Volume 1

Recollections of a happy life : being the autobiography of Marianne North / edited by her sister, Mrs. John Addington Symonds.

  • North, Marianne, 1830-1890.
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Recollections of a happy life : being the autobiography of Marianne North / edited by her sister, Mrs. John Addington Symonds. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    It was a melancholy scene of desolation, without any growing things to humanise the dry stones. I was too ill to do much else than doze, and trace a few of the patterns. I began to hate all architecture, however beautiful, and to long for green gromng things again. I saw odd things on the road back to Agra: six camels carrying six haystacks; camels pulling double-storeyed human cages on wheels at a trot: and the common cab or ekkdi, with a high shower-bath awning over the passengers, who sat on their own heels under it, with a wheel on each side of them, the driver on the pole between two bullocks, pinching their backs with his finger-ends continually to keep them going. But I was very ill, and found it of no use fighting longer with the dry heat of Agra, so started by the rail at nine at night for Bareilly. At five in the evening of the next day we started again, in a great box on wheels, with a board to put up between the seats to make a bed of, changing horses every six miles. So we jolted through the darkness, stopping in the middle of the night to feed. I drank five bottles of soda- water that night, and still felt thirsty, and wondered I sur- vived it. But at daylight we were close under the mountains, and we turned in among them, and stopped at Kanibagh, a place with large mango-trees all loaded with bloom, and a running river below, which did one's eyes good to see after the months of dust. I felt better, and could eat again, and after a night's rest was carried up the hills in a dandy (by two bearers at a time, changing places every five minutes), in four and a half hours, to Naini Tal. In spite of the earliness and dryness of the season, I saw many beautiful flowers: great masses of blue plumbago, pink gentian, white and pink bauhinia, and the judas tree, a perfect mass of pink without any leaves. Other bushes were covered with small red or blue flowers, looking like almond or peach blossom. The hills were marvellously blue, piled one over the other beyond them. I never saw such abundance of pure colour; but they