Life and Travel in India: Being Recollections of a Journey Before the Days of RailroadsLeonowens, Anna Harriette
History
Life and Travel in India: Being Recollections of a Journey Before the Days of Railroads
Leonowens, Anna Harriette
India -- Description and travel; India -- Social life and customs
[80] A genus of leguminous trees and shrubs, usually with thorns and
pinnate leaves, and of an airy and elegant appearance. It is found in
all the tropical parts of both the Old World and the New, and also in
Australia and Polynesia. A few species only are found in temperate
climates.
[81] Small pieces of meat seasoned and roasted on a skewer.
[82] A white flower very much like a double jessamine, with much the
same fragrance.
[83] A veil that covers the whole person.
[84] A patemar is a coasting vessel, built generally in Bombay. It has
prow and stern alike, double planked--a handsome craft of about two
hundred tons burden, with two masts and great wide lateen sails.
CHAPTER XIII.
The Taptee River.--Surat and its Environs.--The Borahs and Kholees
of Guzerat.--Baroda, the Capital of the Guicowars.--Fakeers, or
Relic-Carriers, of Baroda.--Cambay.--Mount Aboo.--Jain Temples on
Mount Aboo, etc.
The views along the Western Ghauts and the coast are very grand. We soon
lost sight of all their varied beauty, and in a couple of days entered
the splendid river Taptee, which flows broad and deep immediately under
the walls of the city of Surat.
Almost at the mouth of the Taptee stands a lovely little island;
opposite to this is a little town called Domus, a quaint,
homelike-looking place, where Europeans spend the hot months. The river
flows for miles through a richly-cultivated suburb of gardens,
plantations, and beautiful houses, till it reaches the city, which is
walled with bastions at certain points, but the walls and towers are
fast crumbling away. At one extremity stands the famous old castle of
Surat, about three hundred years old, looking older and more stained
with time and age than even the fortress of Damaun.
Surat has a double wall and twice twelve gates, inner and outer,
communicating with one another. But its history is even more varied and
complicated than its "world-protecting" walls and wooden-leaved gates.
It is written in the ruins found everywhere in the gardens, palaces of
the nawabs, rajahs, and peishwas, as well as in the factories of the
Dutch, French, Portuguese, and English, most of which are now
transformed into hospitals, lunatic asylums, hotels for European
travellers, or pleasure-houses and grounds for wealthy natives.
Here are also grand English and Dutch cemeteries, where many noted
English and Dutch lie magnificently entombed in stately mausoleums, in
order to impress the Oriental mind, which is always disposed to attach a
certain kind of sanctity to piles of brick, mortar, and stone, whether
priest, prophet, or knave lie interred beneath.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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