Even though the railway was only being constructed, as already stated, and only the base layer had been rather sloppily, nevertheless a train was put on provisional rails that took us and our baggage at a slow speed from Sohela up to the border river of Sarda where the railway bridge was being completed. Here our baggage was carried by coolies across a pontoon bridge nearby while we reached the opposite shore in a boat guided by a railway engineer. This proved to be a difficult task as the gentleman knew very little about naval matters and sent the boat twice into sand banks in the middle of the river so that we were stuck amidst the waves until wading coolies managed to liberate us out of this unedifying situation.

At the other shore a special train was waiting that took us, after everything had been loaded, on the line of the Rohilkund Kumaon Railway to Lucknow. A heavy storm raged in the sky with thunder and lightning and the first drops of rain started to fall when the train departed, First the railway crossed beautiful jungles, similar to those we had found in Nepal, with teak and shala woods. Then the landscape changed to the monotonous character of the Indian plain. We passed the time with sleeping and reading until we arrived towards 7 o’clock in the evening at Lucknow. As we had to change wagons and the transfer of the baggage made an immediate departure impossible, we used the pause to a stroll in the mild night in which the moon was shining brightly.

At  11 o’clock we entered the train that took us without interruption first on the line of the Oudh and Rohilkund Railway via Jaunpur and Benares to Moghal Sarai and from there on the line of the East Indian Railway to Calcutta.

Links

• Location: Lucknow, India
• ANNO – on 27.03.1893 in Austria’s newspapers.
• The k.u.k. Hof-Burgtheater is closed until 2nd April, while the k.u.k. Hof-Operntheater is performing the comic opera „Freund Fritz“.