From Sea to Sea; Letters of TravelKipling, Rudyard
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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
Providence really helps those who do not help themselves. I went up a
street, name unknown, attracted by the colour that was so wantonly
flashed down its length. There is colour in Rajputana and in Southern
India, and you can find a whole paletteful of raw tints at any
down-country durbar; but the Burmese way of colouring is different. With
the women the scarf, petticoat, and jacket are of three lively hues, and
with the men putso and head-wrap are gorgeous. Thus you get your colours
dashed down in dots against a background of dark timber houses set in
green foliage. There are no canons of art anywhere, and every scheme of
colouring depends on the power of the sun above. That is why men in a
London fog do still believe in pale greens and sad reds. Give me lilac,
pink, vermilion, lapis lazuli, and blistering blood red under fierce
sunlight that mellows and modifies all. I had just made this discovery
and was noting that the people treated their cattle kindly, when the
driver of an absurd little hired carriage built to the scale of a fat
Burma pony, volunteered to take me for a drive, and we drove in the
direction of the English quarter of the town where the sahibs live in
dainty little houses made out of the sides of cigar boxes. They looked
as if they could be kicked in at a blow and (trust a Globe-trotter for
evolving a theory at a minute's notice) it is to avoid this fate that
they are built for the most part on legs. The houses are not cantonment
bred in any way--nor did the uneven ground and dusty reddish roads fit
in with any part of the Indian Empire except it may be Ootacamund.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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