What the Traveller Saw. Eric Newby
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a whale surfacing, there was a pause and an enormous, indescribable sound came blasting out of them. Out on the platform, close to them, it was as if one’s ears were full of giant bluebottles; not surprising as the thing could be heard ten miles away. Inside the keepers’ house it was worse. The ones off duty lay rigid in their bunks waiting for it. There was not long to wait. It gave four three-second blasts every two minutes. After seventy-two hours of the siren, everyone was ready to transfer to British Railways.
The power of the sea at Round Island was enormous. At three in the morning on 7 January, the previous year, the wind was WSW Force Ten. In the official jargon this produces ‘very high waves with long overhanging crests … the tumbling of the seas becomes very heavy …’. At three-thirty the radio aerial carried away, the window of the pantry on the inside of the protecting wall was smashed in by seas surging 130 ft up the rock. This was the weather in which a giant wave roared up the West Gulley and stove in the oak doors of the engine room which were more than three inches thick.
At six o’clock it was blowing Force Eleven – more than sixty knots. This was a storm in which ‘small and medium ships might be lost to view’. In such weather seas will be breaking over the top of the Bishop, 180 ft, and the Wolf and their towers will be shaking violently. In addition, according to keepers who have served there, on the Bishop at the height of the storm they hear strange metallic clankings that seem to come from the base of the tower. On the Longships there is an awe-inspiring sound that is generally agreed to be made by a boulder rumbling about in an underwater cave.
At a quarter to six in mid-September the sun is rising behind a line of jagged cloud over a grey, heaving sea. In a half-circle around you the lights begin to go out. From Round Island you can see them going: to the east the triple-flashing light on the Seven Stones light vessel towards Cape Cornwall; beyond it to the east the occulting white light with red sectors on the Longships; the alternating red and white light on the Wolf to the south-east and the double-flashing white of the Bishop. There is not a ship to be seen. It is lonely here. Occasionally a Dutch liner comes in close to give them a toot on the siren. The Keeper on Watch closes the micrometer valve, changes over the bottom lens vaporizer. He changes bottom and top vaporizers alternately (later he will put it on the kitchen-stove to dry out) and hangs the curtains over the lenses for another day.
AT TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon of 6 December 1963, my forty-fourth birthday, Wanda and I set off to travel down the Ganges by boat from Hardwar, one of the most venerated Hindu bathing places, which lies at the feet of the Siwalik Hills. Our destination was the Bay of Bengal, 1200 miles away. The vessel was a five-oared rowing boat and it looked very much like an oversize Thames skiff – it had probably been built by some British official in a moment of nostalgia for the Thames at Henley. Now it was the property of the Executive Engineer of the Irrigation Works on the Ganges Canal, who was an Indian. He had only lent it to us, and then with extreme reluctance, because we had shown him a letter, signed by Mr Nehru, ordering all and sundry to help us on our way down the river.
The boat was twenty-five feet long, had a five-foot beam, was made of mild steel put together with rivets and needed thirty-two people to carry it. This was the number of barefooted men I had paid to carry it across a mile of almost red-hot shingle to the Ganges from the Ganges Canal.
With us was a rather too-high-caste companion for such a journey, procured for us by the personal intervention of Indira Gandhi, acting on behalf of her father, who warned us that he wouldn’t stay the course – he didn’t – and, for this first part of the journey, three boatmen.
Among the things we had with us was a canvas bag full of books, a Janata oil stove, hurricane lamps, 8 kilos of rice, a small sack of chilli powder, flour, vegetables, a teapot, a kettle, a number of lathis (weighted bamboo poles) for hitting dacoits – robbers – on the nut, and military maps with which we had been supplied by the Director General of Ordnance of the Indian Army, who had also obligingly allowed us to acquire some bottles of Indian Army rum.
Two hundred yards below the bridge at Chandi Ghat from which we set off, the boat went aground on great, slimy stones the size and shape of cannon balls, which we had to lift to make a passage for it. Difficult to describe the emotions we felt aground on a 1200-mile boat journey within sight of our point of departure.
What makes the Ganges a great river, and in this sense the greatest of all rivers, is that for more than 450 million Hindus, and for countless others dispersed throughout the world, it is the most holy and most venerated river on earth. To each one of them it is Ganga Mai
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