INDIA AND THE IIIMA.LAYA.*

COUNT GOBLET VALVIELLA belongs to the number of those, whom we are accustomed to describe, with impertinent conde- scension, as "intelligent foreigners." His Sahara and Lapland is a bright, pleasant, picturesque volume, the work of a quick and comprehensive observer. He is less successful as a novelist, chiefly because he perverts the purposes of the novel. Partie Perdue is merely a pamphlet, in which the Belgian Deputy of the Left adopts as a convenient form of polemic and pro- paganda the "fixings" of romance ; but though the argument is put neatly enough, the story is dull and the puppet personages are profoundly uninteresting. The Count Goblet d'Alviella, as an intelligent foreigner, taking advantage of the visit of the Prince of Wales to India, to travel in that wonderful country, and recording his impressions of it in the least verbose and the most vivid and easy-to-be-followed narrative of the memorable occurrence which we have seen, commends himself anew and strongly to notice as a teller of travellers' tales worth hearing. The occasion might fairly be considered unpropitious for the formation of a just estimate of the social aspects of India, but the writer meets this objection convincingly. "If," he says, "all along the path of the illustrious traveller the normal state of life was suspended by the influx of visitors no less than by the splendour of ceremonies and fetes, this unusual concentra- tion of luxury and enthusiasm enabled one to take in at a glance all the aspects of a civilisation which delights in external pomp, but which also reserves it for great occasions. On the other hand, if one wished to free one's mind from the illusions of the pageant, which were renewed at every stage, one had only to depart a little from the official programme, to come upon districts in nowise affected or turned from the even tenour of their daily life and habits by the echoes of the grand doings in their vicinity." Acting upon this plan, M. Goblet d'Alviella managed to combine enjoyment of the accidental splendour and movement of the occasion with obser- vation of the permanent realitice of the country. Ile observes acutely, and is troubled with no apprehension of boring his country- men with details already familiar to them, but frankly takes it for granted that even those acquainted with the " ouvrage vraiment magistral " of M. Louis Rousselet do not know much about India as he has seen it. He gives not only them, but us, just the kind of book which is pleasant to read, especially as a re- compense for the special-correspondence reprints with which our souls have been afflicted, and which have represented an India about as real as Potemkin's Russia was to his con- veniently credulous Czarina. A light-hearted traveller, knowing nothing of the native languages, endowed with activity and curiosity to a degree which any one except the Emperor of Brazil might envy, delighted with everything, not deeply impressed by anything, taking the ancientness of the land easily, and surveying men and things with good-humoured interest, in which there is no trace of sympathy, he easily records his obligations to the visit of the Prince. " But for this," he says, "I could not have seen, in the space of a few months, such extraordinary spectacles as the assembly of the Rajahs at Bombay, the procession of the Holy Tooth at Ceylon, the illumination of the Ganges at Benares, the fetes given by the Maharajah of Cashmere at Jummoo. But interludes of this kind, which are like stray leaves from the Arabian Nights, could only add to the attractions of a society which combines with the strangest of types and of customs brilliant costumes, splendid monuments, and even natural beau- ties " (he was evidently surprised to find the country beautiful), "whether one visits the gloomy pagodas of the Hindoo kingdoms, or the populous bazaars of the Mogul cities,—whether one partakes of the sumptuous hospitality of the native princes, or wanders alone in the deep valleys, and among the giddy heights of the loftiest mountains in the world." He * Inds et Himalaya: Souvenir, de Voyage. Par In Comte Goblet d'AlvIella. Perla : Plon et Cie.

questinned everybody he could get hold of about everything, and he availed himself of the colleotion and condensation of official documents which formed a portion of the preparation for the Prince, to learn as much as lie could about the system on which England governs India and the actual condition of the

subject races. Ile treats these comprehensive matters in a final chapter with an easy frankness, pleasantly characteristic, and hits

several blots with neat precision ; but the serious side of his book is the accidental side, the symmetrical complement merely of the design he announces :—

"My aim," ho says, "is simply to show, on the one hand, how worthy India is, in every respect, of the attention of the tourist as well as of that of the artist and the man of science ; and on the other, how one may, thanks to tho recent development of the modes of communica- tion, not only travel throughout the length and breadth of the peninsula within the space of a few mouths, but also include in the trip the sight of all the most interesting objects in this land, fertile in wonders, and complete the excursion by a visit to the giant Himalaya."

So effectually does M. Goblet d'Alviella carry out this design,

that those who meditate such a tour, whose feasibility he makes as clear as its interest must be evident, cannot do better than accept his book as tourists in Normandy and Brittany accept the

Guide Diantant ; it is as accurate, if less technical, and the traveller will rarely find himself in pleasanter company than the

writer's, unless he be of the thin-skinned kind, and incapable of appreciating the impartial vision with which the Count;

surveys the " natives " and the "Anglo-Indian element" equally. The Hindoo reverence for animal life, and the British perseverance in eating animal food, drinking "B. and S."—so he gravely names "the favourite beverage of the Anglo-Indian "—and making morning calls during the hottest

hours of ; the day arrayed in frock-coats and chimney-pot hats,

strike him with equal surprise. Ho records his disillusions with complete equanimity—the first " nautch " furnished him with one—puts into two pages the best description within our know- ledge of the bewildering grandeur and bizarrcrie of the assem-

blage which welcomed the Prince on his landing at Bombay ; and goes on to examine the organisation of public instruction, to which he bears the following tribute :—" I know no civilised nation in which talent has so much opportunity of bringing itself to light in the organisation of popular education" (as in British India), "and it may safely be affirmed that among European States no Government could, without being accused of Socialism, interfere in so liberal a fashion for the development of the intellect of the poor." The writer was present at the disgusting combat of wild 'beasts which formed a regrettable incident of the Prince's visit; he .describes it vividly, but with a certain contempt, and says, after a

brilliant sketch of the coup dceil :—" One might have believed oneself carried back to some city in Asia Minor during the last

:years of the Cvosars, and one looked round involuntarily for the proconsul who was to give the order that the Christians should be thrown to the beasts." From Baroda to Ahmedabad (at the ex- tremity of the line which will hereafter place Bombay in communi- cation with the mouth of the Indus, and from thence with the fron- tiers of Afghanistan), where he visited the temples and the great tank, back again to Bombay, and thence, on board the to

Goa, where he expected to find ruins and stagnation, went the traveller,—and had another d4illasien in a contrary sense. " I was agreeably surprised," he says, " on beholding a small town, well built, and well kept, with wide, clean streets, freshly painted and airy houses. The troops w hich formed a line from the landing-place to the Government House presented a more martialand better-disciplined appearance than I expected, and the crowd assembled upon the quays lent to the town an animated appearance of a9tivity." The visit to Ceylon is capitally told, and the writer's energy and perseverance come out strikingly. Then coins "the kingdom of the Nizam and another " ddsillusion," but this time M. Goblet d'Alviella himself, not time or change, is to blame. Sir Saler Jung, the tombs, the great tank, the native city, the .elephants, and the grand entertainments were all satisfactory ; but when the traveller was taken to visit the mines of Golconda, he felt him- self aggrieved. What of the diamond mines ? There are none there, "pas mime l'onabre,"—and thereupon he derides them as

.41 mines higendaires." But the two or three now existing "mines of Golconda" tweet a great distance from the hill fort, and the city was, iriformer times, only the storehouse of the diamonds found in the dominions of the Nabob. From Hyderabad the writer went to Calcutta, and thence to Benares, at once the Rome and the Jerusalem of Brahminism," and his .description of the latter city, its temples, its gods, its sacred .animals, its ghauts, and its fireworks, is one of the most amusing In the book. Lucknow and the Mutiny, Cawnpore and the well, Agra and the Taj Mahal, we can be told nothing new about these places ; but M. Goblet d'Alviella tells us his impres- sions of them in a very attractive way, and gives a striking de- scription of Akbar's capital, Futteypoor, which was built and abandoned within fifty years,—a strong city, to all appearance, which, as you approach it, looking for some gate or breach by which you may enter, looks like a city which ought to be rich and populous :—

" You would do better to remain outside, with your illusion, for within the rampart you will find only one of those whited sepulchres of which the Scriptures speak. Wild shrubs have invaded the courts once thronged by the escorts of princes; tigers tenant the hareems ; serpents lurk under the thrones of marble. The palaces are still standing, and such is their resistance to decay, that but for the mildew upon their walls, you might take them to have been built yesterday. But the houses have disappeared with the inhabitants ; the few human habitations grouped upon a vast surface of waste ground within the mighty enclosure are but a collection of miserable huts, whose poverty-stricken inhabitants do not oven know the name of their predecessors. Nothing more melancholy can be imagined than these deserted cities of Hindostan, which have never been destroyed, but which, created by one caprice of a despot, have owed the end of their ephemeral existence to another."

From Delhi and Jeypore to Lahore are beaten tracks, but the traveller turns off them to see out-of-the-way places on his route to Jummoo, where he witnessed the grand reception and the famous hunting parties given to the Prince, and thence returned to Agra, before starting for the expedition to the Himalaya, which forms a

very interesting section of his work, and contains much that is quite now to French readers, but which the "Lady Pioneer," who has opened up for us the recesses of the Indian Alps, has made known to us. M. Goblet d'Alviella particularly invites the attention of his readers to the concluding portion of his tour, which comprised a visit to Sikhim, "that curious strip of country which intervenes like a political transition between the Indian Empire of her Bri- tannic Majesty and Chinese Thibet." The Lamaseries are also already known to us by description, but he lends them vivid in-

terest, concluding by some of the strangest scenes of human existence, a rapidly unrolled series of dissolving views of the most majestic and mysterious country in the world.