212 ROUGHING IT IN SOUTHERN INDIA 



avoid trampling on them, thereby destroying many a possible 

 lordly clump. Looking at these green spikes we were re- 

 minded of two widely different uses to which they are put 

 at that early stage of their growth. One is the preserving 

 them in syrup, when they are not easily recognisable for 

 bamboo, in ' Chow-Chow,' that delicious compound of all 

 sorts of things cut up small, or very young, such as gherkins, 

 tiny green oranges, limes, etc. The other, a horrifying one, 

 in which the rapid growth of these shoots is utilised in one 

 of the cruel and ingenious methods of torture too common 

 in the East, I will not describe. In all these tortures, called 

 punishments, natives are as resourceful as in other directions ; 

 the nearest thing will serve their turn. What can be nearer 

 than a bamboo shoot I For they grow nearly everywhere by 

 the million, at the astonishing rate of several inches in a 

 single night, too. Not that these practices are openly carried 

 on — in British India at least. Some Europeans may never 

 have heard of them, though living among the people who 

 invent and apply them. It is said that criminals have been 

 condemned, not to death directly, but to some fell disease, 

 a thousandfold worse, even to ravaging leprosy itself ! As 

 to the truth of this I cannot speak. The simplicity of their 

 ideas it is that strikes one ; no complicated machinery of 

 pulleys, cords, or blades, only Nature herself put to the 

 business — just starting her. Cruelty begets cruelty, here 

 as elsewhere. A man who had been subjected to the bamboo 

 torture, and survived it, told F. that all he lived for after- 

 wards was the chance of doing as he had been done by. 

 We never heard if he got the chance ; but his will was 

 good. One would think that crimes meriting such cruel 

 penalties must needs be terrible ; not so, necessarily. A 

 few annas' worth of stuff stolen, or a scrap of leather, or 

 some such trifle is quite enough to get the thieving hand 



crushed with a mallet, or imprisoned in green hide, or . 



But there is no end to the choice of tortures ; they are read 



