The Giridih Coal-Fields E-Book

Rudyard Kipling

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 34

Beschreibung

Rudyard Kipling was a prolific British writer and poet.  Kipling’s children fiction, specifically The Jungle Books and Just So Stories, are some of the most famous in English literature.  This edition of The Giridih Coal-Fields includes a table of contents.

Leseprobe

THE GIRIDIH COAL-FIELDS

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Rudyard Kipling

KYPROS PRESS

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Copyright © 2015 by Rudyard Kipling

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Giridih Coal-Fields

Chapter 1: On the Surface

Chapter 2: In the Depths

Chapter 3: The Perils of the Pits

THE GIRIDIH COAL-FIELDS

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CHAPTER 1: ON THE SURFACE

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SOUTHWARD, ALWAYS SOUTHWARD AND EASTERLY, runs the Calcutta Mail from Luckeeserai, till she reaches Madapur in the Sonthal Parganas. From Madapur a train, largely made up of coal-trucks, heads westward into the Hazaribagh district and toward Giridih. A week would not have exhausted ‘Jamalpur and its environs,’ as the guide-books say. But since time drives and man must e’en be driven, the weird, echoing bund in the hills above Jamalpur, where the owls hoot at night and hyenas come down to laugh over the grave of ‘Quillem Roberts, who died from the effects of an encounter with a tiger near this place, A.D. 1864,’ goes undescribed. Nor is it possible to deal with Monghyr, the headquarters of the district, where one sees for the first time the age of Old Bengal in the sleepy, creepy station, built in a time-eaten fort, which runs out into the Ganges, and is full of quaint houses, with fat-legged balustrades on the roofs. Pensioners certainly, and probably a score of ghosts, live in Monghyr. All the country seems haunted. Is there not at Pir Bahar a lonely house on a bluff, the grave of a young lady, who, thirty years ago, rode her horse down the cliff and perished? Has not Monghyr a haunted house in which tradition says sceptics have seen much more than they could account for? And is it not notorious throughout the countryside that the seven miles of road between Jamalpur and Monghyr are nightly paraded by tramping battalions of spectres — phantoms of an old-time army, massacred who knows how long ago? The common voice attests all these things, and an eerie cemetery packed with blackened, lichened, candle-extinguisher tomb-stones persuades the listener to believe all that he hears. Bengal is second — or third is it? — in order of seniority among the Provinces, and like an old nurse, she tells many witchtales.

But ghosts have nothing to do with collieries, and that ever-present ‘Company,’ the E.I.R., has more or less made Giridih — principally more. ‘Before the E.I.R. came,’ say the people, ‘we had one meal a day. Now we have two.’ Stomachs do not tell fibs, whatever mouths may say. That ‘Company,’ in the course of business, throws about five lakhs a year into the Hazaribagh district in the form of wages alone, and Giridih Bazar has to supply the wants of twelve thousand men, women, and children. But we have now the authority of a number of high-souled and intelligent native prints that the Sahib of all grades spends his time in ‘sucking the blood out of the country,’ and ‘flying to England to spend his illgotten gains.’