meets the swarms of beggars that make life a burden. Aged men, with loathsome sores, stand whining at corners beseeching the favor of a two-anna piece; blind men, led by small, skinny children, set up a mournful wail and then curse you fluently when you pass them by, and scores of children rise up out of hovels at the roadside and pursue your carriage with shrill screams. All are filthy, clamorous, greedy, inexpressibly offensive. If you are soft hearted and give to one, then your day is made hideous by a swarm of mendicants, tireless in pursuit and only kept from actual invasion of the carriage by fear of the driver's whip.
The feature which makes travel on Indian railways a weariness of the flesh is the roughness of the cars. Each truck on the passenger cars is provided with two large wheels, exactly like those on freight cars, and these wheels have wooden felloes and spokes. With poor springs the result is that though the road-bed is perfect the cars are as rough as our freight cars. When the speed is over twenty-five miles an hour or the road is crooked, the motion of the cars is well nigh intolerable. Ordinarily the motion is so great that reading is difficult and writing out of the question. At night the jar of the car is so severe that one must be very tired or very phlegmatic to get any refreshing sleep. When one travels all day and all night at a stretch—as in the journey from Jeypore to Bombay—the fatigue is out of all proportion to the distance covered. In fact Americans have been spoiled by the comforts of Pullman sleeping-cars, in which foreign critics find so many flaws. Probably the chief annoyance to our party of Americans, aside from the jar of the cars, was the dust and soot which poured in day and night. The engines burn soft coal and the dust on the road-beds is excessive. A system of double windows and well-fitting screens would remove this nuisance, but apparently the British in India think dust and grime necessary features of railway travel, for no effort is made to eliminate them.
No Oriental trip would be complete without a visit to Egypt, and especially a ride on the Nile. It is more difficult to make anyone realize the charm of Egypt than of any other country of the Orient. The people are dirty, ignorant, brutish: their faces contain no appeal because they are the faces of Millet's "The Man With the Hoe." Centuries of subjection have killed the pride which still lingers in the face and bearing of the poorest Arab; the Egyptian peasant does not wear the collar of Gurth, but he is a slave of the soil whose day of freedom is afar off. Yet these degenerate people are seen against a background of the most imposing ruins in the world. Luxor and Karnak and the tombs of the kings near old Thebes contain enough remains of the splendor of ancient Egyptian life to permit study for years. The mind is appalled by this mass of temples, monuments, obelisks and colossal statues. It is difficult to realize that the same people who are seen toiling in the fields to-day raised these huge monuments to perpetuate the names of their rulers. A climate as dry as that of the Colorado desert has preserved these remains, so that in the rock tombs one may gaze upon brightly painted hieroglyphs of the time of Moses that look as though they were carved yesterday.
In this Oriental tour the stamp of strange religions is over all the lands. The temple is the keynote of each race. And religion with the Oriental is not a matter of one day's worship in seven: it is a vital, daily function into which he puts all the dreamy mysticism of his race. The first sight of several Mohammedans bowed in the dust by the roadside, with their faces set toward Mecca, gives one a strange thrill, but this spectacle soon loses its novelty. Everywhere in the Far East religion is a matter of form and ceremony: it includes regular visits to the temple and regular prayers and offerings to the deities enshrined in these houses of worship. But it also includes a daily ritual that must be observed at certain fixed hours, even though the believer may be in the midst of the crowded market place. The spiritual isolation of an Oriental at his prayers in any big city of the Far East is the most significant feature of this life—so alien to all the mental, moral, and religious training of the Occident. Vain is it for one of Anglo-Saxon strain to attempt to bridge this abyss that lies between his mind and that of the Burman or the Parsee. Each lives in a spiritual world of his own and each would be homesick for heaven were he transferred to the ideal paradise of the other. So the traveler in the Orient should give heed to the temples, for in them is voiced the spiritual aspirations of the people, who have little of comfort or hope to cheer them in this world.
JAPAN, THE
PICTURE COUNTRY OF
THE ORIENT
First Impressions of Japan and The Life of The Japanese
Yokohama looks very beautiful to the traveler who has spent over two weeks on the long sea voyage from Seattle; but it has little to commend it to the tourist, for most of its native traits have been Europeanized. It is noteworthy, however, as the best place except Hongkong for the traveler to purchase an oriental outfit and it is probably the cheapest place in the world for trunks and bags and all leather goods. Its bund, or water-front, is spacious and its leading hotels are very comfortable.
Of Japan and the Japanese, all that can be given are a few general impressions of the result of two weeks of constant travel over the empire and of talks with many people.
Of the country itself, the prevailing impression of the tourist, who crosses it on the railroad or who takes rides through the paddy fields in a rickshaw, is of a perennial greenness. Instead of the tawny yellow of California in October, one sees here miles on miles of rice fields, some of vivid green, others of green turning to gold. The foothills of the mountains remind one of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, as they all bear evidences of the rounding and smoothing of glacial action.
At a distance the rice fields look like grain fields, but seen near at hand they are found to be great swamps of water, with row on row of rice, the dead furrows either serving as ditches or as raised paths across the fields. Every bit of hillside is terraced and planted to rice or vegetables or fruit.
Often these little, terraced fields, which look like the natural mesa of southern California, will not be over fifty feet long by ten or fifteen feet wide. Between the rows of fruit trees are vegetables or corn or sorghum. The farmers live in little villages and apparently go home every night after tilling their fields. There are none of the scattered farmhouses, with trees around them, which are so characteristic a feature of any American rural scene.
The towns as well as the cities show a uniformity of architecture, as most of the shops are one story or a story and one-half, while the residences seem to be built on a uniform plan, with great variety in gateways and decoration of grounds. Most of the roofs are made of a black clay, corrugated so that it looks like the Spanish-American tile, and many of the walls that surround residences and temples are of adobe, with a tiled covering, precisely as one sees to-day the remains of adobe walls in old Spanish-Californian towns.
The general impression of any Japanese city when seen from a height is that of a great expanse of low buildings with a liberal sprinkling of trees and a few pagodas or roofs of Buddhist temples.
The strongest impression that the unprejudiced observer receives in Japan is of the small value set upon labor as well as upon time by the great mass of the people. In Yokohama and in Kobe, which show the most signs of foreign influence, the same traits prevail.
It is one of the astonishing spectacles of the world, this accomplishment of the business of a great nation by man power alone. Only in one city, Osaka, the Chicago of Japan, is there any general evidence of the adoption of up-to-date methods in manufacturing. Everywhere one sees all the small industries of the country carried on in the same way that they were conducted in Palestine in the time of Christ.
Everywhere men, harnessed to heavy push carts, are seen straining to haul loads that are enough for a horse. The few horses in the cities are used for heavy trucks, in common with bulls, for the Japanese bull is a beast of burden and not one of the lords of creation as in our own country.
The bull is harnessed with a short neckyoke and a saddle on his back, which bears a close resemblance to the