Following the Equator by Mark Twain (audio ebook reader .TXT) 📕

the throne from possible
plots;

5. For not betraying the subject secretly, for a bribe, into the
hands of bands of professional Thugs, to be murdered and robbed in
the prince's back lot.

Those were rather common princely industries in the old times, but they and some others of a harsh sort ceased long ago under English rule. Better industries have taken their place, as this Address from the Jain community will show:

"Your Highness,We the undersigned members of the Jain community of
Bombay have the pleasure to approach your Highness with the
expression of our heartfelt congratulations on the recent conference
on your Highness of the Knighthood of the Most Exalted Order of the
Star of India. Ten years ago we had the pleasure and privilege of
welcoming your Highness to this city under circumstances which have
made a memorable epoch in the history of your State, for had it not
been for a generous and reasonable spirit that your Highness
displayed in the negotiations between the Palitana Durbar and the
Jain community, the conciliatory spirit that animated our people
could not have borne fruit. That was the first step in your
Highness's administration, and it fitly elicited the praise of the
Jain community, and of the Bombay Government. A decade of your
Highness's administration, combined with the abilities, training,
and acquirements that your Highness brought to bear upon it, has
justly earned for your Highness the unique and honourable
distinctionthe Knighthood of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of
India, which we understand your Highness is the first to enjoy among
Chiefs of your, Highness's rank and standing. And we assure your
Highness that for this mark of honour that has been conferred on you
by Her Most Gracious Majesty, the Queen-Empress, we feel no less
proud than your Highness. Establishment of commercial factories,
schools, hospitals, etc., by your Highness in your State has marked
your Highness's career during these ten years, and we trust that
your Highness will be spared to rule over your people with wisdom
and foresight, and foster the many reforms that your Highness has
been pleased to introduce in your State. We again offer your
Highness our warmest felicitations for the honour that has been
conferred on you. We beg to remain your Highness's obedient
servants."

Factories, schools, hospitals, reforms. The prince propagates that kind of things in the modern times, and gets knighthood and guns for it.

After the address the prince responded with snap and brevity; spoke a moment with half a dozen guests in English, and with an official or two in a native tongue; then the garlands were distributed as usual, and the function ended.


CHAPTER XLII.

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his othershis last breath.
Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Toward midnight, that night, there was another function. This was a Hindoo weddingno, I think it was a betrothal ceremony. Always before, we had driven through streets that were multitudinous and tumultuous with picturesque native life, but now there was nothing of that. We seemed to move through a city of the dead. There was hardly a suggestion of life in those still and vacant streets. Even the crows were silent. But everywhere on the ground lay sleeping natives-hundreds and hundreds. They lay stretched at full length and tightly wrapped in blankets, beads and all. Their attitude and their rigidity counterfeited death. The plague was not in Bombay then, but it is devastating the city now. The shops are deserted, now, half of the people have fled, and of the remainder the smitten perish by shoals every day. No doubt the city looks now in the daytime as it looked then at night. When we had pierced deep into the native quarter and were threading its narrow dim lanes, we had to go carefully, for men were stretched asleep all about and there was hardly room to drive between them. And every now and then a swarm of rats would scamper across past the horses' feet in the vague lightthe forbears of the rats that are carrying the plague from house to house in Bombay now. The shops were but sheds, little booths open to the street; and the goods had been removed, and on the counters families were sleeping, usually with an oil lamp present. Recurrent dead watches, it looked like.

But at last we turned a corner and saw a great glare of light ahead. It was the home of the bride, wrapped in a perfect conflagration of illuminations,mainly gas-work designs, gotten up specially for the occasion. Within was abundance of brilliancyflames, costumes, colors, decorations, mirrorsit was another Aladdin show.

The bride was a trim and comely little thing of twelve years, dressed as we would dress a boy, though more expensively than we should do it, of course. She moved about very much at her ease, and stopped and talked with the guests and allowed her wedding jewelry to be examined. It was very fine. Particularly a rope of great diamonds, a lovely thing to look at and handle. It had a great emerald hanging to it.

The bridegroom was not present. He was having betrothal festivities of his own at his father's house. As I understood it, he and the bride were to entertain company every night and nearly all night for a week or more, then get married, if alive. Both of the children were a little elderly, as brides and grooms go, in Indiatwelve; they ought to have been married a year or two sooner; still to a stranger twelve seems quite young enough.

A while after midnight a couple of celebrated and high-priced nautch-girls appeared in the gorgeous place, and danced and sang. With them were men who played upon strange instruments which made uncanny noises of a sort to make one's flesh creep. One of these instruments was a pipe, and to its music the girls went through a performance which represented snake charming. It seemed a doubtful sort of music to charm anything with, but a native gentleman assured me that snakes like it and will come out of their holes and listen to it with every evidence of refreshment And gratitude. He said that at an entertainment in his grounds once, the pipe brought out half a dozen snakes, and the music had to be stopped before they would be persuaded to go. Nobody wanted their company, for they were bold, familiar, and dangerous; but no one would kill them, of course, for it is sinful for a Hindoo to kill any kind of a creature.

We withdrew from the festivities at two in the morning. Another picture, thenbut it has lodged itself in my memory rather as a stage-scene than as a reality. It is of a porch and short flight of steps crowded with dark faces and ghostly-white draperies flooded with the strong glare from the dazzling concentration of illuminations; and midway of the steps one conspicuous figure for accenta turbaned giant, with a name according to his size: Rao Bahadur Baskirao Balinkanje Pitale, Vakeel to his Highness the Gaikwar of Baroda. Without him the picture would not have been complete; and if his name had been merely Smith, he wouldn't have answered. Close at hand on house-fronts on both sides of the narrow street were illuminations of a kind commonly employed by the natives scores of glass tumblers (containing tapers) fastened a few in inches apart all over great latticed frames, forming starry constellations which showed out vividly against their black back grounds. As we drew away into the distance down the dim lanes the illuminations gathered together into a single mass, and glowed out of the enveloping darkness like a sun.

Then again the deep silence, the skurrying rats, the dim forms stretched every-where on the ground; and on either hand those open booths counterfeiting sepulchres, with counterfeit corpses sleeping motionless in the flicker of the counterfeit death lamps. And now, a year later, when I read the cablegrams I seem to be reading of what I myself partly sawsaw before it happenedin a prophetic dream, as it were. One cablegram says, "Business in the native town is about suspended. Except the wailing and the tramp of the funerals. There is but little life or movement. The closed shops exceed in number those that remain open." Another says that 325,000 of the people have fled the city and are carrying the plague to the country. Three days later comes the news, "The population is reduced by half." The refugees have carried the disease to Karachi; "220 cases, 214 deaths." A day or two later, "52 fresh cases, all of which proved fatal."

The plague carries with it a terror which no other disease can excite; for of all diseases known to men it is the deadliestby far the deadliest. "Fifty-two fresh casesall fatal." It is the Black Death alone that slays like that. We can all imagine, after a fashion, the desolation of a plague-stricken city, and the stupor of stillness broken at intervals by distant bursts of wailing, marking the passing of funerals, here and there and yonder, but I suppose it is not possible for us to realize to ourselves the nightmare of dread and fear that possesses the living who are present in such a place and cannot get away. That half million fled from Bombay in a wild panic suggests to us something of what they were feeling, but perhaps not even they could realize what the half million were feeling whom they left stranded behind to face the stalking horror without chance of escape. Kinglake was in Cairo many years ago during an epidemic of the Black Death, and he has imagined the terrors that creep into a man's heart at such a time and follow him until they themselves breed the fatal sign in the armpit, and then the delirium with confused images, and home-dreams, and reeling billiard-tables, and then the sudden blank of death:

"To the contagionist, filled as he is with the dread of final
causes, having no faith in destiny, nor in the fixed will of God,
and with none of the devil-may-care indifference which might stand