Читать книгу Lola Montez: An Adventuress of the 'Forties - Edmund B. D'Auvergne - Страница 8

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INDIA SEVENTY YEARS AGO

The land to which little Mrs. James was eager to return seems to us now to have been a poor exchange for the rollicking Ireland of Lever’s day. India in 1838, as for a score of years after, was under the rule of John Company. Collectors and writers of the Jos. Sedley type were still able to shake the pagoda tree, and Englishmen in outlying provinces often became suddenly rich, how or why nobody asked, and only the natives cared. Indigo planters beat their half-caste wives to death, and English magistrates looked the other way. Our people died, like flies in autumn, of cholera, snakebites, and the thousand and one fevers to which India was subject. We were still shut in by powerful native states. Ranjit Singh ruled in the Punjaub, the Baluchis in Scinde; there was yet a king in Oude and a rajah at Nagpûr. Slavery was only abolished in the British dominions that very year, and Hindoo widows had but lately lost the privilege of burning themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres. The chronic famine had assumed slightly more serious proportions.

It was a land of loneliness, remote and isolated. A postal service had been introduced only the year before, and letters took at least three months to come from England. This was by the overland route, which was liable at any moment to interruption by the caprice of the Pasha of Egypt or the enterprise of Bedouins. There were, of course, no railways and no telegraphs. You travelled wherever possible by river, in boats called budgerows, which had not increased in speed since Ensign Gilbert’s day. Going up the Ganges you might have seen the Danish flag waving over Serampore. If you were in a hurry and could afford it, you travelled dâk—that is, in a palanquin, carried by four bearers, who were changed at each stage like posting-horses. This method of travel—about the most uncomfortable, I conceive, ever devised by man—greatly impressed and interested Lola. She thought it repugnant to one’s sense of humanity, but could not help observing the lightheartedness of the bearers. They jogged briskly along to the accompaniment of improvised songs, which were not always flattering to their human load.