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
Except for those who, under compulsion of a sick certificate, are flying
Bombaywards, it is good for every man to see some little of the great
Indian Empire and the strange folk who move about it. It is good to
escape for a time from the House of Rimmon--be it office or
cutchery--and to go abroad under no more exacting master than personal
inclination, and with no more definite plan of travel than has the
horse, escaped from pasture, free upon the countryside. The first result
of such freedom is extreme bewilderment, and the second reduces the
freed to a state of mind which, for his sins, must be the normal portion
of the Globe-trotter--the man who "does" kingdoms in days and writes
books upon them in weeks. And this desperate facility is not as strange
as it seems. By the time that an Englishman has come by sea and rail
_via_ America, Japan, Singapur, and Ceylon, to India, he can--these eyes
have seen him do so--master in five minutes the intricacies of the
_Indian Bradshaw_, and tell an old resident exactly how and where the
trains run. Can we wonder that the intoxication of success in hasty
assimilation should make him overbold, and that he should try to
grasp--but a full account of the insolent Globe-trotter must be
reserved. He is worthy of a book. Given absolute freedom for a month,
the mind, as I have said, fails to take in the situation and, after much
debate, contents itself with following in old and well-beaten
ways--paths that we in India have no time to tread, but must leave to
the country cousin who wears his _pagri_ tail-fashion down his back, and
says "cabman" to the driver of the _ticca-ghari_.
Now, Jeypore from the Anglo-Indian point of view is a station on the
Rajputana-Malwa line, on the way to Bombay, where half an hour is
allowed for dinner, and where there ought to be more protection from the
sun than at present exists. Some few, more learned than the rest, know
that garnets come from Jeypore, and here the limits of our wisdom are
set. We do not, to quote the Calcutta shopkeeper, come out "for the good
of our 'ealth," and what touring we accomplish is for the most part off
the line of rail.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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