Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/99

Rh monotonous waste of time, and the evening bands, or meet at "Scandal Point," is open to the charge of a deadly dullness.

Visits become visitations, because that tyrant Madam Etiquette commanded them about noon, despite risk of sunstroke, and "the ladies" insisted upon them without remorse of conscience. Needless to say that in those days the Gym-hánah was unknown, and that the Indian world ignored lawn-tennis, even croquet.

Another point in Bombay Society at once struck me, and I afterwards found it in the Colonies and most highly developed in the United States. At home men and women live under an incubus, a perfect system of social despotism which is intended to make amends for an unnatural political equality, amongst the classes born radically unequal. Abroad, the weight is taken off their shoulders, and the result of its removal is a peculiar rankness of growth. The pious became fanatically one-idea'd, pharisaical, unchristian, monomaniacal. The un-pious run to the other extreme, believe nothing, sneer at the holies, "and look upon the mere Agnostic as a 'slow coach.'" Eccentricity develops itself Bedlam-wards. One of my friends had a mania and swore 'By my halidom.'" Another had an image of Gánpati over his door, which he never passed without prayer, "Shri ganeshayá Hamahá" ("I bow to auspicious Janus"). A third, of whom I heard, had studied Aristotle in Arabic, and when shown the "Novum Organon," asked, indignantly, "who the fellow might be that talked such stuff." And in matters of honesty the social idea was somewhat lax; to sell a spavined horse to a friend was considered a good joke, and to pass off plated wares for real silver was looked upon as only a trifle too "smart." The Press faithfully reflected these nuances with a little extra violence and virulence of its own. By-the-by, I must not forget making the acquaintance of a typical Scot, Dr. Buist (afterwards Sir Charles Napier's "blatant beast of the Bombay Times"). He wrote much (so badly that only one clerk could read it) and washed little; and as age advanced he married a young wife.

After a month or so at Bombay, chiefly spent in mugging "Hindostani," and in providing myself wit the necessaries of life—servants, headed by Salvador Soares, a handsome Goanese; a horse, in the shape of a dun-coloured Kattywár nag; also a "horsekeeper," a dog, a tent, and so forth—I received my marching orders and set out to "join" my own corps. The simple way of travelling in those days before steam and rail was by palanquin or pattymar. I have described the latter article in "Goa," and I may add that it had its advantages. True it was a "slow coach," creeping on seventy of eighty miles a day ,and some days almost stationary; it had few comforts and no