Slowly Down the Ganges
Eric Newby has never been bedeviled by practicality. Hence this  1,200-mile journey down the Ganges River, which the author undertook in  1963 in the company of his wife and an ever-changing crew of Indian  retainers. What moved him to take the trip? Partly it was the memory of  his military service in India more than two decades before. And as he  confesses, Newby has a lifelong and perhaps congenital love of rivers:  "I like exploring them. I like the way in which they grow deeper and  wider and dirtier but always, however dirty they become, managing to  retain some of the beauty with which they were born." Few rivers grow  quite as dirty as the Ganges, which also goes by such nicknames asAtula("Peerless"),Savitri("Stimulator"), andBhinna-brahmanda-darpini("Taking pride in the broken egg of  Brahma"). And few accounts of this mighty waterway could possibly be as  acute and hilarious asSlowly down the Ganges, which Newby first  published in 1966.As always, the author finds human comedy everywhere he looks. Take his  initial departure from beneath the Balawali Bridge, where a highly  emotional crowd has gathered to see him off:Two hundred yards below the bridge and some twelve hundred miles from  the Bay of Bengal the boat grounded in sixteen inches of water.... I  looked upstream to the bridge but all those who had been waving and  weeping had studiously turned their backs. The boatmen uttered  despairing cries for assistance but the men at the bridge bent to their  tasks with unwonted diligence. As far as they were concerned we had  passed out of their lives. We might never have existed.And so it goes, even as Newby and his crew run aground 63 times in the  first six days, or switch doggedly from boat to train to bullock cart  and back to boat again. His patience in the face of continuous disaster  is superbly entertaining, as are his attempts to mollify his  increasingly impatient wife, Wanda. Still, his gift for the farcical  slow burn never keeps him from relishing the terrain, or from recording  it in lyrical yet laconic prose: "At about six the sky to the east  became faintly red; then it began to flame and the moon was  extinguished; clouds of unidentifiable birds flew high overhead; a  jackal skulked along the far shore and, knowing itself watched, went up  the bank and into the trees; mist rose from the wet grass on the  islands on which the shisham trees stood, wrapped like precious objects  in their bandages of dead grass."Slowly down the Gangesis  packed with such time-lapse portraiture, along with plenty of casual  wisdom about history, humanity, and (last but not least) conjugal life.  It's one of those rare voyages we only wish were much, much slower.--James Marcus--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.