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Part Three — The World a Gate to a Thousand Wonders

Chapter 33The World a Gate to a Thousand WondersDIE WELT EIN TOR ZU TAUSEND WUNDERN

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The world a gate to a thousand deserts. This word of Nietzsche's1 and its terrible truth I believed I could shape into one last Symbolist picture, with which the ring of my life-symbols would close: a naked woman collapsed against desert rocks, black birds whirring about her. I had sketched it, but I was not to paint it, never to paint it, for the many-coloured thousandfold life of the cosmos drew me under its spell, turned my painter's eye to other goals. — Actually I had already been about the world a great deal, more than a thousand others. But how could I form a judgment of this world if I did not know the tropics? So I applied to Norddeutscher Lloyd for closer information. It laid a return ticket, saloon cabin, to Ceylon at the feet of the "well-known artist." Wholly unexpected, it fell into my lap. And I regarded it as an unheard-of stroke of luck. For since I had now given my children out of my hands for good, I had grown more restless and peaceless still. So now I was to make my first journey round the world!

If only my good father had lived to see this, who had always set before me, in such drastic words, the utter hopelessness of any such journey for me.

So I equipped myself properly and professionally, and went aboard the "Grosser Kurfürst2," at the beginning of September 1906, towards all the wonders of India.

I had really made a fairly clean sweep of Europe beforehand, and could now travel towards the magic of the tropics with a good conscience. On board I plunged into the "Indian world" of Madame Blavatsky3, the true founder of the theosophy of Annie Besant. — And it was well I did, for "Maya," the hollow world of outward appearance on this first-class luxury steamer, began to oppress me more and more.

Even the phosphorescence of the sea and the Southern Cross left all these worldly people cold, who seemed to have a sense only for flirtation, toilettes, the pleasures of the table and games of shuffleboard. Later, indeed, as it grew ever hotter, only for a lolling on the deck chairs.

My mood grew more embittered with every day, and all these correct-looking human puppets, as if drawn on wire, got so much on my nerves that I conceived a desire suddenly to do something wholly unforeseen, such as jumping onto the table, simply to startle them up for once.

The sunsets grew ever more overwhelming — and so did the heat; in the Red Sea we had 40 degrees Celsius in the cabin.

Seven months this first world journey of mine lasted! It was to me as if the door had now been thrust open into the immeasurable of the universe, and slowly but surely the cosmic consolation began to work on me.

To be sure — rest this journey did not give me. For where the simple globetrotter rests from all the exertions of looking, I had to write and to paint. I wrote regular feuilletons for German newspapers — in those days they still deigned to take something of mine — and painted about eighty pictures — under the most aggravating circumstances. In Madura, before the temple, I was nearly trampled by an elephant, since I was working kneeling on the ground in the dense throng, and in Ramisseran, on Pamban, the little island between Ceylon and the mainland, a fanatical fakir wanted to drag me off to prison, because by entering the holy of holies I was supposed to have committed desecration of the temple. I could only intimidate him with the threat "english governement."

And then I bathed daily in new wonders, and my soul drank the deadly travel-poison in deep draughts. What was all other splendour of the world beside this? After resting a few days in Colombo in the hospitable Freudenberg house and taking Ceylon's Colombo wonders into myself, I had travelled via Madura, Trichinopolis and Tanjore with their Dravidian temples, which all reminded me of the biblical Temple of Solomon, straight across the country, in a thirty-six-hour railway journey on the comfortable Indian railway, to Bombay. This English-Indian railway is the best I know.

In Bombay I put up at the Taj Mahal Hotel, the most magnificent hostelry in the world. Like a dream the dazzling oriental luxury surrounded me there, after the terrible privations of the south Indian "stationrooms." —

Naturally I had had letters of recommendation to the consulates made out for me, and suddenly received a telegram from Count Quadt, then consul-general in Calcutta, asking whether I felt inclined to come to Gwalior for a few weeks as the guest of the Maharaja4.

Whether I felt inclined!

In Calcutta the German consulate secretary, Herr von K., took me round everything worth seeing. Including the houses with the little blue wreaths for the plague dead and the red ones for the smallpox dead inside them. (For the visit of the Prince of Wales most of these had been whitewashed over. Potemkin redivivus.) These interested me quite particularly.

And then K.'s "Indian widow"! Who keeps house for him and shares his sleeping chamber, sleeps in a black, wonderfully carved, throne-like marriage bed. What can have become of her? He said at the time that on coming home he was always afraid of not finding her there any more.

Via Ahmedabad, Jaypur, Ajmere and glorious Mount Abou with its thirty marble temples of the eleventh century I then travelled to Gwalior. The Maharaja had been out hunting for days and was not to return until the following evening.

So I drove in a wretched donkey cart from minister to minister. They had not yet been notified of my coming. I knew not where to lay my head; there were no hotels.

At last, in the evening, a telegram arrived from the Maharaja's secretary, saying that I was expected in these very days. At that my situation changed all at once, and I was lifted out of the donkey cart into a magnificent court carriage, with the crowned serpent in its coat of arms, and driven to my palace. As in a fairy tale!

For almost three weeks I lived there in pure joy and splendour.

Until the smallpox epidemic, getting the upper hand, frightened me away. My carriage was always surrounded by pustule-covered beggar children tapping at my hand. I fled, although I possessed a personal elephant, Sipri by name, on whom I rode every afternoon (with mortal fear in my heart) around the rock fortress. Volumes I could tell about Gwalior. — I met there, at the English consul's, the French poet Vicomte d'Humieres5 with his young wife, with whom I had made friends on the rock island of Elephanta. The other day I read by chance that he too had fallen in the war.

I now travelled to the crown of all India, to Agra. There the Tatsch Mahal, the tomb of Shah Jehan and his "Mumtaz Mahal," is the pearl of the whole Persian-Mohammedan art that came over from Persia with the sultans of northern India. The Italian Austin de Bordeaux6 built the Tatsch, this white marble wonder, in the seventeenth century. I was there many times, but the Tatsch by moonlight gave me a rapture —: to have seen it almost repays this whole heavy life.

From Agra I travelled still further north, to Delhi, Lahore and Amritsar with its Golden Temple. In Delhi I kept Christmas with a German lieutenant, Herr von Neumann, and an American lady. I broke myself a green bush out of the hotel garden and hung it with twenty metres of golden-yellow chains of gendal blossoms. These flower chains are bought by the metre all over India in front of the temples. Candles I had conquered too. We came to feel quite Christmassy over it. Delhi with all its former residences, the most glorious buildings in the Mohammedan style and the green-blue glazed tiles that gleam like jewels, made a deep impression on me. Ah, what made no impression on me in this fairy-tale land! And the Delhi Fort with its jewel-encrusted zenana (the women's quarters), the Jasmine Tower, Divan i Kas and Divan i Am. — I must not grow too detailed, and refer those who are interested to my India book published by Heckner of Wolfenbüttel: "Durch Glut und Geheimnis7." With this book too I had no luck, compared with Hans Heinz Ewers8' "Indien und ich," published three years later, which not only teems with errors (for instance the "cow" Nandi for the emblem of Siva and of fertility, the bull Nandi) but also brought him great ringing profit. — I will set down here a poem from my "Kreuz des Südens" that came into being on my Indian journey, which Constantin Brunner9 held to be my best:

Buddha

Buddha stares black and silent and vast10 Into the velvet lap of the running night, Behind it the evening's embers Bleed trembling to death in the sky. So he has stared from the first day Into the beat of thousands of longing hearts, So he has stared and kept silence, When the wishes climbed to heaven. And he stares on still ... the jungle night Grows higher and higher in green splendour, And whispering the trees bow down — They know the Buddha's silence. They know: one thing alone avails the mind: To long for nothing, wish for nothing; — to sway Along the ground wishless and dreamless — Fleeting as tendrils of flowers. One day to blossom about the Buddha's brow And then to moulder and then to burn away. Nirvana, the great dream-Nothing, Insatiably devouring the wellspring of light. ... And a bowing runs murmuring through the jungle — The Buddha smiles in his silence.

In Amritsar it was already bitingly cold in January, Kashmir ice-airs blew towards me there across the Himalaya.

But now I had reached the northernmost point of my journey, and travelled south-eastwards to the heart of India, to Benares. I stayed there longer than I intended, for soon after my arrival I had sprained my foot. —

The journey on the Ganges, in the early morning, when the ten thousand Hindus take their bath, when the whole flood gleams with yellow chains of blossom and the pyres burn at the "buring ghat" (we counted ten), will remain for ever unforgettable to me. "And in gliding past, the glow of the dead warms me11, which does my cold life good like a last love," I wrote in the poems "Kreuz des Südens." I undertook a journey by moonlight too, in which the vultures circled slowly over the waters after prey. As is well known, the corpses of priests and of children under four years are not burned but sunk in the holy river. — In Clark's Hotel I found human sympathy over my accident from the manager, Mr. Thomas, a half-caste from Goa. That did me much good in my forsakenness — the good man writes to me still now and then and reports how he fares. He had a bent towards higher things and has now become a teacher. When I was restored, I visited Annie Besant12 in the Hindu College, the theosophical-Indian educational institution of Madame Blavatsky's successor, and was shown by her, among the seven hundred pupils, a reincarnation of Buddha. Annie Besant left me the impression of a very strong personality.

Then I travelled via Lucknow to Calcutta, where I enjoyed much hospitality in the house of Count Quadt, the then consul-general, made excursions together with the countess and painted in her garden. Very interesting dinners I experienced there in the house, with wonderful floral decoration. As indeed all over India a downright extravagant luxury is practised in table flowers. At one dinner I sat beside the Governor of Bengal, who told me that he had bagged fifty of these beasts on the tiger hunt. — In glaring contrast to all the splendour in the consul-general's house stood my dreadful hotel in the "Durimtolla." As I later learned, the hearth of a violently raging smallpox epidemic was just then there. By unlucky chance I had been cast away into this den.

I travelled on to Darjeeling, to see "the snows"; I had after all to have paid my visit to the Himalaya range. This "little" excursion could be reached in a forty-eight-hour journey from Calcutta and gave me unforgettable impressions. But it was as cold up there as with us in a hard winter. The throng of people from Nepal and Sikkim at the Sunday markets is unforgettable to me. I acquired a pair of Tibetan turquoise earrings too, from a Buthia-Busti girl, and many Tibetan curiosities altogether. I also saw the sun rise over the peak of Kichinjunga. What did I not see there in wonders and curiosities! The beards of moss on the rhododendron trunks of the abundant forests pleased me quite especially. I painted a fair amount in Darjeeling; from the window and in the midday sun it was more or less possible.

When I came back, had collected my luggage from the Hotel Metropole and was on my way to Burma, I discovered on opening my travelling bag that the hotel had also been a quite common den of thieves. Three costly kimonos and a packet of turquoises from Lahore were missing.

In Rangoon I was intoxicated by the gold-laden blaze of colour of the Shwe Dagoon pagoda13, the greatest Buddhist place of worship in the world. Indeed all Burma went to my head like sweet wine. Could such luminous splendour really exist? Like a golden sheen it lay over all the lands; it radiated from the uncounted, the millions of pagodas under an eternally light-blue sky. And with it the gaily dressed people in their rustling silk "putsoes" (cloths wound shawl-like about the hips by men and women alike). — Later I travelled, from lost, wonderful Pegu, by rail as far as Mandaley, the last royal residence, of improbably luminous splendour, and then up the Irawadi further still, to Bamho on the Chinese frontier and back again, in many days' journeys on a very curious steamer, filled with the most motley mixture of peoples, down to Prome. Most glorious of all I found the deserted residences Ava, Sagaing and Amarapura near Mandaley. That was truly a land made expressly for my fantastical soul. Pagan, the oldest residence, with its thousand giant pagodas, built from the fifth to the thirteenth century and then abandoned, I unfortunately had to pass by, and could only watch some of its greatest temples mirror themselves in the Irawadi.

Yes, now the door had been thrust open for me into the wideness of the world — now the cosmic consolations could cradle my soul. Ah, and poison it far, far more! For how, after all this, could I ever again endure the petty-bourgeois European everyday life? I became, returned home, a stranger among strangers, to which the poem of mine that came into being in those days bears witness:

As from Another Star

And back again out of the far-off land, Where I found wonder upon wonder And the home-blue of my soul — Everything here seems to me so pale and lukewarm; Am so strange and far — As from another star. And if one offers me a friend's hand — No one here is kin to my soul. My soul is far. On another star. Between me and the others gapes a gulf, Out of it something rises like the scent of mysteries — I cannot cross over — The friend cannot cross to me — Each one as far, As star from star. While everything here moved in the dark, My soul flew through glow and mystery14 — Now it is strange and far to the everyday As from another star.

From Rangoon I travelled back to Madras. Second cabin, for economy's sake. But I asked the captain for a good exceptional berth, as an artist.

"That you shall have," he said, laughing, and sent me to a giant cabin with ten beds, apparently quite newly fitted out, for me alone. I made myself comfortable, felt very snug. By chance, though, on going out I read over my door in giant letters "Plaguehospital — Pestspital." Blazing with fury I rushed to the captain. But he calmed me. "That's only for show." There had never yet been a plague patient in it, but when the inspection comes, it reassures them. Quite easy about it I was not, for all that, but I came away without plague. Although it was raging fairly hard in Burma. The furrier to whom I had given a leopard skin to prepare had lately died of it. I therefore left the skin lying on the veranda at "Waldfrieden" for months on end. In the course of the years it has no doubt aired itself out.

From Madras I also made the wonderful excursion to the "seven pagodas15" on the Coromandel coast. These are the oldest Indian temples carved out of the rock. One has not the least clue as to the time of their origin. There are, however, not seven but some fifty temples — although the sea has already swallowed a few. At full moon they are said still to be seen shining out of the waters. It can be compared with nothing, this Indian Vineta. —

I was then in the giant Dravidian temples of Conjeeveram besides, before travelling from Madura to Ramisseran on the island of Pamban. There stands the greatest of all Indian temples. A book by Ehlers had made me curious about it, but when I got there with a thousand troubles, neither dak bungalow nor stationroom (the south Indian substitute for a hotel) was to be found.

The harbour officer, Mr. White, quartered me in the mission house, empty for ten years and falling into decay, in a lonely cactus wilderness. I lay on a board without bedding. A bucket of lukewarm water was my bath for eight days, and my fellow lodgers were some eighty bats. Mrs. White gave me a petroleum lamp, to hold the eerie bed-lodgers in check by its light at night. Food was brought me by six boys of the White household. It was cold and almost inedible, and the six boys followed every bite with a fixed stare. They had to bring the dishes back.

How I could stand it here for eight days is a riddle to me to this day. I often drove to the temple, to which a pilgrimage was just then in progress, which had drawn over twenty thousand Hindus to the little island. I was then to be dragged off to prison by a fanatic, as I have already told.

Yes, Pamban made many demands on my strength of nerve.

Returned to Ceylon, I first rested again for a few days in the hospitable Freudenberg house. There I was given back to civilisation.

Then I went "up country," first for a few weeks to Kandy. There, in the cosy Florence Villa, I lodged and painted, a very great deal in fact, for several weeks.

And then I made a journey to the excavations of Mr. Bell16, to the old Sinhalese temples of Anunadhapura, Mahintale, Sigiri.

Last of all I went on to Banderavella and Nuvara Elya, "Nureglia," the mountain station on Ceylon. There we sat by the fireside again, as in Darjeeling, and one could not imagine at all that one had only just escaped the most crushing tropical heat.

I then climbed the highest mountain of the island besides, the Pidurazalla. A fairy-tale sight! The rhododendron forests stood now in luminous red bloom. When I think of it, my heart widens in longing. — When shall I ever return to all these wonders?

From Ceylon it was homewards. In Peradenya, the botanical station of Kandy, my second turquoise collection had been stolen from me, the one I had bought anew in Lahore. I now said to myself that no millionaire would get himself so costly a thing a third time. But I — a poor artist17 — would — "thirst them off." It was the torments of Tantalus. Every time that I would otherwise, almost at the point of fainting, have allowed myself a "peg," a glass of iced whisky and soda, for one or one and a half rupees, I now suppressed the impulse, but wrote myself instead one or one and a half rupees to my turquoise account. When in this way, through many weeks, I had slowly all but perished of thirst in the tropical heat, I had the sum together and bought myself, for the third time, a selection of my beloved blue stones, the "metrics," the natural turquoises, for which I had, after all, a morbid passion.

A couple of German gentlemen, my table neighbours from Kandy (who had taken me for an Englishwoman for eight days, and who had outraged me because at table they perpetually drank iced pegs — in my fury I said "swilled" — and cast it up to me that I drank nothing), persuaded me to disembark with them at Suez and make a "trip" to Cairo. How I looked forward to seeing the picturesque city again. — From there the one departed after eight days, and the other, Assessor B., persuaded me to come along to Jerusalem. We took Cook's tickets, which for only two persons were quite excellent.

Even after the luminous wonders of India, the rigid grandeur of the Promised Land took me captive. In Jerusalem we were constantly taken for a parson and his wife, which partly annoyed, partly amused me. — But Palestine was so wonderful. — Now it was I, for my part, who persuaded the Assessor to come along to Damascus and to the ruins of Baalbeck.

We did not regret it. Baalbeck's grandeur and situation, before the snow chain of Lebanon, defy all description.

But now I regretted not being able to see Babylon, Nineveh and Bagdad as well, but I had at last to return.