Golden Afternoon (49 page)

On the first night of that trip both boats set off together, ours leading, and we stopped as soon as we were far enough from Gujrowla to avoid being pestered by pi-dogs and small boys, set up camp and ate the dinner that Mahdoo had prepared for us. But for the remainder of the trip, both luncheon and our evening meal depended on what the men had managed to shoot for the pot. For no sooner had we selected a campsite than Tacklow, Colonel Henslow and Mike, accompanied by Kashmera, and with Bets and me as onlookers, set out in search of food. Game in those days was easy to come by. The open country on either side of the river swarmed with partridge and quail, sand grouse, snipe, wild duck, teal, hares and any number of black-buck. Tacklow was a poor shot, but Mike and Colonel Henslow were excellent, and since Kashmera was as good as either of them, we — and the thirteen members of our entourage — fed royally.

It was an unforgettable trip, and one that no one will ever again be able to emulate. Since then the population of India has doubled and then tripled and now quadrupled, and where, in my time, there was nothing
but open and empty land between the little villages and the occasional town, I am told that these days village touches village. And once, many years later and long after India had become independent, when I was talking over the old days with an old, old boatman, whom I had known as a young man in the days when I was a child, he sketched a wide gesture with his outstretched palms, and said sadly, ‘Once there were many, many
kala-hirren
(black-buck). But now there are none left in all this great land!' Well, he was wrong there, for there are a few, though I think they won't last much longer, because there isn't going to be any room for them!

But back in the autumn of the last year of the Roaring Twenties the lovely, empty land was alive with
kala-hirren
and any number of game birds. And night after night we went to sleep to the flicker of firelight and the voice of the river as it whispered and chuckled and rippled its way between the moored boats.

I have said somewhere before that though I was born among mountains and will always think of the Kashmir-that-was as the most beautiful country in the world, the plains of India, and the great rivers that flow across them, have a particular and inexplicable hold on my heart and imagination. I have never really been able to explain why this is so. But every inch and every hour of that trip down the Ganges was pure joy. It was something to do with the size and the flatness of the land. The sense of enormous space. The mile-wide river and the vastness of the empty land which, despite its size, was dwarfed by an even more enormous sky that reduced everything below it to pygmy proportions. The huge circle of the horizon that, whichever way one turned, was always there, so that one stood, a tiny creature no bigger than an ivory chess pawn, in the middle of such a gigantic circle that it was difficult to understand why it did not curve — as nowadays one can see the land or sea curve away below one from the window of an aeroplane. I could never decide at which time of day I liked it best; at dawn, or midday, sunset or night. At dawning, in that clear, pale light that casts no shadow and seems to make the earth shrink down and become as flat as a threadbare Persian carpet, stretching away around you, with the river a smooth expanse of glass and the world so quiet that you could hear the smallest fish jump in the shallows under the far bank, or the fall of a dead leaf on to the sand.

It is in the early dawn that wild duck and geese and teal that have been feeding during the night on the croplands that surround every small village return to the hidden backwaters of the river, where head-under-wing they
drowse away the hot days until the sun nears the horizon and it is time for them to wake again for the evening flying.

The skies of early dawn are usually empty and cloudless, and beginning to turn the same dusty shade of duck-egg green that the Georgian architect, designer and decorator Robert Adam used so often in the magnificent houses that he built. But sometimes the night will have left behind it a thin scatter of clouds, wisps and shreds of vapour that will catch the sun while it is still a long way from the horizon, and blaze gold against the green. And presently the cool duck-egg green will turn to yellow, until at last the whole sky is that colour. It is then that the birds awake and sing in chorus; and suddenly there are shadows where no shadows have been before, and a million million dew-diamonds flash and glitter from every twig or stone or blade of grass, as the sun lips the horizon and, as Kipling wrote, ‘… the Day, the staring Eastern Day, is born'.

I loved every minute of those spectacular Indian mornings, and would often set a small alarm clock under my pillow so that I could wake up in time to watch the darkness fade and the sky turn from grey-blue to Adam green and primrose-yellow and from there to the silver and the brilliance and the gold. It was a spectacle that grabbed my heart as a child and has never let go, even though I know that by now most of the empty spaces and the silence will have gone.

The day was almost as alluring. The incredible blue of the sky and the distances. The glitter of the slow-flowing river. The lines of white egrets pricking along the shallows and the flocks of emerald and turquoise parakeets that whirled, shrieking, out of nowhere, to settle briefly and drink, before rising in a chattering mob and whisking themselves away again. The miles and miles of silver sand, blindingly white in the blazing sunlight, and patched here and there with sparse outcrops of grass and casuarina and a green shrub that was always bright with vivid yellow flowers, and whose name I have forgotten — if I ever knew it. The way that heat danced on the sandbanks, so that the horizon and the entire landscape leapt and quivered as it presented you with a series of enthralling mirages — castles and camels and silver lakes, and sudden glimpses of green woods and waterfalls. And except for the gurgling of the water under the prow of our cumbersome craft, no sound but our own voices to break the hot, sun-bleached stillness.

The evenings were always spectacular, since heat and dust are wonderful materials for light to work with. And once again, as the sun sank towards
the horizon, the sky would turn back from blue to apple green, streaked and splashed with every colour on an artist's palette. There were never very many clouds, but those there were lit up the sky, evening after evening, until it blazed with wisps and scarves and explosions of molten gold, bright apricot and rose-pink. Whichever member of the Heavenly Host is responsible for Indian sunsets not only makes a spectacular job of it, but does not have to stoop to repeating a performance, since the repertoire seems to be endless. Every evening I would think, This is the best
ever
! — it's gorgeous, it's wonderful, it's out of this world. If only I could paint it.' But I couldn't: the splendid transformation scene was always over too quickly. But when it had gone, there was still the night.

Oh, those nights on the Mother of Rivers! The moonlit ones were wonderful, but the starlit ones were better. I had watched many night skies since the night when Tacklow took me up to the Ridge at Simla and gave me my first lesson in astronomy. I can't have been much more than five years old at the time, but he hooked me on astronomy for life. Yet when I look at the night skies now, or read about them or watch TV programmes about them, it is the night skies as I saw them on that Ganges trip that I remember best. I'd never seen the stars quite so clearly before. Perhaps there had been a rainstorm somewhere not too far away — a foretaste of the winter rains that, long after the monsoon has ended, can spoil a camp, or a trek, in northern India. We certainly did not have a drop of rain or even an overcast day during that trip. But if there had been rain somewhere just beyond our vision, it would have helped to clear the dust and made the stars brighter. And then, of course, the month was November, and the monsoon, which had ended in early September, had been heavy enough to have cleared the air and laid the dust in a fairly drastic manner. Also it was now eleven years since the Great War had ended. Time enough in which to dissipate all the corruption that bombs and high explosives, gas attacks, petrol fumes, disease and death had created. The terrible epidemic that had swept round the world in the wake of that war — killing as it did so, many more men, women and children than all the bombs and ammunition had been able to do — had passed, and the bodies of those dead had long ago been burned or buried, or carried away in their thousands by India's rivers, and the land (by now a far emptier one) had had plenty of time in which to cleanse itself of the man-made foulness that war had bred.

The fact that the death-toll of 1917 had been so high — higher in India I believe than almost anywhere else — was already being made good. But the land was still relatively empty, for whole villages had been wiped out, and that meant far fewer cooking-fires and cleaner air.

I don't remember on which night of our trip there was a full moon, or whether the ‘dark ones' came at the end or the beginning. I only remember standing out under a starlit sky and suddenly seeing it as I had never seen it before. ‘The stars in their courses', each one keeping its own station as it spun through space, some so near that it seemed as though I could reach up and touch them, and some so far away that it was easy to believe that I was watching something that had blinked that blink long before the pyramids were built — before Babylon was built or Troy fell, or Alexander the Great crossed the Indus to invade India. Or perhaps even further back still, when dinosaurs roamed the world and the star I was watching had already blown itself to pieces so long ago that I was only watching something that had not been in existence for uncounted centuries.

It was as if I was seeing the night sky in what we would now call 3-D, and though I have never seen it quite so clearly again, that is the way I still think of it: when I first saw it in an unpolluted sky and remembered the words of David — if he really was the author of the Psalms — and I can paraphrase slightly: ‘When I consider the heavens, and the wondrous works of Thy hands, what is Man that Thou art mindful of him?' What indeed? When you look at some of the things that mankind has been doing on this planet, I can't imagine!

But then there is no reason to suppose that we are the only world He created. There may be thousands of others; and any day now we may easily discover that we have succeeded in making this one expendable. If so, serve us right! No one can say that we haven't asked for it!

With freedom to choose a new campsite each evening, we stopped for preference where there were trees under which we could pitch our tents, and if possible, shrubs and pampas grass, and low, sandy cliffs at our back. The sites that we chose were sometimes on the right bank of the river and sometimes on the left as the lie of the land dictated, but always near trees or tall grass; with the result that, after the silence and solitude of the sun-baked hours, the brief and beautiful period of twilight and dusk — in Eastern lands so quickly over that it seems to be little
more than a breath drawn between day and darkness — was by contrast as clamorous with sound as though the invisible conductor of an orchestra had let his baton fall and released a torrent of music.

Flights of homing birds, chattering, quarrelling and gossiping, would appear out of nowhere until the trees seemed alive with them. Each evening there were peacocks crying from the cane-brakes and partridges calling from every clump of grass, while out on the river the wild-duck would wake and take off for the evening flight in line after talkative line. This uproar lasted only a short time, but as the last of the sunset faded and the first stars began to shimmer in the darkening sky, the day-time birds fell silent and the owls and the nightjars took over; and from somewhere far out on the plains beyond the river, a jackal-pack would raise its hunting cry, beginning with a single mournful long-drawn-out howl that was repeated several times, until the whole pack took up the cry and howled together in a yelping, wailing chorus.

On white nights the pi-dogs of the nearest village would provide a back-up to the eerie howling by baying at the moon, and sometimes one would hear the maniacal laughter of a hyena — a sound I could have done without. But I never minded the jackal-packs in full cry, perhaps because that sound had been a familiar part of my childhood for the first ten years of my life. As familiar was the peacock's harsh, mournful cry, which I loved and still remember with deep affection, because that cry woke me up each day at dawn, and was one of the last calls to be heard in the dusk.

We would always stop, if Kashmera could manage it, within walking distance of a village, because the old
shikari
and his boatmen enjoyed company and liked to have a bazaar, however small, within reasonable reach; as did Mahdoo, who preferred to shop daily for items that did not keep well in the heat, such as milk and butter and fresh eggs, vegetables and fruit. So there was generally a good deal of coming and going between the camp and the nearest village after dark when the campfires were lit. There were always
tulakdars
and grey-headed village elders who remembered Tacklow and Mother from those yearly trips down the Ganges during the war years and the early twenties, and who asked for news of people like Sir Charles and Buckie and the others who used to pass that way in the old days. They were sad to learn that Sir Charles was dead and sent their respects and messages to Buck-Sahib and ‘Soppy'-Sahib and Bunting-Sahib and their congratulations to those younger sahibs who
had now become the fathers of sons who, undoubtedly, would one day in the future come drifting down-river to talk to the sons and grandsons of the men who had known their fathers.

Sometimes they would bring gifts with them: a handful of walnuts, or a stick or two of sugar-cane or a slab of
halwa
made from buffalo's milk sweetened with
gur
, which is raw sugar, and boiled and boiled until only the solids remain, when a few chopped pistachio nuts and a drop or two of attar of roses are added before the sweetmeat is flattened and shaped into bars, and — on very special occasions — wrapped in skin-thin pieces of pure, beaten silver. Sometimes a
tulakdar
would proffer a
nuzzer
consisting of a few rupees in a small handkerchief, and this Tacklow would touch and return, as is — or was — the immemorial custom of the land. I have heard that nowadays too many ex-rulers of princely states have taken to accepting the money instead of merely touching it. In which case I imagine the custom will not last much longer!