Next day on the other side of Delhi, between the Flagstaff Tower and the Mutiny Monument, on the rough ground of the Ridge, I was looking at another curious pillar, one of the stone "Lats of Asoka," which is said to date from some centuries before Christ. An inscription at the base of the column states:—
"This pillar was originally erected at Meerut in the third century, B.C., by King Asoka. It was removed thence and set up in the Koshuk Shikar Palace near this by the Emperor Firuzshah, A.D. 1356, thrown down and broken into five pieces by the explosion of a powder magazine, A.D. 1713-1719. It was restored and set up in this place by the British Government, A.D. 1867."
There was a tearing horrible wind and clouds of dust blowing along the Ridge. The Mutiny memorial is not beautiful.
Tucked away among narrow streets of the old city, where blood-red hand-prints marked the white walls (I think in some connection with the imminent "Holi" festival of the Hindoos), I found the most strange as well as one of the oldest of Delhi's Mohammedan buildings, the Black Mosque, the numerous small domes of which I had seen from the minaret of the Jama Masjid. It belongs to that sloping style of architecture which seems kindred to Egyptian work, and gives an appearance of massive strength. A wide flight of twenty-eight steep stone steps leads up between two tall cones of masonry, which flank the entrance and rise above its battlements.
I had the great pleasure at Delhi of being welcomed by an old friend in the I.C.S., to whom I owe many an interesting screed from India since our schooldays—letters written in the scant leisure possible to an Indian judge. I found Alfred Martineau but little changed—full of the same contented humour he has always possessed. Such cordial hospitality as he and his charming and gifted wife extended to me during my visit came with that welcome contrast to accommodation at hotels and dak bungalows that only travellers can understand, and from the hour when I found him waiting at the railway station on the arrival of my belated train to that of my departure from the Moghul capital, these good friends seemed to think no effort too great to further my pleasure and convenience.
When I look now at the hollyhocks in my own garden I remember always those other English hollyhocks grown with such eager care about a home in Delhi.
A grey squirrel dropped from the roof on to the table, scrambled over the papers beside the magistrate's hand, and scampered away into the adjoining room.
I was sitting in the Deputy-Magistrate's Court at Dehra Dun, waiting beside the D.-M., while he discussed a matter of land compensation with a stout gentleman in gold-rimmed spectacles, and I learned that "Government" pays compensation of fifteen per cent. plus the market-value, of land taken for engineering works. Our chairs were upon a raised part of the floor, divided from the other two-thirds of the room by a wooden railing, behind which a number of people waited audience, and among them I noticed the round face of a little Goorkha Subadar, with the silver badge of crossed knives on his forage cap. Dehra Dun is the headquarters of the Goorkhas, and, thanks to the kindness of Colonel Crommelin, I was able to see the smart bayonet practice and physical drill of the Second Battalion of the 9th Goorkha Rifles.
Among the military forces, however, a mountain battery interested me most. Dehra Dun is not, of course, a hill station, but there is plenty of hilly ground close to it, and this No. 32 Battery was put through its paces for my benefit on a steep piece of rocky ground, the mules kicking and bucking like creatures possessed.
The guns, painted a pale coffee colour, are worked by Punjabis, and one of these posed for me to paint him in the blazing sun with extraordinary patience. I was told that these troops very rarely suffer from sunstroke, but that when some of them went to China a regular epidemic of heat apoplexy was experienced, due probably in large part to the power of suggestion aroused by two or three cases of such an unusual trouble.
In his khaki turban the Punjabi wears a roll or crest of scarlet cloth which glows far more brightly in the sun than can be represented on canvas. Beside this burning red the most brilliant tint I could command was as far from the true pitch as the dry watercourse in the valley was different from its flooded aspect after rain.
It is not only the Punjabi turban that cries gaiety aloud at Dehra Dun. I saw the dak tree here which bears large scarlet blossoms, and when in flower finely justifies its popular name of "Flame of the Forest." There are many kinds of trees to make the Dun beautiful, and when I started early one February morning for Mussoorie I drove in a tumtum at first through tall bamboos, eucalyptus, fir trees, mangoes, sal, peepul, plum, cherry and a host of others. Before me the great foothills of the Himalayas blushed warm and rosy, and along the crest of the higher ridges above, the white houses of Mussoorie showed in streaks and lines and patches as if a little snow had remained unmelted after a recent fall. I passed the tents of the X-Ray Institute of India and drove steadily on to Rajpur, gradually acquiring a considerable escort of boys from that village mounted on ponies, which they urged me to engage for the ascent to Mussoorie.
Rajpur consists of one long straggling street of small shops, and here I left the tumtum and hired two coolies, to carry my baggage, and a horse for myself. On this road I passed again and again living embodiments of toil—men carrying baulks of timber on their backs. They looked almost dramatically terrible, not like Leighton's exultant Samson bearing the doors of the city gate in triumph to the hilltop, but weary in mute submission to the burden of mortality.
In this matter of bearing burdens of physical material weight the part is played with more universal similarity even than that of going without food. Jean François Millet was reproached with painting his men carrying a calf on a litter as if they were carrying the Host, but the truth is—as he explained in one of his letters—the expression of men carrying depends upon the weight, and whether they had the Ark of the Covenant or a calf, a lump of gold or a stone, the same expression would be the result; the weight of timber was just near enough to breaking strain for these men's bodily tension to produce an air of slow solemn travail impressive as a religious penance and appealing as an heroic endurance.
Landour is higher than Mussoorie, and as I wanted to see the mountains at early morning, it seemed better, if possible, to sleep at Landour. An American missionary on a pony was buying dried peas at a shop in the bazaar, and after explaining to me that he was a vegetarian, as if that were an original idea and a condition of personal merit deserving of awe, he advised me to try for shelter at a certain Mrs Sharp's who had, as he rightly supposed, a suite of rooms to let.
This good woman, a nurse by profession, had living with her three grandchildren, a girl of twelve and two boys rather younger, neither of whose parents (of pure English blood) India born, had ever been out of the country. These children were the first examples I had met of a second generation of English born in India, and a very healthy and merry trio they were. The father had been an engine-driver, and the mother, since his death, had had to get work at a distant town. These bonny, apple-faced youngsters certainly showed the possibility of healthy rearing of English children in India, but they had spent their little lives as yet entirely in the healthy mountain air of Landour, and far from enervating influences.
Mrs Sharp was a genial old lady of optimistic temperament, whose chief anxiety seemed to be to keep on good terms with her native cook and to make other people happy. A young railway guard was staying with her for a short holiday, and in the evening I was asked to look in on a homely party in their living-room, where a young English girl from a Mussoorie milliner's store played a piano and sang songs called—"We're all the world to each other, Daddy."—"For I've got you and you've got me," and "I'll love you, dear, for ever." The last-named brought easy tears to the eyes of Mrs Sharp, who declared with heaving unction "that's my favourite song." The more treacly the sentiment the more they all enjoyed the words, and the whole scene with the badinage and byplay of the English lower class was a curious contrast to the Indian life I had been seeing.
Happy and innocent people they were, with all their affectations on the surface, through which sterling qualities peeped unobtrusively—people (whose æsthetic sense was far less than that of a bower-bird) lacking all delicacy of either eye or ear, lacking any faintest spiritual conception beyond a heaven of solid twangable golden harps and paper decorations called Jacob's Ladders, open and honest as the day—feeding all the stray cats of Landour as well as the five they delight to own—in a word so essentially British that in a distant land one of the same nation is moved first to smile at meeting them and then to run his fleetest!
It was an easy stroll in the morning to the top of Landour where my feet crunched dry hard snow, and it was cold—very cold work to sit painting. I spent most of the day up there. Looking back over the plains all was haze in the afternoon and mist in the morning, and in the opposite direction clouds covered the snow-peaks of the Himalayas. The best view I had of the plains, however, was on the next day from Mussoorie, lower down—Mussoorie, that growing collection of bungalows and hotels soon to be filled for the season by the annual rush from below for health and cooler air.
Just beneath me I could see St Fidelis, the Soldiers' Orphanage, the St George's College, boarding-school for European boys, and beyond in the distance the dry zigzag bed of a tributary of the Ganges. Dehra Dun sat in the valley, and far away to the right, very faint indeed, rose the Siwaliks, the hills where once roamed monstrous elephants.
I walked down to Rajpur and being directed upon a wrong path was involved in a tramp of fourteen miles instead of the six taken by the old road from Mussoorie. There was little to vary the monotony of the road—a flock of white sheep—an English lady and her children being carried up in "dandies"—a tree fallen across the path. All through the hottest hours of the day I kept steadily on, and Tambusami, if he was not actually done up, pretended to be so, and when I insisted on watching a native tightrope dancer at Rajpur instead of getting into our tumtum, he was as near active revolt as his
About the time when many obscure fishing-folk in the British Isles were reaping rich harvest from Spanish galleons dismantled by storm and tempest, and the chief literary glory of England was paying scores at the Mermaid Tavern for men whose humour his genius turned to undying springs as it splashed on him from their cups, a woman in India who carried her husband in a basket, he being maimed and without hands or feet, placed him within the shadow of a tree while she sought alms from a neighbouring village. Now the man was no sluggard and had his eyes about him, and a lame crow, by reason of his own calamity, drew his attention. He watched the bird fly to an adjacent pool of water. To his amazement the crow no sooner dipped its legs than they became cured, so that it could walk, and its plumage turned at the same time to a milky whiteness. Rolling out of his basket the poor cripple himself reached the pool, and on his wife's return showed her a restored and perfect husband, with normal extremities, sitting upon the basket. At first it is said the woman declined to believe his identity, but Mr Buta Singh, the Amritsar bookseller, who tells the story in his History of the Golden Temple, asserts that "she was subsequently satisfied when the Guru attested the power of the Amrit" (which is the water of immortality).
I think there were possibilities of pathetic developments, and that although the addition of one hand or foot at a time might have been tolerable, it would have been altogether too much for any wife, while she had turned her back for the morning's shopping, to find the helpless subject of her chanty able to walk over her, and her domination destroyed for ever. Be that as it may the story serves for the origin of the sacred tank of Amritsar and its far-famed Golden Temple. The Guru digging upon the site of the miracle is said to have come deep in the delved earth upon a mysterious chamber, housing an old ascetic seated in devotional posture, with grey hair grown long. There are still older legends of the holiness of the spot, for it is told that Buddha, passing through the country, stopped in the jungle by this same pool of water and said—"This spot is best for the Bhikshus to obtain salvation and far superior in that respect to other places in the East, but it must have time for its celebrity."
And when the time came the temple arose and all Amritsar. The great shrine itself stands in the middle of a large square tank, and its precincts include the whole of the wide pavements that surround the water. On these pavements one must go barefoot or wearing velvet footgear, supplied at a small boothlike office at the entrance to the square enclosure. This is attached to a police station, which boasts a speciality in the way of Indian clubs. A row of these, gigantic in size and of considerable weight, stands outside the door, and a Punjabi is ready (for a consideration) to display his splendid muscles like the "strong man" generally to be seen along the quays of Paris near the Institut de France.
A marble causeway bridges the water to the Hari Mandar (God's Temple), starting from a large gateway on the margin of the tank. By the side of this, when I first saw it, a Hindoo was sticking wet rose-leaves and marigold petals on to a wall-painting of a four-armed and four-headed Brahma. Entering the gateway I passed through two doors plated outside with silver and within inlaid with ivory upon the polished wood. A man stood at this portal holding a long heavy silver wand and looking, but for his turban, rather like a verger in some English cathedral. Many people were walking to and fro upon the causeway, but I pushed ahead to the open doors of the temple where the Granth Sahib, the sacred book of the Sikhs, lies covered with a cloth of gold and canary-coloured silk, under a great violet-lined canopy, from the centre of which hangs a golden tassel.
Immediately behind the Granth sat a high priest taking his four-hour turn of duty. A large bundle of peacock feathers lay to hand for dusting; but pigeons, catholic as to the place of their droppings, flew constantly in and out.
"And this is the watch given by Lord Curzon," said a self-appointed guide in my ear, pointing to a large clock set incongruously in the gilded copper wall over one of the four doorways.
A white drugget, held down by carved marble corner-weights, was spread over the centre of the marble pavement. On this, in front of the Granth Sahib, were three silver vessels for offerings of money, and about them lay a heap of loose cowries and pice, while some of the rosy-eyed pigeons pecked away at rice which had been scattered over the drugget. On making offering to the temple one is presented with a sugar cup—a half sphere of coarse white crystal sugar (the size of half an orange), of which I do not know the significance. Men called "Marrasis" on one side were playing stringed instruments and singing words of the Granth.
Up to a height of about six feet the walls were of white marble lined with black, and at the corners inlaid with mother-of-pearl and cornelians; there was a little flower pattern, but above this height the whole interior with its gallery was gilded, and the gold surface intricately patterned over in red and blue.
Outside, across the long causeway with its marble balustrade and rows of lamps, the entrance gate faces an open stone-flagged square surrounded by buildings, the chief of which is the gilt-domed Akal Bunga where, I was informed, "Sikhs are made." This institution is partly subsidized by Government and partly depends for income upon the offerings made by those who come to be initiated. It is a kind of house of investiture and ordination, and contains various historic treasures—"irons" of old time including weapons which belonged to some of the Gurus. Every orthodox Sikh must wear five things, and these are—first, the Kunga, a comb of wood or ivory; second, the Kara, a circlet of iron; third, the Kash or loincloth; fourthly, Kesh (pronounced Kaish) which means long hair, and lastly, a Kard or knife, a miniature specimen of which was given to me when I was garlanded in the Akal Bunga.
Extremely beautiful was the constant procession along the causeway of the temple votaries in bright dresses, and the dazzling brilliance of the golden building itself reflected in the surface of the water, one moment as still as a mirror and the next all quivering in a thousand ripples.
I walked round the border of the tank past various other "Bungas," built by princes and rajahs for their use when visiting Amritsar, till I reached the side farthest from the causeway; here, entering a garden, I passed an enclosed well and came to the tall tower called Baba Attal and climbed its seven storeys.
When I had reached Amritsar the evening before the whole place was under a pall. Dense clouds of white dust, choking and almost intolerable, swept along on the wings of a strong wind, hiding the side of the road like a thick fog and even driving along the passage-ways and corridors of the hotel and entering at every door and window; so it was with anxiety that I looked out next morning and with much relief beheld bright sunshine through a clearer air. Though, however, the wind-storm had abated, as I stood on the top of the tower, a pall of dust still hung over the city spoiling what should have been a wide and distant view.
The tower was built to commemorate a son of the sixth Guru who recalled to life a playmate who had died. The Guru is said to have been very wroth with his son for this act, whereupon Baba Attal lay down and died saying he gave his own life to his friend. The inside walls of several of the storeys are covered with painted frescoes, and on one floor true fresco painting upon wet plaster was actually going on. Small boys were grinding the colours, and an artist of skill and invention was covering the surface with scenes of crowded life illustrating sacred stories. His naïveté made me think a little of Benozzo Gozzoli, especially in his frescoes at San Gimignano, but this work was on a very much smaller scale and, for an Oriental artist, strangely lacking in design.
I returned late in the afternoon to the flagged square facing the entrance gate through which the marble causeway leads across the water. I said the pavement was stone—it is all of marble. About it sat many flower-sellers, men in white, red and black robes with baskets heaped with orange-coloured marigolds, blue cornflowers, pink roses and scarlet poppies. The silver doors stand open, and through the white marble gateway a constant stream of people come and go along the causeway with its rows of golden lamps on short marble standards leading to the Golden Shrine itself in the middle of the water.
Close by, from octagonal marble bases rise two tall masts of gold, at least sixty feet high and ending in spear-heads; a yellow flag hangs from each, one pale canary colour and one dark like the marigold flowers. Ropes keep these masts firm, ropes with grand curves that sweep from the iron collars, necking the masts high up, to iron rings fixed in the surrounding buildings.
Under a little shrine in the wall sits a blind man. The water of the sacred tank may bring him inner vision, but to-day has no such virtue as to cure aggravated cataract. A stranger stops a moment at the shrine, and when he is gone the blind man rises and gropes with his hands to feel if any pice had been put down on the small marble ledge that projects before the painting of a Guru.
The sun has now just set and a light that seems to cast no shadows spreads and grows, suffusing all the scene in soft effulgence. Most of the women are dressed in long trousers, close fitting from the ankles to the knees and then bagging out loosely. They all have long veils which they wear like a hood; some are white but others scarlet, crimson, or orange, and some of green silk tissue strewn with silver stars and bordered with a ribbon of bright gold. It is the hour when even humble clothes take on luxurious tints, and richer stuffs show all their utmost beauty in enhanced perfection. One passes near wearing trousers of pale blue with silver pattern, a silk coat of deep rose-pink, and over all a veil of pale canary-coloured tissue painted with roses and bordered deeply with gold. I thought "Was Solomon in all his glory..." but just then some children playing with a ball butted against me in sudden collision, and at the same time I encountered a Sikh gentleman who claimed direct descent from the second Guru, spoke English softly, and in leisured talk deplored to me the vanity of women.
In front of the building called the Akal Bunga, which faces the entrance to the causeway, a great drugget stretched from the upper branches of a tree heavy with leafage to staples set in the wall. The leaves shook and the drugget swayed a little. Old priests with long white beards sat at large window openings chanting—thousands of windows were in sight, but never one pane of glass though sometimes wooden doors or gaily-painted shutters. A woman passed arrayed like some princess of mediæval France, wearing a golden head-dress shaped like a sugarloaf and tapering slenderly to a point whence yards of pale blue tissue floated in the air behind her. In the same clear air a child's kite high above caught glints of light. Oh! golden, golden hour, how often on a wistful thread my thought like that child's kite will float away, borne by easy airs of memory, into that distant scene and dream it all again!
A wide, sandy plain with trees and a little scrub. Here and there camels were feeding on this poor herbage or, where they could reach them, upon the leaves of trees.
I was on my way from Amritsar in the Bombay mail-train, and after passing Wazirabad and Lalamusa the country changed from flat plain to irregular humps and hillocks of mud, as far as eye could see. Mud everywhere—grey, desolate, monotonous mud. I passed mud towns. Here and there accumulated stores of great mud-coloured logs lay near the line river-floated from the hill forests of Kashmir. Then slabs and ridges of grey rock thrust out of the mud. I could see away over a plain of pathless distances to where a range of mountains slowly grew. Then, as in a world of crumbling fossil cities, all the grey desiccated land was dust. Presently, wild yellow grasses appeared near the dry beds of former pools and quivered a little in the faint evening breeze.
I reached Peshawar a little before dawn and got out at the cantonment and not at the city station. A powerful electric light illuminated the wide platform. It gleamed on the white sides of the carriages and caught with light the creepers on long strips of wooden trellis between the upright posts of the long station veranda. A man huddling a blanket round him was leaning back against the bookstall, and as he turned his head, his beard shone fiery red. In a drizzling rain (thrice blessed for previous shortage) mail-bags were being pitched from the train into a trolley-box. In the stationmaster's room a group of great-coated men with rifles crowded round a fire. The city station had been raided only one week before, and although the cantonment was safer "than houses" there was an invigorating air of excitement.
I drove to the Alexandra Hotel and slept for a few hours in a tent in the compound, as the rooms were all occupied by the wives of officers returning from a military expedition.
All that day Peshawar seemed a veritable slough, but the night was clear and starry and the following morning sunshine reigned. Snow glittered on the distant mountains, white cherry-blossom gleamed in orchard and garden. English children, some on ponies and some in "prams," were out with their ayahs, and the wide tree-bordered and well-kept roads through the cantonment looked not unlike English parkland in spring.
I entered the city by the Kissa Kahani—the Peshawar Lombard Street—through the pointed arch of the Edwardes Gate, the Kabuli Dariwaza. This led me to the Kotwali, with its own wide gateway leading off at right angles into the silk market and the older parts of the city. Immediately on the other side of this white-washed police station is a wide and busy space. The Kotwali faces an octagonal rest-place, called the Hastings Memorial, with seats on a platform some ten feet above the road at the other end, and between the two was a dazzling scene.
Red and white and yellow, hung out to dry in the sun after being dyed, were a myriad skeins of silk (brought hither from Bokhara and from China), on long lines up and down one side of the oval space. Opposite to these, bordering as it were the central way, were stalls of bankers and money-changers—four of them side by side and each with their large pile of rupees and other coins (which is really a mud-cone covered outside to look like a solid heap of silver). Then at the back, behind the silk on the one side and the money stalls on the other, were the lines of bazaar shops.
I turned right from the Hastings Memorial and presently reached a building called the Gor Khatri which stands on a piece of rising ground, and here I found Mr Agha Khan—not the celebrated head of the Aligar College, but a junior Tehsildar who had been deputed to show me Peshawar.
We went first up to the roof of the building from which there is a fine view over both country and city. Mr Agha Khan was a short Mohammedan with a black beard, many clothes, and a large stick. He pointed out to me a small Hindoo temple about forty yards away called the Gorak Nat, the name of a Hindoo saint who lived there many years ago and gave the name Gor Khatri. This building was originally a guest-house built by Nour Jehan, Jehangir's queen, and is sometimes called still the Sarai of Nour Jehan Begum. Its greatest title to fame, however, lies in its having been occupied for many years and largely added to by the Italian General Paolo Crescenzo Martino Avitabile, one of the most romantic characters in history and, under Runjeet Singh, Governor of Peshawar, which he was the first man to keep really in order.
Walking on the flat roof with Agha Khan I looked over all the city. In the distance to the right rose Mount Tartara from the line of hills that surround Peshawar on three sides like a horseshoe. Cutting through the flat-roofed town, and coming straight to our feet, was the long sharp shadow of the Bara Bazaar. To the left I could see the red-brick Mission Hospital; the large cupola of the mosque of Dilawar Khan, a Kardar in the time of Chaghatta; and still farther to the left, a tower called the Burj of Said Khan; while far away beyond Peshawar, a dip in the nearer hills, marked the position of Jamroud guarding the entrance to the Khyber Pass. Behind us, across the compound of space belonging to the Gor Khatri, was another of its buildings used at times of Mohammedan festival and as quarters for any representative of the Amir of Afghanistan coming to Peshawar.
The Gor Khatri itself is now used for municipal offices. The unglazed window spaces are fitted with dull red wooden shutters; shoes were lying about everywhere in the large rooms, and the brick floors, covered with rush matting, were littered with books of paper made in the Peshawar gaol—that revered building which gives compulsory shelter to so many saintly characters. Amid a heap of documents officials squatted with reed pens, each under his own particular cupboard let into the thickness of the wall.
Here upon dhurries spread over the rough matting sat the "Siahnavis" who keeps the general revenue accounts of the Tahsil. Opposite to him, also on the floor, sat the cashier, the "Devidial" (salary 15 rupees per month). Then at 20 rupees per month, in the midst of a huge litter on a red and blue striped dhurry, sat the Wasil Baganavis, keeping the accounts from the separate villages of the Tahsil. Opposite to him again was the "Ghulam Mahdi" (15 rupees per month). He keeps accounts of income tax and wears silver studs. "Every man who makes a profit of 1000 rupees or more in a year," said Agha Khan, "has to pay income tax."
In the next room, Mr Faujuin, a Pathan, fair, and speaking some English, keeps for 20 rupees per month the Urdu records of cases, criminal, civil revenue, and judicial revenue. He is called the judicial "Muharrir." Then I came to the "Kanungo," the highest of these minor officials who keeps (for 40 rupees per month) records concerning crops and agricultural matters. In this Tahsil, the Kanungo informed me, among the chief things grown are rice, maize, cherry-maize, bajra, sugar-cane, cotton, chilis, cabbages, carrots, turnips, wheat, barley, grain and sesamum—also a little tobacco and, among fruits, grapes, pomegranates, melons and water-melons. There are eighty-two patwaris, lesser officers for the villages in this Tahsil and four field Kanungos who bring in the village reports. Finally, I was introduced to the Tehsildar under whom, with his two assistants, all these other officials work. The Tehsildar owns to 200 rupees per month and the assistant Tehsildars to 60 rupees each.
Inside the main gateway of the Gor Khatri, in a room behind iron railings, were a couple of prisoners. In cases of non-payment of taxes the Tehsildar has power to keep a prisoner for ten days before sending him for trial before the Deputy Commissioner, who may then sentence him to a month's imprisonment. In criminal cases the Tehsildar can himself sentence up to six months.
Mr Agha Khan and I now drove half-way down the Bara Bazaar and then walked up a very muddy side street called the street of Hakims (native doctors). We stopped to talk to one sitting on the raised floor of his shop with its rows of strange bottles and drug jars.
Mr Agha Khan and I were getting on famously. He did not seem at all wearied by my questions, and appeared to enjoy my happiness in being in what is largely still an Afghan, if not a Persian, city. But the doctor—this old turbaned, black-bearded magician with so much spare drapery! I would not ask his name lest I should be told it was not Abenazer and that he never had a nephew, but I did ask what money he charged for his advice and drugs. And the Hakim answered, "A rupee if I go to the patient's house, but if the sick man come himself to the shop only the medicine do I charge him for and the cost of that would be three to five rupees." I wondered if the latter price was in expectation of any possible demands of my own and remarked, "That would surely be a very great deal if the sick man were a poor man." "If the illness is serious," said Mr Agha Khan, "he will be able to pay—otherwise he will not."
Near by was a barber's shop, combined with a bathing establishment. We went inside and as I wished to see the baths the barber got a small lamp and took me to the back of the shop where the baths were: stone boxes like tiny cachots with wooden doors. There was just room for a man to stand upright or squat upon the floor, and in the middle of the wall on one side was a small hole in which the bowls of water could be placed from without.
A woman at the corner of the street was cooking or "popping" maize. She put the maize into a bowl-shaped depression over the fire with some black sand which was afterwards sifted back from the corn. She was paid by retaining a small portion of each lot brought for her to cook.
Near by was the mosque of Dilawar Khan, of brick-work and decorated plaster, and a tank of turbid green water in the middle with red goldfish swimming about in it. Mr Agha Khan said that Dilawar Khan was a Khardar of the Chaghattai kings. I noticed a long wooden trough inside the mosque. "It is to put the shoes for safety," said Agha Khan; "there are many thieves here who would take them if left outside," which indexed one side of the Peshawar character and showed that the Pathan's passion for thieving is greater than his respect for religious observance.
We watched some goldsmiths for a while and then a baker making round flat cakes called "gird" of wheaten flour and water and others of the Afghan pattern shaped like a flat spoon. These are called "Nan," and have ghee (butter) mixed with the flour so that they cost two annas each whereas the girds cost but two pice. The oven is like a spherical kiln in the floor with the fire inside on the bottom and a small round opening at the top on the floor level where the baker sits. When he has kneaded the dough and marked his cake with various thumb-marks for decoration, he takes a rafida, a kind of small stiff pillow, wets it and on it puts the cake. Then, reaching down through the oven-hole with his hand, he slaps it up on to the curved wall and leaving the cake adhering brings out the pillow again. Then when the bread is cooked, with a hooked bamboo stick called a kundi he brings out the baked loaf. "I am very wise and clever to do this work," said the baker, "this is not easy work."
Next we called at a dispensary where a native doctor, trained at a medical school at Lahore, told me he sees an average of 200 patients per day. Eyes and throats were the most frequent trouble. We saw another mosque—one founded by Gangeli Khan, another official under the Chaghattai kings—with a fine old Imam. The Imam must be ready at all times to go to the house of one dying and read the Arsin as well as to wash the body and perform various ceremonies after death.
In another part of the city I went to see a house in the street called Undar Shahr which had been recently raided by Zakka Khels. Two bankers, Nan Dan and Chela Ram, had the upper floor where the raid took place. Going through an open passage-way in this building I came into an Afghan merchant's go-down, where raisins brought from Kabul were being sampled by a group of men sitting upon the floor. Among these merchants, bargaining with them, I saw, somewhat to my surprise, an enterprising Teuton!
With regard to the raid and the probability of its having been engineered by friends living in the city, I was told the following native proverb:—
"Chori Yaru naukri
Baj Wasila nahi."
Of which the meaning is:—
"Theft, love and service
All require a go-between."
Near the Katchari Gate is the Government High School, a large red-brick building next to a white Hindoo house. I went in one day and found the lowest class sitting in a circle on a large dhurry in the garden, the boys' shoes taken off and carefully put aside. The classmaster, Abdul Rahim, was teaching reading and writing. These children pay from one to three annas per month, while boys in the higher classes pay from three to eight rupees each. Some higher classes were doing gymnastics in the playground. They were all Mohammedans except four and very few of them were married, marriage in the North-West Provinces being usually later than elsewhere. While Mr Hargreaves, the enthusiastic headmaster, was telling me this, a small boy in black velvet came up to him. The boy brought a message from two others in one of the classes in the schoolhouse. He said he wanted "leave" for Chan Bad Sha (which means moon king) and Phul Bad Sha (which means flower king), because the sister of Chan Bad Sha's mother was sick. I was then shown a boy whose father, the Shahzada, Abdul Karim, was King of Kokand, the district from which Babar came. This lad, who wore a long-sleeved Chitral coat, talks five languages—Turki, Urdu, Persian, Chitrali, Pushtu and English. "My home is two months' journey from here—from the way of Kabul, Bokhara and Samarkand," he said.
Another clever youngster was Fazal Rahman whose father was a C.S.I. Fazal was enormously fat and appeared proportionately good-tempered. Many of the boys show an altogether precocious and surprising memory. Mr Hargreaves told me he had caught them knowing by heart, without understanding it, an epitome of English history they had got hold of surreptitiously to save all bother of studying the proper history book.
Several men and a boy who had been waiting some while for the headmaster's attention now received audience. The youth was an Afridi, whose name had been crossed off the books for continuous absence and who wanted to be re-admitted. He was very fair, with beautiful brown eyes unusually large, and declared he would never be absent again if they would take him back. He had been sick—very sick—but was well again. His white turban was dirty. His lungs had been wrong since June, but at last he had been put in a freshly-flayed sheepskin for some hours and was quite cured!
Outside the school I passed an old Hajji who had lately come from Mecca and was on his way home. A number of his fraternity, waiting for some days in one of the Sarais, had just cost the schoolmaster twelve annas for rope. The cause was as follows:—Moti (which means Pearl) was the name of an exceptionally ugly buffalo whose only labour was the daily drawing of a little water on a piece of land belonging to the school. Moti was well fed, and at night was always taken by the man who had charge of him to sleep in the Sarai, now crowded by the ponies of the Hajjis. The buffalo resented the unusually close quarters and in the silence of the night, charged right and left into the Hajjis and their ponies. The pilgrims thereupon attacked Moti's guardian with sticks and belaboured him soundly, and thus it was that Moti's keeper required 12 annas for new rope wherewith to bind the outraged buffalo.
The schoolmaster introduced me to a great friend of his, an American archæologist, Dr Brainerd Spooner, whose charm is only equalled by his energy and whom I found in one of the trenches at Shahijikidheri a little way from the city where he was superintending excavations in search of the great Buddhist stupa of Kanishka or its foundations.
A thorough organization of archæological survey in India was one of the fruits of Lord Curzon's viceroyalty and Dr Spooner, who is a specialist in ancient Oriental languages, was superintendent of the survey in the North-West Frontier circle.
Kanishka, according to Vincent Smith, lived about A.D. 125, and is supposed to have erected near Peshawar the most lofty and important stupa of all India, so celebrated indeed that it, or rather its adjacent monastery, was occupied for a thousand years. "We are trying to prove," said Dr Spooner as we tramped along deep trenches and clambered over mud hillocks, "that this is really the spot where Kanishka did build." I saw some masses of masonry and lines of wall which had already been uncovered, and later, at Peshawar museum, some pieces of sculpture and plaster reliefs showing very strong Greek influence; but since my visit, far greater success has rewarded Dr Spooner's labours including the discovery of the Buddha relics which have now been presented to the Buddhists at Rangoon.
Mr Agha Khan had undertaken to send me early on a certain morning a "suitable" vehicle in which to drive to the Khyber Pass. It proved to be a heavy old phaeton with a pair of big lumpy horses and a driver named Junno Kuchwan. It was not possible to get any other conveyance without some hours' delay, and as the "fitten" as he called it was already behind time (it was 7.15 a.m.), I started in it for Jamroud and the famous Pass.
A military expedition was just over but convoys of stores had still to return, and when I obtained permission to enter the Khyber and make a painting of the fort of Ali Masjid, the pass had not yet been re-opened.
Four miles from Peshawar and five from Jamroud I stopped near some big tamarind trees. The place, a military border police fort, was called Harising Poor, and from it I could see the big fort of Jamroud on the level plain and to the left, violet in the morning light, the hills of the Khyber through a V-shaped dip in the horseshoe of mountain that nearly surrounds the Peshawar country. Very far to the right, snow mountains watched over the nearer hills and away to the left, where raiders come from above, was a small blockhouse where twenty-five men were kept.
As I drove nearer to Jamroud the native hamlet appeared, with a tall tower of the usual village type, at some distance from the Fort, and the long wall of the Sarai where passing caravans, coming from Central Asia and Afghanistan, stop on the last night before they reach Peshawar.
I saw a company of the Khyber Rifles being drilled in an open space near the Sarai. I watched them marching in fours—marching in fours to a flank and company opening fire in close order. The men were Afridis of various tribes and the Subadar, the senior native officer of the company, was a Malikdin Khel Afridi—all good fighters, cunning thieves and as light-hearted as children. A great Jirga was about to be held at Peshawar and armed tribesmen were dribbling in to attend it.
The Fort of Ali Masjid, in the Khyber Pass.
The Fort of Ali Masjid, in the Khyber Pass.
Before going on to the mouth of the Pass I looked into the Sarai. The men in it were mostly Kabulis waiting to go up and not down. They were taking tea, sugar and general supplies from Peshawar, having sold there the raisins they had brought in from Afghanistan. Their camels were of the long-haired Central Asian type, stronger than the Indian camels and very different in appearance.
My permit having been examined at the fort, and a khaki clad sepoy of the Khyber Rifles told off to accompany me by way of escort, I drove on towards the mouth of the pass. The road enters by a sweeping curve along which the wind blew strongly. Here the "fitten" horses began to jib, and in spite of all Junno Kuchwan could do they flatly refused to go forward. Kuchwan, who had been on foot for some time, at last began to heave rocks at the horses which was still unproductive of the desired result. It became clear that we could never reach Ali Masjid with these animals, and there was nothing for it but to get back to Jamroud and try for a chance "tumtum," having come out from Peshawar earlier in the morning. We found, however, there were only two and both were booked for immediate return. It seemed hopeless and I was beginning to arrange for the next day when the officer in command of the fort pointed out another "tumtum" just emerging from the pass and exclaimed, with an eager twinkle in his eyes, and a peculiar straightening of the back, "There's a lady in it."
There were two ladies in it—they had driven from Landi Kotal, having made the journey from Kabul in eleven days. The younger said she was a lady doctor just leaving the Amir's service, and they were both persuaded to let me have their vehicle and drive on themselves to Peshawar in my phaeton.
In addition to my Hindoo servant I had now with me the sepoy escort, and throughout the rest of the journey there was a running squabble because the tumtum driver contended that he ought to walk. The rifleman was a Kuchi Khel Afridi, and his most obvious characteristic was a passion for shaking hands with me. Whenever vituperative argument seemed extra strong, the Kuchi Khel appeared to cap the other man's invention and turned to shake my hand grinning and nodding his head. This occurred at about three minute intervals during the afternoon. I might be gazing at the landscape or noting cave dwellings on the hillside—when I would feel my hand suddenly seized and wrung hastily; he was a very friendly man this Afridi!
We passed altogether quite a number of people along the road. In one place where I was walking some tribesmen invited me to share their food, and I ate with them—bread, coarse brown sugar in lump and Indian corn. Then I passed an officer of the Amir's army with a convoy of mules bringing the goods and chattels of the lady doctor.
The fort of Ali Masjid crowns what looks like a steeply sloping squat cone of hill in the middle of the pass, about half-way that is between Jamroud and Landi Kotal, with the main line of hills on each side. It is of tawny yellowish stone of much the same colour as the ground. I climbed up to it from the roadway but found no one within. Hot and dusty with the clamber I walked round the walls, banged at doors and shouted loudly to any who might be inside, but to no purpose, and it was only later that I learned how it was that no one was stationed up in the fort itself. The reason was that the camp remaining from the expeditionary forces was pitched below by the side of the road on what had been a few wheat-fields belonging to an adjacent village of cave-dwelling Kuchi Khels.
My permit demanded early return that I might be at Jamroud again well before dark, and after an hour or two I started back little knowing how soon I was to see Ali Masjid again.
What happened was that we came to a place where there was a sick camel on the road, and the tumtum horses both took it into their heads to shy violently and become generally rampant. The bamboo shafts of the vehicle were not very strong and when, through the sudden plunging, they both suddenly snapped short off at the body of the tumtum and left two splintered ends I, being in front, was thrown upon one of the rearing ponies. I managed to get clear without any hurt and none of us were harmed as much as the driver himself, who was a bit bruised and had one finger torn. His face, by the way, was disfigured by an old scar which he said was through a former break-down.
Now whatever it was the tumtum driver said to the sepoy at this juncture it roused his deepest feelings, and a torrent of execration raged between them. It was clear that the whole affair was being laid upon the Afridi's shoulders, and I don't know how long he would have kept his hands off the driver if two young officers on their way back to the camp had not reined up to know what was the extent of the damage. Dusk was not far away and they insisted that I must ride back to Ali Masjid and spend the night in camp with the 59th Scinde Rifles Frontier Force. I say insisted, but I was nothing loth.
At first, however, it only seemed to be a case of "out of the frying-pan into the fire," for the native bred horse called up for me started off at a hurricane pace, refusing to obey the reins. I left the officers far behind, and every time the road turned I was at some difficulty to keep in the saddle. The more I pulled the faster the horse went. I wondered afterwards whether this impetuosity was intended as an expression of joy at his new burden or annoyance. He gave in at last and gradually became amenable, but I am convinced that no warrior of any of the conquering armies that have entered by the Khyber Pass ever rode so swiftly towards India as I galloped away from it.
Heaped about the camp was a great quantity of booser bales, and in the wind, which was steadily rising, the chopped straw of the booser blew everywhere. The very walls of the mess were built of booser bales for there was no tent—only enough sailcloth to make a roof (absence of tents and "travelling light" generally had greatly helped the success of the recent expedition). After dinner, with the wind still rising higher and higher, straining at every cord, tearing and ripping everything that could be torn or ripped, howling so loudly that even coughing camels could not be heard through it, most of us sat talking while the surgeon and another played picquet by the light of a hurricane lantern.
There had been some of the enemy's people among our own troops (they had had option) and stories were told of them. One tower in the Bazar valley belonged to a Jemadar among the party about to demolish it. "Would you like us to let your tower stand?" he was asked. "Oh! smash it up, sahib, I shall get compensation." Apart from personal or family feuds it really matters little to the Afridi which side he is on so long as there is a sure chance of fighting; he loves it more than life. When they came to the Jirga what was the first question asked by the "enemy"? Some Zakkha Khels went up to the General and asked him, "Did we fight well, sahib?"
It was said that compassionate members of Parliament, knowing as much of a Zakkha Khel's mode of life as that of the ruling class in Mars, had begged at Westminster that their gardens and orchards might not be destroyed, and that their women and children might not be turned into the streets. These things cheered the camp at Ali Masjid, however irritating they might have been to authority. The women and children had all been moved to places of safety before the expedition started. A blind about "manoeuvres" was well understood in the Peshawar bazaar, though the unusual rapidity of the movements did surprise, and, as objected at the Jirga, the use of smokeless powder was baffling.
At first no newspaper correspondents were allowed to come near, but one or two young men who reached the expedition later certainly did their little part to increase hilarity. One reported that Lala Chena (which he did not know was another name for Ali Masjid) was destroyed with heavy loss, and another that a regiment of Goorkhas (who pride themselves on doing everything possible quietly by signs) entrained with much noise and shouting.
"If I'm charged for transport on this kit I refuse to go on service again," said a man with a green eyeshade. Four conversations were going on at the same time and all were fighting with the noise of the wind. "Fourteen aces and fourteen queens," called Hubby the surgeon from the depths of his sheepskin coat. "I expect Hubby's going to pay for his transport," cried another, and one, reading from regulations—"Any class of transport animal may be provided except elephants." And one telling yarns of Tommies and the vernacular—"I dunno wot 'ee says, sir. Look 'ere, I'll call my mate—'ee can bowl over bat" (bol, i.e., speak, and bat, i.e., language). And of thirsty Tommy on a railway platform—"Now, then, bring that there pani—don't be lumba or I'll break your confounded seer," and again—"Know their lingo? No, sir, I axes 'em once in English and then I brings the lakri."
Of camels—"We were going along a very narrow path with a steep drop on one side of a thousand feet or so and a sheer rise on the other. Suddenly one of the camels slipped and rolled down. We halted and looked over the edge and saw the poor beast ever so far below. I sent some men down to cut off what baggage had remained on the animal and to collect as much as possible of the rest, and the man who looked after the camels went down to cut the tail off to show the owner that he had not sold this one. He took his knife out and was just getting 'home' when that camel gave a spring and made for the ledge. We loaded him up again and—Oh, yes, the tail was all right!"
Then of Afridi feuds and of the sepoy who would go on firing after an officer rode up and told him to stop as the distance was much too great. How he entirely ignored the officer and continued to fire, and then to a sharp remonstrance only said: "Do let me have one more shot, sahib; it's my uncle."
Among these hillmen there are very binding unwritten laws. No man may kill his brother while he holds the plough in his hand. The blood-feud is the life of the Afridi, but they prefer some reason in the start. Thus when a certain rifleman ran amuck, and it was necessary that he should be shot, some of his relatives appealed to the officer in command, begging that to them might be given the killing of him since were it done by any not of his own family a feud must be started and many deaths ensue.
At night I was given the luxury of a hospital dhoolie, whereby I was much better sheltered from the wind than the others. Officers and men vainly sought sleep, and booser whirled everywhere about the camp. The young moon swung in the starlit sky: signallers at a blockhouse flashed their tiny sparks to a party up on the ridge: in the darkness of the hills unseen and far rested a hoof-mark of Mohammed's steed. I put my head out for a last peep at Orion and soon was in a dreamless slumber.
In the morning I was out early watching the camels in the wind and later, in a little shelter, I painted a portrait of Nasir Khan, a Subadar of the 59th Scinde Rifles and a Eusaf Zai Pathan. He had a beard of fiery red, which I was told is the result of using black dye and not being able to renew the treatment.
On the hillside above the camp was a Kuchi Khel village of cave-dwellings. I asked my sepoy escort to climb up to it with me but he firmly declined, explaining that it was his own village and that he had a feud on, so one of the officers accompanied me.
The hill, called Asrog, which means the veins of the horse, was now in bright light. The fort on the round molehill shape in the middle of the pass appeared sharply against a drift of cloud. Beyond it, towards Landi Kotal, the silhouette of mountain was black purple, with two growing patches of yellow light, where the sun got through behind the fort. And all the while the wind, the Khyber wind, hustled and tore and screamed through the camp.
The loose shale glistened in the sun and the low bushes looked silver grey as I again left Ali Masjid, following the little stream that spates in June when the snows melt. Then these caves on the hillside will be empty and the Kuchi Khels will be all away up in the Tirah hills.
"Hatee Aiah! Hatee aiah!"—"The elephant comes!" cried the children running, and one small scamp danced in front and shouted, "Hatee kuta machi bucha"—"The elephant is a dog bad beast," and fled to escape consequences of such boldness. I was now seeing Lahore city from the back of one of the Lieutenant-Governor's State elephants which had swelled with pride the heart of Tambusami, my servant, when in all the bravery of scarlet trappings it came to fetch me from the hotel. Tambusami's respect for "Government" was almost sublime. He rarely showed the faintest interest in shrines or temples, but invariably reflected every manifestation of official interest in, or attention to, his master. On such occasions the whole strain of his body seemed differently keyed, and on the back of that elephant he gave himself the most amusing airs, tilting up his chin and appearing to bask in an atmosphere of luxurious importance for all the world like a child playing at chief minister to some Haroun al Raschid, who had thrown off disguise and shown himself to the public in proper grandeur.
With me was a delightful Pundit Omaid Chand, Superintendent of the Punjab Government Records, who accompanied me during my stay at Lahore. "My native place," he told me, "was Saharanpur in the United Provinces; but now I am a nationalized Punjabi because I have been here fifty years since I was eight years old."
We entered the city by the Delhi Gate and filled the narrow street so that there was consternation among the shopkeepers and joy among the children all along our route. Elephants are no longer used so much as formerly, and at Lahore even the Lieutenant-Governor only keeps two now instead of eight.
When we met a troop of buffaloes there was a mighty hubbub. The shopkeepers squealed and jibbered much that I am sure was impolite as the frightened beasts plunged and pressed upon their goods. Many of the taller buildings with elaborately carved woodwork belonged to well-to-do Mohammedans, who have their homes away from the city, and use such houses in the intervals of business, and for friends of an evening. They do not usually go home till after nine o'clock at night. We were, of course, on a level with the projecting balconies and carved oriel windows. Here and there awnings were stretched across the street between the opposite houses, and once or twice we had to wait while these were hauled up to let us go by. Passing through another gateway we halted before a beautiful mosque, wondrous with exquisite tints of blue and green in the old glazed tiles that were all about its front and minarets. Its elaborate inscriptions were in blue, with yellow and green ornament on a white ground. Baked daily in the sun for nigh three hundred years the beauty of this glazed inlay was only enhanced by time, and well may it last unharmed through future centuries! The narrow streets, in spite of all their charm, will be swept away as the townsfolk gradually alter their standards and ideas, but the traveller of the age to come should still find this fair mosque to please his eyes.
Out of the city at length we came to the now open space about the crenelated walls and bastions of the fort, and the Badshahi Masjid with its four old capless minars. Midway between the west gate of this mosque and the walls of the Fort stands the graceful pavilion called the Baradari. The stone is mostly red Agra sandstone, Jehangir's favourite building material, recalling Kenilworth in colour, but the mosque has three domes of white marble.
Descending once more to earth I walked all over the fort, with its Pearl Mosque of white Jeypore marble (much, so much less fine than the Moti Masjids of either Delhi or Agra) its white Nau Lakha, its Diwan-y-khas, looking ready to tumble to pieces, though now in the restorer's hands, and its Shish Mahal.
Near these last, to the right of the same quadrangle, is the armoury. In Europe the traveller is often shown instruments of torture—rack or boot or "maiden," and in England what village of tourist attractiveness is without either stocks or pillory? In India, however, such relics are rare, and those shown at the Lahore Armoury, including a machine for pulling off thieves' fingers, invented by Dhuleep Singh, only remind one of the general absence of such stepping stones to civilization.
There is a great variety among this choice collection of weapons, and although it cannot compete with that of Turin, Valetta or Hertford House, it would prove at least a valuable addition to any one of them. Here are recalled the times of Ranjeet Singh, the one-eyed monarch, who had the genius to gather under him European officers of such calibre as Avitabile, Allard and Ventura. Here are cuirasses, imported by General Ventura for his French legion of 8000 men, bearing on their fronts the Gallic cock with laurels and standards on a star of steel, and beside them Sikh shields with copper bosses. Here are swords from Iran, with ivory hilts and blades engraved with mottoes calling on the help of "Ali." There are combination swords and pistols, Afghan knives, old flint-lock and match-lock guns with barrels damascened, old four-chambered match-lock revolver guns, musquets (short carbines or blunderbusses) carried by the Gurcharahis, (Sikh cavalry 4000 strong), tir kaman (bows and arrows), tarkash (quivers), Abyssinian shotels made with a double curve and wielded with the point downwards, Mahratta swords, farangs—straight swords adapted by the Mahrattas from the Portuguese, Khandahs, those long Sikh swords made broader near the point, a Persian mace of the time of Rustem—a gem for any collection—tabai (battle-axes) gokru, the crowsfoot—caltrap of ancient Europe for throwing down to stop cavalry, a Burmese Dha or Dhas, a fakir's baraggan or short sword-stick leaning on which some "muni of the ages" has sat in meditation in the jungle. There are Goorkha kukris and Hindoo Katars, the iron-shod stick of a Chaukidar, a powder-flask of golden thread, back-plates and breast-plates and helmets of steel and brass.
The armoury is certainly more interesting to-day than the Shish Mahal opposite wherein, as in a certain chamber at Versailles, it is said that begums and a man would shut themselves for weeks together. Here there is indeed no armoury of love—is it because the weapons of that warfare were of a kind inseparable from those who wielded them—the charms that vanished with their owners? Or can it be that their enduring pattern has never been improved upon, so that each blade and buckler of the past is still in full demand for current wear?
I went up to the roof of the Shish Mahal for the view of Ranjeet Singh's tomb and the Badshahi mosque, and between its minarets towards the west could see the silver band that is the Ravi River, and then before going back to the elephant I looked at Ranjeet Singh's tomb on which certain bosses are carved in the marble with curious significance. Eleven of these are grouped round a large centre, and of the eleven four are for Ranees (who are married women) and seven for concubines, while at two of the corners of the slab are detached smaller bosses to commemorate a pair of pigeons burned in the funeral pyre.
What a contrast, I thought, on returning to the spacious roads of the modern town outside the city gates, between the new order and the old! On arriving at Lahore the first thing that the stranger notices is the fortified railway station, then a tank and an old mosque covered with green-glazed tiles with others about it of bright peacock-blue; and then, as he drives from the station in a gharry, through white dust, past quite handsome modern buildings in pale red brick, comes the "Upper Mall," a perfect road with an ideal lay-out for a modern town—wide and trim with electric-light standards painted a clean grey on brick-edged grass strips which separate the centre roadway from a riding track that, in its turn, runs parallel to a footway; while on either side stretches a line of gardens. It is all as handsome as the Boulevard Anspach at Brussels, and as different from the more lovable streets in old Lahore as can well be imagined.
I had seen in front of the museum Zam Zammah, the old gun with a long history which Rudyard Kipling played round as a boy long before Kim was written, and had watched the urchin scrambling on its back when the policeman was not looking. Having heard that the character of Mahbub Ali of Kim—"known as one of the best horse-dealers in the Punjab"—was drawn from a man named Wazir Khan (not that minister of Akhbar after whom the Chauk of Wazir Khan is named, but an old horse-dealer who is still alive), I took some trouble to inquire for him. The old man was on the road, however, having gone to a horse-fair at Jhelum, but I found his son and asked him to show me the old Sarai where his father used to sleep on his visits to Lahore. This is called the Sarai of Mahomet Sultan and belongs to the Maharajah of Kashmir. It is a wide quadrangle, about 60 yards square, with round-arched cloisters on all sides; and the son of Wazir Khan showed me, shut off between pillars, the place where his father used to sleep in the old days. The shadows of a large shisham tree flickered over the broken white plaster of the wall. There was a well in the centre, and near it was a group of horses from Waziristan. Out through the gateway ("the Gate of the Harpies who paint their eyes and trap the stranger") I could see the Lunda Bazaar and a woman squatting on the edge of the footway washing her face with soap. Near her was a tamasha wallah, a boy with a cage of green parrots, and a Hindoo woman cooking chupatties over a fire of dung-cakes, and from one of the houses there was singing in Pushtu.
I returned to the old gun and entered the building of the "wonder-house" in front of which it stands.
The Mayo School of Industrial Art, which is attached to the Lahore Museum, was founded to revive arts now half forgotten, and generally to develop the Industrial Art of the Province. I went thoroughly over its various departments, its schools of modelling and design, architecture, engineering, wood-carving and carpentry, repoussé and blacksmith's work—and I do not think the importance of this college, as an educational institution, could be exaggerated. Its ambition to turn out a constant succession of the best possible craftsmen, rather than theoretic students, makes it the best means yet arrived at of moral and mental development inseparable to my thinking from the purely utilitarian value of handicraft training. Among the students were pointed out to me lads from distant villages and outlying districts, some in receipt of Government stipends, others supported by District and Municipal Boards and others again by Independent States. A well-regulated boarding-house is connected with the school for the accommodation of such pupils, a large proportion of whom find immediate employment on the completion of their course at the school and so continually add to the popularity of its training.
The energy, talent and success of Mr Percy Brown during the many years in which he has developed and enlarged the scheme initiated under the late Mr Lockwood Kipling, are beyond praise, and I only hope that his recent translation to Calcutta may bring an extension to other provinces of India of practical application of the same educational ideas.
The museum is justly proud of its Buddhist sculptures, the best of which is one in black hornblende schiste (from the Yusafzai country near Peshawar), of Buddha after his forty-nine days' fast. Carved with extreme delicacy and refinement, this wonderful sculpture seems to carry one rather to Renaissance Italy than the North-West Provinces. Who were they, these sculptors? How much or how little were they identified with the people whose gods they carved? Would Alexander of Macedon have had in his train men of sufficient eminence in their craft to account for the apparent Western influence?
One of the latest additions under Mr Brown's curatorship is a collection of paintings and drawings of the Moghul Emperors and people of their times, which includes many exquisite illuminations and old water-colour drawings of extreme fineness and delicacy and yet full of character, design and amazing distinction. Appreciation of such things since the days of their production is only beginning to be re-awakened, and they are still purchasable in India at such prices as the museum can afford. Mr Brown told me that I was the first who had yet looked at this collection with enthusiasm to justify his own in buying them, but "who knows the spelling of Du Guesclin?" They are as wonderful as Holbein's drawings, their detail would have enchanted Altdorfer, and their exquisite line might have delayed the death of Aubrey Beardsley! Such are the Mullah Do Piaza, the picture of Akhbar's jester and his thin Rosinante, or the beautiful drawing of Humayun, Babar's son, out a-hunting.
India is a land which changes any sympathetic traveller to a set of strings on which its spirit plays through all the working-hours. Every day is crowded with new wonders, and no sooner does he sink to earth, as if fallen from the hands of one player, than he is snatched up again and every fibre wrung by some new loveliness he knew not of.
One afternoon I drove out with the pundit to Shaddra where Jehangir is buried and Nour Jehan. We started to the west of the city on the high road to Peshawar, past the Mohammedan cemetery and the Hindoo burning-ground, outside which some women in white and yellow robes sat waiting while their men-folk burned a body within.
In the time of Ranjeet Singh, the pundit told me, the river used to flow past the Badshahi Masjid, a large red sandstone mosque, which we next passed: but in India the rivers are not so constant as the stars in their courses.
A little farther on we crossed the dry bed called the Ravi Nullah and then, driving through the Ravi Forest, reached the bridge of boats that spans the Ravi River at a little distance from the railway-bridge. A merry old Kuka Sikh on a white donkey was waiting at the bridge toll-gate for someone from whom to beg the money to cross. It is a long bridge and very narrow, so that two vehicles cannot pass one another and a bullock-cart, which had just started to cross from the opposite bank, seemed inclined to take an infinity of time about it; but the Kuka Sikh was in no hurry, and when we had paid his toll joked with the pundit to beguile the time. This boat-bridge has to be dismantled in the rainy season, from June to August, when the river is swollen.