A RIVER OF RUINED CAPITALS.

A LAMENTED historian has shown the influence exerted on the making of England by the natural configuration of the island. But while physical geography is now recognised as an initial factor in the fortunes of European countries, it has received scanty acknowledgment in histories of the East. Yet in India, where man has for ages confronted with bare arms the forces of tropical nature, his terrestrial surroundings have controlled his lot with an energy unknown in our temperate clime. Mountains and rivers and regions of forest set barriers to human ambition in India, barriers against which the most powerful Mughal sovereign in vain shattered his dynasty. The same isolating influences which forbad a universal dominion, tended also to perpetuate local institutions, race animosities, and exclusive creeds. The conception of India as a whole, or of its races as a united people, is a conception of the British brain. The realisation of that conception is the great task of British rule. For in India man no longer confronts the forces of nature with bare arms. Science, which is in England a calm pursuit, is to our countrymen in the East an instrument of empire. It has overtopped the mountains, spanned the rivers, and pierced the forests which divided kingdom from kingdom. It has thrown down the landmarks of isolation which nature had set up, and is clasping together with bands of iron the peoples and provinces of a united India.

The following pages present a single episode in this great struggle between man and nature. I shall show how, during ages, nature lorded it over man, laughing at his painful toils, and destroying with scornful ease his mightiest works. I shall indicate the new allies which man has lately called to his aid. The battle is still a drawn one, and on its issue the prosperity, if not the existence, of the capital of British India now depends. I believe that only by thus examining Indian history in connection with Indian geography, can its true significance in the past or its bearings on the present be understood. There is another point, also, in regard to which I have a strong conviction. When Marco Polo returned from the East, the Venetians nicknamed him the Man of Millions, from the huge

figures in which he indulged. Indian history and Indian progress still express themselves in vast totals-in totals so enormous as almost to seem to place themselves outside the range of accurate Western research. I believe that if we are to approach Indian questions in a scientific spirit, we must begin by getting rid of these immense integers. We must shun the foible of Messer Marco Millioni. For in India, as elsewhere, the aggregate is merely the sum of its items, and exact knowledge is best reached by proceeding from the particular to the general-by leaving the whole alone until we have examined its parts. This article will restrict itself to a short river trough, which runs inland from the Bay of Bengal, with the buried Buddhist port near its mouth; with Calcutta about halfway up; and with Murshidabad, the forsaken Muhammadan capital, towards its northern end.

The Hugli is the most westerly of the network of channels by which the Ganges pours into the sea. Its length, under its distinctive name, is less than 150 miles a length altogether insignificant compared with the great waterways of India. But even its short course exhibits in full work the twofold task of the Bengal rivers as creators and destroyers. The delta through which it flows was built up in times primæval, out of the sea, by the silt which the Hugli and adjacent channels brought down from inland plains and Himalayan heights, a thousand miles off. Their inundations still add a yearly coating of slime to vast low-lying tracts; and we can stand by each autumn and see the ancient secrets of landmaking laid bare. Each autumn, too, the network of currents rend away square miles from their banks, and deposit their plunder as new alluvial formations further down. Or a broad river writhes like a monster snake across the country, leaving dry its old bed, and covering with deep water what was lately solid land.

Most of the channels do their work in solitude, in drowned wastes where the rhinoceros and crocodile wallow in the slush, and whither the woodcutter only comes in the dry months, after the rivers have spent their fury for the year. But the Hugli carries on its ancient task in a thickly peopled country, destroying and reproducing with an equal balance amid the homesteads and cities of men. Since the dawn of history it has formed the great high road from Bengal to the sea. One Indian race after another built their capitals, one European nation after another founded their settlements, on its banks. Buddhists, Hindus, Musalmans, Portuguese, Dutch, Danes, French, Germans, and English, have lined with ports and fortresses that magnificent waterway.

The insatiable river has dealt impartially with all. Some it has left high and dry, others it has buried under mud, one it has cleft in twain and covered with its waters: but all it has attacked, or deserted, or destroyed. With a single exception, whatever it has

touched it has defaced. One city only has completely resisted its assaults. Calcutta alone has escaped unharmed to tell of that appalling series of catastrophes. The others lie entombed in the silt, or moulder like wrecks on the bank. The river flows on relentless and majestic as of old, ceaselessly preaching with its still small ripple, the ripple that has sapped the palaces of kings and brought low the temples of the gods, that here we have no abiding city. It is a vision of the world's vanities such as the world has not seen since Spenser mourned the Ruines of Rome

Ne ought save Tyber hastning to his fall
Remaines of all: O world's inconstancie!
That which is firme doth flit and fall away,
And that is flitting doth abide and stay.

In order to understand a great Indian waterway, we must lay aside our common English idea of a river. In England the streams form lines of drainage from the interior to the sea. The life of a Bengal river like the Ganges is much more complex. Its biography divides itself into three chapters-a boisterous boyhood, a laborious manhood, a sad old age. In its youth the Ganges leaps out from a snow-bed in the Himalayas, and races across the sub-montane tracts, gathering pebbles and diverse mineral treasures as it bounds along. After three hundred miles of this play, it settles down to its serious work in life, grinding its mountain spoils to powder against its sides, bearing on its breast the commerce of provinces, and distributing its waters for the cultivation of the soil. Its manhood lasts a thousand miles, during which it receives tributaries from both sides, and rolls onward with an ever-increasing volume of water and silt. But as it grows older it becomes slower, losing in pace as it gains in bulk, until it reaches a country so level that its mighty mass can no longer hold together, and its divergent waters part from the main stream to find separate courses to the sea. The point at which this disseverance takes place marks the head of the delta. But the dismembered river has still an old age of full two hundred miles before its worn-out currents find rest. It toils sluggishly across the delta, splitting up into many channels, each of which searches a course for itself southwards, with endless bifurcations, new junctions, twists, and convolutions.

The enfeebled currents can no longer carry on the silt which the parent stream, in its vigorous manhood, has borne down. They accordingly deposit their burdens in their beds, or along their margins, thus raising their banks above the low adjacent plains. They build themselves up as it were into high-level canals. The delta thus consists of branching rivers winding about at a perilous elevation, with a series of hollow-lands or dips between. The lofty banks alone prevent the channels from spilling over; and when a

channel has filled up, the old banks run like ridges across the delta, showing where a dead river once flowed. In the rainy season, the floods burst over the banks, and drown the surrounding flats with a silt-laden deluge. Then the waters settle and drop their load in the form of a coating of mud. As the inundation subsides, the aqueous expanse, now denuded of its silt, partly finds its way back to the channels, partly sinks into the porous soil, and partly stagnates in land-locked fens. The Ganges thus yields up in its old age the accumulations of its youth and manhood. Earth to earth. The last scene of all is the solitude of tidal creeks and jungle, amid whose silence its waters merge into the sea.

The Hugli is formed by the three most westerly of the deltaic spill-streams of the Ganges. The first or most northerly is the Bhagirathi, a very ancient river, which represents the original course of the Ganges, down the Hugli trough to the Bay of Bengal. A legend tells how a demon diverted the sacred Ganges by swallowing it. The demon was a geological one-a band of stiff yellow clay which confined the Ganges to its ancient bed, until a flood burst through the barrier and opened a passage for the main body of the Ganges to the east. The disruption took place in prehistoric times. But to this day the Bhagirathi, and the Hugli which it helps to form lower down, retain the sanctity of the parent stream. The Ganges ceases to be holy eastward from the point where the Bhagirathi breaks south. It was at this point that Holy Mother Ganga vouchsafed, in answer to the Sage's prayer, to divide herself into a hundred channels to make sure that her purifying waters should reach, and cleanse from sin, the concealed ashes of the heroes. Those channels form her distributaries through the delta. The Bhagirathi, although for centuries a mere spill-stream from the parent Ganges, is still called the Ganges by the villagers along its

course.

The levels of the surrounding country show that the bed of the Bhagirathi must once have been many times its present size. The small portion of the waters of the Ganges which it continued to receive after the geological disruption no longer sufficed to keep open its former wide channel. Its bed accordingly silted up, forming islands, shoals, and accretions to its banks. It now discloses the last stage in the decay of a deltaic river. In that stage the process of silting up completes itself, until the stream dwindles into a series of pools and finally disappears. This fate is averted from the Bhagirathi by engineering efforts. The vast changes which have taken place in the Hugli trough may be estimated from the one fact, that the first of its headwaters, which originally poured into it the mighty Ganges, is now a dying river kept alive by artificial devices.

The other two headwaters of the Hugli bear witness to not less memorable vicissitudes. The second of them takes off from the

Ganges about forty miles eastward from the Bhagirathi. At one time it brought down such masses of water from the Ganges as to earn the name of the Terrible. But in our own days it was for long a deceased river; its mouth or intake from the Ganges was closed with mud; its course was cut into three parts by other streams. The country through which it flowed must once have been the scene of fluvial revolutions on an appalling scale. That tract is now covered with a network of dead rivers; a vast swampy reticulation in some places stretching as lines of pools, in others as fertile green hollows. But thirteen years ago a flood once more burst open the mouth of the Terrible from the Ganges, and it re-expanded from a little cut into a broad distributary. The third of the Hugli headwaters has its principal offtake from the Ganges again about forty miles further down. It constantly shifts its point of bifurcation from the Ganges, moving its mouth up and down the parent river to a distance of ten miles. All the three headwaters of the Hugli dwindle to shallow streams in the cold weather. At many places a depth of eighteen inches cannot always be maintained by the most skilful engineering. But during the rains each of them pours down enormous floods from the Ganges to the Hugli trough.

The Hugli, thus formed by three uncertain spill-streams of the Ganges from the north and east, receives no important tributary on its western bank above Calcutta. One channel brings down the torrents from the mountain fringe of the Central India plateau. But during three-quarters of the year this channel dwindles, in its upper course, to a silver thread amid expanses of sand. Formerly, indeed, the Hugli above Calcutta received a mighty river from the westward, the Damodar. About two centuries ago, however, that giant stream burst southward, and now enters the Hugli far below Calcutta. For practical purposes, therefore, the only feeders of the Hugli are the three spill-streams from the Ganges on the north and east.

How comes it that these decaying rivers suffice to supply one of the great commercial waterways of the world? In the dry weather, writes the officer in charge of them, it is impossible, at a short distance below their final point of junction, 'to tell whether they are opened or closed, as the proportion of water which they supply' to the Hugli is a mere trifle.' Thus in 1869 two of them were closed, and the third only yielded a trickle of twenty cubic feet a second. Yet within fifty miles of their junction the Hugli has grown into a magnificent river, deep enough for the largest ships, and supplying Calcutta with twelve million gallons of water a day without any appreciable diminution to the navigable channel.

This was long a mystery. The explanation is that during the eight dry months the Hugli is fed partly by infiltration underground, and partly by the tide. The delta forms a subterraneous sieve of silt,