INDIA SEEN FROM THE TRAIN.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 2674, 31 August 1889, Page 6 (Supplement)

INDIA SEEN FROM THE TRAIN.

A " Tkavkllinc Gent," writing to the Civil and Military Gazette, gi'vos ths following impressions derived iu the courso of his rambles in India : — "In a wide waste of sunburnt clay, which a misguided man in one corner, with a wooden bit of plough and no clothes scarcely, was trying to tickle into fertility, I saw a kind of crippled tree. Any one unlucky enough to have such a vegetable in his plantation would have weeded out the eyesore on the spot; but where I saw it, it was the only feature of the landscape except some grinning gashes in the bare earth, that might have held, but had no trace of water. So I looked at the tree an.! saw that its dismal branches—there weie no leaves on the upper half of it—were laden with obscene fruit of fleshy-necked, heavy-wiu-g«cl birds of offal. 'Beneath them as they sat there, shrug-shouldered and untidyfeathered, nodding their evil heads in all directions, lay half of a grey bullock, at which two dogs— a black one and a yellow one—were very busy. Overhead wheeled innumerable kites, crossing and recroesiug like flies in a summer room at home. The glimpse was only momentary as the train went by ; but it has remained with me as the keynote of all I have seen to-day and has prepared me more or less to fall in with the spirit of pessimism that haunts all Anglo-Indians. Yet there were many that should have been more striking. A disjointed procession of red-tented wagons jolting along a water-crack, through a wilderness of wheat, which the waves of wind from our passing train whitened in patches, bringing momentary memories of autumn at Home, wheu the ruddy-armed reaper ►bows like a stalwart merman breast high in a. shimmering sea of corn. But here, see, a dog runs through the crop to keep ahead of the wagons, and scarce dips below his middle. Next came a clump of dark-green trees, which in the distance hart looked like oaks ; but in their shade a herd of shiny-limbed women were collecting dried leaves for fuel, into some ingenious sack-like arrangement of their drapery, each sack of loaves swaying behind like some enormous dress improver, in front of which the thin brawn legs hopped, quaintly bird-like. Hard by a mudliole, which was studded with the upturned snouts of many bathing buffaloes, on a solitary thorn bush weaver birds were building their queer pendulous nests, like worn-out pool baskets from a billiard-room, hung up to dry. A cottage with its tottering roof— of six tiles, three sticks, and a slab of mud—seemed to bend beneath the weight of one large, solitary vegetable marrow (or whatever is its Indian equivalent) which had somehow sprung from a cobweb of withered stalks that straggled all over the wall. Then the train rattled and clanked over a bright-red railway bridge—no doubt a great work of engineering science, but hideous to contemplate, and stomachachey in colour—and down below were fishermen standing like high-water-mark pillars, shining in the sun. Further on, a clump of bamboos again betrayed the presence of man by the wheeling kites and vultures ; for wherever in the East, it appears to me, man makes his home, there waste and filth are always present. I may be wrong. In the near foreground, after a mile or two, we came upon a herd of cattle waiting lo go through the railway gate. They were of many colours and sizes ; but, like all Indian cattle, curiously betrayed their antelope origin by fiddle-shaped markings on the face and backward slopo of the horns. Blood, however, is thicker than water, and here I see the same rule prevails as with cows at home ; the eldest must go through first. See how that old .speckled wreck of an animal prods off all her juniors that attempt to yet ahead of her. The souls of extinct Spanish grandees ought to inhabit cows. In no other species of animal are the absurdities of etiquette so pronounced. It is the old cow's right to go through that gatu first. Nothing short of a broken horn will make her abandon it ; and little peace of mind will there be for any young minx of a hpifer who, puffed up perchance with digestive pride of a melon skin picked up on the road, ventures to go through before her duennaship. The rules of vaccine etiquette are easily learnt and a horn in the stomach is a wonderful incentive to memory. All along the line, for miles after this, runs a hedge of cactus-like green, yel-low-lipped bottle-brushes—a scrubbery in fact—stuck upright in rows ; with here and there, close uuder the window, a quaint sentry-box of creepers, studded with pale flowers, from which a maniac issues half clothed to wave a flag. Here ■and there, too, is a leafless, tangled thicket, bursting into flowers of washy pink ; or a stout shrub blazinsr with the yellow that I have only seen elsewhere upon the English furze —which Linnnnis fell upon his knees to thank Heaven that he had seen. A lucky man was Linmeus ; for most, men, kneeling near furze bushes, would get some half dozen needles into their shins, and perhaps be lamed for life; but, being a botanist, he probably knew enough of the habits of furze to put his hat on the ground first, and kneel on that. As the day'gets hotter the yellower the flowers seem to become, and the thicker the clouds of coppery butterflies that flutter from them iu the swirl of the pissing train, like a heap of dead leaves scattered by the wind in autumn. And over it all the Indian glare, like waves of dancing gnats, flickered and flowed ; and higii in tlic dazzling blue the level\vini»<:(l vulture watched man working behind to find him good. Then the guard incontinently arrived at my carriage door to tell mu that this was the place where I had ordered tiffin.