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The New York Times, July 8, 1888, p.10:CALCUTTA AND ON THE WAY.PLACES THAT RECALL EVENTFUL DAYS OF OLD.THE MIGHTY BANYAN TREE--TRAVEL NOW AND IN THE PAST--WHEN SEEN AT BEST ADVANTAGE. SPENCE'S HOTEL, CALCUTTA, May 18--Our homeward journey has fairly begun at last. We have left Burmah far behind, and in India we have only one more thing to do, viz., to run up into the Eastern Himalaya by train, as Lord Dufferin did a week ago, and see the three highest mountains in the world melt into the cold splendor of the tropical moonlight or kindle into living fire beneath the glory of the tropical sunrise. Meanwhile we are making excursions through all parts of the "City of Palaces" in a carriage kindly furnished to us by our friend the Maharajah of Vizianagram, whose voyage with us from Madras [Chennai] to Calcutta [Kolkata] was described in my letter of Feb. 4. When he came here yesterday afternoon to offer us tickets for the Theatre Royal he certainly looked "every inch a King," and presented a very edifying contrast to the crouching Bengalis around the hotel door, although he wore only the plain white native dress in which we had first seen him on the Madras steamer, and displayed no jewelry of any kind. Calcutta cannot fairly be classed among those places which attract one at first sight. The Hooghly River, upon which it stands, might more justly be called the Ugly River, and the city itself is merely a big, showy, flat, dusty, thoroughly modern town, which, being neither so ancient nor so conveniently situated as its two great rivals, Madras and Bombay, might well seem to have become the metropolis of India by mistake. But if there is not much romance in its outward appearance, there is more than enough in the associations connected with it. Not ten minutes walk from this hotel in which I write lies beneath the shadow of the shining dome and jaunty pink columns of the new Post Office that fatal spot where 123 English prisoners died of suffocation in one night, cursing with their last breath the savage despot whose cruelty has handed down to remotest ages the terrible name of the Black Hole of Calcutta. In the very centre of the bustling and populous business quarter once stood, if native tradition may be trusted, the gloomy temple of the demon who presides over secret murder, whence the future capital took its name of "Kali Kuttah," (Kali's shrine.) Some local antiquary might even now point out the spot where, early one fine morning, a covered litter was seen passing which contained Sir Philip Francis (the supposed author of "The Letters of Junius,") who was returning with a bullet through his body from an interview with the Governor-General. His misfortune, however, was his country's salvation, for had that famous duel resulted in the fall of the Governor-General himself, (a pale-faced little man whose name was Warren Hastings,) that of England's Eastern empire would probably have followed it forthwith. Just below the city, where the brown slimy stream of the Hooghly widens into the beautiful bend of Garden Reach, Lord Clive, standing on the deck of a homeward-bound Indiaman more than a century ago, looked his last with those stern gray eyes of his upon the great empire which he had created, and turned his face homeward for the last time, to die by his own hand in the height of his greatness, amid the taunts and curses of the men whose honor he had saved and whose dominions he had enlarged. Near the same spot, not many years ago, ended in even deeper and more shameful downfall another life which had for a moment seemed destined to become almost equally memorable. Below Fort William on the left bank of the Hooghly, where the broad banner-like leaves of the palm groves stand massed together like an army in battle array, there rises high above the clustering tree tops a huge, flat-roofed, many-windowed building, fantastically ornamented, and surrounded by a massive white battlemented wall. During the years that immediately followed the great Sepoy mutiny of 1857, this building was at once the palace and the prison of the nominal leader of that tremendous outburst, the miserable old debauched idiot with whom ended the terrible race of Timour, and from whose palsied hand dropped at once and forever the sceptre of the Kings of Oude. By a strange and terrible retribution, the appointed jailer of this man in whose name the worst horrors of the great rebellions were perpetrated was one of the most famous of those whom it had marked for its victims -- Mowbray Thomson of Cawnpore, one of the four survivors of the massacre, whose bronzed and bearded visage, as I saw it years later in a quiet little French seaport, still wore that indescribable look wherewith death stamps those who have beheld him face to face in his worst form. It must be owned, however, that Calcutta is seen to the least advantage by those who, like ourselves, have just returned from Burmah, where the wonderful mingling of bright colors in the native dress, whether male or female, makes the most ordinary street scene as brilliant and striking as an operatic tableau. This splendid variety is wholly wanting in lower Bengal, where the most indulgent spectator must soon grow weary of the unchanging white of cap, dress, or turban, more especially when (as often happens) the "spotless robe of the picturesque Oriental" has become so grimed with soot and dust as to look very much like a collier's tablecloth. Nor does the panorama through which you come up to Calcutta from the sea do much to atone for the great city's own intrinsic shortcomings. Like most great rivers, the Ganges in its dotage is a miserable sight when, instead of rolling on as heretofore in one giant stream, deep and swift and mighty, it frets its glorious life away in a thousand puny and pitiable struggles. The transformation of the rushing Rhine into the creeping Vaal, or the noble Niger into the seven muddy ditches of the Delta, is not a more deplorable spectacle than the degeneration of this grand Asiatic river, which begins by leaping down like a flash of heaven's lightning from the unknown solitudes of the Himalaya, only to end at last as a shallow, slimy gutter amid the swamps of lower Bengal. Even West Africa in its sternest mood can produce nothing more dreary and hideous than these low, flat mudbanks bristling with dark, leathery leaves, these endless marshes, whose rank, unwholesome green betrays the unfathomable depths of foul oozy mire below, and these matted thickets, whose black, snaky tangle of intertwined boughs seems knotted into one horrid, unending coil. These are the famous "Sunderbunds," which are to Bengal what the great Lincolnshire fens are to England, the marshes of Minsk to Russia, or the Bog of Allen and its sister morasses to Ireland. But in this strange amphibious region, where the water has mixed itself up with the land, the land has retaliated by intruding upon the domain of the water. Yonder, where the discolored stream and the swirling eddies mark the whereabouts of the formidable "James and Mary Shoal," stand gauntly up out of the thick brown stream the topmasts of a sunken vessel--the sole remaining trace of the British India steamer Arcot. Out of the same spot--a fatal one indeed for Anglo-Indian packets--our own steamer, the Almora, went aground two months ago, only a few days after we had landed from her in Ceylon. Even in these dismal wilds, however, there are not a few traces of man's presence, which grow more and more frequent as we ascend the stream. Every here and there, through a narrow gap in the great wall of clustering leaves, we catch a momentary glimpse of a tiny thatched hut, with two or three queer little brown "pickaninnies" grouped around its low doorway, half a dozen meagre fowl strolling listlessly over the clearing in front of it, and a small green square of rice plantation in the background. As we advance these patches of civilization become thicker and thicker, showy houses of stone or brick are seen peeping through the trees--a telegraph station makes its appearance--the whistle of an unseen train is heard behind the bamboo thickets--several bullock carts are seen plodding along in a well-made road which runs parallel with the river, and at length the vanguard of Calcutta itself comes in sight, in the form of the tall smoky chimneys and big red brick factories of Budge-Budge, a place as busy in its way and very nearly as ugly (though that is a bold word) as any manufacturing town in England. These mills and factories appear to be a leading characteristic of the outskirts of the so-called "City of Palaces," and when one's first sight of the great town is taken at daybreak through a judicious mixture of river mist and factory smoke, it is almost as hideous as Liverpool itself. But the picture wears a widely different aspect when the cloudless noonday sunshine lights up the dark glossy foliage of the Botanical Gardens on the Howrah side of the river and gilds the white battlements and carved pinnacles of the King of Oude's palace on the opposite shore. Very green and beautiful in the dazzling tropical sunlight, and much more like a toy fortress than one which has witnessed the bloodiest scenes of war, appear the smooth sloping earthworks of Fort William, which represented Calcutta itself in the early days of England's presence in Bengal, for at that time no "Ingrez" could venture to show his face beyond the limits of their circuit without the risk of being murdered. And then there begin to tower above the mass of buildings the stately dome which covers the new Post Office and the vast many-windowed frontage of the National Bank. The latter, according to Hindu tradition, stands upon the very spot where in ancient days rose the grim shrine of the goddess of smallpox, a fact which may possibly have suggested the tremendous sarcasm wherewith Burke shattered the exulting appeal of Warren Hastings partisans to the reported erection of a temple in his honor by the Hindus of Bengal: "I know that the natives of India, while worshipping some gods from love, worship others from fear. I know that they erect temples not only to the beneficent deities of light and plenty, but also to the demons who preside over smallpox and murder; nor do I at all dispute the claim of Mr. Hastings to be admitted into such a Pantheon." But in those days Calcutta was, in the eyes of every Englishman, more remote than Siberia or New-Guinea is now, and it was seldom indeed that any ordinary Anglo-Indian came home more than once or twice in a lifetime. Clive's first voyage to Madras gave him leisure to spend several months on the coast of Brazil and to become tolerably fluent in Portuguese. Warren Hastings second voyage to Calcutta afforded him ample time to fall in love with another man's wife and to make arrangements for purchasing her from her complaisant husband, which were afterward carried out to the letter. Even Lord Macaulay, as late as 1834, had time enough on his way out to India to read "among many other books," 70 volumes of Voltaire. But now the age of hurry has superseded the age of jog trot, and all such things have passed away forever. In our time one goes from London to Bombay in 23 days, and from Bombay to Calcutta in 63 hours. In the days of our grandfathers the one journey occupied at least six months, and the other two. As soon as the hot season which is now upon us makes itself felt in earnest, "all Calcutta" (i. e., the handful of European residents inhabiting one corner of it) goes off to the hills as we are about to do ourselves, leaving nobody in town except the 500,000 natives who form the remainder of its population. But when the great migration is only just beginning, an evening drive down "Mall" along the river bank (which is to Calcutta what Rotten Row is to London, or the "Drive" in Central Park to New-York) will show you every detail of the lifelike picture drawn by a recent author:
But the great "sight" of Calcutta is unquestionably its splendid Botanical Garden, on the further shore of the Hooghly, and the giant bunyan tree which stands in the midst of its palms and bamboos like a king amid his courtiers. It is true that the five-mile drive thither across the Canning Bridge and through the endless bazaars of Howrah (the Brooklyn of Calcutta) is anything but an easy enterprise to achieve satisfactorily. If you start in the morning the whole journey there and back is one long martyrdom to a heat and dust and glare which only those who have been in India can fully appreciate. If you start in the evening you arrive just in time to see the whole garden vanish from your eyes into the deepening darkness of night, and have to console yourself with the time-honored joke, "There was nothing to be seen, and I saw it thoroughly." The latter result attended the first effort which we ourselves made to reach the reknowned banyan, and the bazaar happening to be unusually full that night, our homeward drive through it in the dark, with an accompaniment of shouting and whip-cracking worthy of a royal "progress," vividly recalled Sir George Trevelyan's famous definition of "hi!" as "a monosyllable used by cabmen and omnibus drivers preparatory to running over deaf people." But such a spectacle as the monster tree of Calcutta is well worth a double journey, and our second attempt was more fortunate then our first. Starting from our hotel at 4 P. M., we reached the garden a little before 5, and had already driven more than half way across it when our "gharri" (carriage) halted suddenly at the entrance of a long, straight avenue flanked by two ranges of lofty trees, and our Bengali driver, pointing to the far end of it with his lean, brown forefinger, said impressively, "Dekho burra gach wahan hai" (Look, there is the big tree.) We followed the pointing finger with our eyes, but saw nothing except a thick grove of small trees, in which the path seemed to lose itself, and this was all we could make out till we got within about 100 yards of it. Then, to our amazement, we found that the supposed grove was all one giant tree, and that its countless trunks were nothing more than the shoots which it had sent down into the earth from each of its mighty boughs, to take root there and spring up again until the whole plantation was covered. After walking many yards beneath one huge bough, and noting that this giant was only one among scores--some of which, although so vast and ponderous as to need supports of solid brickwork, seem mere twigs compared with the enormous mass of the parent stem--I began to have a clearer idea of the real size of this vegetable Goliath than I ever could have gained from the inscription attached to one of its largest branches stating that the girth of its trunk is 42 feet, that the circumference of its crown is 850, and that is has sent down into the earth 252 "aerial roots." The same inscription tells you that the tree is more than 100 years old. When it was first planted Warren Hastings was turning his face homeward to figure in the greatest political trial which England had seen since Cromwell and his grim comrades sat in judgement upon "the man Charles Stuart." Two-thirds of India and the whole of Burmah were still independent of the British crown. Frederick the Great was still reigning in Berlin. The French Revolution lay hid in the unknown future, and the battle of American independence, though nobly fought, was not yet won. And it may be that when not one stone of Calcutta shall remain upon another, and when tigers shall prowl and vultures shriek over the ruins of the Viceroy's palace, the giant tree will still appear amid a vast solitude, those mighty boughs that once shaded the bravest men and fairest women of India a silent and solitary mourner at the tomb of that great empire whose childhood was coeval with its own. DAVID KER.
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