Yurand

“ Diedrich was dumb, he could make no confession, and though he could explain to the chaplain he would not do so from very terror. Then what? Then who could learn that Yurand had not received all those wounds in battle? He might easily have lost his tongue from a spear thrust between the teeth; a sword or an axe might have cut his right hand off; and he had only one eye, hence what wonder that that eye was knocked out when he hurled himself in madness on the whole garrison of Schytno? Ah, Yurand! The last delight of his life shook up for a moment the heart of old Siegfried. ”

“ But Siegfried and Rotgier rushed to a gallery which projected above the great windows of the hall, and called on others to follow and save themselves. They did so in haste, so that men crowded one another on the narrow staircase, wishing to be there at the earliest, and thence strike the giant with whom every hand-to-hand struggle had proved impossible. Finally the last man slammed the door leading to the gallery, and Yurand was alone on the ground floor. Shouts of delight and triumph were heard in the gallery; heavy oaken tables, benches, iron sockets of torches began to fly now at Yurand. ”

“ Did Yurand himself suspect us of this deed, and if he suspected us why did he, before we invited him to Schytno, search the whole boundary for bandits so as to ransom his daughter from them?"
"Well," said the prince, "as to truth, though thou hide it from people, thou wilt not hide it from God. Yurand held you guilty at first, but afterward—afterward he had another idea."
"See how the brightness of truth conquers darkness," said Rotgier. ”

“ Who will swear that they did not lie to Yurand, and have not lied now to thee? I know not where Danusia is, but I have challenged this man; for though I should have to lose my life, death is sweeter to me than is life without her who in all the world is my dearest. ”

“ Yurand's face grew pale from indignation, and a terrible moment came, in which it seemed that he was just ready to seize the pilgrim by the breast and put him under his knees, but he throttled the anger in his bosom, drew a deep breath, and spoke slowly with emphasis,—
"Whoever thou be, bend not my patience over much lest it break." ”

“ But death did not come, though increasing grief rose in his breast, and through his head darker and darker thoughts flew, like clouds which, driven by a storm one after another, hide the light of day and extinguish all earthly pleasure. Zbyshko understood, as well as the princess, that if Danusia went to Spyhov she would be the same as lost to him. "Here," thought he, "all wish me well; there Yurand may not even receive me, or listen to me, especially if a vow or some unknown reason binds him. Besides, how can I go to Spyhov when I am sick and barely able to move on this bed." ”

“ Yurand woke from his long sleep in presence of Father Kaleb, and having forgotten in his sleep what had happened to him, and not knowing where he was, he began to feel of the bed and the wall near which the bed stood. But Father Kaleb seized him in his arms, and weeping from tenderness said,—
"It is I! Thou art in Spyhov! Brother Yurand! God has visited thee, but thou art among thy own. Pious people have brought thee home. Oh, brother Yurand! ”

“ The short winter day inclined to its close gradually, but the bridge was ever in the air, and the gate remained fastened.
Toward evening the wind rose, blew away the fog, cleared the sky, and disclosed the brightness of evening. The snow became blue, and afterward violet. There was no frost, but the night promised clear skies. The people went down from the walls again, except the guards; the crows and rooks flew away from the gibbet to the forest. At last the sky became dark, and complete silence followed.
"They will not open the gate till sometime about night," thought Yurand. ”

“ When I regard the condition of the women of the Orient, I feel like starting an immediate crusade—in Egypt they are slaves or toys; in India, bound by the iron laws of custom and caste, sad and dejected; in Burma, happy because independent on business and property lines, thanks to the English Government; in Ceylon, cheerful but with no recognized positions; in Java, children of toil; in Siam, fearless and intrepid in temperament, but subject to the conditions of the Orient; in China, Manchuria, and Korea, seemingly impassive but bound by traditional customs, enforced for centuries ”

“ Besides securing internal order and erecting a government, we have provided India with the novelty of order on her land frontier, nowadays nearly 6000 miles long, and peopled by hundreds of tribes, mostly inured to hereditary rapine, and full of the ferment of religious war. In our own day we have, in the far east, settled Upper Burma from the Gulf of Martaban to the Hukon valley, and from Yunan to the Lushai Hills ”

“ For a brief and breathless moment the whole continent of India vibrated beneath the magnetic touch of the dramatic figure of Dupleix, and when the glittering prospect opened up by him faded before the grim tenacity and forceful determination of the seamen and traders of Great Britain, a craving for empire sprang up in adjacent territories and found expression in a series of ill-conceived enterprises in the direction of Burma and Siam. ”

“ Many merchants from Surat have settled in Durban with their families. Most of them, including the assisted immigrants, can read and write their own language to a greater extent than one would think they do.
I venture to quote the following from my ‘Open Letter’ [5] to the Members of the Legislative Assembly and the Legislative Council of Natal to show what treatment the Indian receives at the hands of the general run of Europeans in the Colony:
The man in the street hates him, curses him, spits upon him, and often pushes him off the foot-path. ”

“ In the days of the Chinese supremacy, the commerce with Yarkand was next to nothing, and was looked upon by the Chinese as contraband. Now that they have regained possession of the country, it is to be hoped that they will profit by the lesson which has been taught them in another province of China, where rebellion was put down, but where they have lately been compelled to admit Western civilization through the door which the Mohammedans of Yunnan opened during the short period of their emancipation. ”

“ The Chinese conquest of Jungaria and Eastern Turkestan having become an accomplished fact, what did the new rulers do to justify their forcible interference in Central Asia? What measures did they adopt to conciliate the subject peoples, and what to increase the prosperity of a vast region, naturally fertile, but impoverished by centuries of improvident government and of civil anarchy and war? ”

“ The Germans, the Belgians, the English, and the Portuguese, are crying out at present for territory in Central Africa. Meantime humanity is crying out for some one to administer the country; for some one to claim it, not by delimiting a frontier-line upon a map with colored crayons, but by seeing justice done upon the spot; for some one with a strong arm and a pitiful heart to break the Arab yoke and keep these unprotected children free. ”

“ The Portuguese had made their way to India round the Cape of Good Hope about the end of the fifteenth century, and for a hundred years had been building factories in the territories of Hindu Rajas, and converting them into fortresses. Nothing of the kind would have been allowed by the Great Mogul, or by the Sultans of the Deccan, but the Portuguese had persuaded the Hindu Rajas that they would help and protect them, and the Rajas never saw the danger until the fortresses were bristling with cannon and opposition was useless. ”

“ The whole of this region, and, indeed, the whole of Central and Northern Asia, has been the cradle of the people of India from the remotest antiquity. Hindus and Mohammedans are all immigrants from beyond the Indus. The Dravidian races, the pre-Aryan people, brought their devil worship and noisy orgies from Northern Asia into Hindustan. Eventually they were driven to Southern India by the Aryan people, who brought the Vedic gods and hymns, the sacred hôma and the ministration of Rishis, from Persia and Media into Northern India. ”

“ It is natural to ask why, if the boundaries of the promised land were so extensive, if they reached so far [55] on the north-east as the Euphrates, and if they extended from Lebanon on the north to the confines of Egypt on the south, there should have been any difficulty about the two and a half tribes occupying the land east of the Jordan, where only by a special permission they obtained their settlement. ”

“ In those days there were none of the resources of modern civilization to bring the ends of a country together — no railroads coursing through the valleys and over the mountains, no telegraphs to flash signals from tribe to tribe. The tribes were as widely separated as nations are now. Those on the opposite sides of the Jordan were as far asunder as England and France are to-day, separated by the British Channel. But at the annual feasts the people came, not only from Judah, which was nigh, to Jerusalem, but from Simeon in the South to Dan in the North ”

“ Powerful bands found their way through the passes of the Himalayas into the Punjab, and spread themselves, chiefly as Brahmans and Rajputs, over India.
The Aryan offshoots, alike to the east and to the west, asserted their superiority over the earlier peoples whom they found in possession of the soil. The history of ancient Europe is the story of the Aryan settlements around the shores of the Mediterranean; and that wide term, modern civilization, merely means the civilization of the western branches of the same race. ”

“ Yemen and Hedjaz, Mecca and Medina, are no longer mysteries to us, nor are we wholly without information on the districts of Hadramaut and Oman. But of the interior of the vast region, of its plains and mountains, its tribes and cities, of its governments and institutions, of its inhabitants, their ways and customs, of their social condition, how far advanced in civilization or sunk in barbarism, what do we as yet really know, save from accounts necessarily wanting in fulness and precision? ”

“ The feeling against the wholesale importation of free Indians has steadily increased in Durban, and the recent arrival of 700 more Indians of this class by the steamers Courland and Naderi, would seem to have aggravated the feeling. ”

“ We find it in Africa, where, "when he addresses the king, a Borghoo man stretches himself on the earth as flat as a flounder, in which attitude he lies, kissing the dust, till his business with his sovereign is at an end." Asia furnishes many cases of it: "When preferring a complaint, a Khond or Panoo will throw himself on his face, with hands joined, and a bunch of straw or grass in his mouth;" and while, in Siam, "before the nobles all subordinates are in a state of reverent prostration, the nobles themselves, in the presence of the sovereign, exhibit the same crawling obeisance." ”

“ They come from every part of Asia and Africa—from the snow-swept steppes of Siberia, from the coral-fringed islands of the Indian Archipelago, and from the tangled jungles of Senegambia and Abyssinia. Turks, Kurds, Persians, Tartars, Chinese, Malays, Egyptians, Berbers, Nubians—men of all colors and of countless tribes and tongues—they all foregather in the Sacred City of Arabia to get inspiration and strength to win proselytes to the creed of Mohammed. ”

“ Afterwards proceeding to the south-east, he descended into the cinnamon and myrrh country, behind Cape Gardefan, (the Cape that terminates the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean) from this, crossed over to Arabia, to the Homerites, being the same people with the Abyssinians, only on the Arabian shore. He then conquered several of the Arabian princes, who first resisted him, and had it in his power to have put an end to the trade of India there, had he not been as great a politician as he was a warrior. ”

“ And indeed Europe, at this time, was probably inhabited by shepherds, hunters, and fishers, who had no luxury at all, or such as could not be supplied from India; they lived in woods and marshes, with the animals which made their sport, food, and cloathing.
The inhabitants of Africa then, this vast Continent, were to be supplied with the necessaries, as well as the luxuries of life, but they had neither the articles Arabia wanted, nor those required in India, at least, for a time they thought so; and so long they were not a trading people. ”

“ I look rather to facts and deeds. At the time of our worst reverses in South Africa I was in a very typical part of India where there were only two or three other Englishmen, and where I could be in touch with real Indian feeling in regard to these events. At home men were talking of the decay of the Empire, and were in the deepest depths of gloom. ”

“ Even in very remote times, before the Hindu numerals were sculptured in the cave of Nānā Ghāt, there were trade relations between Arabia and India. Indeed, long before the Aryans went to India the great Turanian race had spread its civilization from the Mediterranean to the Indus. [291] At a much later period the Arabs were the intermediaries between Egypt and Syria on the west, and the farther Orient. ”

“ To-day the tribes constitute more than one half the population, and an ethnological map of Yunnan is a wonderful patchwork, for side by side and yet quite distinct, you find scattered about settlements of Chinese, Shans, Lolos, Miaos, Losus, and just what some of these are is still an unsolved riddle. To add to the confusion there is a division of religions hardly known elsewhere, for out of the population of twelve millions it is estimated that three or four millions are Mohammedans. ”