INDIA'S VARIETY.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVI, Issue 16, 19 January 1905, Page 2

INDIA'S VARIETY.

A TRAVELLER'S IMPRESSIONS.

_ There is the "India of the picture books" (writes Arthur SaWtelL in the "Empire Review")i where the lordly elephant crashes through the primeval forest, where the tiger nightly sallies forth to seek his prey from the village hidden amidst the towering palms and spreading banyans of the jungle, where birds of strange and dazzling plumage fly afar in the golden sunshine, or lie safe in the umbrageous depths of the giant trees, where a timil but all naked people lives the year round in steamy, tropical heat.' There is "India's coral strand," with many of us our first conception of the immemorial East, where the poor heathen stands on a low surf-beaten shore with a background of the cocoanut palms, smoking funeral pyres, and cars of Juggernaut. There is the "gorgeous East," a vague and fascinating image, consisting chiefly of bejewelled Rajahs seated on elephants caparisoned in cloth of gold in the courtyard of some marble palace, from the trellised lattices of which peep the full, dark eyes of Oriental beauties. These are not entirely pictures of fancy even yet. They have their reflex in reality—pale, perliaps, and even tawdry compared with the rich colours with which imagination generously limns them. You may see your tropical jungle in Lower Bengal, and a voyage down the southern coasts wall show you here and there the corul strand, though not with all the accessories of one's youthful fancy; many of the native States still .on occasion make a brave show of Eastern pomp and chivalry.

Of India's many faces, the bar-land of the Punjab, or the desert country between the two rivers, is at first sight one of her least attractive. The train journey, say from Lahore to Multan, is depressing in its ugliness and monotony. For mile upon mile you pass through a country that seems too arid to support anything but scrub and stunted trees, which stretch away unbroken to the horizon. Here and there are small patches of cultivation, where the crops are only kept alive by constant irrigation from wells sunk 00 or 70 feet below the surface. But the fresh green of the growing crops only emphasises the surrounding barrenness. It is a dreary picture, and one wonders how such a country can support villages full of people, cattle, camels, goats, and sheep. Whether they live well or ill .the inhabitants cannot find much joy in life. It seems impossible to associate cheerfulness with life in a land so flat and, sterile. These are the reflections tliaf occur as you speed through the desolate bar country in the mail train. But a few days' closer acquaintance with these deserts causes you to revise your impressions. It is said that the vast and expressionless veldt of South Africa hag a strange fascination for those who know it well, even though they may be native to smiling English valleys. I can easily believe it after having seen the Punjab rukh at close quarters. What seems from the railway carriage window a wilderness of shabby trees and disreputable scrub becomes, after all, a country with certain graces of its own. The still air, the quiet skies, the wealth of sunshine, and the all-pervading silence, seem to be manifestation of a genius loci whose influence is soothing, and yet cheerful. We speak of smiling and frowning landscapes, of Nature rioting in tropical luxuriance or laughing in the well-ordered plenty of cornfields and vineyards. But how do we describe her quieter mood in which we find her in these desert solitudes? No single word seems apt to convey the impression.

There is not much obvious beauty and perhaps little majesty in these sparse and silent forests. Still these qualities are not entirely absent. The seeing eye may discover them in the vastness of the landscape, the clear atmosphere, the brilliant light, and the patient t?ees. The complacent railway traveller may spare his pity for the joyless lives of the children of the rukh. Simple, ignorant, and ugly they are, but when you see them in their own environment you cease to wonder how they can support its plainness and monotony. They know notihing better; still, they might know someiVhing worse; and it would be a nice question to decide which is the happier lot —that of the goat-herd carolling his evening song as he drives his flocks from the forest pastures of the sarban sleepily watching his camels grazing off the iSalvadora and farash shrubs of the rukh, wr the lot of the Lancashire operative 1 , ,who rarely sees a clean sky, or, air that is not smoke-laden, and to w.horn the charm of silence and solitude never comes. I referred just now to the patient trees. No one who has seen the rukh and caught glimpses of its spirit will cavil at the description. Patience is the pervading essence of these desert „Pests. J&ttflfe vfealth tb dbwer np'otv -"Below, a hard and unwilling sdil, where even the earthworm cannot make a living, above, an rainless sky. Yet from this sterile putt, as this kind of soil is called, spring innumerable dwarf trees of a few hardy kinds, while the camelthorn (which the camel will not touch) Hourishes in ragged clumps on every hand. Showers in these parts are events, like snow storms in the'south of France. Children of 6 and 7 years may never have seen rain, and even clouds are noteworthy phenomena. Barren, hot, and waterless, the land is nevertheless not bare, but the vegetation which abounds is of- the poorest and most hardy —not hardy like the sturdy trees of bleak Northern climes, where constant p battle with storm and frost gives them a heroic and defiant air, but with the hardihood of poverty borne without stress and without complaint. Poor as they are, these trees have to support innumerable creatures. Grey partridge, sandgrouse, parrots, and a host of smaller birds find a home in their branches, while rats, squirrels, hares, foxes and jackals burrow amongst their roots. They give shade to herds of wild buck. Camels, goats, and even cattle graze tipon their foliage, and in the end they are felled to provide the chief fuel supply of a province larger than Great Britain.

For all this variety of fauna the trees, stunted, dusty, and unimpcsing, are veritably the staff of life. Here and there in the rukhs occur wide stretches of naked waste, covered perhaps with the debris of ancient brick-kilns, or blighted by some natural cause. Here you have the desolation of desolation. With the cessation of the forest, the birds, the wild buck, the hare* and tlsc jackal are no more; not even a blade of grass or a solitary weed can find sustenance amongst these } sterile mounds or upon these wide flats of putt, scrofulous with white patches of saltpetre. These great gaps in the rukh bring home the fact that the little trees" are the life of the country. Without them the whole bar would be a dead and empty waste. Small and shabby

they may be, boasting no beauty, except when the setting sun bathes their dry foliage in a flood of gold attd amber._ Still the wilderness and the solitary place are made glad by them; ; they heal the leprosy of the soil by absorbing its strong salts, and they give food, shelter and warmth to beasts, birds and men, who without them must flee to more hospitable land.