Travel

[We publish on this page articles and notes which may help our readers in making their plans for travel at home and abroad. They are written by correspondents who have visited the places described. We shall be glad to answer questions arising out of the Travel articles published in our columns. Inquiries should be addressed 4o the Travel Manager, The SPECTATOR, 99 Gower Street, W .C.1.]

The Tourist in India

IT is a curious fact that in his own eyes no man, or at any rate no Englishman, is ever a tourist. He prefers to be

regarded as a traveller. The distinction, of course, is a snobbish one. But it is an amiable form of snobbery, and, like so many variations of the same perversion, it is based upon an instinct which is true and healthy enough. For the tourist, whatever the dictionary may say of him, is an insensitive being who is transported around the world like merchandise, in ships and trains and motor-cars, without effort on his part and almost without choice. He puts himself in another's hands, and he buys his experience as he

buys his groceries, across a counter. The traveller, too, must use ships and motor-cars. : He,- too; must buy his

tickets across a counter. But he does not look for under- standing there. He must absorb it through his eyes and ears, and distil his experience in the silent workings of his mind. The traveller, in short, is an artist in a tourist world of mass-production.

In these days, however, the opportunities for travel become more rare ; and as the globe contracts beneath the pressure of the all-inclusive tour it is increasingly difficult to withstand its subtle temptations. It is so easy, so simple and so secure. Life is short - so much the better if the trivial drudgery of travel can be shelved. And, after all, a tourist in method, may one not yet be a traveller in spirit In India, at least, such a thing is possible. There, certainly one can have the best of both worlds. A six weeks' tour in India can be undertaken as lightheartedly as a Mediterranean cruise. Distances are great, but trains are as comfortable, as commodious and as safe as elsewhere ; and one's ticket is no

more expensive. Throughout the. Continent one can rely upon clean accommodation, healthy food, excellent service and, in the cold weather, an equable climate. When he has provided himself with blankets and sheets and a sufficiency of warm clothing the cold weather visitor is free of respon. sibility for his tour. The planning of its irksome details he can safely leave to his travel agent. And he can trust his Indian servant as he would the purser of the ' Gigantic ' itself to see to it that the plan is duly executed.

Mechanically the Indian tour goes smoothly enough. Intellectually it is an adventure. It is easy to see India. It is impossible, having seen, to escape from thought. The towers and gleaming domes of Bombay rear themselves slowly above the unperturbed horizon, as beautiful as Naples, as surprising, after the torpid _aridity pf Aden, as New York. The great black hull slides easily and imperceptibly up to

the quay, where pigmy -figure's: wave and beckon ; the passengers throng the rails. The tourist casts a last, anxious glance around his stateroom, counts again his suitcases, and feels for the letter of creditiin his 'pocket. He descends the , gangway and he finds himself- in a new an ancient and a

disturbing world, _ _ _ A first contact with the East brings inevitably-a sense of the insignificance, or at. least of the prokineialism,_.of Western civilization. The tourist is suddenly ,brought face to face with the fact that the earth is very largely peopled by human beings in every way different from 'himself, with different thoughts, different emotions and different values. And he realizes with a start that to the great mass of mankind all those problems to which he is accustomed to attribute supreme importance—Disarmantient, the Gold ,Standard, Mr. Mellon or Herr Hitler—are matters_ of supreme indifference. The tourist sloughs his skin. - He becomes a traveller.

Especially must this- be so in: India, the self-constituted prosecutor not of Britain alone but of the West. -The waters of the Indian Ocean lap gently at the base -of,fhe Gateway of India. The bugle' echoes '.round tke diistY cantonments. The slopes of 'Malabir Hill look dONiri miOn the towering chimneys of industrial Bombay, and children sleep beneath the clattering looms_ of Ahmedabad. But in their hundreds of thousands the pilgriins pour into Allaliabad. The endless caravan, nose to tall, winds slowly through the Khyber, heedless of the aeroplane which soars above it. On the tawny steps of Benares, beautiful, by its swift green river, like the inside of a drawn bow, the Sadhu flaunts his profitable sores. And on the plains of Delhi a seventh city tells that kingdoms pass and civilizations crumble.

There is food enough for thought in India. There is beauty, too, for the eye. In no other land on earth, perhaps, do beauty and regret—and even horror—lie so contentedly side'by side. And the visitor need have no fear lest in his ignorance and bewildered by the immense variety of his choice; he overlook those things which most deserve his attention. It matters not where he goes in India, from Bombay to Calcutta, from Cape Cormorin to the Khyber, he will find sufficient to hold his mind or fill his eye.

Sightseeing in India would be a heavy task for a lifetime, but from six weeks one can seize images of beauty which will endure while memory lasts. There is the twilight loveliness of Agra, in itself abundant recompense for the longest journey. The towering Fort, perfect in its emptiness and silence, combining the force of Akbar with the feminine sensibility of Shah Jehan, stands sentry over the Ta-j Mahal. The dead city of Fateh-pur Sikri, built by Akbar for a whim and abandoned in a panic, lies lifeless in the sun. Here it was that the great Emperor lived for a decade, playing hide-and-seek with the ladies of his harem or listening to the grave disputes of Jesuit and Brahmin. And to-day, if he would but arise from his tomb, twenty miles away, and walk up that long, low corridor which leads to daylight, he could return to his palace and never know, perhaps, that he had left it.

There is the Frontier, with its tormented hills and its happy

careless people, its walled villages and its skies, grey and low., yet kindly after the harsh blueness of the heavens in the plains. There is the awful austerity of the Himalayas, floating in.the moonlight above Darjeeling. There are the Indian States, compounded curiously of the Arabian Nights and the Prisoner of Zenda, an unforgettable admixture of gorgeousness and squalor. The catalogue is endless ; but it is open, even in these difficult days, and it is easily read.

RICHARD LAW.