The Mine

1895-1897, India

She was five years old, and she wanted her mother. Light-skinned and pretty, with a mop of black curly hair, she was a high-caste child living in the temple women's house next door to the powerful bastion whose heavy carved door was the gate to hell for hundreds of little ones inside. She had enormous, perfectly round eyes like a deep-water pearl, and so she was called Pearleyes.

The temple was in a village called Perungulam, dedicated to the worship of the god Perumal. Shut away behind closed doors, Pearleyes was given picture books to look at, scenes of the vileness and depravity, and when she pushed them away the temple woman beat her soft shoulders with a stick.

But she was only five years old, and she wanted to go home to Tuticorin, twenty miles away. Watching her chance, she ran out into the street one day when the door was accidentally left open by a careless servant, but the temple woman was swiftly beside her. "Aiyo! Ungrateful one! Should a servant of the gods run about in the streets?"

And because it was not the first time she had disobeyed, she was dragged into the courtyard, where the woman heated an iron rod in the flame and branded her on the back of both hands.

Pearleyes lay on her mat that night, and even though another temple woman rubbed some oil on the burns, she cried. But her cry was only one in many thousands, for this was India.

India, turning the corner into the twentieth century, was little different from India through almost five thousand years of history. On the surface were colorful layers of tapestry but underneath—the mud floor and muck and dark corners and crawling things. To a new arrival, India was hot, dry air that parched the throat, filling the mouth with dust that could neither be swallowed nor coughed up.

India was a mosaic of scenes. Early morning with the sun's rays splayed out, scintillating over the marketplace, where streets teemed with noisome life, stinking of garbage, ginger, goat urine, the vendors' smoky food, incense, sweat, hot curry. A bewitchment of color. Lavish, inflammatory rug colors were set against a background of dullest squalor. Shopkeepers spilled out wares into the streets: Watery sweets speckled with flies. Ivory carvings. Leather goods and brassware. Large, practical jugs in red and blue and earth colors, mounded to stack one atop the other. Turbans purpural. Rainbowed saris hung on racks, pretty as pink tinsel. Filigreed jewelry, glass bangles, and loops of silver; golden ornaments poured out without measure on a merchant's table. Amber, the size of knuckles, strung on thong. Carnelian. Jade drops, like liquid grass.

A snake charmer with a turban as huge as last week's laundry, offering to charm poisonous snakes out of old walls, sat cross-legged before a cobra, its hood spread, the creature rising and swaying from side to side, eyes following the piping flute of its owner.

Tired, bony cows jostled against people in the streets, their eyes stupid and full of hopeless resignation. A fungus-spread of wasted beggar bodies—bodies—bodies—skeletal bodies as far as eye could see. A vast, open-air morgue.

Beyond the marketplace sprawled the factories making cotton goods, built by the British East India Company, who also traded in indigo and spices. Hundreds of thousands of Indians lived on the company land.

In the countryside and villages, the leitmotiv of early morning in India was the pungent smell of burning fuel cakes and blue smoke. And the women squatting with spread-apart knees, patting the cow dung into wagon-wheel-sized slabs, storing them in batooras, eye-high rooms of baked clay.

In the south were palm trees and propagated rice cultivation—slips of plants pegged down for firm growth. Short, dark little people with curly hair, descendants of ancient Dravidians, threshed grain with bullocks or plowed with a wood stick near fields of sugar cane, flocks of goats, hawks overhead.

Millions of Untouchables—the outcastes—who "were all horrible sinners in eons past, deserving now neither help nor sympathy while they work out their curse," any Indian would explain.

India's temples, carved from solid rock, served as sermons in stone for 92 percent of the population who were illiterate, keeping alive the deeds (and misdeeds) of the holy ones—thirty million or so—as centuries flowed over them. Outwardly imposing and stolid with an ugly barbaric beauty, some of them, like the tower of a temple in Madras, depicted eight hundred life-like figures, astonishing the beholder with its workmanship.

A Brahmin pathologist, educated in European universities, gave his opinion of the temples: "As evil as the ooze of the riverbanks. I myself went within them to the point where one is obliged to take off one's shoes, because of sanctity. Beyond lay the shrines, rising out of the mud, decaying food, and human filth. I would not walk in it. I said, No! But hundreds of thousands do take off their shoes, walk in it, worship, walk out, and put their shoes upon their unwashed feet. And I, a Hindu and a doctor, must bear witness to that!"

There was civilization and Hinduism in India over four thousand years ago. The Vedic writings of religious ceremonies and sacrifices are as old as the book of Genesis. At the turn of the century, India still had no common language. Languages and dialects numbered more than 850.

India has always been a country of villages, 500,000 of them. Over 250 million people, at the time, lived in villages or cities. Seventy percent of the people were farmers.

Madras was a large, very old seaport on the east coast of India in the Bay of Bengal, founded in 1639 by the East India Company. In November 1895, a discouraged, confused, and ill young Irish woman, Amy Carmichael, arrived just in time for the coolness of the rainy season, when water poured as if from sluices from a gray, low-bellied sky. Steamers and brigs, fishing boats and dhows clogged the harbor.

She was twenty-eight years old. Behind her lay a definite call to the mission field—but also a year's term of service in Japan, a breakdown, a holiday in China, a worsening of her condition, a trial at Ceylon, then by Christmas 1894 all the way back to England right where she had started from.

The Christian Literature Society was in Madras, and Amy stayed there three weeks getting rested up with a missionary family. She then traveled to Bangalore, where a nurse friend had written that the climate and surroundings were "delightfull!" On the way she...