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The Hindus do not bury those who die; they burn their bodies on bonfires. Those who die in Benares are burned on the steps that lead down to the river, and so many are burned there that men make a regular business ofselling wood for these funeral fires. The richer a man is, the bigger fire he can have when he dies; but often a man is so poor he has not left even enough money to pay for the few sticks of wood necessary to burn his body.
There are so many people in India that often there is not enough food to go around, and though the poor people live on little but a few handfuls of rice a day, thousands upon thousands starve to death for lack of even this little food. The rajahs and well-to-do people look fat and well-fed, but the poor people are usually as thin as skeletons, and as they often wear hardly any clothes, you can see every bone in their lean bodies.
From rajahs with their millions’ worth of jewels to the poor wretch who dies without two sticks of wood to burn his body, that is the "opposite-feet" land.
South of India is an island called Ceylon, where men wear skirts and combs in their hair. Much of our tea comes from there. Near Ceylon are the greatest pearl fisheries—greater even than those of the Persian Gulf. Many of the rajahs’ famous pearls have been found there, and even I have a black pearl that came from there.It is supposed to bring good luck whether you wear it or whether you don’t. I don’t.
The Indians are famous magicians, and at Colombo in Ceylon I saw some of their tricks. An Indian placed his wife in a basket, covered it with a shawl, stabbed through it in every direction, and then uncovered her alive and smiling. I saw him put a seed in a flower-pot and while you watched it it grew to a plant. How do they do such things? You can only guess just as every one else does.
