delivered to the merchant sahib on the quay his load of gambier; or he reproves
them for their slowness and want of interest, and threatens them with the rod,
and tells them to look how he holds it above them. If in the course of the
harangue one of the dumb listeners pauses to pick a mouthful of young lallang
grass by the roadside, the softly crooning tones give place to a shriek of
denunciation.
The agile Kling springs down from his improvised pulpit, and rushes at the
offender, calls him the offspring of a pariah dog, shows him the rattan, rubs it
against his nose, threatening to cut him up with it into small pieces, and to feed
the pieces to the birds. Then he discharges a volley of blows on the sleek sides of
the offender, that seem to have little more effect than to raise a cloud of tiger
gnats, and to cause the recipient to bite faster at the tender herbs.
As the bullock-cart that has blocked our way, and at the same time inspired this
description, shambles along down the shady road, and out of the reach of the
syce’s arms, the driver slips quietly up the pole of the cart until a hand rests on
either hump, and commences to talk in a half-aggrieved, half-caressing tone to
his team. Our syce translates. “He say bullock very bad to go to sleep before the
palanquin of the Heaven-Born. If they no be better soon, their souls will no
become men. He say he sorry that they make the great American sahib angry.”
The singular trio passes on, the driver praising and reprimanding by turns in the
soft, musical tongue of his people, the historic beasts swinging lazily along,
regardless of their illustrious past, all unconscious of the fact that their names are
embalmed in sacred writ and Indian legend, and rounding a corner of the broad,
red road, are lost to view amid the olive-green shadows of a clump of gently
swaying bamboo. To me, for the moment, they seem to disappear, like
phantoms, into the mists of the dim centuries, from out of which my imagination
has called them forth.
Soon you are at the wide-open gates of the Botanic Garden. A perfect riot of
strange tropical foliage bursts upon the view. The clean, red road winds about
and among avenues of palms, waringhans, dark green mangosteens, casuarinas,
and the sweet-smelling hibiscus, all alike covered with a hundred different
parasitic vines and ferns. Artificial lakes and moats are filled with the giant pods
of the superb Victoria regia, and the flesh-colored cups of the lotus.