CHAPTER XXVII
BOMBAY
FTER two months "up-country," Bombay seemed a European city, a Western metropolis; and that hotel which strikes such dismay and disgust to the heart of the tourist coming from Europe seemed to us a very palace of comfort; that hotel whose corridors are strewn with servants and their rolls of bedding, their pots, pipes, and traps,—servants who gabble and smoke, eat and sleep, dress and undress, each before his employer's door, as unconcernedly as in their own serais; that hotel of hard and hillocky beds, which all one's winter accumulation of razais cannot soften; that hotel whose partition walls stop two feet from the ceiling, where every room has an outer balcony and an inner dark bath-room whose primitive plumbing puts the American in fear for his life. By contrast with up-country hotels it was the home of comfort, and at last we understood how people could talk of the "luxury of Indian travel." All things are comparative, and one's ideas of splendor depend on what has gone before. Even the Madras and Calcutta hotels would have seemed splendid after a round of inns and banglas.
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