dy crowding,
nobody hustling or jostling, an even flow of cheerful humanity,
inexhaustible, imperturbable, convincing one at first sight of the truth
of all one has heard of the order, independence, and vigour of this
extraordinary people. The shops are high and spacious, level with the
street, not, as in India, raised on little platforms; and commonly,
within, they are cut across by a kind of arch elaborately carved and
blazing with gold. Every trade may be seen plying--jade-cutters,
cloth-rollers, weavers, ring-makers, rice-pounders, a thousand others.
Whole animals, roasted, hang before the butchers' shops, ducks,
pigs--even we saw a skinned tiger! The interest is inexhaustible; and
one is lucky if one does not return with a light purse and a heavy
burden of forged curios. Even the American tourist, so painfully in
evidence at the hotel, is lost, drowned in this native sea. He passes in
his chair; but, like oneself, he is only a drop in the ocean. Canton is
China, as Benares is India. And that conjunction of ideas set me
thinking. To come from India to China is like waking from a dream. Often
in India I felt that I was in an enchanted land. Melancholy, monotony,
austerity; a sense as of perennial frost, spite of the light and heat; a
lost region peopled with visionary forms; a purgatory of souls doing
penance till the hour of deliverance shall strike; a limbo, lovely but
phantasmal, unearthly, over-earthly--that is the kind of impression
India left on my mind. I reach China, awake, and rub my eyes. This, of
course, is the real world. This is every-day. Good temper, industry,
intelligence. Nothing abnormal or overstrained. The natural man,
working, marrying, begetting and rearing children, growing middle-aged,
growing old, dying--and that is all. Here it is broad daylight; but in
India, moon or stars, or a subtler gleam from some higher heaven.
Recall, for example, Benares--the fantastic buildings rising and falling
like a sea, the stairs running up to infinity, the sacred river, the
sages meditating on its banks, the sacrificial ablutions, the squealing
temple-pipes, and, in the midst of this, columns of smoke, as the body
returns to the elements and the soul to God. This way of disposing of
the dead, when the first shock is over, lingers in the mind as something
eminently religious. Death and dissolution take place in the midst of
life, for death is no more a mystery than life. In the open air, in the
press of men, t