Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/113

Rh mother had been in the habit of pulling them in my boyhood; but I now remarked that mine had not acquired half the dimensions to which the human ear can attain. The reason is that at Calicut the children's ears are pierced directly they are born, and from that moment their parents ingeniously insert in the opening a dried palm-leaf twisted into a roll, which having a constant tendency to unroll, enlarges the hole so enormously that there are ears to be seen through which you can put your fist. You may imagine how proud are the possessors of such a personal advantage; they are the dandies of the country.

"My first care on landing had been to hire a Nair, a sort of janissary or drago-man, to visit the town and its environs and help me in the bargains and purchases I had to make. We set out in due course for Calicut, but on the way we were overtaken by such a hurricane that I, found myself obliged to take shelter in a m Malabar pagoda. It was the very same spot where, four hundred years before my time, Vasco da Gama had landed.

"As the interior of the temple was adorned with pictures and images, Vasco and his companions mistook the pagoda for a Christian church, and when men dressed in calico, looking not unlike Catholic priests in undress, poured water and ashes on their heads, they were still further confirmed in their belief. All the same, one of Da Gama's companions, disturbed at the sight of the strangelooking idols, and anxious not to compromise his eternal salvation, supplemented his prayer with this saving clause:

"'Whether I am or am not in the Devil's house, it is to God I address my supplication.'

"For my own part, being something of a heathen, I offered no supplication whether to God or Devil. I simply waited until the rain was over.

"I had always heard speak of a commercial procedure frequently employed at Calicut, which could not fail to interest me, now that I was about to establish a business of one sort or another there. A creditor meeting his debtor, I had been told, had only to trace a circle round him and I was assured the latter could not leave it, under pain of death, till the debt for which he was liable had been paid. I had even been assured that on one occasion the King himself had met a .-nerchant whom he had been continually putting off from day to day for three months; the man drew a line round the King's horse, and the King sat there motionless as an equestrian statue till the sum was brought from the palace which he required to liquidate his debt. The incident had really happened, but in times long ago, and the law we have mentioned had now grown practically obsolete.

"But another was still in force, albeit the English had declared that Hindoo wives were not bound to obey it, a law which orders wives to be burned on the bodies of their deceased husbands. Now as if I were destined to witness all the different kinds of auto-da-fe that are practised on the west coast of India, I was no sooner settled at Calicut than it was announced that a Brahmin had just died and that his wife had resolved to be burned on his tomb.

"Thus I arrived in the nick of time to witness a suttee. This was too curious a sight for any European to miss, especially one who was blessed with a wife who, so far from burning herself on his tomb, would no doubt have lit a bonfire in token of her satisfaction on the day of her consort's death.

"Accordingly I made definite arrangements with my Nair to stay on for a month in my service. He was a man of some intelligence, who struck a bargain with me for a half faron a day and undertook to secure me a place from which to witness the ceremony.

"The appointed day fell upon the following Sunday, and the rite was to be carried out in an open plain a quarter of a league from the city. The funeral pile, built of the most combustible materials and the most inflammable wood, was, I can scarcely say, raised, but at any rate set up, in a trench, so that the whole presented the appearance of a crater presently to be filled with fire and flame. On the pile lay the husband's dead body embalmed in such a way as to await his wife without becoming too offensive in the meantime.

"At the hour agreed upon, namely ten o'clock in the morning, the Brahmin's widow, bare-footed and bare-headed, and clad in a long white robe, left her husband's house to the sound of flutes, drums and tom-toms, and was led with great state and ceremony to the funeral