AJMERE
To see things—really to see them—one must use the legs as well as the eyes. Even a vicarious muscular effort quickens the vision; and a country that is looked at from horseback or a carriage, is seen almost as completely and intimately as one through which the spectator has walked on his own feet.
But there is another kind of sight-seeing, admittedly less adequate than the first, but in its own peculiar way as delightful: the sight-seeing that is done in comfort and without the contraction of a muscle from a rapidly moving machine. Railways first made it possible, to a limited extent indeed and in somewhat disagreeable conditions. The automobile has placed the whole world at the mercy of the machine, and has turned high-speed sight-seeing into a new and genuine pleasure. It is a pleasure, indeed, which the severe moralist, if he analysed it, if he were to determine exactly its kind and quality, would class, I am afraid, among the vicious pleasures; a narcotic, not an energising pleasure; a pleasure analogous to opium-smoking; that numbs the soul and lulls it into a passive idleness; a pleasure of sloth and self-indulgence.
I speak as an unrepentant addict to what I must admit to be a vice. High-speed sight-seeing induces in me a state of being like that into which one slides, one deliciously melts—alas, too rarely and for all too brief a time, at a certain stage of mild tipsiness. Sitting relaxed in the machine I stare at the slowly shifting distances, the hurrying fields and trees, the wildly fugitive details of the immediate hedgerow. Plane before plane, the successive accelerations merge into a vertiginous counterpoint of movements. In a little while I am dizzied into a kind of trance. Timelessly in the passivity almost of sleep, I contemplate a spectacle that has taken on the quality, at once unreal and vivid, of a dream. At rest I have an illusion of activity. Profoundly solitary, I sit in the midst of a phantasmagoria. I have never taken the Indian hemp, but from the depths of my trance of speed I can divine sympathetically what must be the pleasures of the hashish smoker, or the eater of bhang.
Much less completely, but satisfyingly enough, the movies have power to induce in me a similar trance. Shutting my mind to the story I can concentrate on the disembodied movement of light and shadow on the screen, until something that at last resembles the delicious hypnotism of speed descends upon me and I slide into that waking sleep of the soul, from which it is such a cruel agony to be awakened once again into time and the necessity of action.
The long days of travelling through Rajputana seemed to me, as I sat entranced at the window, at once short and eternal. The journeys occupied only as much time as it took to fall into my trance, to eat lunch and relapse, to change trains and, once more settled, to relapse again. The remaining hours did not exist, and yet were longer than thousands of years. Much passed before my eyes and was seen; but I cannot pretend that I remember a great deal of what I saw. And when I do remember, it is not so much in terms of individual objects as of processes. Innumerable separate images, seen during hours of contemplation, have blended and run together in my mind, to form a single unit of memory, just as the different phases of the growth of plants or the development of caterpillars into butterflies are selected and brought together by the photographer so as to be seen as a single brief process in a five-minute cinema film.
Shutting my eyes I can revisualise, for example, the progressive changes in colour, across the breadth of Rajputana, of the horns of the oxen; how they started by being painted both green, how the green gradually melted out of one and became red, how, later, they were both red, then both parti-coloured, then finally striped like barber’s poles in concentric circles of red, white and green. More vividly still I remember a process connected with turbans, a gradual development, the individual phases of which must have been separately observed here and there through hundreds of miles of country. I remember that they started, near Jodhpur, by being small and mostly white, that they grew larger and larger and redder and redder until, at a certain point where they came to a climax, touched an apogee of grandeur, they were like enormous balloons of dark crimson muslin with a little brown face peeping almost irrelevantly out of the middle of each. After that they began to recede again from the top of their curve. In my memory I see a process of gradual waning, culminating at Ajmere in a return to the merely normal.
The train drew up in the midst of the most ordinary Indian headwear. I had seen the rise, I had been the entranced spectator of the decline and fall of the Rajput turban. And now it was time to alight. Reluctantly, with pain I woke myself, I turned on lights inside my head, I jumped into spiritual cold baths, and at length—clothed, so to speak, and in my right mind—stepped out of my warm delicious timelessness into the noise and the grey squalor of Ajmere Station.
PUSHKAR LAKE
The holiest waters in India are mantled with a green and brilliant scum. Those who would bathe must break it, as hardy swimmers, in our colder countries, break the ice, before they can reach the spiritually cleansing liquid. Coming out of the water, bathers leave behind them jagged rifts of blackness in the green; rifts that gradually close, if no more pilgrims come down to bathe, till the green skin of the lake is altogether whole again.
There were but few bathers when we were at Pushkar. The bathing ghats going down in flights of white steps to the water were almost deserted and the hundred temples all but empty. We were able to walk easily and undisturbed along the little stone embankments connecting ghat with ghat. Here and there, on the lowest steps, a half-naked man squatted, methodically wetting himself with the scummy water, a woman, always chastely dressed, methodically soaked her clothes. On days of little concourse the bathers do not venture far out into the lake. Death lurks invisible under the green scum, swims noiselessly inshore, snaps, drags down. We saw him basking on a little shrine-crowned island a hundred yards from land, monstrous and scaly, grinning even in his sleep—a crocodile. Pushkar is so holy that no life may be taken within its waters or on its banks, not even the man-eater’s. A dozen pilgrims disappear each year between those enormous jaws. It is considered lucky to be eaten by a crocodile at Pushkar.
Behind the ghats rises a charming architecture of temples and priestly houses and serais for the pilgrims—all white, with little domes against the sky, and balconies flowering out of high blank walls, and windows of lattice-work, and tunnelled archways giving a glimpse, through shadow, of sunlight beyond. Nothing very old, nothing very grand; but all exceedingly pretty, with a certain look of the Italian Riviera about it. Italian, too, are the innumerable shrines—in little niches, in ornamental sentry-boxes of stucco, under domed canopies of stone-work. Looking into them, I almost expected to see a mouldering plaster Crucifixion, and Annunciation in painted terra-cotta, a blue-robed Madonna with her Child. And it came each time as something of a shock to discover among the sacred shadows of the shrine a rough-hewn cow of marble or red sandstone, kneeling reverently before a bi-sexual phallic symbol and gazing at it with an expression on its ingenuously sculptured face of rapt ecstatic adoration.
CHITOR
The fort of Chitor is larger than that of Jodhpur and therefore less spectacular. The Jodhpur fort is perched on the summit of what is almost a crag. The hill on which Chitor is built is probably as high, but it seems much lower, owing to its great length; it is a ridge, not a pinnacle of rock. And the buildings, which, at Jodhpur, are crowded into a single imposing pile, are scattered at wide intervals over the space enclosed within the circuit of the walls of Chitor. Jodhpur is wildly picturesque, like something out of a Doré picture-book. Examined at close quarters, however, it is not particularly interesting. From a distance, Chitor is less imposing; but climb up to it, and you will find it full of magnificent buildings—temples among the finest in Upper India, great ruined palaces, towers fantastically carved from base to summit. None of these buildings is much more than five hundred
