雙語+MP3|美國學(xué)生世界地理55 對面腳踩之地

     THERE is a shop downtown with a department in the basement, underneath the sidewalk. The sidewalk is made of thick glass, and as you look up you can see the feet of the crowds of people as they pass overhead. If the World were made of glass and you could look down through it in the same way, you could see the bottoms of the feet of the crowds passing by on the other side of the World. It is the "Opposite-feet" Land. That sounds awkward, so grown-ups call it "The Antipodes," which means exactly the same thing-"opposite-feet." The Opposite-feet Land on the other side of the World is a pie-shaped country called India. It is the half-way country-half-way round the World. You go away from home till you reach India, then, though you keep on going, you are coming back. I went west around the World and a friend of mine went east. We both started at the same time and met in India. When I landed at a place called Calcutta, there he was on the dock waiting to greet me. From Calcutta we used to get a kind of cloth which we called, from the name of the place, calico.


     When I say "Indians", you probably think of tommyhawks, colored feathers, and warpaint. But you are thinking of American Indians-the kind that were in our country before the white man came. There are only a few of these Indians left. They belong to the red race.
     There is another kind of Indian that belongs to the white race, the same as we do, and there are more than twice as many of them as there are people in our whole country. They get the name "Indians" from the name of the country where they live-India. India is the country that Columbus was trying to reach by going the other way around the World. When he bumped into America he thought he had reached India, so he called the people he found here Indians. He did not find out until later that America was not India at all, but a new and unknown land, and that the people were really not Indians at all, but Red Men.

     India is shut off from the rest of Asia on the north by the highest wall of mountains in the World; they are called the Himalayas, Him-al-ay-as. The highest mountain on the face of the globe is in this range; it is called Mount Everest, after an English engineer named Everest, who measured its height. No one has ever been to the top, yet we know exactly how high it is. An engineer can find out such things. He can tell exactly how high a tree, a church-steeple, or a mountain is without leaving the ground. This mountain is twenty-nine thousand and two feet high-more than five miles high. The top and sides of Mount Everest are covered with snow and ice which never melts away and will always be there until the crack of doom.


     Men have tried and tried again to climb to the top and many have lost their lives in attempting the climb, but no one has ever been able to get there. The top reaches so high up into the sky that there is very little air up there, and men have to take along canned air to breathe. If they attempt to climb without canned air, they are able to take but a single step and then must stop to breathe many times, like a dog panting for breath, and every few steps they must rest awhile before going on. Two Englishmen, after weeks of struggling up the sides of the giant mountain, got nearer than any other human being ever had before-within a few hundred feet of the top. A companion whom they left at their last stop watched them as they plunged upward in their last desperate struggle, and then-whish!-an icy blast of snow and sleet swept them from sight-forever. The native people think a goddess lives at the top and that she will let no one climb to her, and that it brings bad luck and even death to try to reach such a holy place.

     At the other end of the Himalaya Mountains is a high valley which is so beautiful that poets call it a vale instead of a valley. It is the Vale of Kashmir. "Who has not heard of the Vale of Kashmir," says one poet, "with its roses, the brightest the earth ever gave?" Beautiful lakes with snow-topped mountains, and roses, roses everywhere. It seems as if this should have been the Garden of Eden instead of that sun-baked mud bank between the Tigris and Euphrates.

     If you will look at your map of Asia carefully you will see something strange about two of the countries that touch India. The country next to India on the west and the country next to India on the east have the same name, Pakistan. How can two separate countries have the same name? The answer is that Pakistan is one country in two parts. Until after World War II these two parts called Pakistan were both a part of India and all India belonged to England. The people of India, like people almost everywhere, wanted to rule themselves. So finally the English said they would give up India and turn the country completely over to the Indians. This pleased the people of India but there was one trouble with the plan. Most of the people of India believed in a religion called the Hindu religion but a great many others were Mohammedans. These two religions didn't mix very well. The Hindus wanted India to remain one big country when it became independent. The Mohammedans didn't want one big country for they knew then the Hindus would do most of the ruling as there were more Hindus in India than Mohammedans. The Mohammedans wanted the country split into separate Mohammedan and Hindu countries. Then the Mohammedans could have a country of their own and not have to be part of a Hindu country. They almost went to war about it but finally both sides agreed to make two countries out of India, a Mohammedan country to be called Pakistan and a Hindu country to keep the name of India.

     Now the Mohammedans lived mostly on the western and on the eastern sides of India and the Hindus lived mostly in the middle. So Pakistan became a new country with two separate parts, an eastern part and a western part with the new country of India in between. For Pakistan it must be something like living in a house with the kitchen on one side of the street and the living room on the other side. But it seems to work.
     Both India and Pakistan are members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.