• DOI:10.1017/S0026749X00015845
• Corpus ID: 144932927

The Nineteenth-Century Indo-American Ice Trade: An Hyperborean Epic

@article{Dickason1991TheNI,
  title={The Nineteenth-Century Indo-American Ice Trade: An Hyperborean Epic},
  author={David G. Dickason},
  journal={Modern Asian Studies},
  year={1991},
  volume={25},
  pages={53 - 89}
}

• D. Dickason
• Published 1 February 1991
• Art
• Modern Asian Studies

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta [sic], since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin [sic], priest of Brahma and Vishnu, and Indra, who sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The purc Walden water is mingled with the sacred waters of the Ganges. With favouring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the Periplus of Hanno, and floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.