Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/17



T can hardly be said with literalness that one enjoys India. I had not expected to enjoy it, and it proved itself, despite its color and picturesqueness, quite as melancholy and depressing a country as I had thought it would be; but so absorbingly interesting, so packed with problems, so replete with miracles accomplished by alien rule, so ripe with possibilities, that one soon overlooked the unnecessary hardships and discomforts of travel—travel as plain and primitive as in the Klondike, or as if the country had been conquered only within this decade.

The surprises, the contrasts, and the contradictions administer perpetual shock and mental stimulus, and the unexpected continually confronts one. Never have I suffered with cold as in India. Not a snake did I see or hear of in the cold-weather, tourist season, save in zoölogical gardens or snake-charmers' baskets, and the tigers were likewise caged.

There are so many Indias that no one person can know them all, and the Winter India which the tourist sees during the cold-weather weeks is not the real one which the Anglo-Indian knows the year around. The military man, the civilian officer, the