The remainder of the voyage from St Helena to England was apparently
marked by no incident worthy of mention, as the khan notices only the
reappearance of the pole-star on their crossing the line, and
re-entering the northern hemisphere, and their reaching once more the
latitude of Delhi, "which we now passed many thousand miles to our
right; after which nothing of importance occurred till we reached the
British Channel, when we saw the Scilly Isles in the distance, and
about noon caught a glimpse of the Lizard Point, and the south coast
of England, together with the lighthouse: the country of the French
lay on our right at the distance of about eighty miles. I was given
to understand that the whole distance from St Helena to London, by the
ship's reckoning, was 6328 miles, and 16,528 from Calcutta." In the
Downs the pilot came on board, from whom they received the news of the
attempt recently made by Oxford on the life of the Queen; and here the
captain, anxious to lose no time in reaching London, quitted the
vessel as it entered the Thames, "the sources of which famous river, I
was informed, were near a place called Cirencester, eighty-eight miles
from London, in the _zillah_ (county) of Gloucester." The ship was now
taken in tow by a couple of steam-tugs, and passing Woolwich, "where
are the war-ships and _top-khana_ (arsenal) of the English Padishah,
at length reached Blackwall, where we anchored."
"I now (continues the khan) returned thanks to God for having
brought me safe through the wide ocean to this extraordinary
country--bethinking myself of the answer once made by a man who had
undertaken a voyage, on being asked by his friends what he had seen
most wonderful--'The greatest wonder I have seen is seeing myself
alive on land!'" The troubles of the khan, however, were far from
being ended by his arrival on _terra firma_: for apparently from
some mistake or inadvertence, (the cause of which does not very
clearly appear,) on the part of the friends whom he had expected to
meet him, he found himself, on landing at Blackwall and proceeding
by the railway to London, left alone by the person who had thus far
been his guide, in apartments near Cornhill, almost wholly
unacquainted with the English language, separated from his baggage
and servants, who were still on board the Edinburgh, and with no one
in his company but another Hindustani, as little versed as himself
in the ways and speech of Franguestan. In this "considerable
unhandsome fix," as it would be called on the other side of the
Atlantic, the perplexities of the khan are related with such
inimitable naïveté and good-humour, that we cannot do better than
give the account of them in his own words. "As I could neither ask
for any thing, nor answer any question put to me, I passed the whole
night without a morsel of food or a drop of water: till in the
morning, feeling hungry, I requested my companion to go to some
bazar and buy some fruit. He replied that it would be impossible for
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