Music Welcome to Snewscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep. Find us at snoozecast.com and if you enjoy our show, please share us with a friend. This episode is brought to you by Geographical Expressions. Tonight we'll read a selection from The Crosenest, also known as on the other side of the latch by Sarah Jeanette Duncan, who also published as Mrs. Everard Coats and Garth Grafton. Duncan worked as a travel writer for Canadian newspapers and a columnist for the Toronto Globe and eventually the Washington Post. Later, she made a journey to India and married an Anglo-Indian civil servant thereafter dividing her time between England and India. She wrote 22 works of fiction, many with international themes and settings. Unlike her travel writing, the crow's nest is a memoir of description and not action as Duncan spends her time in recovery at a mountain house in Simla, India, as she undergoes a rescue for tuberculosis.

In the passage we'll read tonight,

Duncan pauses contemplating her current situation

and turns her attention to the garden

at the home where she is exiled.

Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bed. Now take a few deep breaths. There is a right side and a wrong side to the mountain of Simla. it was a mountain 8,000 feet high and equally important long before it became the summer headquarters of the government of India and a possible pin point on the map. These mountains run across the tip of India, you will remember, do east and west, so that if you live on one of them, you are very apt to live due north or south. On the south side, you look down on a clear day, quite to the plains. If that is any advantage, you see the punjab lying there as flat as the palm of your hand and streaked with rivers and the same sun that burns all India bakes down upon you. On the north side, you have turned your back on Hindostan and sit upon the borders of Tibet. A world of mountains bars your horizon. A hermit, Mahatma, might abide with you in his ashes, ashes and have his meditations disturbed by no thought of missionaries or income tax. Your prospect is all blue and purple with a wonderful edge sometimes of white. Cool winds blow out of it and fan your roses on the hottest day. Out there is no man's land, or perhaps the country of a little king who wears his crown embroidered on his turban and in India who wrecks of little kings. There are no secretariats, no army headquarters, no precedents, probably very little pay, but the vast blue freedom of it, and all expanded, all extended just at your front door. Into my field of vision comes Atma, doing something to a Banksya rose bush that climbs over a little arbor, erected across a path, apparently for the convenience of the rose bush. Atma would tell you, protector of the poor, that he is the gardener of this place. As a matter of feet, his relation to it is that of tutillary deity and real proprietor. I have talked in as large a way as if it belonged to Pigloff Pillister because he pays for the repairs. But I should have had the politeness at least to mention Atma, whose claims are so much better. So far as we are concerned, Atma is prehistoric. He was here when we came, and when we have completed the tale of one years of exile and gone away, he will also be here. His hut is at the very end of the shelf, and I have never been in it, but if you asked him how long he has lived there, he would say, always. It must make very little difference to Atma what temporary lords come and give orders in the house with the magnificent tin roof where they have tablecloths. Some, of course, are more troublesome than others. But none of them stay. He and his bulbs and perennials are the permanent undisputed facts. It is unimaginable that any of them should be turned out. I am more reconciled to my fate when Atma is in the garden. He is something human to look at and to consider, and he moves with such calm wisdom among the plants. He has a short, black, curling beard that grows almost up to his high cheekbones and soft, round, brown eyes full of guileless cunning and a wide and pleasant smile. He is just a gentle hillman and by religion a gardener. But with his turban twisted low and flat over his ears, he might be any of the old testament characters one remembers in the pictured Bible stories of one's childhood. Something primitive and natural about him binds him closely to Adam in my mind. It was with this simplicity and patience, I am sure, that the original cultivator tied up his bank sias and saved his minionette after the fall. When he had something to do, beside come to his meals. I am not the only person. Everybody to whom it is pointed out notices at once how remarkably atma takes after the father of us all. I have often wished to call him Adam because of his peculiarly deserving of it, but Tiglath Pilliser says that profane persons, knowing that he could not have received the name at his baptism, might laugh and thus hurt his feelings. So he is at must still.

It is near enough. He is also patriarchal in his ideas. This morning he came to us upon the business of Shropo. Shropo, he said, wished for six days leave in order to marry himself.

Bye. upon the business of Shropo. Shropo, he said, wished for six days leave in order to marry

himself. But said I, this is not at all proper. Shropo went away last year to marry himself. How shall Shropo have two wives? Ne replied atma with his kindly smile.

That was Masuddi. Masuddi has now a wife and a son, and his wages are so much the less. Also, without doubt, this sropo could not have two wives. Certainly not, said Tigloth Piliser, virtuously. Sropo is of my village. Atma explained, genially, and we folk are all poor men. More than one wife cannot be taken. But if we were rich like the Presence, he went on gravely. We would have five or six. Ticklaugh, Piliser, shook his head. You would be sorry, said he, and would be a mistake. But only I saw the ambiguity in his eye. It is not your honor's custom. Returned Atma simply. Stropo then will go. Call Masuti said Tiglath Pilsar. It is a serious matter, this of wives. Round the corner of the veranda came Masuddi, shy and broadly smiling, with an end of his cotton shirt in the corner of his mouth, and pulling at it, as other kinds of children pull at their pinniforce. Masuddi said to Glafpilissar, last year you made a marriage in your house, and now you have a son. Which young woman did you marry? Masuti's smile broadened. He cast down his eyes and scrabbled the gravel about it with his foot. Took to, he said, shame facetly. While there is no harm in that, what is the name of your son? Masude looked up intelligently. How should he have a name? He asked. He has not yet four months. He came with the snow. When he has a year, then he will get a name. My Padre folk Brahman will give it. But you will say what it will be. I put in, nay," said Masuddi. The Padre folk will say to their liking. Masuddi and Shropo are two of the four who pool my rickshaw. When I am not taking carriage exercise, they will do almost anything else except so or cook. But I have discovered that the thing they really love to be set at is to paint. In the spring, the paling required a fresh brown coat. And in a moment of inspired economy, I decided that Masoodi and his men should be entrusted with it. Never was task more willingly undertaken. With absorption, they mixed the pigment and thue oil, squeezing it with their hands. With joy, they laid it on, competing among themselves, like Tom Sawyer's school fellows. Low, it is beautiful. Masuti would exclaim after each brushful, drawing back to look at it. I think they were sorry when it was done. Atma is of these people, and the two grooms, and Dumbu, the upper housemaid, a strapping treasure, six feet in his stockings. I would like it better if all our servants were, but it is impossible to conceive Sropo doing up muslin frills. At least it is impossible to conceive the frills. And I could not ask people to eat on trays sent up by any friend of Masudees. I admit they do not altogether adapt themselves, or even wash themselves. I have before now locked Masuri and the others up with a tub and a bar of kitchen soap and instructions of the most general nature, demanding on their release to see the soap. It was the only reliable evidence. Besides if I had not required to see my soap worn by honest service, they would have sold it and bought sweet meats and gone none the cleaner. They have many such little ways, which few people I know consider as engaging as I do. But what I like best is their lightheartedness and their touch of fancy. Sropo will go to his nub-suals with a rose behind his ear. Where in my barbarous west does a young man choose to approach the altar thus? And when Masuddi courted Tuk-Tuk upon the mountain paths in the twilight, I think a shy idol went barefoot between them. though he, the male creature, would make shame of it now, preferring to speak of obedience. They are the young of the world, these hills, suns, and daughters, and they still remember how the earth they are made of stirs in the spring. It is late evening in my garden now. They're as seemed somehow, no good reason to go in. The one new leaf in the borders has long been just like another. And far down the code, I hear a playing upon the flute. It is a fragmentary air but vigorous and sweet, And it brings me dropping through the vast and purple spaces of the evening, the most charming sensation. For it is not a secretary to the government of India who performs, nor any member of the choir invisible that sings Hosanna's over there to the commander in chief, but a simple hillman who would make a melody because it is spring, and he has perchance been given leave to go and marry himself. People are often removed from their proper social spheres in this world and placed in others, which they think lower and generally less worthy of them.

Their distant and haughty behavior under these circumstances is rather like my own conduct at present, down in the world as I am and reduced to the society of a garden. I too have been looking about me with contemptuous indifference. Returning no visits, the quantities of things have been coming up to see me, and perpetually referring to the superior circles I moved in when I knew better days and went out to dinner. You may notice, however, that such persons generally end by condescending to the simpler folk they come to live among. It is dull work subsisting upon the most glorious reminiscences, and much wiser to become the shining ornament of the more limited sphere to which one may be transferred. That is the course I am considering, for whom cards of invitation are deadletters, And to whom the gay world up here will soon refer, I have no doubt, as the late Mrs. Tiglath Pillister, who chose so singularly to bestow her remains in a garden, though I am really alive and flourishing there. I can never be the shining ornament of my garden, because nature intended otherwise, and there is too much competition. But I may be able to exert an improving influence. It is not impossible, either, that I may find the horticultural class about me more interesting than I find myself. I have been accustomed to speak with quite the ordinary contempt of persons who have no resources within themselves. In future I shall have more sympathy, and less ridicule for such. I should rather like to know what one is expected to possess in the way of resources, tucked away in that vague interior, which we are asked to believe regularly pigeonholed and alphabetically classified. We do believe it by an effort of the imagination, but only try, on a fine day out of doors to rummage there. Your boasted brain is a perfect rag bag, a waste paper basket, a brand pie, for which you draw at hazard an article value, a penny, a penny. This is disappointing when both you and your family believe that you have only to think in order to be quite indifferent to the world and vastly entertained. Resources somehow suggest the things one has read, and I know I depended largely upon certain poets, not one of whom will come near me unless I go personally and bring him from the bookshelves in his covers. for one. Why Pope I cannot say, unless because he would blink and cough and be fundamentally miserable in a garden. Great breaths of Pope I thought would visit me in quotation? Not a breath. Immortals of earlier and later periods are equally shy. I catch at their fluttering garments and they are off, leaving a rag in my hand. Only that agreeable conceit of marvels comes and stays, annihilating all that's made to a green thought in a green shade. Apply within for lofty sentiments or profound conclusions. The result is the same. These things fly the ardent seeker and only appear when you are not looking for them. Instead, you find shreds of likes and dislikes. The ghost of an opinion you held last week. A desire to know what time it is. My regrettable experience is that you can explore the recesses of your soul out of doors in much less than a week if you put your mind to it, with surprise and indignation that you should find so little there. You beat your paint and fancy wit will come. Knock as you please, there's nobody home. Hear me, there is Mr. Pope and very much as usual to the point.

No resources are things you can lay your hands upon, and I have come to believe that they are all in the house. Everything is up and showing.

The garden is green with promise.

But very few things are quite ready for my kind advances. Very few things are out. What a pretty idea, by the way, in that common little word as the flowers use it. Out of the damp earth and the green sheath, out into the sun with the others, out to meet the bees and to snub the beetles. Oh, out! When young girls emerge into the world they too are out. The word was borrowed, of course, from the garden. Its propriety is plain. This be, I remember, is out this season. But I do not see anything in the borders exactly like it. Deltless later on, her prototype will come in June, I think, unfolding a pink petal coat. There is no hurry. It is yet only the second week in April. and these grey mountains are still delicate and dim under the ideal touch of the wild apricot and plum. The borders may be empty, but there is sweet vision to be had by looking up, and just a hint of nature's possible purposes. It now occurs to me that there ought to be clouds and clouds of this pink and white blossoming all about the house, behind as well as before. On each of our several declivities, there ought to be, and there is not. I remember now why there is not. One In Christ morning, last autumn, Tiglath Pillacer, who is a practical person, was struck by the fact, though it is not a new one, that wild fruit trees may be made to cultivate fruit by the process of grafting, and announced his intention to graft largely. Think, said he, of the satisfaction of being able to write home to England that you are gathering from your own trees, quantities of the green gauges which they pay ten pence a pound for and place carefully in tarts. The proceeding had not my approval. It seemed to me that it would be a good deal of trouble and care and thought and anxiety to grow green gauges here, and we had none of these things to spare. Neither would there be any satisfaction in gathering quantities of them when one could buy a convenient number in the Bazaar. We could not eat them all, and it was not our walk-in life to sell such things. We might certainly expect to be cheated. We should be reduced to making indiscriminate presents of them, and receiving grateful notes from people we probably couldn't bear,

or possibly I, like the enterprising heroine of improving modern fiction, would feel compelled to start a jam factory. And did I strike him to Glaf Pylissar as a person to bring a jam factory to a successful issue? At the moment I remember an accumulation of green gauges seemed the one thing I precisely couldn't tolerate, but I didn't say very

much. Hardly more than I have mentioned, as the supreme argument failed to occur to to me at the time, the supreme argument, which only visits you after watching the pink and white petals drop among the deodars for hours together is of course that if If you can afford to grow fruit to look at it,

is utilitarian folly to turn it into fruit to eat.

So, I have no doubt that he had his way.

I have been to see it is the case. Where there should be masses of delicate bloom, there are stumps. There attenuated stumps tied up in peltices with fingers sticking out of them, which suppose are the precious graphs. I cannot conscientiously pass over the rhododendrons, which are all aloft and ablaze just now. It would be unkind when they have come of their own accord to grow here and make it in places really magnificent, though they arouse in me no sentiment at all, and I had just as soon they went somewhere else. At home, the roaded dendron is a bush on a lawn. Here, it grows into a forest tree, and when you come upon it far out in the thes, with the sun shining through its red clusters, against the vivid blue, it stands like candelabra, lighted to the glory of the Lord. I will consent to admire it in that office.

But for common human garden uses,

I find it a little oversuperb to the apricots and plums. and palms. Yn yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n y