# Winter India/Chapter 5
### CHAPTER V MADRAS AND THE SEVEN PAGODAS

E had expected to have another feast of jewels at Conjeveram, the Benares of southern India, but at Chingleput Junction the constable from that sacred city was waiting to tell us that we could not see the temple jewels, owing to a recent theft of three thousand rupees' worth of treasure and the arrest of the head high priest, who held one of the five keys. "I have just brought forty Brahmans up with me as witnesses. There has been a big quarrel on among the high-caste families, one trying to run the other out; but as all the temple offices, even the keepers of the oil, are hereditary, only civil suits and criminal imprisonment ever oust them. Each steals a little from the god himself, but does not want any one else to do so."
When we arrived at the great railway station of Madras, the largest and oldest city in southern India, with a population of half a million, there were no European vehicles to be had—only bullock-carts and the bandbox jutkas, or native pony-cabs. "There is a convention of Theosophists on now," said the station-master in explanation, but he could not tell what people with astral bodies wanted with material cabs. ​The jutka was such torture and indignity that we walked the last block to the hotel in a great garden, where a hen-brained lot of "don't-know" servants held the summer-house, which served as hotel office.
There were no manager, no rooms, no memorandum of our telegrams, no anything at this only hotel. There was no other place to go; no steamer leaving for five days. The butler led us to a neglected row of rooms that we might prepare for tiffin and await the return of the manager. Ants ran riot over the beds and the torn matting on the dirty cement floor; the ragged, brown mosquito-netting suggested horrors in the darkness; and the bath-water of days ago stood iridescent in the tubs. We retreated to the stone porch and then to the dining-room, where there was painted as a decorative frieze: "Recommend us. Recommend us. The best hotel in India." There was a veteran table cloth, but a charming floral decoration, and we were served a pallid and tasteless soup, potato croquettes, grilled bones, and "cornflower cream," i. e., a watery blanc-mange. Meanwhile, our robust British table neighbors—all resident Anglo-Indians, with a proper scorn for tourists—ate broiled birds, dressed the most inviting tomato-salads, and closed their feast with red bananas and cheese. "Oh! that belongs gentlemans. Gentlemans self buy bazaar," hissed the butler, when we had sternly pointed to and ordered birds and salad and bananas.
Then the manager came and bowed us into a carriage and off to a branch house, "a residential hotel," where he said he had most spacious rooms ​reserved. Remembering the bath-tubs, the grilled bones, and the legend on the dining-room walls of the parent establishment, we had small expectation of anything sybaritic at the offshoot hostelry. Yet we were rewarded with a great mansion, in a garden that was almost a park; the house was clean and admirably kept by a black, black butler, twin to the end-man of the old minstrel shows.
We drove miles and miles through tree-lined streets to the water-front of the city to find the post, telegraph, and steamship offices and the bank. All Madras and all southern India, planters from Bangalur and the Nilgiri Hills, and officials from everywhere, were doing their Christmas shopping those days, the races were on, and the streets and bazaars were full of life and animation. We drove into beautiful grounds and around under a great portico of a mansion to find the chemist's shop; into another splendid place to find, not the lord chief justice, but the grocer; and this extravagance of space makes Madras a city of frightfully magnificent distances.
MONOLITHIC TEMPLES AT MAHABALIPUR
Madras residents had, long in advance, engaged all the "budgery-boats" on the Buckingham Canal for Christmas week; and instead of one of those comfortable house-boats, where civilized existence continues its regular routine, we had to content ourselves with a coal-barge—a "spacious and commodious fourteen-passenger-boat," Samuel Daniel called it—for the visit to the Seven Pagodas, the ruins of Mahabalipur. Our Turveydrop assured us that all tourists went in such craft; that Bishop Phillips Brooks had traveled that way to see this one of the seven great wonders of the Indian world; and as he talked on, we almost forgot the ignominious cargo-lighter.
The guide-book said to pay seven rupees for such a boat to go to the Seven Pagodas; the butler said fifty rupees; Daniel and David stoutly maintained fifteen rupees; and we finally gave ten rupees. Coal-barge No. 1350 was some twenty feet long, with a mat roof, side awnings, and a single mast; and when swept, scrubbed, and drenched under our eyes, we ​embarked with mattresses, chairs, a few pots and pans and provisions from the hotel, and a great supply of our own stores to augment the tiffin-basket. Instead of driving to Marmalong or Guindy Bridge, and trusting to meet the dilatory boatmen there, we embarked at Governor's Basin, and for reward found the Buckingham Canal drag a stagnant, sewery way past Madras commons and dead walls, past hedges and kitchen-gardens, for six miles to Guindy Bridge, where the open country began. We posted a letter in the mail-box at the bridge, ordering a carriage to be waiting there at five o'clock the second morning, and then were towed and poled at a comfortable gait southward through the long, lazy afternoon, curtained from the western sun, with a fresh little breeze from the sea pleasantly stirring the air.
It was a fiat, level country, lying close to the Coromandel coast. Once the canal debouched into a great lagoon, and the trackers plashed like a file of storks across a few miles of shallow water, and often we heard the long boom of the breakers. Villages nestled under palm and banian groves; villagers trod the high embankment paths like so many white storks or red flamingos; and market, cargo, and fire-wood boats slipped silently by. We walked past a series of locks in the late afternoon, and when the great triangular sail dropped we took our chairs to the roof and glided down such a sunset stretch as met one's ideal of the tropics. Two Tamil coolies, tandem, towed us; a tall boatman poled; and Daniel's brilliant red turban at the fore gave the high keynote to the sunset color scheme, while his voice rose ​in sonorous passages descriptive of his country and his people. Even the untutored blacks of the crew crept close to hear the foreign language roll from his tongue in such unctuous streams. He told of the temple jewels we had not seen; of the stores of the finest old Indian jewels which the Nautch girls everywhere own, since the women of the great families are continually robbed by degenerate sons, who have learned only more forms of vice and extravagance with Western education. Then of the Brahmans and their "hereditary heirness" he said with a sneer: "Those Brahman priests say they are the gods visible in the world. Once they may have taught truths, but now they only humbug the poor people." Buddhism as it flourishes in Ceylon? "More humbug," he averred.
The palm-trees grew darker than violet against the rosy west, until they were black skeletons against a steely blue, star-spangled firmament, where Jupiter shone like a small moon and Orion's three great belt-jewels streamed golden tracks across the lagoon. We could hear the boom of the Coromandel surf; dark palm groves stopped the gentle sea breeze; the sail, spread to catch any breath, dragged and flapped against the mast, then filled with the soft sea air when the star-dotted horizon was visible again, and drew canal-boat No. 1350 along through the enchanted night.
In the middle of the darkness came the clatter of the falling sail and an angry colloquy by the bank-side, David and Daniel together venting their strongest language at invisible retorters.
​"It is the twenty-mile lock," said David, shaking with wrath. "The manager has gone to bed and will not open the lock again until morning, and we shall not get to Seven Pagodas before ten o'clock. They will always do it for the gentries, but they do not believe when poor native says he has gentries waiting in a boat." With one lantern and an escort of innumerable shadows in ghostly clothes, we went and pounded on the lock-keeper's door, and besought him as the most courteous of a whole race of kindly disposed people to consider a tourist's precious time and consuming zeal for rock-sculpture, and open his locks and let us wing and track our way to Mahabalipur, "Certingly, certingly. Right away, mem-sahib," and the lock-keeper came out with his keys, our crew worked the gates and levers, and while we walked and talked with our benefactor of the tropic night, the waters swirled in and lifted the boat to the next level.
They drove a stake in the soft sand and made fast at three in the morning, and in the gray-blue dawn we woke to find ourselves and three budgery-boats lying at the edge of a great sandy flat, beyond which a white house and some palm-trees promised government cheer. We went over to the dak bangla and demanded baths, breakfasts, and chair-bearers at once. The first two demands were complied with; but at six o'clock it was "wait a little," as it had been at five-thirty, and, realizing that the sooner we began the five-mile walk in the sun and sand the better were our chances of surviving and accomplishing it all before noon, we set forth in the cool of the ​December morning. Slowly, quite slowly, we strolled out past great lily-ponds, through sandy commons and underbrush, for a mile and a half to the sculptured raths of Mahabalipur, the boulder-temples of the once great city of Bali.
When the pious ones of that place, whether in the sixth century or still earlier, wished to build a temple they took a boulder of the desired size, carved it outwardly until it looked as if built by masons' hands, block by block and course by course, and then hollowed the interior into chambers, even one and two stories of pillared and vaulted chambers. Five such monolithic raths, or temples, remain in this lonely strand, with guardian lions, elephants, and bulls hewn from lesser boulders before them. Two of the raths are mere sentry-box shrines, or image-cells, eleven feet square and twenty feet high, carved with a wealth of exterior and interior ornament. The largest rath is the Split Temple, forty-two feet in length, with an impressive interior hall. All the raths stand empty and deserted, as if touched by the enchanter's wand, miraculously turned to stone. There was no moving thing, no sound but the distant moan of the surf and the rustling clash of palm-branches. The seven-o'clock sun already burned the sands and was reflected scorchingly from the rock masses, whose burned, yellow-brown tones seemed the very expression of heat.
Very slowly we walked for a mile through a plantation of young fir-trees, proof that the government of India considers the welfare of this region, whose long-denuded sands are being reforested ​for both economic and climatic reasons. We came out on the hard sand beach where the ocean lapped in soft, creamy wavelets, and the terrible Coromandel surges we had heard and read of only splashed gently on the steps of a quaint little pyramidal temple carved, course upon course, to its final bell-cap. Posts and columns stand far out in the water, and a line of breakers, a mile still further out, mark where legend says other pagodas stand intact beneath the waves. Southey has imaged it in "The Curse of Kehama," but prosaic surveyors say that there is only a reef of needle-rocks below the surface. That lonely little temple at the edge of the loud-sounding sea, although a common thing of masons' construction, is most impressive of all the seven temples. Its stone façade is rounded with sand-blast, spray, and surge, its walls are broken, its portico and platform half wrecked by the fury of past storms, and its cool, wet chambers hold Vishnu's images in his different incarnations,—Buddha, Vishnu's ninth avatar, occupying a last cool grotto.
The sun was burning with full strength then, and we sought the mud and thatch Tamil village under a cluster of palm-trees. The villagers swarmed out, and an inky, sooty flock of cherubs ran beside us to another boulder-temple, where we sat in the shade and regarded a huge stone hollowed like a churn or bowl, where "the gopis made butter for Krishna in the forest"—"But the cat ran away with the butter," said Daniel, regretfully. Krishna, the dancing god of Hindu mythology, very nearly corresponds to the Greek Apollo or Hercules, and the gopis parallel the naiads and muses.
​The palm-tree was our Christmas-tree that day, and the villagers, having already stripped it of gifts, pierced the green cocoanuts and gave us reviving drinks. The Tamil cup ids folded palm-leaves into drinking-cups and drank such portions as their elders gave them. It was a pretty, primitive scene, purely and ideally Indian, when around the rock came a British tourist in a pith helmet, a lady in a helmet, too, with streaming green veil ends. They looked at the churn, they looked at the temple on which we sat, but they saw us no more than they would see canal-boat No. 1350 at anchor beside their splendid budgery-boat. We opened more cocoanuts and drank to the merry day, to the Superior Person, to the Pharisee wherever he may find himself. "Peace on earth—good will to men." Blessed is the Christmas spirit and the Briton's sense of decorum. Alas, that we had no letters of introduction with us!
Slowly we walked up over a great scarped rock—and it was like walking across a hot stove—and descended steps in its front to see the carving known as Arjuna's Penance—a rock-front, thirty-seven feet high and ninety feet long, carved all over with life-sized figures and animals in high relief, a whole picture-book of earliest mythology. The wicked cat who stole the gopi's lump of butter was triumphantly pointed out, standing on its hind legs in penance, while mice ran about its feet. "Really," said Daniel, "he is waiting for the sea to dry that he may eat all the fish in it." This gigantic bas-relief sculpture, beside which Thorvaldsen's lion at Lu​cerne is a toy, is from an earlier time than the monolithic raths by the sea, and marks the dateless era of serpent-worship. But the sunny rock-front radiated heat like a bonfire, and there was no wish to stand and study it.
It was then past nine o'clock, the sun was scorching high overhead, and nothing Daniel could say about the "numberlesses of gods and goddesses," or lesser cave-temples, could stir us. Not "Krishna and the gopis, his sweethearts in paradise," not Ganesha, all black, greasy, and garlanded in his own rock-cut temple, could attract us longer—all interest in art, archaeology, and architecture scorched and scotched for the day. For a half-mile we had made Daniel give guarantees of importance before we would look within a cave or take one extra step in that terrible scorch and sun-glare of a midwinter morning.
The sands were blinding and our boats quivered in heat-waves as we went toward them at noon; but while the coolies splashed along over tow-paths submerged by the tide, we were cooled by a gentle head-wind all the afternoon. The water was a-splash with bits of silver, and one of the trackers stopped, wrestled with something under his foot, and threw a large fish into the boat. At sunset we could see a faint line of surf beyond the sand wastes, and the beat of the sea was heard through hours of darkness succeeding the most beautiful, moist pink sunset.
THE VILLAGE STREET.
The sky was full of big, yellow, pulsing stars, but the Southern Cross was not visible. Orion gradually changed its angle and tilted itself almost in reverse; and Orion was a great offense to me in those low latitudes. As if one went to latitude 0° and to 6° N. and 13° N. to see one's most familiar northern constellation!
"Meh lady! Meh lady! The Holy Cross is here in the sky now," said faithful David at four o'clock, and he crossed himself as became a good Romanist, There, straightaway in our wake to southward, were two lopsided crosses, or diamonds, each outlined by four great, glowing yellow stars where the narrow cut of the Buckingham Canal exactly underlay and reflected the great southern constellation, the filmy trails of Magellan's clouds floating near.