Asian Current

Before the Curtain Rises

After everyone else had held forth, the general spoke:

“Yes, gentlemen, you have been to strange places.

But have you ever heard of the Black Pagoda?”

We were with Allenby’s army, camped at Deir el Belah on the edge of the Sinai Desert, just south of the old Philistine capital of Gaza. I was putting up for the night at the headquarters of a mounted column and we were sitting in the mess tent after dinner. The inevitable toast “To the King I” had just been drunk in Jewish wine from Richon le Zion, and after the general had passed around a box of Dutch cigars the conversation turned to the topic of far countries.

An Englishman, an Australian, and an Irishman were discussing strange places they had seen. The general was a British officer of the old school, originally of the Bucks Hussars; the Australian, a major in the Imperial Camel Corps; and the Irishman a captain in the Hong Kong-Singapore Battery. They were professional soldiers-had been for most of their natural Iives-e-and always on the move. They talked in the same off-hand intimate way of Basutoland, Malta, Shanghai, Khartoum, and Mandalay as we might speak of Omaha, Denver or Toledo.

“Right-he, sir,” we all said, “and where and what is the Black Pagoda?” Then we hitched our camp-chairs a bit nearer the general’s end of the table and settled ourselves to hear his yarn.

“It was before the war when I was doing my turn in India,” continued our host. “Occasionally we would be given a short leave that was hardly long enough for a voyage to England or even for a decent shoot in Kashmir. One winter, while my regiment was stationed at Mhow, I decided to try ocean bathing-for my liver. Getting a bit crotchety, don’t you know. I had heard a lot about the wonderful surf at Puri on the Bay of Bengal. And there I went. During my sojourn at this sacred Hindu city the local captain of police took me on the most unusual trip I ever made, and India, as you know, is one country where you can go on an unusual journey any day, or any night.

“Borne on the shoulders of muscular coolies, we bounced along on an all-night journey by palanquin. Just at dawn we arrived at our destination, the Black Pagoda, the weirdest and some say the finest of all the temples in India. Many are the strange sights to be found in Asia, but this temple surpasses them all. Why? Well, for the reason that its sides are covered with images, many of them of life size, that depict human beings in the act of committing nearly every sin in the world.

‘Strange, weird things that no man may say, Things Humanity hides away… Cruel things that man may not name, Naked here, without fear or shame’.

“Of course, there are many British officials in India who know of its existence, but few have ever been there -and those who go do not take their wives.”

Then the general gave us such a graphic, detailed description of the Black Pagoda that I returned to my tent there on the plains of Philistia declaring by the whiskers of Samson and Goliath that I would hire me a palanquin and make that midnight journey along the coast of Bengal to the Black Pagoda if my caravel ever touched the shores of mysterious Hindustan.

It was while on a speaking-tour of the world, relating tales of adventures with Allenby and Lawrence, that I caught my first glimpse of India. Here, I realized, was by far the most fascinating of all the countries I had visited. Richard Curle, mining engineer, savant, and friend of Conrad, once wrote a fascinating book entitled “The Shadow Show.” I like that title because it has always seemed to me that life on this planet is indeed a shadow show. And when I saw India I knew that I was witnessing the greatest show of all. I had found Australia and New Zealand fascinating, Africa full of thrills and surprises, and the Far East absorbingly interesting. But India towers as far above them as the Himalayas tower above the Alps. As a spectacle there is nothing like it.

Variety, we are assured, is the spice of life. The country that interests us the most is the one where there is the most variety. At any rate, so it seems to me. And India has variety to the nth degree. It is supremely the land of startling contrast. The southern tip touches the equator. Central India is in the Temperate Zone and is not only a land of mighty rivers and fertile valleys, but also includes vast deserts similar to those of Arabia, Arizona, and the Sahara. Along the northern border of India loom those towering mountain ranges, the Himalayas, loftiest of all the peaks of earth, their summits clad with ice and snow since the dawn of time.

Mark Twain once said that India was the land that all men long to see, and having seen by so much as a glimpse, would not trade that glimpse for all the other sights of the world. He wrote of it as the only land with an irresistible appeal to alien prince and alien peasant alike.

After the World War, when the fiery Clernenceau retired from political life, he announced that there was one country he simply had to see before he died. Romantic India.

The other day in a book about Napoleon I encountered a mention of a dazzling myth, one of those beliefs, half superstitious perhaps, that have fascinated men over the span of the centuries. Napoleon was charmed and tricked by it, and held it in the back of all his dreams. Throughout history, in the higher imaginations of statecraft that same beguiling idea appears again and again. Alexander was motivated by some such intuition. The idea is this: Who holds India holds the world. As a theory of world-politics you can pick it to pieces, but you cannot escape its seductive, glamorous persuasion.

Strangest of all the lands of this earth, India is inhabited by peoples who, in outward appearance at any rate, seem to include nearly every race under the sun. They vary in shade from the Untouchables of the south, who are descendants of the black aborigines, to the brown Brahmins, to the Mongolians of the north, and to the Caucasian races that include not only the British rulers but many of the native inhabitants as well.

On top of all this, just to lend more variety and contrast, India is a land of splendor and magnificence far, far surpassing anything to be found in either Europe or America-and at the same time it is also a land of squalor and misery so terrible that the mere memory of it still makes me shudder.

I had thought of India as a country one could see, and be satisfied to come away from, in a month or two. But instead of two months, I stayed for two years. Even then I was not content. I wanted to remain on and on, but unlike Aladdin I had no magic lamp, and one day my chancellor of the exchequer brought me out of my Arabian Nights’ dream with the harsh news that. my wealth in no way resembled either that of the fabled kings of Golconda, or of a present-day Indian maharajah.

To those of us who stop to think about it there is something impressive in the thought that one out of every four people on this spinning planet of ours is a citizen of the British Empire. And when we get that far in our contemplation, it is interesting to keep on for a moment and ponder over the fact that three out of every four people in the British Empire live in India. A thousand years or so from now, when the Muse of History sets down her verdict as to the success of the greatest empire the world has ever known, she will be obliged to measure that success largely by what the British have accomplished among the Oriental peoples of the vast Asiatic peninsula of Hindustan.

I decided to commence my journey at the extreme southernmost tip of the peninsula, right down near the equator. There is no city there, nor had I ever read of any traveler’s visit to that cape. Accompanied by Harry Chase, who had been with me in Arabia, Africa, and Europe during the World War, I sailed down the Red Sea, and then crossed the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean to the island of Ceylon. Here we engaged Singhalese fishermen to ferry us across the strait in their primitive catamarans. Then from Cape Comorin we proposed to set forth on our two or three months’ journey, a journey that lengthened to two years and took us back and forth across India for a total distance of over sixty thousand miles-more than twice the circumference of the earth at the equator-and over a vast country nearly as large as the continent of Europe and inhabited by more people than there are on the continents of Australia, Africa, and North and South America all combined.

Every traveler from the West who visits India should have a guru, a wise man, to lead him about and explain the strange things he sees and hears. Without a guru the European or American who sojourns for a little while in India wanders in a daze and comes away as bewildered as any Alice in Wonderland. But to find your guru when you get to India, ah, that may not be so easy. Ganesha, the Hindu goddess of luck, smiled on me. She may not have given me the ability to see with eyes of understanding, but she did send me a guru. For I was fortunate enough to have a proper teacher who expounded to me many a mystery and perplexity.

In these western parts the custom of learning is to attend the lectures of a professor in a hall. But in India you sit at the feet of an ascetic hermit in a forest, or accompany a wandering yogi as a humble disciple, and your guru expounds to you the secrets of cryptic wisdom. I, metaphorically speaking, sat at the feet of a guru, a yogi. Incongruous as it may seem my guru was neither Hindu, Mussulman, nor Buddhist monk. He was not even an oriental, at any rate not by place of birth or ancestry. He was an Englishman, and a professional soldier.

“Y.B.” was the nickname by which he was known throughout the Indian Army. And most of his fellow officers thought him a bit mad. “Y.B.” would take off his uniform, don the picturesque costume of an Afridi, and wander about like a modern Harun-al-Rashid. Then too, he seemed to be genuinely fond of the Oriental peoples around him and seemed to understand them. Also he was an enthusiastic student of the languages and philosophies of the East. All of which somewhat baffled his beef-eating fellow Britons.

Major Francis Yeats-Brown was the younger son of an English diplomat. Against his will-he wanted to be a poet-he was sent to Sandhurst and trained for the army. The Orient called to him and he became a Bengal Lancer, although every turn of his mind was toward scholarship, literature, and philosophy. But he soldiered well and capably, a slashing cavalry officer in the incessant wars along the Indo-Afghan frontier. When the World War came he transferred to the cavalry of the clouds and became an aviator with the British Army in Mesopotamia. During the advance on Bagdad, not long before the fall of Kut-al-Amara, he flew over the Turkish lines on a hazardous mission to cut the enemy telegraph wires. He did so, but was captured, marched across the North Arabian Desert and after months of captivity made his escape, in the plotting of which he had recourse to a desperate expedient. He took up the smoking of opium to gain the confidence of an opium addicted Turkish commandant.

But affairs military were usually subordinate to “Y.B.” In India he had plunged deeply into the study of the occult lore of the Hindus, Vedantism, yoga, and gained a knowledge of these mysterious subjects as few save native Indians can hope to do. It was this that caused his brother officers to raise their eyebrows and the finger of astonishment. They all seemed to love “Y.B.”, considered him a crack polo player, a gallant soldier, a charming companion, and, as I have said, a bit mad.

Although his charm and drollery are not to be resisted, he is indeed one of the most eccentric fellows alive. And it is his very eccentricity that has resulted in his knowing India as few others do. This is amply demonstrated by a book of his recently published under the title of “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.” It is perhaps the most extraordinary book ever written about India by a westerner. In it he tells of the strange life he lived and something of the strange lessons he learned in the fabulous land of Hindustan.

Any insight that I may have into the ways and ideas of the mysterious land of India I owe to that sapient, whimsical guru, “Y.B.” I found him equally at home along the Coromandel Coast, near the equator, in the mountains of Waziristan, and in the holy cities of the Gangetic Plain. He had delved into the lives of the people and into the hidden knowledge and discipline of yoga. He was the only western yogi I have ever known.

For months we traveled together, and as scenes of fantasy and mystery unfolded before us he expounded the wise, enlightening, and witty ideas of a British yogi. So whatever of truth and wisdom you find in these pages should be credited to “Y.B.”, the Bengal Lancer who became a yogi.