Through India and Burmah With Pen and Brush
9781465682307
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Down came the rain, sudden, heavy and terrible, seeming to quell even the sea's rage and whelming those defenceless hundreds of dark-skinned voyagers in new and more dreadful misery. Terrors were upon them, and in abject wretchedness and hopeless struggle men, women and children spread every strip of their belongings over their bodies and even used for shelter the very mats upon which they had been lying. What trouble a Hindoo will take to keep his body from the rain! Extremely cleanly and fond of unlimited ablutions he yet detests nothing so much as a wetting from the sky, and now, wholly at the mercy of the elements, do what they would, no human ingenuity availed to keep these wretched people dry. It was the season of the rice harvest, when South India coolies swarm over to Burmah much as the peasantry of Mayo and Connemara used to crowd to England every summer. If anybody is really anxious to remember that there are paddy fields in Burmah he should cross the Bay of Bengal in December. Somebody said that our ship was an unlucky one—that it ran down the Mecca on her last trip and killed her third officer; but we got through safely enough, though that crossing was one of the most disagreeable as well as the most weird I ever made—disagreeable because of the bad weather, and weird because of the passengers. The deck and the lower deck were tanks of live humanity, and when it began to get rough, as it did the morning after we left Madras, catching the end of a strayed cyclone, it was worse than a Chinese puzzle to cross from the saloon to the spar deck, and ten chances to one that even if you did manage to avoid stepping on a body you slipped and shot into seven sick Hindoo ladies and a family of children. There were six first-class passengers, all Europeans, and 1700 deck passengers, all Asiatics, and the latter paid twelve rupees each for the four days' passage, bringing with them their own food.
