บทที่ บทที่ 1 · Chapter I

. Chapter I

Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off—the city

of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than

washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along

the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so

freely. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as the

Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front,

and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream.

The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few

fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys

whose filth deters all but the invited guest. Chandrapore was never

large or beautiful, but two hundred years ago it lay on the road

between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the fine

houses date from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in

the eighteenth century, nor was it ever democratic. There is no

painting and scarcely any carving in the bazaars. The very wood

seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, so

monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges

comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into

the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but

the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking

there, like some low but indestructible form of life.

Inland, the prospect alters. There is an oval Maidan, and a long

sallow hospital. Houses belonging to Eurasians stand on the high

ground by the railway station. Beyond the railway—which runs

parallel to the river—the land sinks, then rises again rather

steeply. On the second rise is laid out the little civil station,

and viewed hence Chandrapore appears to be a totally different

place. It is a city of gardens. It is no city, but a forest sparsely

scattered with huts. It is a tropical pleasaunce washed by a noble

river. The toddy palms and neem trees and mangoes and pepul that

were hidden behind the bazaars now become visible and in their turn

hide the bazaars. They rise from the gardens where ancient tanks

nourish them, they burst out of stifling purlieus and unconsidered

temples. Seeking light and air, and endowed with more strength

than man or his works, they soar above the lower deposit to greet

one another with branches and beckoning leaves, and to build a city

for the birds. Especially after the rains do they screen what

passes below, but at all times, even when scorched or leafless,

they glorify the city to the English people who inhabit the rise,

so that new-comers cannot believe it to be as meagre as it is

described, and have to be driven down to acquire disillusionment.

As for the civil station itself, it provokes no emotion. It charms

not, neither does it repel. It is sensibly planned, with a red-brick

club on its brow, and farther back a grocer’s and a cemetery, and

the bungalows are disposed along roads that intersect at right

angles. It has nothing hideous in it, and only the view is

beautiful; it shares nothing with the city except the overarching

sky.

The sky too has its changes, but they are less marked than those

of the vegetation and the river. Clouds map it up at times, but it

is normally a dome of blending tints, and the main tint blue. By

day the blue will pale down into white where it touches the white

of the land, after sunset it has a new circumference—orange,

melting upwards into tenderest purple. But the core of blue

persists, and so it is by night. Then the stars hang like lamps

from the immense vault. The distance between the vault and them is

as nothing to the distance behind them, and that farther distance,

though beyond colour, last freed itself from blue.

The sky settles everything—not only climates and seasons but when

the earth shall be beautiful. By herself she can do little—only

feeble outbursts of flowers. But when the sky chooses, glory can

rain into the Chandrapore bazaars or a benediction pass from

horizon to horizon. The sky can do this because it is so strong

and so enormous. Strength comes from the sun, infused in it daily,

size from the prostrate earth. No mountains infringe on the curve.

League after league the earth lies flat, heaves a little, is flat

again. Only in the south, where a group of fists and fingers are

thrust up through the soil, is the endless expanse interrupted.

These fists and fingers are the Marabar Hills, containing the

extraordinary caves.