THE WEIRD, MULTITUDINOUS, MANY-COLOURED EAST. (T. P.'s Weekly.)

Otago Witness, Issue 2674, 14 June 1905, Page 70

THE WEIRD, MULTITUDINOUS, MANY-COLOURED EAST. (T. P.'s Weekly.)

Sir Frederick Treves does great injustice to that very interesting, and, indeed, r<?-mark-ible book he has jusl prodaccd. He calls it "an account <n a commonplace (our round the world."' The tour was "commonplace" enough, for Sir Frederick went practically over paths tint are flattered by being called beaten ; but the account of the trip ii a ' not in the least commonplace. Indeed, I have been frequently astonished at the extraordinary vividness with whicn Sir Frederick has been able to desciibe the scenes in which he can have spent but afew days, and there are passages which I stand out in my memory above thousands ' of other pages I have read for tdieh power - j ful and lucid description of even the bestknown thing*. Considering that Sir Frederick Treves simply made the trip across tho Eastern world in a few months, which is now made yearly by thousands of his countrymen, it' is amazing- to me thas he is able to give a record which is so rich in observation, in impressive and striking pictures, and in suggestive analysis of often complex problems. My difficulty in dealing with tho work is not to find passages which are suitable for quotation, but to choose out of an embarrassing richness of material. For there ai-o few chapters in the book which, dealing as they do wita trite subjects and sights, do not give one an iinpiession of freshness, of keen penetration, of tho power of presenting a picture that his the vastness often ot a ■panor&jno and the minuteness and accuracy of a photograph. Let me first give some general impression's that the book has given me. The nvi>iu fact that remains in my memory about Asia is the infinite numbers of its teeming populations. India, Avifah nearly 300 millions; China, with its 400 millions; | how small and even petty appear the popu : lations of Europe in comparison with these vast aggregations of humanity. Tho second impression is the sadness of nicest of the people,, and their extreme poveity. Tho old supposition wa* that India was as remarkable for its vast wealth as for its blaming sun. Milton, for instance, talks of ths "wealth of Ornius or of Ind" ; there is no such wealth. It was part of tJio poetic licence, which was due as much to ignorance of political economy as of geography in the days when Milton sang. And tho third general reflection I have to make is that Asia seems to be even more varied than Europe.. Between the sad Indian and the gay and sparkling Burmese what a vast, gulf of difference ; but vaster that between the Chinaman, content in his dreamy and inert Conservatism, which has seen, all the rest of th© world go by, and the Japanese, with his intense and prompt adoption of everything most modern and most European. But above all other impressions, I feel the yawning abyss wnich lies between Western and Eastern modes of thought. Reading the description of a keen and eloquent observer like Sir Frederick Treves, it seems as if tho Asiatic were rather a being of another world than a fellow man on this small planet. I propose in the essay which Sir Frederick Troves's book suggests to take up the' different Asiatic peoples whom he saw in turn, and give something of their characteristics. 11. And first I start, of course, with ttos ; people who must always be most interesting to us among the populations of Asia, the people who are directly under our control, whose lot is &o inextricably lniyecl up with cur own ; I mean, of course-, the people of ludia. I gave in a previous issue a quotation from tho remarkable chapter in whicn Sir Frederick Treves describes the sad, common Indian aian, and it will be remembered that the main point he brought out — indeed, it is the point which strikes every open-eyed visitor to India- — was tho intense sadness of the people. "India,''said Sir Frederick Treves in that passage, "leaves on the mind an impression of poorness and melancholy," and "sadder than the country are the common people. They talk little, they laugh less." And is not I this one of tho most terrible sentences you : have ever read, speaking of a whole people of nearly 300 millions? — "A smile, except or> the face of a child, is uncommon." There is a sentence almost to make one shudder. If one seeks for the cause of this intense melancholy, it is to be found, nob in the religion so much as in tlr economic and social conditions o* the people. Their religion is not the cause of their gloom ; their gloorr is the oa-igin of their j religion. Religion in Asia, as elsewhere, is, in large i.ail, the outcome and expression of the character of the age and the nation which professes it. This is why, in the words oi Sir Frederick Treves, those, poor Indians have changed the bright deities of the Veda — the god of the clear blue sky, and the goddess of the dawn — for leas kindly objects of worship. They | are terrified by demons, or sire haunted by J tho burden of sins which they have com- ! mitted ii< a, previous state of existenc. livery misfortune h a punishment, and j their priests can offer them little comfoit- I other than to warn them to -ivert woise troubles to come by suitable offerings. Their heaven is hard to reach, for even" if the i\aj be straight it is disconsolate and very lons,-. They are fatal Us. "Clip sava, s?ri\" ("What will be. will be!') If the God kills, he kills. There is always the hope of one more meal, and the swee'er hop* 1 that aftar death thsir bodies may be burned and the ashes cast into the motherly Ganges. 111. Let rs see what are the causes that have produced this wretchedness of body ar.d of soul. Th<" j first of the reasons is that India

* "The Otlier Side of the Lantern " by Sir precleiick Tieves. (Cassell and Co., LtdJ

is too thickly populated. Like so many other travelers, Sir Fiederick is appalled by the vast crowds of Indians that everywhere* meet the eye. "The first impiession,"' ho says, "which succeeds the realisation of the strangeness of all things is an impression of teeming life — of th-a unwonted number of living beings, human and animal, who crowd the land.

The count ry would seem to be overrun

by a multitude of men, women, and children, all of about the same degree, a little b?low the most meagre comfort, and a

little above tho nearest reach to staivatioi>. In the towns they hustle one another as they trample along m the dust, so that each narrow street is full to its waits. The driver of a donkey lias to veil himself hoarse to make way for his

beast, and the bullock reaches the lane's end by ploughing his shoulders through tho crowd as through a field of maize. From the tower of any walled city a

many-coloured stream can be seen moving out of each gate across the plain. Tho

streams are made up of brown-faced men trampling away to be lost- on the horizon, trampling *in to be lost in the town. From sunrise to sundown the muffled sound of Hifir steps never ceases, and at night there is no dark alley without tlis sleeping" figure of the homeless man. Beyond the confines of the cities^ the diy road that leads from town to town is

alive with the same -wandering folk.

They are busy in a hundred fields ; they huddle agaii'fct the mud walls of tba villages, and even in the open plain or in

the jungle one will not long m^ss i man's

white turban or a woman's blue hood. One of the terrible things abovt this frightful over-population is, ot course, that when tiny great disaster come* it dies like so many flies. For. as Sir Frederick puts it. "there are some of the great hordes who provided in their lean Indies victims for rh? yearly sacrifice io cholera, famine, and plague." And then there are the ghastly figvr-es: "Plague will slay 20,000 in a we-ok : chole'M will destroy ten times that number in a year, and the famine of on© well-remembered time accounted for five and a-qufirter millions of dead people." But there is an even more terrible fact : "Yet the numbers of th. living seem ever the same." Thero may be, row and then, a freer passage through the bazaars, less colour in the stream from the city gate, less bustle on the highway, but the living column wavers not, for the host that can give up 100,000 on one fell march- can

move as a great host still

I don't know whether my readers are as familiar as I am with that wonderful and haunting passage in Cardinal Newman's story. "Callista," in which he describes a locust plague ; the passage was once quoted among our Cameos But it is curious how like that, passage is, in its description of the myriads of the locust army that sped o-n — in spite of hundreds of thousands left on the way — to this description of the eveisuffering and yet ever-increasing axmy of misery in Incba. And this teeming life of human beings is oompleted by a life quato as teeming of animals. "Animal life seems to swarm everywhere in proportionate degree "' : Vultures lurch on high gates or ruined turrets about the outskirts of the city. Ths grey-headed crow is everywhere — on tho walls, in the alleys, in the temple courts. Always alert and impudent, he pries into everything, watching, wrangling, and thieving with unquenchable energy. The cheery mina birds. . ■

are present in thousands. • Green porrakeets are as commioi^RS rooks in a cutheosral town. Flocks of pigeons, are constantly fluttering over the houses. In the pinched streets of the bazaar there aro nearly as many animals as men. Camels stalk along indifferently as if they were' alone in the desert, donkeys with packs patter on their way in companies of 20, while with them are bullocks draw -

ing carts, cows coming in from the fields, or buffaloes carrying bundles of indefinite garbage. A Brafamin bull will be lying asleep in fiontof a temple. ' Sheep will be dodging in and out of a crowd in search of a living, and to every enipty cart, or tc any convenient awning pole, a calf is likely tc be tied. A rat or two" will now and then run across the little lane ; .while the disreputable snarling parial dog, with the mnrk of the starving rogue upon his brow, will be skulking wherever a shadow will hide

him from tho fate of Cain. . • . Another animal who helps to make up th-s crowd of living things in India is the monkey. He. . . . appears particu-

larly in the haunts of men. . In a street of shops in the native quarter of Agra I had Uie good fortune to see a considerable melee among. . . . thirty baboons, largo and small. . . The fighting took place on the house-tops, among balconies, on &>hop awnings, and in the street. . . . Tli a crowd in the street stood ttill tc gaze at the spectacle, until some buffaloes crawling along unconcerned strolled into then as if they had been invisible. The battle ended as abruptly as it had commenced. Lastly,* th^ra is everywhere the little grey-haired squirrel. . . He is as much at home on the top ot a palace as in the gutter, and apparently only uses the tree as a place of refuge.

V. Such a people as this might be happy in spite of their teeming millions if the economic conditions were good : especially if there were a fertile soif and a good system of land tenure and skilful agriciikuio. 'Thti-i are regions of China which are quite as thickly populated, and which yet aro rtllel by a population prosperous. Iabo« ions, and happy But India seems accuvscd "Melancholy." wiitcs Sir Frederick Treves. "hangs over both the land and tlie people ' The cotnnry m the nisi pl.ii.-o is iwi beautiful. So far a^ it can be seen dur-

h\£ a journey of some few thousand miles, ii ib monotonous, and oit-en dreary. Its boundless exteut is opjnessive, since

for league after league the face of tho land may remain the same. It looks homeless. The villages are piteous clusters of mud walls, daubed around tho sidtsS of a thick pond in the bfre earth. Where the-e should be a village green tlu-ro is a, patch of stained dust covered with rubbish, and peopled by fowls ar.d ■dogs, by naked children and bony cattle. Cultivation is carried on in despairing patches snatched from the wa&te, and the labour of the husbandman seems infinite. Every drop of water for these sorry fieMs has to be drawn from a well in a bucket of cowhide. . . . Tho best patch of green wheat suggests suck a orop as n. lonely man, wrecked on a. desert island, may have produced after many seasons of labour and of grabbing with his hai.ds. India leaves on the mind an impression of poorness and melancholy, 2ven if in certain districts cultivation is luxuriant, a.nd if, after the rains, the country is brilliant with blossoms which no meadow in England can produce. It was in such a land that a gospel like that of Buddha naturally found devotees. Buddha, it must never be forgotten, was an Indian. He was born in Oudh ; and it was in the sight of such .spectacles as those seen many centuries later by an Englishman that this Oriental Solomon — or shall I say Thomas a Kempis?—learnedfirst the gospel of the vanity and tlie sorrow of human things. If anybody he startled by this comparison I make between an Oriental prophet and a great Christian mystic, let him read these words : "Let no man love anything ; loss of the beloved is evil." They sound like Thomas a Kempis ; they are really buddha. VI. Among the other causes which Sir Frederick Treves gives for this brooding gloom of India is caste, and the position of women. Ca&te "keeps the man of low degree from ever rising from the mire, and stamps out from the stoutest heart any impulse of ambition:" Born a sweeper, you shall die a sweeper, your children shall be sweepers, and there shall be ever upon your brow a mark as clear as the mark of Cain, but it shall be made in dirt instead of blood. Such is the form of curse under which mill'ons start forth on the journey of the world in the heyday of life. The position of women is very low in India. They are ' ior the most part abject, and are occupied in all manner of sordid work — grubbing about in the dirt, or crouching before a millstone, or bearing oppressive burden^ on their headftt" All but the youngest of them have managed to eliminate most of the distinctive attractions of their sex. . . . They are bare-footed and bare-legged. . If the grown-up Indian woman cannot look beautiful, she can, at least, look old. . . . He who would see what a human being might look like at the agv, of 200 years should see one of the toothless old women who crouch in the dark doorways in the bazaar. He would find a crooked, grey ghost in rags . . . whose face grows wrinkles which "obliterate the features, and seem to be graven down to the skull. Such a poor soul may be no more than sixty, but Methuselah on his death-bed could not have looked older. VII. There is one final passagt about India which I cannot omit ; though I have to omit many others that I had marked for quotation. It is a description of a road by the mountain side just outside Simla — that station in the hills where the Government of India is carried on for several months every year. At the point, where you see this road you have an unbroken view across miles of hills right "up to the wall of snow-clad peaks which look over into Tibet." And here is what you see: Along the sides of these hills, and not far below then summits, is a horizontal mark — like a high-watei mark — which can be followed for leagues. It turns into every cleft between the many peaks, and winds around every bluff. It is lost to view a score of times, but it emerges again, always keeping to about one level, and, in spite of all obstacles, ever moving patiently towards the east. It is but a faint grey scratch upon the mountain side. It begins- at Simla, and a telescope will show that it ends only where all things end, at the horizon. This old grey line is one of the great primeval highways of the world. It is , a way from Asia into India. It is a road which has taken -pitrt. in the peopling of the earth, in the formation of nations, in the primitive migrations of man. It is a solemn, fate-determin-ing p-ith. which has controlled destiny. Compared with it, a Roman way in Britain is a thing of a year ago, a path in a child's, garden, for men weie toiling along this road before Rome was

built. The track can only compare with the load in an allegoiy, with s,uch a path as Bunvan saw in his dreams. The actual highway is poor enough. It is very nairow, and only men on foot can travel along it. tosether with their donkeys. mule«. and goats. Whoever follow it to the end on horseback must needs rule well and have a trusty beast. li w.is on thi> road that I met the men ■niili the pbnks. They arc hillmen of the poorer sort, who carry planks of sawn wood into Simla. Each beam is from twelve to fourteen foot in length, and two to three make up a load. The men are ill-clad, and the sun and rain have tanned them and their ra<?s to the colour of brown eirt'h Ihnv bear the planks across tlioir bent back«, and the burden is grievous They come from a place some days' journey towards the snow?. They pod along from the dawn to the twilight /They seem crushed down by tlie weight of the beams, and tkeii?

gait is more the gait of a stumbling beast than the walk of a man. They move slowly. Their long black hair is white with dust as it hangs by each side of their bowed-down faces. The sweat among the wrinkles on their brows is hardened into lamentable clay. They walk in single file, and when, the path is narrow they needs must move side-

ways. In one day I met no less than 50 creeping wretches in this inhuman procession. Each dull eye is fixed upon the scuffled road, or upon the plank on the stooping back that" crawls in front. To the beams are strapped their sorry possessions — a cooking pot, sticks for a fire, a water gourd, and a sheep's skin to cover them from the frost at night. If there were but a transverse beam to the plank, each one of these men might be carrying his own cross to a far-off place of crucifixion. . No funeral procession of silent, hooded figures could be more horrible than this. The path is in a solitude among bare and pitiless hills ; the road is as old as the world, and in the weary dust of it many hundreds have dropped and died. There along- it steals this patient line of groaning men, bending under the burden of the planks upon their backs. .Behind them a rose-tinted light is fall•ing upon the .spotless snows, and it needs only the pointing figure of Dante, 'on one of the barren peaks, to complete the picture of a circle in Purgatory. It is with some sense of relief that I leave India behind ; and pass on to one of the many' other countries which Sir Frederick Treves so graphically describes. — T. P.