The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  And as the soil of Palestine contains neither coal nor oil, it will escape the attentions of the foreign promoter, and it will be allowed to work out its own problems as Yahweh and the Mohammedan majority will permit.

  THE DISTANCE BETWEEN THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN TOP AND THE LOWEST OCEAN DEPTH IS 11½ MILES, OR 1/700 OF THE EARTH’S DIAMETER

  Chapter XXXIV

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  ARABIA—OR WHEN IS A PART OF ASIA NOT A PART OF ASIA?

  According to the maps in our ordinary atlases and according to the handbooks on geography, Arabia is a part of Asia. But the proverbial visitor from Mars, ignorant of the history of our planet, would probably come to a different conclusion and would decide that Nejd, the famous Arabian desert, is really nothing but a continuation of the Sahara, from which it is separated by an inconsequential and rather shallow bay of the Indian Ocean known as the Red Sea.

  This Red Sea is almost six times as long as it is wide and full of reefs. Its mean depth is about three hundred fathoms, but where it connects with the Gulf of Aden, which is really part of the Indian Ocean, the depth varies between only two and sixteen fathoms. It is possible that the Red Sea, which is full of little volcanic islands, was originally an inland lake which did not get elevated to the rank of a sea until the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb was formed.

  As for the Arabs themselves, they seem to have no desire to be either African or Asiatic, for they call their country “the island of the Arabians,” which is rather a large order for a piece of territory six times as large as the whole of Germany. The number of inhabitants is not at all in proportion to the size of their country. It is less than that of Greater London. But the original ancestors of these 7,000,000 modern Arabs must have been possessed of extraordinary physical and mental qualities, for they have been able to impress themselves upon the world at large in quite an extraordinary fashion, and that without the slightest assistance from Mother Nature.

  In the first place, they lived in a country with a climate that is not fit for human beings. Not only is this continuation of the Sahara Desert completely deprived of rivers, but it is also one of the hottest places on earth, except in the extreme south and east, where the coast is so damp and moist as to be practically uninhabitable for Europeans. But in the centre of the peninsula and in the south-west, where the mountain-ranges reach a height of over 6000 feet, the life of both man and beast is made intolerable by those sudden changes in temperature which take place immediately after dark and which cause the thermometer to fall from 80° to 20° in less than half an hour’s time.

  If it were not for the underground water the interior would be entirely uninhabitable. As for the coastal regions, they are not much better off, except the territory immediately north of the British settlement of Aden.

  From a commercial point of view, however, the whole peninsula is not worth as much as the lower part of the island of Manhattan. But the island of Manhattan will have to do a great deal better than it has done so far if it desires to equal Arabia in its general influence upon the cultural development of the world.

  Curiously enough, the Arab peninsula has never been a country as France and Sweden are countries. As a result of the irresponsible promises made to everybody and everything during the Great War when the Allies were badly in need of a few extra men, a baker’s dozen of so-called independent States now stretch all the way from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Akaba, and even farther northward where Transjordania, ruled by an Emir who takes his orders from Jerusalem, separates Palestine from the Syrian desert. But most of them are mere names like El Hasa and Oman, along the Persian Gulf, Hadramut in the south and Yemen and Asir along the Red Sea, just south of El Hejaz, which is perhaps the only one of any importance. For the Hejaz not only has a railway of its own (the final part of the Bagdad road which now runs as far as Medina and which eventually will be continued to Mecca) but it also is in control of the two holy cities of the Moslem world, Mecca, the place where Mohammed was born, the Bethlehem of the Moslems, and Medina, where he lies buried.

  Neither of these two oasis cities amounted to much early in the seventh century when they became the centre of such stirring events. Mohammed, who was responsible for their fame, was born in 567 or 569, several months after the death of his father. Soon afterwards his mother died too, and he was thereupon entrusted to the care of an impecunious grandfather. At an early age he became a camel-driver and travelled all over Arabia with the caravans who hired his services. He may even have crossed the Red Sea, and there is a possibility that he visited Abyssinia, which was then trying to turn Arabia into an African colony (and having an easy time, of it, as the different desert tribes hated each offer too cordially to be able to put up a concerted fight).

  At an uncertain age he married a widow. Her property allowed him to give up his wandering life and open a little store of his own, dealing in grain and camel-feed. Like many offer people suffering from epileptic fits, he had strange hallucinations when in a state of semi-consciousness, and, like many other people affected by that unpleasant ailment, he tried to console himself for his unfortunate affliction by telling his neighbours that he had gone into a trance in order to receive a revelation from God. Not being a man of great originality of thought, he did not find it easy to develop some definite and new system of religion of his own. He vaguely talked about restoring the ancient faith of Abraham and Ishmael. For a time he even seems to have played with the idea of adapting the Christian faith to the needs of his wild neighbours, who would never have listened to anyone talking to them of meekness and asking them to turn the offer cheek to their enemies. In the end, and under the pressure of his Meccan neighbours, who laughed, rather heartily at the vegetable-vendor turned prophet, and who threatened his life when he began to take himself a bit too seriously, he fled to Medina and there he started upon his career as a preacher in all seriousness.

  I cannot go into details about his doctrines. If you are interested buy a Koran and try to read it, though you will find it heavy going. Suffice it here to state that as a result of Mohammed’s labours the different Semite tribes of the great Arabian desert suddenly became conscious of having to fulfil a mission. In less than a century they had conquered all of Asia Minor and Syria and Palestine, together with the whole of the northern coast of Africa and Spain. Until the end of the eighteenth century they were a constant menace to the safety of Europe.

  Well, a people who could do all that, and in only a few years, must have been possessed of extraordinary mental and physical abilities. According to all those who have ever had anything to do with them (including Napoleon, who was a bad judge of women, but who knew a good soldier when he saw one) the Arabs are terrific fighters, and their medieval universities in Spain were concrete proof of their intellectual gifts and their interest in science. Why in the end they should have lost so much of their former prestige I could not say. It would be very easy here to indulge in a few high-sounding theories about the influence of the geographical background upon the character of men, and then prove that desert tribes have always been great world conquerors, but there are just as many desert people who have never amounted to anything. Also there are just as many mountaineers who have done all sorts of wonderful things. And then again there are offer mountaineers who have never risen for above the ranks of drunken and careless and lazy loafers. No, I am sorry, but I have never been able to draw a single general moral lesson from success or the lack thereof on the part of any nation.

  But what has happened once may happen again. The great reform movement of the middle of the eighteenth century which purged Mohammedanism of all forms of idolatry and which gave rise to the puritanical sect of the Wahhabites with their insistence upon frugal and simple living may cause the Arabs to go on the war-path once more; and if Europe continues to waste its strength on civil warfare they may become as dangerous to us as they were twelve centuries ago. Their terrible peninsula is a vast reservoir of ‘hard people,’ of people who rarely smile, who rarely play, who take
themselves with dignified seriousness, and who cannot be corrupted by the pleasant prospects of material wealth because their needs are so simple that they have never felt the lack of anything better.

  Such nations are ever a potential source of danger. Especially when they have a just reason to feel themselves aggrieved. And in the case of Arabia, as in that of all Asia, Africa, America, and Australia, the White Man’s conscience is not quite as clear as we might wish.

  Chapter XXXV

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  INDIA, WHERE NATURE AND MAN ARE ENGAGED IN MASS-PRODUCTION

  Alexander the Great was the first European to discover India, That happened three hundred years before the birth of Christ. But Alexander did not get very far beyond the Indus River, and although he crossed the Punjab, the home of the Sikhs, he never penetrated the heart of the country of the true Hindus, who lived then, as they do now, in the wide valley of the Ganges, situated between the Himalayas in the north and the plateau of Deccan in the south. Eighteen centuries had to go by before the people of Europe got their first reliable information about this wonderland of Marco Polo. That happened when the Portuguese Vasco da Gama reached Goa on the coast of Malabar.

  Once the sea route from Europe to the land of the spices and the elephants and the golden temples had been established, information poured in upon the geographers at such a vast rate that the map-makers of Amsterdam were kept working overtime. Since then every nook and corner of the teeming peninsula has been thoroughly explored. This is the lie of the land in as few words as possible.

  In the north-west India is cut off from the rest of the world by the Khirthar mountains and the Sulaiman range which run from the Arabian Sea as far as the Hindu Kush. In the north the barrier consists of the Himalayas which run in a semicircle all the way from Hindu Kush to the Gulf of Bengal.

  Please remember that everything connected with India is on a scale which dwarfs the geographical proportions of Europe and makes them look almost ridiculous. In the first place, India itself is as large as all of Europe outside Russia. The Himalayas, if they were a European mountain-range, would run from Calais to the Black Sea. The Himalayas have forty peaks which are higher than the highest mountain of Europe. Their glaciers are on the average four times as long as the glaciers of the Alps.

  INDIA

  India is one of the hottest countries on earth, and at the same time in several parts it has the records for the world’s annual rainfall (nearly 500 inches per annum). It has a population of 350,000,000 people who speak 150 different languages and dialects. Nine-tenths of them still depend for their livelihood upon their own crops, and when the annual rainfall is insufficient they die of starvation at a rate of 2,000,000 per year. (I am giving you the figures for the decade between 1890 and 1900.) But now that the English have stamped out the plague, have made an end to inter-racial warfare, have built vast irrigation works and have introduced the first rudiments of hygiene (paid for of course by the Indians themselves) they are increasing at such a rate that soon they will be just as badly off as they were in the days when pestilence and hunger and the death-rate of their babes kept the ghats of Benares working twenty-four hours each day.

  The big rivers of India run parallel with the mountain-ranges. In the west the Indus first runs through the Punjab and then breaks through the mountains of the north, where it provided the prospective conquerors from northern Asia with a convenient passage-way to the heart of Hindustan. As for the Ganges, the holy river of the Hindus, it follows a course which runs almost due east. Before it reaches the Gulf of Bengal, the Ganges is joined by the Brahmaputra, which also takes its origin among the peaks of the Himalayas and which runs due east until it is forced to make a detour by the Khasi Hills, changes its course from east to west and shortly afterwards joins the Ganges.

  The valleys of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra are the most densely populated part of all India. Only in China are there a few spots where quite so many millions of people must fight each other for the barest necessities of life. On the western banks of fix-moist and marshy delta of these two enormous rivers lies the city of Calcutta, the chief manufacturing centre of India.

  As for the products of the Ganges valley, more commonly known as Hindustan, or the land of the true Hindus, they are numerous and would probably be profitable if that whole part of the world did not suffer so hopelessly from chronic overpopulation. In the first place, there is rice. The people of India and Japan and Java do not eat rice because they happen to be so fond of it, but they eat rice because rice yields more food per square mile (and per square foot and per square inch) than any other plant that has thus far been domesticated.

  The cultivation of rice is both difficult and messy. That is not a pleasant word, but it happens to be the only word that will adequately describe a procedure which forces millions of men and women to spend the greater part of their time wading through mud and liquid manure. For the rice is originally sown in mud. When the little plants are about nine inches high they are dug out by hand and transplanted into flooded fields which must remain under water until it is time for the harvest, when the disgusting pap is allowed to run away by means of a highly complicated system of drainage ditches until it finally reaches the Ganges. At this point the Ganges provides both bathing and drinking water for the pious who have gathered together in Benares, the Rome of the Hindus and probably the oldest city in the world. By this time that putrid liquid has acquired such a degree of holiness that it can whiten sins which no other form of ablution could possibly hope to cleanse.

  RICE

  Another product of the Ganges valley is jute, a vegetable fibre which was first sent to Europe a century and a half ago to be used as a substitute for cotton and flax. Jute is the inner bark of a plant which needs almost as much moisture as rice. The bark itself has to be soaked in water for weeks before the fibre can be extracted and sent to the Calcutta factories to be changed into ropes and jute bags and a coarse sort of clothing which the natives wear.

  Then there is the indigo plant from which we used to get our blue colour until the recent discovery that it could be extracted much more economically from coal-tar.

  Finally there is opium, which was originally grown to deaden the pain of that rheumatism which was inevitable in a country where the greater part of the population spent so much of its time slushing knee-deep through mud, cultivating its meagre daily portion of rice.

  Outside the valley on the slopes of the hills tea plantations have taken the place of the old forests. For the shrub which produces these tiny but valuable leaves needs a great deal of hot moisture and therefore grows best on mountain slopes where the water does not hurt the tender roots.

  Southward of the Ganges valley lies the triangular plateau of Deccan which has three different types of vegetation. The northern mountains and those of the west are the centre for the trade in teak, a very durable sort of timber which does not warp or shrink and which does not corrode iron. It used to be in great demand for ship-building purposes until fire introduction of the iron steamer, but is still used for a number of purposes. The interior of Deccan, which has very little rain and is another dreaded hunger spot, cultivates much cotton and some wheat.

  As for the coastal regions, Malabar on the west and Coromandel on the east, their large populations, owing to a generous rainfall, are provided amply with rice and millet, a sort of grain which we import for feeding chickens but which the natives of India eat instead of bread.

  The Deccan is the only part of India where coal and iron and gold are found, but these deposits have never yet been seriously exploited, for the rivers of Deccan have too many rapids to be of any use, and the construction of railways would hardly pay in a part of the world where the natives, being totally without worldly goods, do not stir beyond their own villages.

  The island of Ceylon, east of Cape Comorin, is really a part of the Indian peninsula. The Palk Strait, which separates it from Deccan, is so filled with reefs drat it must be dredged continually in order t
o be kept navigable. The reefs and sandbanks which form a sort of natural bridge between Ceylon and the mainland are called Adam’s Bridge, because Adam and Eve escaped that way from Paradise after they had incurred the wrath of God by their disobedience. For, according to the people of this part of the world, Ceylon was the original Paradise. It is still a Paradise compared to the rest of India. Not only on account of the climate and its fertility and the abundance (but not superabundance) of rain and its moderate temperature, but because it has escaped one of the worst evils of India. By remaining faithful to Buddhism, which the Indians rejected as being of such sublime spiritual value as to be beyond the grasp of the average man, it has escaped the rigours of caste which is an inseparable part of the Hindu religion.

  Geography and religion are much more closely connected than we usually suppose. In India, where everything is done on a superlative scale, religion has for thousands of years dominated man’s mind so completely and absolutely that it has become an integral part of everything the Hindu says and thinks and does and eats and drinks, or carefully avoids to say or do or eat or drink.

  In other countries, too, religion has often interfered with the normal development of life. The Chinese, with their veneration for the departed ancestors, bury grandpa and grandma on the southern slopes of their mountains. That leaves them only the cold and wind-swept northern slopes for the cultivation of their daily bread. As a result of this otherwise highly laudable affection for the departed relatives, their own children starve to death or are sold into slavery. Indeed almost every race (we ourselves included) is handicapped by strange taboos or mysterious ancient laws of divine origin which quite frequently interfere with the progress of the nation.