; it is too evi dent that to him the Englishman is the ideal model of humanity. A copy so perfect is not natural. And then all this European display swears at his white petticoat and at certain Asiatic hints in his physiognomy. Naturally, one prefers the Chinese with his pigtail and his blue robe to the Japanese in frockcoat and Derby hat. One is distrustful at the astonishing address with which individuals of yellow or black skin imitate the European ; and cannot but question whether the imitation goes at all below the surface, whether the depths do not still remain mysteriously Mongol or Negro. Cer tainly this man does his best to surprise me, with his air of knowing the world, his stiff manner, the nonchalant slowness of movement with which he takes an Egyptian cigarette from his case of yellow tortoiseshell.

It is amusing, this little railway upon which my friend, the Cinhalese lawyer, counts to bring civili sation into the depths of the palm forests ; a pretty plaything, a nice little toy railway, not very likely to alarm the eternal vegetation of the equator. The engine burns no vile black coal, but fragrant woods. We glide along under great trees whose leafy tops make a green arch above the track. There are charming stations which have but slight resemblance to a French gare, little cabins all pink and blue with climbing flowers and hidden under great glossy shrubs. There is no restaurant, but slender, bronzed epheboi, in bright-coloured robes, pass, slow and smiling, holding out baskets filled with pineapples, mangoes, bananas in pink clusters, or sometimes yellow young cocoanuts which they open adroitly with three strokes of a hatchet, that you may drink out of the nut its cool and perfumed milk.