Читать книгу Winter India - Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore - Страница 8

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E rumbled and jolted along all that hot afternoon over a monotonous, dry brown plain of parched fields and thorn hedges. There was uproar in the forward part of the train as it left Dindigal station, a hundred voices clamored and shrieked, and a hundred heads hung from the windows of the third-class cars. The train halted, men leaped from it and ran back, while all on the station platform ran up the track toward a small object beside the rails. The station-master came on toward the train, holding fast to a lean little black imp, who was struggling to release himself and fairly bursting with wrath. An excited woman, wailing and declaiming with uncovered face, leaned from a forward car window, talking to an excited group on the ground. At last, an oily babu came to tell us that the small boy had "had a dispute with his mother," and, not wishing to leave Dindigal, had jumped out of the window. "His fearful mother had thought him killed," said the babu, but at sight of the lost heir her fear gave way to fury. She raved and ranted like an Indian Bernhardt as she leaned from the window, unveiled, ​talking to the station officers; and the small boy talked back to everybody, until he was suddenly lifted by the back, like a kitten, and handed through the window to "his fearful mother's" arms. "Because of his youth they will not arrest him," said the babu; and, from the shrieks that came from that compartment, there was no need for the law to add aught to the chastisement of the barefaced, nose-ringed mother.

We were in the heart of the tobacco country, and Trichinopoli in these modern days is as much a synonym for cheroots as Dindigal. Samuel Daniel, the local guide, who claimed us in the darkness of Trichinopoli station, had the advertisement of his own cigar factory on the back of his card, and everywhere we saw and smelled the local cheroot. We slept in the travelers' rooms in the Trichinopoli station, after dining at a table trailed over with bougainvillea vines and set with glasses of great double hibiscus. Trains rumbled by all night, the mosquitos sang a deafening chorus, and at sunrise we sped across another city of dirty white houses, whose inhabitants were just waking and scratching, and whose Brahman families were marking the door-sills and themselves for the day, the houses' toilet as necessary as their own.

The rock of Trichinopoli, exactly as it looked in old geography pictures, loomed ahead; and after a few turns in the narrow streets we came to the carved entrance of the staircase, tunneled up through the solid rock to temples on the side and summit. Two elephants went past on their way to the river ​to fill the sacred water-vessels, and we started to climb the two hundred and ninety steps worn slippery with the tread of generations of barefooted worshipers and painted with the perpendicular red and white stripes of Shiva, Our elderly, pompous guide was voluble, measured, and minute, and permitted no trifling nor omissions. Samuel Daniel talked like Samuel Johnson, using the grandiloquent, polysyllabic literary language of the eighteenth century. We had engaged him to show us the sights, and he did it thoroughly. "Here is the place where many hundreds of people were crushed to death in the dark of the afternoon of a festival in 1849," he said. Since then, the British government has cut windows in the rock, placed lamps, and forbidden climbing after four o'clock. At one landing we found a group of little boys sitting before a greasy, black image of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, receiving instruction from a Brahman teacher; at another landing a high priest stood statuesque in yellow robes, the sacred white Brahman thread and bead on his neck, his forehead smeared with ashes; and at last we came out to the air at a small shrine on an outer shelf of the rock, where we had a far-reaching view of the level plain. After one more tunnel staircase we gained the open summit, climbed a last pinnacle, and found ourselves two hundred and thirty-six feet above the city, that lay like a relief-map at our feet, the fortress-like gopuras of the Srirangam temples rising from green groves southward, A little temple to Ganesha crowns the rock, the goal of the breathless pilgrimage. ​Halfway down the staircase, we were deafened by the flutes and flageolets of the priests and flag-bearers toiling up with water-jars just brought from the river. The sacred elephants at the foot of the stairs saluted us with lifted fore feet and waving trunks, rubbing their foreheads as they begged, plainly demanding a "prissint," after the custom of the country.

It was a short drive of three miles down to the temple of Vishnu at Srirangam, on an island in the dry bed of the Kaveri. This, the largest temple in southern India, is on a magnificent scale, its fifteen gopuras so many marvels of architecture; the greatest of them falling short of its intended three hundred feet by the interruption of building during the French and English wars of the eighteenth century, when the French intrenched themselves at Srirangam and mounted cannon on the gopuras. The outer, inclosing wall of the temple measures three thousand feet each way, and within that lies a first quadrangle of bazaars. A second gopura admits to a quadrangle where the three thousand high-caste Brahmans of the temple dwell. We drove on through a third and a fourth gopura, in one passage disputing right of way with a temple elephant, who backed out before our brougham, and, with the courtesy of a well-bred creature, swept his trunk and lifted a fore foot in apology. The last gateway had great teak doors, and the doctor of the temple and director of the Srirangam government hospital met us there; also the council of priests and five huge elephants, their foreheads striped with the same yellow and ​white tridents of Vishnu as their piously frescoed keepers. We saw the famous Hall of the Horse Columns, where single blocks of granite are as intricately carved as wood or ivory, and we saw the other curiosities of the stone-cutter's art, serried columns displaying the many incarnations of Vishnu. We saw, too, the Hall of a Thousand Columns—nine hundred odd shabby, whitewashed pillars only—and from the roof we were given a glimpse of the golden cupola covering the shrine of the sacred image—the identical image brought by Rama in the age of fable, and which grew fast to the ground when left for a moment. They were then preparing for the great mela or festival of early December, when forty thousand pilgrims assemble, crowds spending day and night in the temple for three weeks.

We were shown to a last pavilion, given armchairs before a table, the five elephants were stationed in line across the entrance, and fierce-foreheaded Brahmans multiplied. Strings of keys clanged on the table, five clumsy wooden chests were lugged in, five padlocks yielded to blows and wrenches, and the table was heaped with riches; the feast of jewels was spread, and a flood of color and light illuminated the shadowy, pavilion. Gold armor and ornaments and utensils incrusted with jewels were heaped on the table and handed us to examine, until one wondered if any more rubies, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds, or pearls were left in southern India. Gold helmets, crowns, breastplates, gauntlets, brassards, belts, necklaces, bracelets, anklets, were sown with rubies of thumb-nail size, with sapphires ​and diamonds seeded between, and fringed with pearls and uncut emeralds. Plain gold salvers, water-bottles, gourds, and bowls had neither value nor interest in our eyes after the play of gems. Even the Prince of Wales's gold salver, inscribed "Dec. 11th, 1875, "to commemorate his visit to the temple, seemed dull and commonplace. Far better was the gold breastplate fringed with tallow-drop emeralds, which he also gave as a souvenir of his visit to this great shrine of Vishnu. There were several Vishnu tridents in diamonds, and jeweled feathers trembling with diamond fringes; turban ornaments in which jeweled birds held great drops of rubies and emeralds in their beaks; a jeweled umbrella-stick with an inch-long sapphire for its ferrule, a crust of rubies for its handle, and a fringe of tinkling bo-leaves edged with pearls. Four great wings of head-ornaments covered with jewels had been given by a pious beggar, who had gathered more than fifty thousand rupees in alms to spend for such gifts to the gods and gauds for the temple, his stones better cut and set and of better quality than any others in the treasury. Strings and strings of pearls—pearls strung alone or alternating with balls of emerald, ruby, or carved gold—slipped through our hands to weariness. Our eyes were sated with splendor and color when, as a climax, they produced a fine bit of gold carving, representing a religious procession, the idol in the state chair cut from a large ruby, the tiny face, the drapery, and the many ornaments most cleverly done.

It was a characteristic and a picturesque scene

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INDIAN LOTAS

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there under the mandapan, the riches of India laid out on a dirty cotton table-cover!—the wise elephants a contrast in good manners to the horde of noisy and excited Brahmans. Although it had required the intervention of three officials to permit us to see the jewels, and each chest is locked with five keys and sealed with five seals of that many Brahman keepers, thefts are frequent, and fifty thousand rupees' worth of jewels vanished at one time. The police kept their eyes on each of the priestly band, the elephants blinked and watched too; and when we had offered our rupees to clean the jewels, the Brahmans set up an approving shout, dropped garlands of marigolds around our necks, and presented us with fragrant lemons. We rose to go, and the most gaudily painted and blackest old Brahman of them all pushed forward, shouting: "I want my photograph now. You have it in that box. You took it an hour ago. I am Venketerama lyenzar, revenue inspector of Srirangam. Send it to me by the post." And with the elephants trumpeting and nosing for two-anna pieces in the dust, we drove away to the silk and silver and muslin shops of "Trichi," as one soon learns to call it. There the tahsildar spied our brougham, and, descending from his bullock-cart, paid us a visit at the silk merchant's shop front—the courteous, gracious old tahsildar, a fine product of two civilizations.

Samuel Daniel, our guide with the tobacco factory attached, was radiant with the success of the whole morning. Elated from his converse with Brahmans, doctors, and tahsildar, he dropped so ​much architectural and historical information about Chidambram, Conjeveram, and Mahabalipur, that we said: "Why, you must have read Fergusson?"

"Yes, your ladyship. I have the book. Ten rupees."

"Then you had better go with us as guide."

"Yes, your ladyship," and he went and made our way so plain, so smooth and interesting, that we compared all other guides in India with him to their detriment.

A Catholic priest in cool white robes tiffined also at the station, and told of some of the great successes in mission work in the south; how whole villages have become Christian when the priest permits them to retain their caste. "It is among our converts, or in places where we have worked before them, that your Protestant missionaries have most success," he said.

From the rock of Trichinopoli we had seen the great pagoda tower of Tanjore on the horizon, and as we rumbled the thirty miles across the Kaveri plain in the early, showery afternoon it rose in height as we advanced, and the train stopped fairly in its shadow. Leaving David to watch the luggage at the station, Samuel Daniel hurried us to the temple gate and under the two gopuras to the striped inner court, where the thirteen-story vimana, or tower, of Shiva tapers away until its great trisul seems to touch the very sky.

"Ah! you see here the cleverosity of the Old World builders and the numerosity of their carvings," said Daniel, proudly.

​After the French occupied the temple as a fortress in 1777, it was never purified or sanctified again, and the deserted court was a contrast to the other temples we had seen. Two barefooted priests slipped silently across an angle of the cloisters, the colossal stone bull crouched under its grease and garlands, and only the fluttering parrakeets gave any sign or sound of life to the vast inclosure. We gazed in wonderment at the court, the tower, and the exquisite little temple of Subrahmanya, the martial son of Shiva, on whose steps we met two glib, sightseeing babus, who began at once to upbraid us for the proselytizing work of the missionaries. The one with the largest Vishnu mark on his brow had graduated as a civil engineer at Calcutta University, but the exact sciences had not taught him to disbelieve in greasy images, or opened his eyes to any absurdities in his creed, and his torrent of words came like the flow of a phonograph. "Why do you come here to destroy our religion?" he pattered. I denied the charge. "Why do you wish us to give up our gods for your gods?" I denied the plural, and after the twittering parrakeet had followed us awhile, we left him shouting the rest of his set speech to the empty court.

It was a rest to find one heathen temple deserted, to be spared the oily Brahman guide, and to trace in peace the details of this most beautiful of Dravidian temples, the purest example of that style. The great vimana, or pagoda, thirteen stories in height, mounts like the gopuras of Madura, course upon course, carved over with figures and ornaments, two hundred feet to the ball at the peak—a granite ​mass weighing more than twelve tons, and which could have been placed there only by rolling it up an inclined plane more than a mile in length. In repairing the tower a few centuries ago, the sculptors introduced a face in one floral medallion that was not of any Hindu type. The local prophets said that it wore the features of the people who would conquer India, and it is easily recognized now as an admirable portrait of John Bright. We found Flaxman's beautiful tablet to the memory of Schwartz in the church where the great missionary preached. The church faces a tank where picturesque files of women with brass jars on their heads went up and down four separate flights of terrace steps, each for a special caste.

The elephants, which are kept "for the honor and glory of the palace," now that rajas ride in landaus and automobiles, were swaying uneasily at their posts in the palace courtyard, trumpeting and tossing trunk-loads of leaves and straw on their backs. We were shown the black and white marble durbar hall of the palace, and the library full of illuminated Persian books, and of precious Tamil manuscripts written on strips of palm leaves. When we had wandered through all the inner courts, such a train of guides, lackeys, ushers, keepers, sweepers, porters, and gardeners fawned with extended palms that even Samuel Daniel was dismayed, laid the coins on the flagstones, and walked away from the ensuing scene of combat. We were just in time to see the mahouts scramble to the elephants' necks as a fanfare of trumpets and two scarlet lancers heralded a landau ​holding two pale yellow, heavily jeweled grandchildren of the raja returning from a drive. A bearer with a red umbrella ran after them, the elephants saluted with trunk and foot, and the sad-faced princelings disappeared in the palace.

The railway station was as deserted as the temple court in the late afternoon, and we had the table brought out to the platform and enjoyed tea in the open air. A white tramp, a pure specimen of the genus hobo, the only one of his kind encountered in India, appeared silently with: "You are a European like myself, lady. Please give me a few rupees to get to Tuticorin." David and Daniel came running in alarm, and hastily swept table, books, chairs, and ourselves inside the refreshment-room and banged the doors, and the beery beggar slunk away to the native bazaar. The butler was decorating his white dinner-cloth with interlacing arabesques of black seeds dropped from a funnel, after which he arranged finger-bowls filled with black-eyed marigolds among his traceries and stood off to admire the effect. Again and again we marveled that the Hindu, with his gross stupidities and incompetencies, had yet been able so thoroughly to master the intricacies of an English dinner, the decoration of the table, the procession of the courses, the ceremony and decorum of it all, with little of the incongruity and inequalities, the mixed splendor and shabbiness, that mark everything of the Hindu's own.