: Apologia Diffidentis by Dalton O M Ormonde Maddock - Bashfulness

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As I write now amid the roar of London traffic, I well believe that to men who have never bathed in eastern moonlight, the description will sound hyperbolical and false. But when I think of those old days, how serene they were, how apart, I let the words stand: I am not artist enough to give them a more plausible simplicity. All conditions that a recluse might crave seemed now to be fulfilled for my benefit. The virgin forests and great hills were a perpetual joy, but there was a tranquil pleasure in the plantation which man's labour had reclaimed from these. That was a meet place indeed for the meditation of a quiet hour, and no more grateful refuge can be conceived than such a shady grove at the height of noon. You must not fancy an expanse of dusty land lined with prim rows of plants in the formal style of a nursery garden; but, spread over the lower slopes of the valleys, spacious woods of clean, grey-stemmed trees, with overarching branches thinned to cast a diaphanous shade over the sea of lustrous dark leaves below. The shrubs stood waist-high in serried, commingling ranks, their dark burnished leaves gleaming here and there in the sifted rays that found their way down through the vaults of foliage; the groves of Daphne had no more perfect sheen.

I learned to feel for this gracious place a love only second to that of the wilder jungle; for nature thus tamed to work side by side with man loses indeed her austerer charm, but not her calm and dignity: these she brings with her always to be a glory to the humblest associate of her labour. Often as I pruned a tree, or stripped its stem of suckers, I felt the soothing, quickening influence of this partnership, and my thoughts turned to others who had known a like satisfaction and relief; to Obermann forgetting his melancholy in the toil of the vintage, plucking the ripe clusters and wheeling them away as if he had never known the malady of thought; or to Edward Fitzgerald out with the dawn among his roses at Little Grange.

Amid these high dreams and simple occupations, time seemed to glide away like a brimming stream, and the only events that marked the passing of the years were wayfarings through the country-side, sojournings in strange, slumbrous native towns, expeditions of wider range to old white ports of Malabar still dreaming of the forgotten heroes whose story Camoens sang. After many such journeys the genius of this oriental land seemed to travel with us, so familiar did every aspect of this simple Indian life become. Our equipment was of set purpose the patriarchal gear of native fashion; narrow carts with great lumbering wheels were covered by matting arched upon bent saplings, and had within a depth of clean rice-straw on which at night mattresses were spread. Beneath each yoke went a pair of milk-white oxen with large mild eyes and pendulous dewlaps, great beasts of a fine Homeric dignity and worthy of Nausicaa's wain. They swung along with a leisurely rolling gait; and if their silent feet moved too slowly, the sleepy brown-skinned driver, crouching on the pole between them, would shame them into speed by scornful words about their ancestry, more prompt than blows in their effect on beasts of ancient and sacred lineage.

We travelled at night or in the freshness of early morning, regardless of the hours, unfretted by the tyrannous remembrances of appointed times. Milestones passed slowly, like things drifting, which ask no attention, and hardly perceived in the moment of their disappearance, serve only to enrich and replenish the mind's voluptuous repose. It was a joy to lie drowsily back upon the straw, awaiting sleep and looking out upon the stars through the open back of the cart, while the fire-flies darted across the feathery clusters of bamboo, and the cradling sound of wheels and footfalls called slumber up out of the darkness. And it was equal delight to spring from the cart at first flush of dawn, and see some far blue hill in the east lined like a cloud with broadening gold, until the resistless sun rose a full orb above it, flooding the grey plains and making the leaves of the banyans gleam with the lustre of old bronze. But though the sun was come, we would often press on for yet three hours, through belts of squirrel-haunted wood, beside great sheets of water with wild-duck floating far amidst, and borders starred with yellow nenuphars, across groves of mango and plantain trees into landscapes of tiny terraced plots, where the vivid green rice-blades stood thick in the well-soaked earth, and bowed brown figures diverted to their roots the thread-like rivulet from the great brown tank above.

Here would be a wayside shrine, a simple stuccoed portico with columns streaked in red, enclosing the sacred emblems with their offerings of golden marigold, and bearing upon each corner, carved in dark grey stone, Siva's recumbent bull. Here millet fields, with hedges of blue aloe or euphorbias like seven-branched candlesticks, announced a place of habitation; soon the village itself appeared, a long irregular line of white-walled houses roofed with thatch or tile, and here and there greater dwellings with carved balconies and barred verandahs, behind which impassive white-robed figures sat and seemed to ponder upon life. On the right, perhaps, would be a shop all open to the road, where, cross-legged upon a kind of da?s, the merchant sat among his piled wares, unenterprising and unsolicitous, serenely confident in the balance-sheet of fate. On the left, in a shady corner, a barber would be bending over a half-shaven skull. Everywhere children of every shade from yellow to deep umber would be playing solemnly about the ways, turning upon the passing stranger their grave, unfathomable eyes.

Beyond the village there would be a rest-house maintained for the use of wayfaring white men, and here we would repose through the heat of the day, reclining with a book in rooms shaded with shutters, or with fine mats drenched from hour to hour with cooling sprays of water. Then with the sun's decline we would set out once more, meeting a file of blue-robed women erect as caryatides as they came up from the well, each bearing upon her back-thrown head a water-jar of earthen or brazen ware, staying her burden with a shapely brown arm circled with bangles of glass and silver. In the short hours before the darkness, we would encounter all the types of men which go to make up Indian country life--the red-slippered banker jogging on his pony beneath a white umbrella, the vendor of palm-wine urging a donkey almost lost beneath the swollen skins, barefooted ryots with silent feet and strident tongues, crowds of boys and children driving buffaloes and cows, all coming homeward from their labour with the evening.

And when these had gone by, and we rolled on through the scented air of the silent open country, we would come perhaps in the gathering darkness to a great river lapping and murmuring through the blackened rocks above the ford, and shining like a glorious path in the light of the rising moon. Silently, high above the banks, there would flit through the still air bands of flying foxes awakened for their nightly raid upon the plantain groves; and in the shadows of the further bank there would gleam a sudden light, or the echoes of a hailing voice would rise and then die away. Steeped in the poetry of all these things we would cross and emerge upon the opposite slope to begin the pilgrimage of the night anew. So to live tranquil days and unfretful, moving in quiet through a still land rich in old tradition--this was an experience of peace which no dreams of imagination could surpass, a freshness of joy penetrative as the fragrance of unplucked wayside flowers.

Sometimes we would set out on longer journeys by land and sea, crossing the wooded ghats and descending to some old port of historic name, Cochin or Mangalore or Calicut, white places of old memory, sleeping by the blue waves as if no Vasco de Gama had ever come sailing up out of the West to disturb their enchanted slumber. The approach to these dreamy shores was dark and tumultuous, as if nature had set an initiation of contrasting toil before the enjoyment of that light and peace. It followed the bed of a mountain stream, which began in a mere pleat of the hills, tumbling often in white cascades, and enduring no boat upon its waters until half its course was run. But here it challenged man to essay a fall; for where it burst its way over rocky slopes were channels jeopardous and hardly navigable, sequences of foaming rapids, races of wild water swirling round opposing boulders, and careering indignant of restraint between long walls of beetling rock. Here when the sun had gone down we would embark with a crew of lithe brown men in a boat hewn from a single tree, seamless and stoutly fashioned to be the unharmed plaything of such rocks and boisterous waters as these. In these rapids the river waked to consciousness of mighty life, tossing our little craft through a riot of dancing waves, whirling it round the base of perpendicular rocks set like adamant in the hissing waters, sweeping it helpless as a petal down some glassy plane stilled, as it were, into a concentrated wrath of movement. The men sprang from side to side, from bow to stern, staving the craft with a miraculous deftness from a projecting boulder, forcing her into a new course, steadying her as she reeled in the shock and strain of the conflict, while their long poles bent continually like willow wands against her battered sides. The steersman stood silent, except when he shouted above all the din some resonant, eruptive word of command; the men responded by breathless invocations to their gods, relaxing no tense sinew until the pent waters rushed out into some broad pool where the eased stream went brimming silently, gathering new strength in the darkness of its central deeps.

At such places the moon would perhaps be obscured by passing clouds, and we would land upon an eyot until she shone once more in a clear heaven. Stretched at length upon the fine white sand waiting for her return, we could hear the boom of waters in the distance calling us on to a renewal of the conflict. These periods of great stillness, interposed between tumults past and impending, had their own refinement of pleasure as far above the joys of fenced and covenanted ease as the bivouac of the hard campaign surpasses slumber in the fine linen of a captured city: they brought the wandering mind into communion with elemental forces, and seemed to hold it expectant of supernatural events. In that interlunar twilight there reigned a solemn sense of wonder evoked here eternally, one felt, from the ancient time, with the rustling of stirred foliage and the voice of those far waters for its music.

The lulled reason yielded place to reverie, and the whole rapt being abandoned itself like an Orphic worshipper to the guidance of an unseen mysteriarch. This acquiescence in the swift succession of calm to fury and stress, resembled the quiet which may be conceived to follow sudden death; the heightened sense of vicissitude in things summoned up and sustained a solemn mood. All the while that we lay charmed and half oppressed in this atmosphere as of an under-world, the clouds were drawing forward on their course; and as their last fringe trailed slowly by and the moon was revealed once more, the spell was broken in an instant by human voices calling us to re-embark. Again we glided to the verge of tumultuous falls, again we were flung through foaming narrows and labyrinthine passages of torn rocks, until, the last promontory turned with arrowy swiftness, we shot through a postern of the granite barrier and bounded far into still water fringed with trees of profoundest shadow. We put in to shore, for this stage of our journey was over; the dawn was near; the carts stood waiting on the road. But the influence of the wonderful night, clinging about us, would keep us long silent, as if awed by the passing of ancient Vedic gods.

I will not describe the later stages of these journeys: the coasting voyages in restful ships that seemed built to sail Maeander; the touchings at old wharfless ports; the visits to lone temples where Herodotus would have loved to linger; the rambles on the slopes of Adam's Peak; the meditations amid the ruins of Anaradhapura and Pollanarrua, ancient homes of kings, now stripped of every glory but that of these sonorous names--such are the records of every traveller, and are chronicled to satiety by a hundred hasty pens. A month of wandering within the fringe of civilization would be closed by a last week of patriarchal travel, bringing us back to our remote valley just as the clouds of the coming monsoon were ranging in denser ranks along the evening sky like the tents of a beleaguering army. Hardly had we time to settle down for the wet season, see to the stacking of fire-logs, and be sure that every tile on the roof was firm in its appointed place, when the embattled host seemed to break up from its last camp, and advance upon us along the whole line that the eye perceived.

One year I was witness of the first onset, which came in the late afternoon--an immediate shock of massed clouds without throwing forward of skirmishers or any prelude of the vanguard. Our home looked down upon a gentle incline of open grassy land to a broad belt of jungle in the middle distance; here the undergrowth and small trees had been newly cleared away, opening out a dim far view across an uncumbered leaf-strewn floor into the backward gloom of the forest. I sat with my eyes fixed upon the trees, drawing the rain on with the whole strength of desire to the parched country lying there faint with the exhaustion of three months of drought. While I watched, the deep line of cloud, at first distinct from the forest-top along which it came rolling, insensibly merged with the foliage, until every contour was lost in a common gloom, only the great bare stems below standing pale against the gathering darkness. There was an intense stillness everywhere like the silence of expectation which falls upon an awestruck crowd; the very insects had ceased their usual song. And now the ear caught a distant sound, vague and deep, coming up out of the mid darkness, and growing to a mighty volume as a sudden wind swept out from the sounding foliage into the open land and searched every cranny of the house as it passed. Then, as if drawn by the wind, there came into view among the nearest tree-stems a moving grey line advancing with a long roar until it hid the whole forest from sight: it was the wave of battle about to break upon us. It came on like a wall, enormous, irresistible; one instant, and it had devoured the intervening space; another, and we were lost in the deluge, and the great rain drops were spilled upon the roof with the noise of continuous thunder. As the deep sound reverberated through the roof above me, I went in exulting to a hearth piled with blazing logs, glad in the prospect of renewing for many weeks old and quiet habitudes of indoor life, rich with solace of books and tranquil meditation.

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