Winter India

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CHAPTER II
TRICHINOPOLI AND TANJORE

E rumbled and jolted along all that hot afternoon over a monotonous, dry brown plain of parched fields and thorn hedges. There was uproar in the forward part of the train as it left Dindigal station, a hundred voices clamored and shrieked, and a hundred heads hung from the windows of the third-class cars. The train halted, men leaped from it and ran back, while all on the station platform ran up the track toward a small object beside the rails. The station-master came on toward the train, holding fast to a lean little black imp, who was struggling to release himself and fairly bursting with wrath. An excited woman, wailing and declaiming with uncovered face, leaned from a forward car window, talking to an excited group on the ground. At last, an oily babu came to tell us that the small boy had "had a dispute with his mother," and, not wishing to leave Dindigal, had jumped out of the window. "His fearful mother had thought him killed," said the babu, but at sight of the lost heir her fear gave way to fury. She raved and ranted like an Indian Bernhardt as she leaned from the window, unveiled, ?talking to the station officers; and the small boy talked back to everybody, until he was suddenly lifted by the back, like a kitten, and handed through the window to "his fearful mother's" arms. "Because of his youth they will not arrest him," said the babu; and, from the shrieks that came from that compartment, there was no need for the law to add aught to the chastisement of the barefaced, nose-ringed mother.

We were in the heart of the tobacco country, and Trichinopoli in these modern days is as much a synonym for cheroots as Dindigal. Samuel Daniel, the local guide, who claimed us in the darkness of Trichinopoli station, had the advertisement of his own cigar factory on the back of his card, and everywhere we saw and smelled the local cheroot. We slept in the travelers' rooms in the Trichinopoli station, after dining at a table trailed over with bougainvillea vines and set with glasses of great double hibiscus. Trains rumbled by all night, the mosquitos sang a deafening chorus, and at sunrise we sped across another city of dirty white houses, whose inhabitants were just waking and scratching, and whose Brahman families were marking the door-sills and themselves for the day, the houses' toilet as necessary as their own.

The rock of Trichinopoli, exactly as it looked in old geography pictures, loomed ahead; and after a few turns in the narrow streets we came to the carved entrance of the staircase, tunneled up through the solid rock to temples on the side and summit. Two elephants went past on their way to the river ?to fill the sacred water-vessels, and we started to climb the two hundred and ninety steps worn slippery with the tread of generations of barefooted worshipers and painted with the perpendicular red and white stripes of Shiva, Our elderly, pompous guide was voluble, measured, and minute, and permitted no trifling nor omissions. Samuel Daniel talked like Samuel Johnson, using the grandiloquent, polysyllabic literary language of the eighteenth century. We had engaged him to show us the sights, and he did it thoroughly. "Here is the place where many hundreds of people were crushed to death in the dark of the afternoon of a festival in 1849," he said. Since then, the British government has cut windows in the rock, placed lamps, and forbidden climbing after four o'clock. At one landing we found a group of little boys sitting before a greasy, black image of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, receiving instruction from a Brahman teacher; at another landing a high priest stood statuesque in yellow robes, the sacred white Brahman thread and bead on his neck, his forehead smeared with ashes; and at last we came out to the air at a small shrine on an outer shelf of the rock, where we had a far-reaching view of the level plain. After one more tunnel staircase we gained the open summit, climbed a last pinnacle, and found ourselves two hundred and thirty-six feet above the city, that lay like a relief-map at our feet, the fortress-like gopuras of the Srirangam temples rising from green groves southward, A little temple to Ganesha crowns the rock, the goal of the breathless pilgrimage. ?Halfway down the staircase, we were deafened by the flutes and flageolets of the priests and flag-bearers toiling up with water-jars just brought from the river. The sacred elephants at the foot of the stairs saluted us with lifted fore feet and waving trunks, rubbing their foreheads as they begged, plainly demanding a "prissint," after the custom of the country.

It was a short drive of three miles down to the temple of Vishnu at Srirangam, on an island in the dry bed of the Kaveri. This, the largest temple in southern India, is on a magnificent scale, its fifteen gopuras so many marvels of architecture; the greatest of them falling short of its intended three hundred feet by the interruption of building during the French and English wars of the eighteenth century, when the French intrenched themselves at Srirangam and mounted cannon on the gopuras. The outer, inclosing wall of the temple measures three thousand feet each way, and within that lies a first quadrangle of bazaars. A second gopura admits to a quadrangle where the three thousand high-caste Brahmans of the temple dwell. We drove on through a third and a fourth gopura, in one passage disputing right of way with a temple elephant, who backed out before our brougham, and, with the courtesy of a well-bred creature, swept his trunk and lifted a fore foot in apology. The last gateway had great teak doors, and the doctor of the temple and director of the Srirangam government hospital met us there; also the council of priests and five huge elephants, their foreheads striped with the same yellow and ?white tridents of Vishnu as their piously frescoed keepers. We saw the famous Hall of the Horse Columns, where single blocks of granite are as intricately carved as wood or ivory, and we saw the other curiosities of the stone-cutter's art, serried columns displaying the many incarnations of Vishnu. We saw, too, the Hall of a Thousand Columns-nine hundred odd shabby, whitewashed pillars only-and from the roof we were given a glimpse of the golden cupola covering the shrine of the sacred image- the identical image brought by Rama in the age of fable, and which grew fast to the ground when left for a moment. They were then preparing for the great mela or festival of early December, when forty thousand pilgrims assemble, crowds spending day and night in the temple for three weeks.

We were shown to a last pavilion, given armchairs before a table, the five elephants were stationed in line across the entrance, and fierce-foreheaded Brahmans multiplied. Strings of keys clanged on the table, five clumsy wooden chests were lugged in, five padlocks yielded to blows and wrenches, and the table was heaped with riches; the feast of jewels was spread, and a flood of color and light illuminated the shadowy, pavilion. Gold armor and ornaments and utensils incrusted with jewels were heaped on the table and handed us to examine, until one wondered if any more rubies, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds, or pearls were left in southern India. Gold helmets, crowns, breastplates, gauntlets, brassards, belts, necklaces, bracelets, anklets, were sown with rubies of thumb-nail size, with sapphires ?and diamonds seeded between, and fringed with pearls and uncut emeralds. Plain gold salvers, water-bottles, gourds, and bowls had neither value nor interest in our eyes after the play of gems. Even the Prince of Wales's gold salver, inscribed "Dec. 11th, 1875, "to commemorate his visit to the temple, seemed dull and commonplace. Far better was the gold breastplate fringed with tallow-drop emeralds, which he also gave as a souvenir of his visit to this great shrine of Vishnu. There were several Vishnu tridents in diamonds, and jeweled feathers trembling with diamond fringes; turban ornaments in which jeweled birds held great drops of rubies and emeralds in their beaks; a jeweled umbrella-stick with an inch-long sapphire for its ferrule, a crust of rubies for its handle, and a fringe of tinkling bo-leaves edged with pearls. Four great wings of head-ornaments covered with jewels had been given by a pious beggar, who had gathered more than fifty thousand rupees in alms to spend for such gifts to the gods and gauds for the temple, his stones better cut and set and of better quality than any others in the treasury. Strings and strings of pearls- pearls strung alone or alternating with balls of emerald, ruby, or carved gold-slipped through our hands to weariness. Our eyes were sated with splendor and color when, as a climax, they produced a fine bit of gold carving, representing a religious procession, the idol in the state chair cut from a large ruby, the tiny face, the drapery, and the many ornaments most cleverly done.

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INDIAN LOTAS

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