Packs of big monkeys and homeless dogs--pariah dogs, they are called--stand on the roads in the suburbs until a horse almost steps on them. They are waiting for the Jains to come with food. The pariah dog is generally mangy, scaly, starved, and half mad when he is not actually snapping. Though a menace to human life, if a European were to kill one it might lead to an uprising in India. The mortality from rabies is appalling.
Lizards were seen sliding about the walls, crickets were piping from the corners, and frogs were hopping about the floor of the room I occupied in Ahmedabad. No one of this sect will kill a lizard, as he is a house scavenger--puts in all his time catching flies and mosquitoes. The lizard is evidently not a Jain.
A 24-hour ride was ahead of us before Agra could be reached. The country passed through was as level as a table, with patches of rice growing on each side of the railway track. Now and again an irrigation trench is seen, and trees in cultivated fields, while often separated by considerable space, give the landscape a timbered appearance. Four poles, from eight to ten feet above the ground, may be seen standing in fields where grain is growing, on top of which a shaky platform has been built. An Indian is assigned to this "look-out," to protect the growing and ripening crops from invasions of destructive fowl and animals. Rice will grow only in from three to twelve inches of water. If the monsoons be limited, there will not be enough water to grow the rice, and the dreaded famine results. Though the monsoons had been good, the people looked half starved; so we have no desire to travel through India in a famine year. The Indian plough is perhaps an improvement on what was in use 5,000 years ago, as it has a pointed iron bolt in a stick of wood, but in the murky past the point of the plough might have been wood. Oxen, with big humps on their shoulders, draw the stick and bolt, and two Indians--generally a woman and a man--seem to be required to work the device. A long pole sticking in the air, with half a dozen to a dozen Indians around--each woman with a baby astraddle her hip--is scaled by two or three men, a cloth no larger than a pocket handkerchief about their loins, the top of the pole bending to the ground as the men approach the end of it. A sort of bucket--generally of earthenware, but sometimes an American five-gallon tin oil can--is seen appearing on the surface with water dripping from it. This is the windmill of India. When the monsoons fail them, this is their only hope of getting water from the wells to nourish the rice "paddies," and it is borne on the head for long distances for the purpose of maintaining life.