Golfing Round the World
Chapter V Pressing
In company with a large party of my fellow travellers I went by special train to Delhi and Agra to see the sites - an amazing experience for the whole trip was carried out on the American plan, that it to say continuous hustle from start to finish. The perfection of the arrangements made for our transport called for nothing but admiration, but otherwise this method of sight seeing partakes too much of the nature of fattening the goose to receive my personal recommendation.
For instance, after sixty hours of the bumpiest railway journey it has ever been my lot to endure, during which we were alternately grilled by day and chilled by night, we arrived at Delhi at a tolerably early hour of the morning. We were immediately transferred to a fleet of waiting cars. These literally tore us at a breakneck speed to a spot about four miles out of Delhi where there was a series of massive ruins which we were ordered to inspect. I believe guides were told off to explain their significance, but as for the most part these were incomprehensible and incoherent, no definite impression save that of garrulity was left on my mind. After some twenty minutes inspection under a scorching Indian morning sun, we were hurled some five miles further on to somebody's tomb - a truly imposing affair, situated in a park about half a mile square. We were ordered to see this and did so. Another burst of six miles or so brought us to the really interesting group of ruins in which the tower called Kut ub Minar is situated.
I will not deny that I was genuinely interested for I had taken the precaution to read up a little of the history of Delhi and here I found the concrete illustrations of my studies.
Thence at a most important speed we were transported through New Delhi, a colossal garden city with gigantic palaces governmental and viceregal, some still in the course of erection, past the exceedingly quaint observatory with the immense astronomical instruments, made of stone, to a hotel where we lunched and at the same time afforded an interesting spectacle to the residents of Delhi who somehow seemed to know we were coming. Lunch over, we rested amid a throng of curio sellers, vendors of travellers joys, and other parasitical hangers on. The afternoon was more or less a repetition of the morning.
While strolling round Delhi Fort, a profoundly interesting place, deserving of many repeated hours of inspection, I saw three exceedingly diminutive but exceedingly fair Englishwomen. They were scantily, albeit becomingly dressed in pink. I suppose there was an ayah somewhere in the offing, but apparently they were unchaperoned. Another delightful instance of the power of the British Raj. For securedness of poise, complete self possession, and happy inconsequence, these three, whose combined ages might have totalled fourteen summers, would be hard to beat.
Some fifteen minutes of this hectic afternoon were devoted to an imposing mosque - I have a faint recollection of white and brown striped domes. Thereafter we were hurled at a speed of about fort five miles per hour from end to end of the 'Ridge' - just to say we had been - and finally we drew up at a sort of ?taree? show where snake charmers and rope tricksters displayed their skill while we consumed tea and strawberries and cream - a great day, but not, on your life, ever to be repeated.
Next morning, apparently our special had reached Agra and most reluctantly I tumbled out of my hard and uncomfortable bunk to find I was the sole occupant of the train. The whole party had dashed off at 6.30 a.m. to 'do' Agra. Did I worry? No Sir. However as there was a day to spend I got a leisurely move on, and emerging from my carriage I encountered our travelling servant. I was predisposed to like this fellow on account of his name. "I am Januk, I look after you". As is well known 'Jannock' is a Lancashire word meaning genuine or straightforward and our Januk certainly justified his name.
He seemed in no way surprised to see me late, last, and lonely as I was. He announced his intention of coming with me, and there and then he constituted himself my personal attendant. I said that to me that matter was equal. Let him come by all means if he wished. He proved to be a most unobtrusive and efficient guide, and saw to it that I was supremely comfortable at every point of a day of hot and dusty sightseeing.
Obviously one does not go all the way to Agra to miss seeing the Taj Mahal, though after the experiences of the previous day I was in a mood to miss anything. It would not have been the first time I had missed seeing essential sights. As a very small boy I recollect spending the whole day in the station waiting room, at Braine L'Alleud because it rained incessantly and was therefore too wet to see the Field of Waterloo some half a mile or so distant.
On another occasion I was bicycling through Normandy with a friend, we passed through Bayeux, and we mutually decided that two francs was an excessive price to pay for seeing the Bayeux Tapestry.
One of my travelling companions hailed from Brussels and I was chaffing him on what I considered an excessive enthusiasm for temples and mausoleums. I asked him if he had ever seen the Wiertz collection in Brussels. He said he had never heard of it, and by further interrogation I elicited the fact that he apparently knew none of the well-known sites of the Belgian capital, or those of Antwerp, Ghent or Bruges. Belgium from the viewpoint of the tourist was a sealed book to him, yet he had been in every quarter of the globe, and could argue with keen intelligence and aplomb on the respective merits of Tutankamen's tomb, Pompeian relics, the ruins of Angkor, and Maya remains.
In due course with the aid of a two wheeled covered buggy we arrived at the Taj. Our approach was through a spacious undulating park not dissimilar from that at Richmond, and enclosing a golf links which to the eye was indistinguishable from dozens of similar courses in and around the London suburbs.
While I was admiring the white marble screen, inlaid with semi precious stones, agate, jasper, chalcedony, topaz and jade which surrounds the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal beneath the centre dome of the Taj, Januk who was just behind me naively observed "All imitation that, good ones gone". He was referring to the traditional belief that real emeralds, rubies, and diamonds were in the original scheme of decoration, but had since been looted and replaced with the more common adornment.
Though my personal preference would be for one of our English cathedrals, one must admit that the Taj Mahal is a superbly beautiful achievement, the work of Persian architects, artists, poets, and scribes under the audaciously imaginative genius and initiative of Shah Jehan, greatest of the great moguls. It is said that he was not even content with his white marble wonder of the world, but proposed to erect for himself a similar monument in black, and connect the two with a silver bridge across the Jumna.
But there are other marvels besides the Taj. Akbar, grandfather of Shah Jehan, chose an even more wonderful setting for his tomb. Away on the plain, he built tier upon tier, platform upon platform of exquisite temples to hold his body in the vault, and his tombstone at the top beneath the stars, surrounded by a white marble cloister, with an entrancing view to all points of the distant horizon. This Allah Akbar, who required nothing less than the Koh i Noor to shed eternal light on his shrine. The pedestal where this famous jewel was kept stands at the foot of the stone.
A day or so later we slipped quietly away from Bombay, how quietly the following incident will show. I had come up on deck after dinner and was enjoying the still warm air and the phosphorescence on the water. I stood in a reverie which was suddenly interrupted by a question "Say are those the lights of the Tadje Mahal?" referring of course to the hotel of that name. I patiently explained that the hotel had been left behind some considerable time ago and that the lights were those marking the entrance to the harbour.
"You don't say we are moving." It was a fact that so effortless and so steady were the movements of the "Imperatrice", that frequently it was impossible to tell whether we were moving or not.
I was grateful for the privilege of having had a glimpse of India, but it was inexpressibly good to be back aboard the ship and sailing the tropic seas. I did not envy me one little bit that important party of tourists who were to spend at least ten days doing India, living night and day on the railway and enduring a kaleidoscopic plethora of sights.
My little daughter wrote to me "Dear Daddy, Can you see Mount Everest from Bombay?" I remember I replied in the negative but also assured her that I could see the moon and the stars which were infinitely more distant and far better. After all, the most sublime sights in the world are tropical sunsets which must be seen to be believed. They defy the skill of the greatest artists; their pomp and splendour, grandeur and magnificence are indescribable.
The brilliance of the stars, and the moon especially in those latitudes is intense and here one may be literally and physically moonstruck. I remember that I once narrowly escaped this disaster in the Caribbean Sea. One very hot and steamy night I carried the contents of my bunk out on deck and lay down in the glare the full moon. I was dozing off, when an old sailor warned me to get into the shade. There may have been nothing but an ignorant superstition in his mind, but the fact is that I remember to this day the intensely violent headache apparently induced by a mere half hour's exposure to that dazzling moon.
I have seen on rare occasions lunar rainbows in Scotland and in the North Atlantic, beautiful pale white misty arcs, but in these Southern Seas I was the fortunate witness of a similar phenomenon which portrayed clearly all the colours of the solar rainbow. This intensity of light does not seem be due to a clearer atmosphere, for landscapes are no more clearly defined than they are in the British Isles, and certainly not so vividly distinct and distantly visible as they in some parts of North America. It is possibly an interesting speculation as to the cause of this phenomenon, which again may be capable of the simplest explanation. Anyhow, there it is and there I leave it.
One evening while steaming some fifteen miles parallel to the South West Coast of India, the dark shadow of the mountains being faintly visible, we passed through a fleet of several hundreds of open boats, each manned a crew of three naked natives, and in each boat at least one of these was standing bolt upright. We passed within fifty yards or so of several of them, and in the rapidly growing darkness it must have needed the utmost caution not to hit them.
To all appearances these frail craft - exceeding frail - were mastless, but as there was a perfectly flat calm 'Paddy's Hurricane' in fact, they had probably stowed all their spars and gear at the bottom of the boat. It was a weird and eerie sight, but what made it stranger still was the fact that these little boats had come more than two thousand miles from the Persian Gulf, with their crews of divers to take part in the Pearl fisheries, just about to be opened for that year by the Government of Ceylon. There does not seem to be any doubt about the matter, the fact of their arrival was casually mentioned in a Colombo newspaper which I read a few days later.
Truly this world is very wonderful. We of the West are sufficiently adventurous, but when we cross the Atlantic in a small, but reasonably seaworthy boat someone is sure to make a song about it. In the Orient apparently they do these things on their heads, as it were, in twelve foot dinghies, and without wearing any clothes to speak of, or eating any food worth mentioning. These unquestionably are "They that go down to the sea in ships and do business in great waters."