Page:St. Nicholas - Volume 41, Part 1.djvu/22

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Of these, the most beautiful are the huge white bulls sacred to the Hindu god Shiva. These lead a life of leisure and luxury. They roam about the streets unmolested, eating from the fruit and vegetable stalls at will. Some are housed in the temples of the god.

Those who are not so lucky as to be held sacred have a rather hard time of it. They do most of the heavy hauling, and often suffer very cruel treatment from their drivers. In fact. no other animal is so much the victim of the cruelty and ignorance of the natives as these poor bullocks.

We drove in all sorts of curious-looking conveyances behind these somewhat refractory creatures. Once we drove out into a desolate region to visit some deserted temples, seated on the floor of a bullock cart with an arched cover of plaited bamboo over us. The men along the road walked faster than our bullocks, which went so slowly that, had it not been for the jolting of the cart, we would scarcely have known that we were moving.

In the southernmost part of the peninsula, along the Malabar coast, where there are no trains, we traveled in cabin-boats rowed by natives. It took them all night to row from Quilan to Travandrum, about fifty miles along the back-water. They sang from the moment they began to row, timing the stroke of the oar to the rhythm of their song. In the morning, they appeared as smiling and fresh as they had the evening before when we started.

In Madras, we rode in rickshaws like those of China and Japan. In many parts of India, men take the place of animals, both in carrying people and in transporting cargo. Several times we were carried up mountains in dholies by coolies. These dholies consist of a scat swung between two poles by ropes. They are carried by two or four men, who trot off up the hill with the poles resting on their shoulders, while the passenger dangles between them. They used to come down the mountains so fast that we were quite terrified. The seat would twist and sway, hit against trees, graze along the side of rocks, while our porters would dance along, talking and laughing, without paying the slightest attention to us. Then there are various kinds of pushcarts used in different parts of the country.

Of course, the really Indian way of traveling