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Updated: June 23, 2025
"How I pity the poor men who are obliged to work at the punkahs." "They are accustomed to the heat, and it is their business," observed Mrs Vallery; "they would not have thanked us had we dismissed them, and told them that for their sakes we were ready to bear the hot stifling atmosphere, or to refrain from going out in our palanquins." "What are palanquins, mamma?" asked Fanny.
It feels all right in the sun out of doors, but indoors after dark and in draughts from punkahs it is horrid. I'd now give a considerable sum for one whole day of twenty-four hours clear Arctic or Antarctic sunny air and snow; one would feel dry then, and lose the cold and fever that sticks to one here.
The variety is only in the intensity of the heat, the mercury being tolerably steady between 80 degrees and 84 degrees, the extreme range of temperature being from 71 degrees to 92 degrees. People sleep on Malay mats spread over their mattresses for coolness, some dispense with upper sheets, and others are fanned all night by punkahs.
How significant it is that among the emblems of royalty in the East the three chiefest are an umbrella-bearer, two men who stand behind and swing great punkahs modelled on the elephant's ear, and two others carrying yak's tails wherewith to scare the flies from the royal person! The elephant is a rajah! There is another mysterious ear which is a stumbling-block to the simple theory-monger.
His name was not Middleton, of course, so I am not really 'giving him away, as he called it, even now. As for his companion, though he is still alive, I have called him Juggins, and, since the family is a large one, he will not, perhaps, be identified. The days are hot and damp, and my legs are stiff with cramp, And the office punkahs creak!
We entered a bare, brick-floored dining-room, and partook of tropical fruits quite new to us papayes, mangoes, custard apples, pawpaws, and the small red eating bananas too delicate for export. Overhead the punkahs swung back and forth in lazy hypnotic rhythm.
There is some stained glass in the apse, but in the other windows, including those in the clerestory, Venetian shutters take the place of glass, as in all the European houses. There are thirty-two punkahs, and the Indians who worked them, anyone of whom might have been the model of the Mercury of the Naples Museum, sat or squatted outside the church.
"Mamma, what are punkahs and tatties?" inquired Fanny, "I did not like to interrupt you when you spoke of them." "The punkah is something like an enormous fan suspended to the roof, and when a breeze is required, it is drawn backwards and forwards with ropes by the bearers.
Both here, and on the Red Sea, into which they entered on the third morning, the staterooms and cabins, in spite of waving punkahs, were almost intolerable, and nobody could get up life enough to do more than lounge feebly on the upper decks in their lightest clothing, reading the lightest literature.
By way of rendering the air at all endurable, the plan of agitating it with punkahs, hung to the roofs of apartments, the punkahs being moved by servants in attendance for the purpose, is adopted. Another plan of communicating a sensation of coolness, is to hang wet mats in the open windows. But by neither of these expedients is the end in view satisfactorily gained.
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