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Ch 1 - A Passage to India · A Passage to India

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  Chapter one, except for the Marabar caves, and they are twenty miles off.
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  The city of Chandrapur presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the
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  river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely
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  distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing steps on
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  the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be wholly here. Indeed,
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  there is no river front, and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting
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  panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and
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  though a few fine houses exist, they are hidden away in gardens or down
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  alleys, whose filth deters all but the invited guest. Chandra Or was never
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  large or beautiful, but two hundred years ago it lay on the road between
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  Upper India, then Imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date
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  from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in the eighteenth century, nor
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  was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the
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  bazaars. The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving
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  so abased, So monotonous is everything that meets the eye that when the Ganges
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  comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil.
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  Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline
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  of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but
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  in destructible form of life. Inland, the prospect altars. There is an
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  oval maidan and a long sallow hospital. Houses belonging to Eurasians stand on the
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  high ground by the railway station. Beyond the railway, which runs parallel to
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  the river, the land sinks, then rises again, rather steeply. On
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  the second rise is laid out the little civil station and viewed. Hence,
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  Chandrapur appears to be a totally different place. It is a city of gardens.
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  It is no city but a forest, sparsely scattered with huts. It
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  is a tropical plaisance washed by a noble river. The taddy palms and mean
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  trees and mangoes and pet pool that were hidden behind the bazaars now become visible
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  and in their turn hide the bazaars. They rise from the gardens where ancient
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  tanks nourish them. They burst out of stifling purlieus and unconsidered temples, seeking
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  light and air, and endowed with more strength than man or his works.
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  They soar above the lower deposit to greet one another with branches and beckoning leaves,
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  and to build a city for the birds. Especially after the rains do
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  they screen what passes below. But at all times, even when scorched or
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  leafless, they glorify the city to the English people who inhabit the rise,
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  so that newcomers cannot believe it to be as meager as it is described,
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  and have to be driven down to acquire disillusionment. As for the civil station
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  itself, it provokes no emotion. It charms, not neither does it repel.
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  It is sensibly planned, with a red brick club on its brow,
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  and farther back a grocer's and a cemetery, and the bungalows are disposed along
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  roads that intersect at right angles. It has nothing hideous in it, and
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  only the view is beautiful. It shares nothing with the city except the overarching
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  sky. The sky too has its changes, but they are less marked than
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  those of the vegetation, and the river clouds map it up at times,
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  but it is normally a dome of blending tints, and the main tint blue.
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  By day, the blue will pale down into white where it touches the
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  white of the land. After sunset it has a new circumference, orange,
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  melting upwards into tenderest purple. But the core of blue persists, and so
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  it is by night. Then the stars hang like lamps from the immense vault.
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  The distance between the vault and them is as nothing to the distance behind
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  them, and that farther distance, though beyond color, last freed itself from
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  blue. The sky settles everything, not only climates and seasons. But when
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  the earth shall be beautiful by herself, she can do little, only feeble
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  outbursts of flowers. But when the sky chooses glory can reign into the chandrapour
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  bazaars, or a benediction pass from horizon to horizon. The sky can do
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  this because it is so strong and so enormous. Strength comes from the sun,
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  infused in its daily size from the prostrate earth. No mountains in fringe
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  on the curve. League after league, the earth lies flats, heaves a
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  little is flat again. Only in the south, where a group of fists
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  and fingers are thrust up through the soil, is the endless expanse. Interrupted
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  these fists and fingers are the Marabar Hills containing the extraordinary caves end of Chapter one,