February 4, 1896: In the afternoon the Clemens party started for Benares, some 90 miles from Allahabad.

Allahabad means "City of God." I get this from the books. From a printed curiosity—a letter written by one of those brave and confident Hindoo strugglers with the English tongue, called a "babu"—I got a more compressed translation: "Godville." It is perfectly correct, but that is the most that can be said for it.

We arrived in the forenoon, and short-handed; for Satan got left behind somewhere that morning, and did not overtake us until after nightfall. It seemed very peaceful without him. The world seemed asleep and dreaming.

We left Bombay for Allahabad by a night train. It is the custom of the country to avoid day travel when it can conveniently be done. But there is one trouble: while you can seemingly "secure" the two lower berths by making early application, there is no ticket as witness of it, and no other producible evidence in case your proprietorship shall chance to be challenged. The word "engaged" appears on the window, but it doesn't state who the compartment is engaged, for.

Breakfast was a satisfaction. Across the lawns was visible in the distance through the open window an Indian well, with two oxen tramping leisurely up and down long inclines, drawing water; and out of the stillness came the suffering screech of the machinery—not quite musical, and yet soothingly melancholy and dreamy and reposeful—a wail of lost spirits, one might imagine. And commemorative and reminiscent, perhaps; for of course the Thugs used to throw people down that well when they were done with them.

Mark Twain and Smythe left Poona twenty-four hours after they arrived, presumably with slim regrets to go with the slim pickings, to rejoin Livy and Clara back in Bombay’s VT for the change of trains up to Baroda, in this case the overnight Dehradun Express. Livy and Clara would have taken one compartment, Twain and Smythe another. Then and now it arrives at crack of dawn.

Watercolor painting of Pune in the late Peshwa era at the confluence of the Mula and Mutha Rivers by British artist Henry Salt
By Henry Salt (1780-1827) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Pune Skyline 2018.jpg
By Akshit 77 [CC BY-SA 4.0 from Wikimedia Commons

January 30. What a spectacle the railway station was, at train-time! It was a very large station, yet when we arrived it seemed as if the whole world was present—half of it inside, the other half outside, and both halves, bearing mountainous head-loads of bedding and other freight, trying simultaneously to pass each other, in opposing floods, in one narrow door.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1895_Times_of_India_Map_of_Bomb…

During his talking tour of the world in 1895-1896, Mark Twain twice visited Ceylon. He had crossed the Pacific in the Warrimoo just before it was laid up for repairs, had floated across the Tasman Sea. to New Zealand in the Mararoa, and had then, been tossed from island port to port in the execrably kept Flora, the Mahinapua, and the 183-ton, 40-horsepower Rotomahana. His reward was at last to relax for thirteen halcyon days on the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company’s “luxuriously appointed” Oceana, sailing from Adelaide, South Australia, to Colombo, Ceylon.

December 13-17, 1895