Читать книгу What the Traveller Saw - Eric Newby - Страница 11

AT TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon of 6 December 1963, my forty-fourth birthday, Wanda and I set off to travel down the Ganges by boat from Hardwar, one of the most venerated Hindu bathing places, which lies at the feet of the Siwalik Hills. Our destination was the Bay of Bengal, 1200 miles away. The vessel was a five-oared rowing boat and it looked very much like an oversize Thames skiff – it had probably been built by some British official in a moment of nostalgia for the Thames at Henley. Now it was the property of the Executive Engineer of the Irrigation Works on the Ganges Canal, who was an Indian. He had only lent it to us, and then with extreme reluctance, because we had shown him a letter, signed by Mr Nehru, ordering all and sundry to help us on our way down the river.

The boat was twenty-five feet long, had a five-foot beam, was made of mild steel put together with rivets and needed thirty-two people to carry it. This was the number of barefooted men I had paid to carry it across a mile of almost red-hot shingle to the Ganges from the Ganges Canal.

With us was a rather too-high-caste companion for such a journey, procured for us by the personal intervention of Indira Gandhi, acting on behalf of her father, who warned us that he wouldn’t stay the course – he didn’t – and, for this first part of the journey, three boatmen.

Among the things we had with us was a canvas bag full of books, a Janata oil stove, hurricane lamps, 8 kilos of rice, a small sack of chilli powder, flour, vegetables, a teapot, a kettle, a number of lathis (weighted bamboo poles) for hitting dacoits – robbers – on the nut, and military maps with which we had been supplied by the Director General of Ordnance of the Indian Army, who had also obligingly allowed us to acquire some bottles of Indian Army rum.

Two hundred yards below the bridge at Chandi Ghat from which we set off, the boat went aground on great, slimy stones the size and shape of cannon balls, which we had to lift to make a passage for it. Difficult to describe the emotions we felt aground on a 1200-mile boat journey within sight of our point of departure.

What makes the Ganges a great river, and in this sense the greatest of all rivers, is that for more than 450 million Hindus, and for countless others dispersed throughout the world, it is the most holy and most venerated river on earth. To each one of them it is Ganga Mai