If there is no road, as happens very often, you must be content with the old-fashioned palanquin or doolie, a species of coffin with doors at the sides, in which you are carried on men’s shoulders at an average rate of three miles per hour, the bearers being changed every ten miles. When I first landed in India, I travelled from Calcutta to Allahabad, a distance of 500 miles, in this way, taking twelve days on the road; the journey being now accomplished by rail in about twenty hours.
After your night’s journey, in which you have probably accomplished some 35 miles, you are glad to espy a solitary house—a dâk-bungalow, as it is termed—in which you can get temporary rest and refreshment; so the doolie is deposited in the verandah; the hot and dusty traveller, who has hardly had a wink of sleep all night, emerges from the inside of the coffin, and summons the native servant, who in white robes and with a venerable grey beard, might sit for a portrait of any of the Old Testament patriarchs. Then ensues something like the following dialogue, which I must translate from the Hindustani, in which it is spoken:—“What can I have for breakfast?” say you.—“Your lordship can have everything.”—“Very well, then, bring me a beef-steak.”—“Beefy-e-steak! nourisher of the poor! how can your slave get any?”—“Well, then, a mutton chop.”—“Mutton-e-chāp! cherisher of the humble! there are none left.”—“Well, what is there?”—“Perhaps, O great king, there may be a fowl.”—“Then get it ready.” Exit the servant, and in another minute you hear a violent _clucking_ in the back-yard, and see the man in hot chase of a venerable cock, who evinces the strongest disinclination to have his few remaining days curtailed to satisfy your unholy hunger. But it is all of no use—he is captured; his head is turned towards Mecca, and the Mahomedan cook, muttering “Bismillah,” “in the name of God the compassionate and merciful,” cuts the fowl’s throat, and in twenty minutes more it is smoking on your table.
And now my watch warns me that I have tried your patience long enough. I have endeavoured to give you some idea of the nature of Anglo-Indian life, and of that country which has so often been described as the brightest jewel in the British Crown. But, after all, the only way to know much of a country is to see it; and I often wonder that more Englishmen do not pay a flying visit to India now that it is so accessible. Many certainly do go there now-a-days for a short time, and are, I am sure, well rewarded for their pains; but they are very, very few in proportion to those who might go, if they only knew how to set about it, and perhaps I cannot conclude my lecture better than by taking you all a journey there on paper, just as if I were Mr. Cook, and you were a party of tourists.