Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/26

4 Some cross current in that pent-up pocket of Manaar makes it a rival of the English Channel for nausea; but at daylight the ship anchored in shallow, gray-green waters seven miles off the low-lying coast of the Indian peninsula—"India's coral strand"—and for two hours it rocked there more fully to complete the misery of two hundred coolie passengers, heaped together on the forward deck like so much cargo. It was slow work disembarking these limp folk, who fell prone in every stage and attitude of misery fore and aft on the reeling tender. A greasy bench was reserved for us amidships, fairly touching the boilers, and, after inhaling steam and engine grease for an hour, we reached the snow-white beach. Inky-black cargo coolies in red and white draperies filed up and down the sandy shore and the narrow pier of Tuticorin, and there was local color to spare; color, too, in the Custom-house, where an aldermanic black official, with an exaggerated sausage of a turban linked around his caste-marked brow, received us with unctuous gravity, listened to our declaration that we had neither spirits, ammunition, nor firearms, and let us go with our unopened luggage, free to wander at will from that furthest end of the empire to the uttermost mountain wall, without official interference or question, welcome without passport or permit, free from espionage and annoyance: a liberty of entrance, a courteously opened door, that covers the American tourist with chagrin as he contrasts it with the landing at any of his own ports.

Tuticorin's white walls and houses, white sand