HINDOO "TELEGRAPHY."

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13742, 6 May 1908, Page 9

HINDOO "TELEGRAPHY."

"What is 'Hindoo telegraphy?'" queried the man at the street corner. His companion shook his head in the negative. "I don't know," he said. If those two men, chatting at the street corner, could have explained what it was they would have cleared up a mystery ■ which has for years baffled the cleverest scientists of the age. The natives of India have no telegraph poles or wires, and neither have they a Morse telegraphic code; yet, even when a hundred or-, moremiles apart, they manage to communicate with each other "with the celerity that the white man does by the aid of the telegraph and cable. Those who anticipated that by rapid marching General Wilcocks would have surprised the Zakka Khels were reckoning without the wonderful power of the Hindoos for secretly and rapidly communicating news over long "distances. Never was this faculty proved more decisively than in the frontier expedition of 1895. The British troops, which were 125 miles from their base, fought and defeated the natives, but, owing to impenetrable mists on the mountains, the English general was unable to heliograph the news of his success until the following day. Yet, shortly after the battle on the tame evening, the officer in charge at the , Lase was informed by natives of the victory. Another instance occurred when Lord Mayo was assassinated by a convict in the'penal settlement on the Andaman Islands. Within an hour or two a Pathan in Simla told his officer that the Viceroy was dead, but it was uoxt day before telegrams arrived authenticating the native's report.