From Sea to Sea; Letters of TravelKipling, Rudyard
General
From Sea to Sea; Letters of Travel
Kipling, Rudyard
Asia -- Description and travel; Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936 -- Travel; United States -- Description and travel; Voyages and travels
So, after one last look at the Palace high up the hillside, the
Englishman was borne away along the Deoli Road. The peculiarity of
Boondi is the peculiarity of the covered pitfall. One does not see it
till one falls into it. A quarter of a mile from the gate, town and
Palace were invisible. But the Englishman was grieved at heart. He had
fallen in love with Boondi the beautiful, and believed that he would
never again see anything half so fair. The utter untouchedness of the
town was one-half the charm and its association the other. Read Tod, who
is far too good to be chipped or sampled; read Tod luxuriously on the
bund of the Burra Talao, and the spirit of the place will enter into you
and you will be happy.
To enjoy life thoroughly, haste and bustle must be abandoned. Ram Baksh
has said that Englishmen are always bothering to go forward, and for
this reason, though beyond doubt they pay well and readily, are not wise
men. He gave utterance to this philosophy after he had mistaken his road
and pulled up in what must have been a disused quarry hard by a
cane-field. There were patches and pockets of cultivation along the
rocky road, where men grew cotton, chillies, tobacco, and sugar-cane. "I
will get you sugar-cane," said Ram Baksh. "Then we will go forward, and
perhaps some of these jungly-fools will tell us where the road is." A
"jungly fool," a tender of goats, did in time appear, but there was no
hurry; the sugar-cane was sweet and purple and the sun warm.
The Englishman lay out at high noon on the crest of a rolling upland
crowned with rock, and heard, as a loafer had told him he would hear,
the "set of the day," which is as easily discernible as the change of
tone between the rising and the falling tide. At a certain hour the
impetus of the morning dies out, and all things, living and inanimate,
turn their thoughts to the prophecy of the coming night. The little
wandering breezes drop for a time, and, when they blow afresh, bring the
message. The "set of the day," as the loafer said, has changed, the
machinery is beginning to run down, the unseen tides of the air are
falling. This moment of change can only be felt in the open and in touch
with the earth, and once discovered, seems to place the finder in deep
accord and fellowship with all things on earth. Perhaps this is why the
genuine loafer, though "frequently drunk," is "always polite to the
stranger," and shows such a genial tolerance towards the weaknesses of
mankind, black, white, or brown.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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