What the Traveller Saw (5 page)

BOOK: What the Traveller Saw
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He then wound up the weight from the base of the tower to the level of the lantern. It weighed about 7 cwt and it took 400 turns of the handle to raise it. When the bell rang it meant that there were fifty more turns to be made. If he went over the fifty, the handle would begin to unwind and either remove his front teeth or else hit him in the pit of the stomach, according to whether he was a large or small light-house-keeper. He had to do this once every hour. At the end of the hour, the bell rang to tell him that the weight
was almost down; but he would know, even if he did not hear the bell. ‘When it’s nearly down you feel it in your bones,’ one of them said.

Once the light was burning the only sounds were the hiss of the vaporiser, the whirr of the governor and the clacking of the ratchet when he began winding again. If fog came down he had to go over to the engine house and start the engine, a 22 h.p. Hornsby Fog Signal Engine, installed aout 1905, but looking like a copy of something much older. In order to start it he heated a metal dome at the end of the cylinder with a blow lamp. When it was nice and hot, he set the flywheel to top dead centre, opened the valve to the compressed air tank, switched on the paraffin and oil drips, and operated the starting lever in short jerks at every other revolution of the flywheel. The first time he did it while I was there he caught the piston on the wrong stroke, the engine went backwards, there was an explosion and the room was filled with dense smoke and a voice fucking the engine and the Brethren for not providing a replacement.

Once the thing was firing correctly he locked the starting lever and closed down the relief valve to allow the compressor to pump air back to the main tank. While he was doing this, being a good lighthousekeeper, he was wondering if the weight bell had sounded, whether the Radio Beacon was functioning (actually, he could see the monitor in the engine house); or whether he ought to be listening to Land’s End on the RT.

Now he had steam up and he could begin to operate the siren, which was miles away on the other side of the rock. Like everything else on Round Island that wasn’t operated by paraffin, the opening and closing of the valves was controlled by clockwork, a gigantic weighted mechanism in the basement which had to be wound up every two hours.

Just before the siren went off the two black horns emitted a sighing noise, like a whale surfacing, there was a pause and
an enormous, indescribable sound came blasting out of them. Out on the platform, close to them, it was as if one’s ears were full of giant bluebottles; not surprising as the thing could be heard ten miles away. Inside the keepers’ house it was worse. The ones off duty lay rigid in their bunks waiting for it. There was not long to wait. It gave four three-second blasts every two minutes. After seventy-two hours of the siren, everyone was ready to transfer to British Railways.

The power of the sea at Round Island was enormous. At three in the morning on 7 January, the previous year, the wind was WSW Force Ten. In the official jargon this produces ‘very high waves with long overhanging crests … the tumbling of the seas becomes very heavy …’. At three-thirty the radio aerial carried away, the window of the pantry on the inside of the protecting wall was smashed in by seas surging 130 ft up the rock. This was the weather in which a giant wave roared up the West Gulley and stove in the oak doors of the engine room which were more than three inches thick.

At six o’clock it was blowing Force Eleven – more than sixty knots. This was a storm in which ‘small and medium ships might be lost to view’. In such weather seas will be breaking over the top of the Bishop, 180 ft, and the Wolf and their towers will be shaking violently. In addition, according to keepers who have served there, on the Bishop at the height of the storm they hear strange metallic clankings that seem to come from the base of the tower. On the Longships there is an awe-inspiring sound that is generally agreed to be made by a boulder rumbling about in an underwater cave.

At a quarter to six in mid-September the sun is rising behind a line of jagged cloud over a grey, heaving sea. In a half-circle around you the lights begin to go out. From Round Island you can see them going: to the east the triple-flashing light on the Seven Stones light vessel towards Cape Cornwall; beyond it to the east the occulting white light with red sectors on the Longships; the alternating red and white light on the
Wolf to the south-east and the double-flashing white of the Bishop. There is not a ship to be seen. It is lonely here. Occasionally a Dutch liner comes in close to give them a toot on the siren. The Keeper on Watch closes the micrometer valve, changes over the bottom lens vaporizer. He changes bottom and top vaporizers alternately (later he will put it on the kitchen-stove to dry out) and hangs the curtains over the lenses for another day.

Mother Ganges
INDIA, 1963

A
T TWO O

CLOCK
in the afternoon of 6 December 1963, my forty-fourth birthday, Wanda and I set off to travel down the Ganges by boat from Hardwar, one of the most venerated Hindu bathing places, which lies at the feet of the Siwalik Hills. Our destination was the Bay of Bengal, 1200 miles away. The vessel was a five-oared rowing boat and it looked very much like an oversize Thames skiff – it had probably been built by some British official in a moment of nostalgia for the Thames at Henley. Now it was the property of the Executive Engineer of the Irrigation Works on the Ganges Canal, who was an Indian. He had only lent it to us, and then with extreme reluctance, because we had shown him a letter, signed by Mr Nehru, ordering all and sundry to help us on our way down the river.

The boat was twenty-five feet long, had a five-foot beam, was made of mild steel put together with rivets and needed thirty-two people to carry it. This was the number of barefooted men I had paid to carry it across a mile of almost red-hot shingle to the Ganges from the Ganges Canal.

With us was a rather too-high-caste companion for such a journey, procured for us by the personal intervention of Indira Gandhi, acting on behalf of her father, who warned us that he wouldn’t stay the course – he didn’t – and, for this first part of the journey, three boatmen.

Among the things we had with us was a canvas bag full of books, a Janata oil stove, hurricane lamps, 8 kilos of rice, a small sack of chilli powder, flour, vegetables, a teapot, a kettle, a number of
lathis
(weighted bamboo poles) for hitting dacoits
– robbers – on the nut, and military maps with which we had been supplied by the Director General of Ordnance of the Indian Army, who had also obligingly allowed us to acquire some bottles of Indian Army rum.

Two hundred yards below the bridge at Chandi Ghat from which we set off, the boat went aground on great, slimy stones the size and shape of cannon balls, which we had to lift to make a passage for it. Difficult to describe the emotions we felt aground on a 1200-mile boat journey within sight of our point of departure.

What makes the Ganges a great river, and in this sense the greatest of all rivers, is that for more than 450 million Hindus, and for countless others dispersed throughout the world, it is the most holy and most venerated river on earth. To each one of them it is
Ganga Mai
, Mother Ganges. For a Hindu to bathe in her is to be purified of all sin. To say, with love, the words ‘
O, Ganga! O Ganga!
’, even when far from her banks, can atone for the misdeeds of three previous incarnations. To be cremated on them, preferably having died there, and have one’s calcined bones scattered on her bosom, or to cast those of one’s deceased parents on it, is the ardent desire of every Hindu.

Even before death, sick and aged people who have the means to do so, and others who have not, make what are often long journeys to spend their last days by her side. Some reside in little huts, while those
in extremis
endeavour to have themselves immersed in her so that their sins may be washed away while there is still life in their bodies.

And to drink the water, having bathed in it, and to carry it away in vessels for future consumption – both confer great merit. Many devout Hindus drink no other water, and those who live at a distance contrive to receive regular supplies of it, for Ganges water has extraordinary qualities. Bottled at one of the sacred bathing places, or anywhere else for that matter, it will keep for at least a year. Taken aboard outward-bound
ships in the days of sail on the Hooghly near Calcutta, it is said to have outlasted all other waters. It also seems to have a genuine capacity for absorbing germs and rendering them innocuous. We drank it unboiled in the fifty-mile stretch of the river after it first enters the Indian Plain, and boiled and made into tea thereafter for most of the rest of its course without any unfortunate effects. Yet whenever we left the river for one reason or another, we invariably became ill. I would not attempt to explain this. I only state it as a fact.

What confers on the Ganges this unique holiness among rivers? It was not always so. The first Aryan invaders of India thought more highly of the Indus. It was much later that they gave Ganga the highest position and called her Sursarit, River of the Gods. The Ganga emerges under the name of Bhagirathi from an ice cave at the foot of the Gangotri glacier, 12,770 feet up in the Garhwal Himalayas. The cave is known as Gomukh, the Cow’s Mouth; certainly nothing in nature could be nearer the divine than this lonely place to which only the most determined pilgrims used to penetrate back in the 1960s.

Three hundred miles from its source the Ganges breaks through the Siwalik Range, outriders of the Himalayas, in a gorge a mile wide, and enters the plains of India where the town of Hardwar stands. Spoiled by a number of hideous buildings, some of them plastered with equally hideous advertisements, this is one of the seven great bathing places of pilgrimage in India.

The ghat – steps leading down to the river – is the scene of great bathing ceremonies, especially on the birthday of Ganga, at the beginning of the Hindu solar year, when as many as 400,000 people gather for the bathing, and on the occasion of a Kumbh Mela (a
mela
being a fair), which occurs every twelfth year when the planet Jupiter is in Aquarius (Kumbh), the bathers are said to number millions.

Here, and everywhere else on the banks of the Ganges, the
bathers can be seen engaged in various acts of reverence to her: drinking her waters, icy in winter; launching small, green, boat-shaped baskets of stitched leaves containing marigolds, rose petals and white sweets, placing them carefully on the water which whirls them about a bit until they are upset and their contents are carried away downstream. There the river winds away, a narrow ribbon of water in the dry seasons, reach after reach of it until it is swallowed up in the haze of the vast plain, a 400,000-square-mile basin formed on the north by the Himalayas, on the south by the Vindhyan Ranges, and to the east where the Brahmaputra enters it, by the thickly forested hills which separate Burma from Bengal. To the west are the great deserts of Rajasthan. In three of the states through which the Ganges flows – Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal – lived 190 million people, one third of India’s entire population.

A hundred miles below Hardwar the river is more or less what it will be for the greater part of the rest of its journey to the Bay of Bengal: a river about two miles wide, narrowing to half a mile or less in winter, then sometimes swollen by the monsoon rains to the proportions of an inland sea.

On the high, right bank, where they are robust enough to resist the encroaching, eroding river, are the permanent villages. It is impossible even to guess at how old they are, for they are built of undatable mud. This is Hindoostan as European artists saw it in the early nineteenth century. Banyan trees grow on the banks, their long branches hanging down like bell-ropes, and, in their shade, the water is the colour of greengages. On top of these banks spindle-shanked men run rather than walk, as such men always do in India, with bamboos slung across their shoulders which have heavy earthenware pots suspended at either end. Sometimes there are men carrying white-wrapped corpses on stretchers to the burning places, crying, ‘
Ram Nam Sat Hai!
’ (‘The Name of God is Truth!’), followed by the mourners, one of whom is carrying a
pot with a fire burning in it. In the river, where there is a shrine, a platform from which a black lingam rises decked with fresh marigolds, some white-clad figures perform their
pujas
and women and girls wallop the washing on lumps of brickwork – all that remains of some Mughal palace or gazebo – shouting to one another in coarse, cheerful voices. Out on the water there may be ferry boats loaded with men, bicycles and goats, fishing boats loaded with bag-shaped nets, or the cone-shaped traps which are set on the bottom of the river; country boats with upturned bows and square sterns with a crew of two, some of them being tracked upstream with a tow rope by one man, the other steering. All the way down the river there are
shmasans
, burning places for the dead, often nothing more than a piece of foreshore distinguished by some ashes and calcined bones. The river is full of imperfectly cremated bodies, floating downstream, often with birds of prey using them as rafts, pecking at them.

When the river widens to such an extent that no proper bank is visible, there is nothing but flats and sandbanks on either hand. By night there is pandemonium on these lonely reaches, what with the continual rumble of sandbanks collapsing into them; the noise made by the huge flocks of tall, grey and red sarus cranes as they trumpet and thresh the water; and the howlings of packs of jackals which are taken up and answered by other bands on the opposite bank.

The end – or one of the ends of Ganga, since she has a hundred mouths – is at the southern tip of Sagar Island, where the river meets the Indian Ocean. Here, at the same time as the Mela is celebrated at Hardwar and Allahabad, a great fair attended by many thousands takes place on the shore, lasting three days. Pilgrims used to sacrifice their progeny by offering them to Ganga, which was infested by man-eating estuarine crocodiles (C.
porosus
), and sharks, a practice repressed in 1802 by Lord Wellesley, the Governor-General, after twenty-three people had been either drowned or eaten the previous year.

But it is at the Sandheads, some sixty miles south of Sagar Island, among the dome-shaped sands, invisible twenty fathoms below, where the long trails of sand run down to the deeps of the Indian Ocean and the river in its multiple guises as Hooghly, Bhagirathi and Ganges deposits on the bottom the dark olive mud mixed with glistening sand that shines like iron filings, the last scourings of a sub-continent, that the Ganga really comes to an end at last.

BOOK: What the Traveller Saw
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