Vidura

“ Yet the gates of Castile are still before us, and we do not quit that most Spanish of provinces without seeing it once more in its sternest and wildest mood. North of the road lies the long level-topped ridge of the Montes Obarenes, a range not dissimilar to our own Mendips, and, like them, cleft with an unsuspected pass. For some distance we skirt the base of the hills; and then with a sharp turn to the left we dive suddenly into the grim defile of Pancorvo, a Deva gorge in miniature, where road, river, and railway jostle each other through a maze of fantastic limestone crags. ”

“ The next afternoon found me in Vitoria, in the land of the Basque; yet another kind of Spain. Vitoria is a city of to-day, clean, bustling, almost American in her streets and architecture and the wide-awake air of the Vascongado. The boína--round cap without visor and the end of a string for tassel--had all at once become universal, worn, like the fez in Damascus, by every age and grade of man from bootblack to mayor. So pleasing was this prosaic city that even though her prices were high I loitered in her shade until the next afternoon before seeking out the highway to Bilbáo. ”

“ Towards the north are the Tyrolese mountains, covered with snow, and half hidden by clouds, and joined by the Vicentian mountains on the north-west. Then towards the west are the nearer mountains of Este, the shapes and recesses of which are plainly to be seen. Towards the south-east is a verdant sea of plants, without a trace of elevation, tree after tree, bush after bush, plantation after plantation, while houses, villas, and churches, dazzling with whiteness, peer out from among the green. ”

“ Of the southern half of the great peninsula of India in the old days we indeed know nothing, except that it was despised by the inhabitants of Hindostan Proper, in comparison with their own holy land. We first find the people of the plains, from the Vindhya mountains northwards, looking up with fear and admiration to the great range of the Himalayas,—the Abode of Snow, as they called it,—where they supposed the gods to reside. ”

“ You proceed together with these rivers.
"The irresistible Indus proceeds straight, white and dazzling in splendour! She is great, and her waters fill all sides with mighty force. Of all the flowing rivers, none is flowing like her! She is wild like a mare, beautiful like a well-developed woman! "The Indus is ever young and beautiful. She is rich in horses, in chariots, and in garments; she is rich in gold and is beauteously clad! ”

“ The very road itself, however boldly it may bestride the hills or pierce the rocks, is yet the slave of nature, its windings often being governed as imperiously [Pg 242] as those of the Vedra within the chasm of the glen. Suddenly the valley widens, opening out to the right in a semicircle. A sunny village with a white church appears before us, rather I should say numerous hamlets and scattered houses. Here again were vines, and grapes almost full grown, though none ripening. ”

“ At the highest point which the road traversed, the view might be called sublime: it looked down into the sea, which seemed like a majestic river flowing between gigantic mountains; one of its banks being the mountain below me, which appeared to dip into the water—the other, the Barbary coast, stretching away in bold outline, and forming, directly opposite, that high and frowning promontory, which is the southern boundary of the Streights of Gibraltar. ”

“ The people of Northern India are especially grateful to you of the South, as the great source to which most of the impulses that are working in India today can be traced. The great Bhâshyakâras, epoch-making Âchâryas, Shankara, Râmânuja, and Madhva were born in Southern India. ”

“ Those of us who know Northern India have memories of many such a sojourn in the enchanted no-man's-land of a Punjâb river-bed, where the soil on which the tent is pitched one year may be deep stream the next, and the great solemn cranes stalk amongst the young green wheat, and the flocks of flamingoes show rosy-red in the sunrises. ”

“ Vidur,1 Bidur.—A Marātha caste numbering 21,000 persons in the Central Provinces in 1911, and found in the Nāgpur Division and Berār. They are also returned from Hyderābād and Bombay. Vidur means a wise or intelligent man, and was the name of the younger brother of Pāndu, the father of the Pāndava brothers. The Vidurs are a caste of mixed descent, principally formed from the offspring of Brāhman fathers with women of other castes. But the descendants of Panchāls, Kunbis, Mālis and others from women of lower caste are also known as Vidurs and are considered as different subcastes. ”

“ What shall my west hurt me? As west and east
In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,
So death doth touch the resurrection.
Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or are
The eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?
Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,
All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them,
Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem. ”

“ Viceroy lives in winter, and the dull streets of English shops where they sell things that are not quite good enough for England or quite bad enough for the Colonies; enter the squalid chaos of the Indian city, so ordinary and colourless compared to Bombay or Madras; pass through mile after mile of crowded bazaars, and teeming slums, and factories jumbled up with temples;—till at last the buildings begin, as it were, to shake themselves loose, green reappears, and when you come upon the river on your left, it looks almost clean and holy ”

“ Yet the road which we have taken to guide us aims right at the very heart of them, and at the little village of Unquera it bears up square to the left. A copious sea-green river (officially known as the Tina Mayor, but invariably styled the Deva by the inhabitants) comes hurrying down at this point from the mountains, and charges the great ridge of limestone which edges the coast-line like a natural sea-wall. ”

“ All the northern coast of the old world is exposed to the same cruel necessity; and from Swedish Laponia to the Sea of Japan, a hundred tribes spend a life as short as it is wretched, in the most complete want, amidst eternal snows. ”

“ On the north and west, as far as the eye can reach, a lovely plain presents itself, which is covered with an immense number of trees laden with fruit and blossoms; while, on the south, it is bounded by mountains, whose lofty summits are crowned with perpetual snows, whence issue the springs and streams that diffuse both health and coolness through the city of Granada. ”

“ In one striking particular the analogies of the Old World are reversed in the New: at least in recent periods, the migration of native races and culture has been from the south to the north. This is the more extraordinary in view of the land predominance which, as has been indicated, belongs to the north. ”

“ I have known the man among the Gonds of the woods of Central India, whom nothing could induce to tell a lie, join a party of robbers to lift a herd of cattle from the neighbouring plains for nothing more than as much spirits as he could enjoy at one bout. I asked a native gentleman of the plains, in the valley of the Nerbudda, one day, what made the people of the woods to the north and south more disposed to speak the truth than those more civilized of the valley itself. ”

“ All open country, north and south, as far as the eye could see. Eastward rose the noble blue barrier of the Sierra, with here and there a field, a slope, a spot, or a pinnacle of the snow that names it Nevada. A landscape of larger feeling than any we can show in the old States, on the tame side of the continent. ”

“ The various ranges of the Vindhyas, from 1500 to over 4000 ft. high, form, as it were, the northern wall and buttresses which support the central table-land. Though now pierced by road and railway, they stood in former times as a barrier of mountain and jungle between northern and southern India, and formed one of the main obstructions to welding the whole into an empire. They consist of vast masses of forests, ridges and peaks, broken by cultivated valleys and broad high-lying plains. ”

“ The first time I heard of Lâl was on a bright spring morning, one of those mornings when the plains of Northern India glitter with dew-drops; when a purple haze of cloud-mountain bounds the pale wheat-fields to the north, and a golden glow strikes skywards from the sand-hills in the south. I was in a tamarisk jungle on the banks of the Indus, engaged in the decorous record of all the thefts and restitutions made during the year by that most grasping and generous of rivers. ”

“ The present adjustment will be the harmonising, the mingling of these two ideals. To the Oriental, the world of spirit is as real as to the Occidental is the world of senses. In the spiritual, the Oriental finds everything he wants or hopes for; in it he finds all that makes life real to him. To the Occidental he is a dreamer; to the Oriental the Occidental is a dreamer playing with ephemeral toys, and he laughs to think that grown-up men and women should make so much of a handful of matter which they will have to leave sooner or later. Each calls the other a dreamer. ”

“ The inhabitants of the cities of the north, on the other hand, were marked by a degree of substantial wealth and comfort, sense and ease, civility and liberality, which were apt to distinguish a people situated as they were, without the traditions and objects, meeting the eye at every step in the south, of the greatest degree of culture in the polite arts of life unto which a people can attain. ”

“ The people of Madras even now occupy the principal seats of religion. It was in the South that when people of North India were hiding themselves in woods and forests, giving up their treasures, their household deities, and wives and children, before the triumphant war-cry of Mohammedan invaders — the suzerainty of the King of Vidyânagar was established firm as ever. ”

“ As might be expected, we have in the Rig-Veda frequent allusions to the Indus and its five tributaries, especially in the seventy-fifth hymn of the tenth book, which we translate in full:—
"O ye streams! The bard celebrates your excellent prowess in the house of the worshipper. They flow in three systems, seven streams in each system. The prowess of the Indus is superior to that of all others.
"O Indus! when you ran towards land rich in food, Varuna opened out the way for you. You flow over a spacious path on the land. You shine above all flowing rivers. ”

“ He has built, moreover, a new city in Mesopotamia, most magnificently magnificent, and most beautifully beautiful, and is considering with himself whether he shall call it Victoria, from victory, or the City of Concord, or Peace, which of them, however, is not yet determined, and this fine city must remain without a name, filled as it is with nothing but this writer’s folly and nonsense. He is now going about a long voyage, and to give us a description of what is to be done in India ”

“ The famous plain of Granada, adorned with groves and gardens and winding streams, and guarded by the famous Mountains of the Sun and Air, forms the foreground to the picture, while in the distance we see the gloomy mountain passes, the fortified rocks and castles, and the great walled cities, through which the Moors passed, always victorious and never pausing until their banners floated from every cliff and tower. ”

“ Those only who have sojourned in the ardent climates of the South can appreciate the delights of an abode combining the breezy coolness of the mountain with the freshness and verdure of the valley. While the city below pants with the noontide heat, and the parched Vega trembles to the eye, the delicate airs from the Sierra Nevada play through these lofty halls, bringing with them the sweetness of the surrounding gardens. ”

“ The descent over the northern face is not everywhere so gradual; on the contrary, there are but few places where it is at all feasible; and some of the rivers of the tableland between Jubbulpore and Mirzapore have a perpendicular fall of more than four hundred feet over these mural precipices of the northern face of the Vindhya range. [2] A man, if he have good nerve, may hang over the summits, and suspend in his hand a plummet that shall reach the bottom. ”

“ One hundred and fifty years after the reign of Honorius, the gravest historian of the times 161 describes the wonders of a remote isle, whose eastern and western parts are divided by an antique wall, the boundary of life and death, or, more properly, of truth and fiction. The east is a fair country, inhabited by a civilized people: the air is healthy, the waters are pure and plentiful, and the earth yields her regular and fruitful increase. In the west, beyond the wall, the air is infectious and mortal ”

“ But in the winter, they return to the South, and shelter their camp, behind some convenient eminence, against the winds, which are chilled in their passage over the bleak and icy regions of Siberia. These manners are admirably adapted to diffuse, among the wandering tribes, the spirit of emigration and conquest. The connection between the people and their territory is of so frail a texture, that it may be broken by the slightest accident. ”

“ Most scholars suppose that there were different migrations, and that each movement westward was accomplished slowly, centuries intervening between their departure from Central Asia and their permanent settlement in Europe. The earliest migration was probably that of the tribes who took possession of [Pg 2] Greece and Italy; who first acquired, and for more than a thousand years maintained, their ascendency over all other branches of their common family; who, in fact, laid the basis for the civilization of the world. ”