Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/257

Rh and of half a dozen other colors. Human nature secretes the same incongruities wherever we find it. Frank Vincent has written, and the Harpers have published, a beautifully illustrated and most readable book about the people, the products, the cities, and the temples, of a vast tract of Indian country, known as the "Land of the White Elephant." In the course of his three years' journey round the world, the author of this volume spent eleven months in the "marvelously-beautiful countries," and amid the "strange people and stranger customs" of Farther India—a country of one million square miles and twenty-five million inhabitants, with a productive soil and extended commerce. After visiting every thing of interest in Lower Burma, the writer made an excursion up the great Irrawaddy River to Mandalay, in Upper Burma, or Ava—a distance of seven hundred miles. Mandalay, the capital, is a new city. It began to be built in 1855, and in 1867 the king and court adopted it as the royal residence, while it now has a population of one million. Let Chicago hide its diminished head in presence of the enterprise of these heathen. "The city proper is a square—a mile on each side—and is surrounded by a lofty and very thick wall of loose brick (unplastered) with a notched parapet, and having a broad and deep moat filled with clear water. There are three gates on each side, and macadamized streets about a hundred feet in width, leading from them, intersect the city at right angles; then, between these are small and irregular streets and by-paths. Along the sides of the larger avenues there run channels for carrying water (which is brought from the river in a canal fifteen miles long) throughout the city. Each gate-way is surmounted by a lofty, pyramidal-shaped wooden tower with the customary terraced roof, and, at irregular intervals, there are turrets, raised a little higher than the wall, and surmounted by small wooden pavilions of the same model as those over the great gates. We crossed the moat on a massive wooden bridge, and passed through one of the western gate-ways—the only one through which corpses are allowed to be taken from the city, as my guide observed. The gates are of enormous height and thickness, and are built of teak beams, fastened together with huge iron bolts." The author says, "I determined to make this trip, to pay my respects to his majesty the king." Accordingly, on his arrival in the city, through the favor of a Chinese resident who enjoyed the friendship of his majesty, he was granted an audience. The king seems to have taken a fancy to him, and offered him good business facilities and as many Burmese wives as he wanted, if he would stay and help him; but the virtuous young man said he would see his folks about it before deciding.

Inspired by his elephant-hunting curiosity, Mr. Vincent afterward visited the King of Siam at Bangkok, and discourses upon the condition of his elephants and the philosophy of the subject as follows:

"The first animal whose stable we entered was quite small, and possessed few of the peculiar characteristics of a 'dark-cream albino,' excepting perhaps the eyes. The keeper fed him with bananas, and caused him to make a salaam (a profound salutation or bow) by raising his proboscis to his forehead for a moment and then gracefully lowering it to the ground. In another shed we saw a larger and also whiter elephant, its body having the peculiar flesh-colored appearance termed 'white.' Here there was, besides, a white monkey—'white animals are the favorite abodes of transmigrating souls'—kept to ward off bad spirits, as the attendant informed us.

"Sir John Bowring—and he is about the only person who has written at length on this subject—in a very interesting 'chapter on-elephants,' tells us that the Buddhists have a special reverence for white quadrupeds; that he has himself seen a white monkey honored with special attention. Also, that white elephants have been the cause of many a war, and their possession more an object of envy than the conquest of territory or the transitory glories of the battlefield. In the money-market the white elephant is almost beyond price. Ten thousand sovereigns (fifty thousand dollars) would hardly represent its pecuniary value; a hair from its tail is worth a Jew's ransom. 'It was my good fortune,' he says, 'to present (in 1855) to the first king of Siam (the Siamese have two kings