LETTER V - A JOURNEY, A GRAND TUMASHA, AND THE TRUTH ABOUT THE CIVIL SERVICE CAREER

Summary

Calcutta, March 12.

Dear Simkins,–I have lately witnessed some phases of life in India which have little in common with Calcutta grandeur and civilization. To begin with the travelling: I spent sixteen hours on the four hundred miles between the capital and Patna, and seventeen hours on the forty odd miles between Patna and Mofussilpore. And uncommonly odd ones they were. I started at ten P.M. on the 9th of last month in the time-honoured palanquin. My suite comprised sixteen bearers, two fellows with torches and four banghywallahs, who convey luggage in something resembling the received idea of the Scales in the zodiac. The performances of these thin-legged, miserable, rice-fed “missing links” are perfectly inexplicable according to our notions of muscular development. Four picked readers of Kingsley would find it hard work to bring along an empty palanquin at their own pace; whereas a set of sixteen bearers will carry you and your traps at the rate of four and four and a half miles an hour for twenty leagues on end. The powers of the banghywallahs are something portentous. Two of them took to Mofussilpore, turn and turn about, a gun-case and a carpet-bag containing, among other things, twenty-eight pounds of shot and three hundred and fifty bullets, going the whole way at a swing trot. And yet the physical conformation of these men is so frail, that a blow on the body is liable to cause instant death.