We left the Peshawar road soon after crossing the bridge and presently reached Shaddra and Jehangir's tomb, a large and elaborate affair with much space about it and great entrance gateways and lines of narrow water tanks in the gardens within. Dismounting from the gharry we walked over the great open space of the Sarai and through the eastern gateway, with its honeycomb vaulted ceiling and soft warm flower decoration on its pink stucco-covered brick-work, to the water channels of the tomb garden, past the central tank and on to the Mausoleum itself, an exquisite low building with four tall minarets, half of white marble and half of the red Agra stone, of which Jehangir was so fond.
We walked up the steps and crossing a pavement of badal stone entered the inner chamber through an arch with a dado of old glazed inlay. Within, a flat oil-lamp upon a metal stand, threw flickering light in a bright path upon the marble floor. There was rich inlay of agate, cornelian and amethyst, the ninety-nine names of God and the titles of Jehangir, all but the most important title—that of husband of Nour Jehan. She is buried, the Queen who ruled him and his people—only her own brother she could not save from his wrath—about half a mile away and I was surprised to find the place in a state of utter neglect. It is awkward to approach and I expect is rarely visited.
When we reached it the sun was very low. A cow was stalled in one part of the neglected tomb and, as I approached, a Mohammedan fakir, rising from the ground to his full height, tall and thin, shook his hands at the sky and cried in Persian—Al Mout! Al Mout! ("Everyone must die—everyone must die!")
"But this is a stable," said the pundit, whose learning perhaps did not include Bethlehem. It is true that the tomb was railed round, but the railings were broken and the sturdy rogue of a fakir had settled himself comfortably with his charpoy, his goat and his cow. His beard was grey and his unkempt hair peeped out in tufts from his roughly-tied turban, once white and spotted with dark blue. The things he continued to shout were curious, but the pundit agreed with me it was mere wildness and no scheming for backsheesh that prompted a reference to England. Waving his arms round and round he cried—"The English will rule all over the world," and then—"One God to rule over us all. He created Adam and Eve: bismillah heraai mornana heem la ilia illillah."
I walked up some broken brick steps and passing through a series of low-pointed arches, down on the other side of a low circular wall, I stood before two tombs. The one nearest to me was that of Nour Jehan, who had been called Rose of the Harem, Light of the World: its neighbour was that of her adopted daughter.
The tombs are quite plain plaster-covered brick-work. In the outer passages there remain some traces of painted ornament—but because she had no children, and her stepson, Shah Jehan, was not on good terms with her when she died, there is here no decoration, no inscription. Not for her tomb are the ninety-nine names of God!
Through the arches on the farther side I could see the trunks of date palms and old, old mango trees in the Begumpura, a garden Nour Jehan had loved. I went underground to the crypt-like chamber below the tomb, and with the help of matches made out that there was nothing upon the floor—only in the ceiling one inset space corresponding to the cenotaph above. The pundit thought the body was probably very deep in the ground—I know not.
When we came out above ground the last of daylight was making golden play among the palms and mango trees. They were in flower—and next June fruit would be upon them.
His Highness the Rajah of Nabha is a noble old Sikh chieftain, distinguished among the native rulers of India, although his territory, one of the Phulkian States, is but small. Through the kindness of the Punjab Government and of His Highness, I was given an opportunity of visiting the little court.
HIS HIGHNESS THE RAJAH OF NABHA.
HIS HIGHNESS THE RAJAH OF NABHA.
To reach Nabha, my train from Lahore was the Bombay mail, and I have rarely seen greater confusion at any railway station than reigned upon its arrival. Every class of carriage was already full, yet there were a number of first-class passengers waiting with title to berths booked in advance as well as second and third-class ticket-holders. The train was already of the maximum size permitted and, after half an hour's uncertainty, a third-class carriage was actually emptied of its fifty or more occupants, taken off the train and replaced by an empty first-class coach. Few more striking instances could be found of purse privilege. It would correspond in England with the dumping on a Crewe platform of the third-class passengers by the Scotch express from Euston to make room for first-class passengers waiting for the train at Crewe. It was not a case of native and foreign, or English and Oriental,—for plenty of native gentlemen travel first-class and it simply meant that having a seat in a third-class carriage in India does not insure your finishing the journey by the train in which you started.
My servant was left behind on this occasion and was consequently not forthcoming when I reached Nabha Station in the morning. Poor faithful Tambusami had not understood whither we were bound, but for some reason or other thought it might be Patiala, and when I returned to Lahore three days later I found him weeping on the platform after vain endeavours to track me.
At Nabha I was met by three of the Rajah's ministers and driven in a luxurious victoria to a large guest-house painted red and blue and standing in quite beautiful grounds. A pair of horses drew the victoria, but a kind of wagonette which followed with my luggage was pulled by two camels which always have rather a circus air in harness.
The red brick-work of the building was all picked out with white, like the walls of a doll's house, and on each side of the wide arch at the entrance there was a life-size painting of a turbaned soldier presenting arms.
His Highness's private secretary could not speak English, and a native gentleman, Mr Hira Singh, who was a schoolmaster in the town, had been deputed to attend me as interpreter during my stay.
I was taken first into the reception-hall, which was hung with small portraits in gouache of former rajahs and famous Sikh monarchs, such as the Rajah Bhagwan Singh (the late Rajah of Nabha), the late Rajah Ragh Bir Singh of Sandoor and the Maharajah Ranjeet Singh, who was painted in a green dress with a halo round his head and mounted upon a brown horse. In large letters on one wall appeared the motto:—
"May God increase your prosperity."
Breakfast was served me in a large room adjoining the great hall. Over the carpet a white drugget was spread and the chairs were all covered in pink chintz.
Mr Hira Singh suggested that I must need some rest and should sleep awhile, so I was taken to my bedroom which was another large apartment. It was a blend of the genuinely Oriental and the Tottenham Court Road. The washstand was humbly and yet aggressively British, while the wide bed was gorgeously upholstered and covered with a beautiful silk coverlet of canary yellow, and was furnished with two tiny hard cushions or pillows in the middle, as well as an ample allowance for the head. I was certainly tired with the journey and nothing loth to lie down. Outside one of the open doors of the room I could see the red-and-blue lance pennon of a sentry appearing and reappearing as he passed to and fro in the sunlight. His footsteps were quite noiseless, and wondering whether after all it was the real sentry or one of the painted ones from the archway wall I fell fast asleep to wake an hour later and find that Sirdar Bishan Singh, Vakil to the political agent of the Phulkian States, a stout, pleasant-looking little man, and Sirdar Jawala Singh, His Highness's minister of finance, taller and darker, were patiently waiting for me in the reception-room, sitting side by side on chairs, with their feet primly together and silently looking before them.
His Highness had graciously consented to give me an hour's sitting the next morning, and these gentlemen had come to drive me to the palace where the painting was to be done to choose a position of suitable lighting. So down I walked again by the five long steps between the blue columns and out through the archway to the victoria, and the painted sentries were still presenting arms and the live one stood at attention. We drove first to the Diwan Khana by the Winter Palace, and going up a long flight of steps to an upper quadrangle I was shown the rooms of the State Treasury and the old heavily-bound boxes containing the wealth of Nabha.
The Diwan Khana itself is used for durbars, and the whole of the upper part of the great room is one continuous forest of chandeliers, mostly of green cut glass. On the walls of this Durbar Hall I noticed four beautiful old miniature portraits of rajahs, with real pearls fitted in for necklets and precious stones and gems on the horses' trappings as in eikons of the Greek Church and a painting of a feast, larger, but worked in the same style as the miniatures. The building was erected in the time of the Maharajah Jaswan Singh of Nabha, and the very florid carpets were certainly not of any earlier date.
As we drove away I saw many pigeons and green parrots about the walls of the Winter Palace, and noticed that all over the building niches had been left for the birds.
Mr Hira Singh told me that the population of Nabha town is over 15,000 and that it is "quite a busy city" with steam cotton-mills (I had seen the tall chimneys near the railway station). The city gateways I passed through are quite stately buildings and in an upper chamber of each gateway, with its silk covering hanging out over the window-sill, is kept a copy of the sacred Granth of the Sikhs.
Driving through part of the city and out again we passed a Hindoo temple with a spacious tank, over one end of which spread the twisting branches of a beautiful "beri" tree, and before long came to Elgin House, a newer building than the Winter Palace, with a very large Durbar Hall, having at one end a painting of Queen Victoria. It was here that the sitting was to take place, and after choosing a suitable position in which His Highness's gold chair of state might be placed ready I went over the rooms of Elgin House and also upon the roofs of the upper storeys.
The Vakil showed me the chief treasures with great pride, but among them all there was not a single beautiful thing of native craftsmanship. Instead of this there were huge modern German vases—pictures sliced into one another by a mechanical trick, so that as you moved along in front, the Princess of Wales changed gradually into the Prince. Mechanical singing-birds of most expensive accomplishment were made to warble for my delectation and greatest of all wonders at the Court of Nabha, a clock-work group of figures behaved quite like real people and a band of musicians played operatic airs while a ballet dancer stood tiptoe on one leg. The mechanical singing-birds had already made me think of Hans Andersen's story of the nightingale, and here was the heroine of another of his tales re-created after the burning she endured with her beloved tin soldier as devotedly as any Hindoo widow of suttee days.
The formal gardens were pleasantly arranged, but managed to avoid the beauty of an Oriental Bagh without achieving that of the European style they sought to imitate. The proportions were good, but there was no grass and one longed vainly for spaces of lawn or greensward to contrast with the elaborate carpet bedding.
On leaving Elgin House we drove to the Gurdwara of Baba Ajabal Singh. A tall and handsome black-bearded priest of thirty-two years showed us over the building, but what most interested me was a wild-looking figure I saw hanging about the cloisters. He was armed with a sword and dressed entirely in black garments, with a huge black turban twisting in and out of steel circlets and irons, and bound over and round in its turn by a metal chain. This was an Akali, one of that still privileged sect of fighting fanatics who became famous in Ranjeet Singh's time under the daring and picturesque "Gardana Sahib"—Alexander Gardner (born on the shores of Lake Superior in 1785).
I had heard that the Akalis wear blue garments to perpetuate the memory of the blue clothes the Guru Govind Singh wore as a disguise, on the occasion of an escape from Moghul soldiers, and part of which he gave to one of his disciples to found a new order—that of the Akalis in question, but this man's habiliments were as black as a crow's feathers. Like their famous Rajah, Ranjeet Singh himself, this latter-day specimen of the bhang-drinking cut-and-thrust "immortals" had only one eye, and I asked whether he had by chance lost its fellow in a fight. "I have never had a chance of a fight," said the Akali—adding consistently with the tenets of his sect—"if I did I would never give in." While we were talking a thin old Sikh limped towards us; he had once been taller than the average man, but was now bent and emaciated with constant opium-eating. Mr Hira Singh told me that he took one "masha" (equal to 16 grains) at a time and took it twice in every twenty-four hours. The old rascal, his deep brown eyes twinkling, put to me a special petition that the Government should grant to all real opium eaters a large quantity gratis at regular intervals to make them happy. He said also, on my asking him what he dreamed about—"In my dreams I think of the Creator, and I feel very earnest to go to a better field and to fight there," which, as I was assured the man was an abandoned scoundrel, may be taken as Oriental humour expressed with an eye to backsheesh.
Driving back to the guest-house we passed an arena where wrestling matches are held, with six circular tiers of high stone steps as seats for the spectators, and a square "loge" built in the middle of one side for the notables, and here is conducted the only physical "fighting" that takes place at Nabha nowadays. The day of the Akalis is over, and while their brother Sikhs make some of the best material in the Indian Army, the devotees of this narrow sect have become wandering mendicants, privileged to carry warlike weapons, and truculently direct in their demands for alms.
The portrait sitting was fixed for eight o'clock the next morning, and ten minutes before his time the noble old Rajah stepped from his carriage and walked almost jauntily up the steps of Elgin House, where I was already installed with palette and canvas.
Gorgeously apparelled in a costume that was like a kiss between two halves of the Arabian Nights, and wearing upon pale greenish silk a galaxy of decorations which included the G.C.I.E. for his part in the last Afghan War (he is now an honorary Colonel in the British Army) and stars and medals from many great Durbars, the Chief of Nabha wore at the same time an air of vigour and joy in life that made the years sit lightly on his shoulders, years that a wrinkled forehead declared numerous.
One of his ministers told me through Mr Hira Singh that at the last Delhi Durbar His Highness had delighted every one by the spirited and boyish way in which he had galloped his horse along in front of the assembled princes. May he appear as hale and vigorous at the Durbar of December next!
After he had shaken hands with me and beamed cordial smiles, we walked through the Durbar hall to the room where I had set up my easel, and the Rajah sat, as arranged, in a chair of gilded brass with lion arms, and directed his gaze at a particular flower vase upon which we had fixed to keep his head in correct position for the portrait. The pupils of his eyes were brown, with a faint grey rim, and he had long waving moustaches as well as a long yellowish white beard. He carried a sword with scabbard of pale green and gold, a steel mace with spherical head, and a contrivance by which, when a catch was pressed at the end of the handle, a number of short sharp blades started out from the head, and also a steel trident of new pattern. The old man was bent upon having as many arms about him as possible, and sent for a large shield of black metal with four bright bosses and a crescent, a favourite rifle and another trident sceptre, so that I had all I could do to dispose these about him in such a way that he could sit comfortably and keep his head still. He seemed especially proud of the mace with the trick knives, and after explaining the mechanism to me with gusto he continued at intervals during the sitting to manipulate it, at which the whole court laughed heartily. They were grouped on either side in all the glory of official costume and included the Commander-in-Chief, who came to England for the Coronation of Edward VII., the Foreign Minister, the Finance Minister, the Chief Justice, the Medical Adviser, and various generals and councillors.
To paint a portrait in an hour! Well, I was not sorry that His Highness had arrived before the arranged time, and that I had already set my palette, and though it would have been intensely interesting to have talked with the Chief of Nabha through the excellent interpreter, when once the weapons were arranged to incommode him as little as possible, I went at the painting with the fury of an Akali and contented myself with smiling appreciatively at his occasional ejaculations.
Every now and then he made a peculiar coughing noise, which began softly and rose to a crescendo, sounding as formidable as the traditional catchwords of the giant of the bean-stalk. It was like "ahum, ahum, ahum—ahhum," and kept his ministers in lively attention.
As nine o'clock struck (for there were clocks at Nabha as well as at Elsinore) I laid down my palette and am glad to say His Highness expressed with Eastern courtesy great delight at the sketch.
Before going he sent for his favourite grand-child, Sirdar Fateh Singh, a boy of about twelve years of age, who shook hands frankly with me. On hearing that I must positively leave Nabha that afternoon—in spite of his kindly pressure to stay at least a fortnight—the Rajah gave orders for the finest of his State elephants to be sent round to the guest-house that I might see an ingenious device by which fountains of water from a hidden tank played from the front of his head to lay the dust. The elephant, unlike his vigorous old master, is weak and ailing, but I found him still a magnificent beast and arrayed even more gorgeously than lilies in sunlight-carrying scores of crystal lamps as well as the fountains.
Mechanical arrangements of all kinds seemed specially to delight the Rajah and he again showed me one of the singing birds I had seen the previous day. Just before leaving Elgin House His Highness paid me the pretty compliment of asking if he might have permission to go.
I left Lahore soon after eight o'clock one evening and when I woke in the train next day found myself smothered in dust and traversing the great Sind Desert, that almost rainless tract, which depends solely for any possibility of cultivation on irrigation from the Indus.
An important trade route from Afghanistan and Persia coming through the Bolan Pass has its base at Shikarpur, in Upper Sind, a few miles from the great cantilever bridge, called the Lansdowne Bridge, which joins Baluchistan to India crossing the Indus between Sukkur and Ruk.
An engineer was waiting at Sukkur railway station to show me the great bridge, and as I had to continue my journey the same evening we were obliged to face the heat of the sun and started back towards the river on a trolley worked by hand levers. We passed a kite's nest close to the railway on the perpendicular face of a mass of limestone rock.
Sukkur is a good-sized town of more than 30,000 inhabitants, but its buildings seemed to be all of wattle and daub, though three and even four storeys high, and they were grey in colour, uncomfortably monotonous in the terrific heat.
A single span of the bridge joins the Sukkur side to Bhakkur Island, a mass of limestone rock fortified centuries ago. The keys of the gates were in charge of a signaller at the blockhouse and a bridge inspector. While they were being obtained I read the inscription upon the bridge—
"Erected by F. E. Robertson and M. S. N. Hecquet, 1887-1889. Girders made by Westwood Baillie & Co., London. J. S. R., 1887."
It is one of the great monuments of Queen Victoria's reign, one among the many bridges, waterworks and railroads that have so far monopolized in modern India all architectural aspiration. Splendid in its utility, an inspiring instrument of commercial development, it looks like the creation of some great Arachnid but stretches its iron network so far into the air that it is as much larger than any spider's trap-net as the highest of the Himalayas exceeds an ant-hill. I walked a little way on Bhakkur Island and stood on the sand under some high walls looking at the Ruri end of the bridge. They were the walls of an old nunnery called "Suttian," I think for widows who had declined to be burned with their dead husbands. The engineer told me in connection with "Suttian" that a man named Mosu Shah was said to have built a minaret we could see with the object of spying upon one of the nuns with whom he was in love.
Out in the stream in front of us two men were "pala" fishing. They had swum out each with an immense metal chattie to keep him afloat and, resting upon these, fished the river with nets on long slender poles, putting the fish inside the chattie as they took them from the net. The fish come up to spawn and the men float down stream with their nets in front of them.
They drifted through the very reflections of the vast cantilevers just as a train was steaming over the bridge and made one more of the innumerable contrasts of the old and new order I had seen in India.
Regaining the trolley we crossed to the Ruri shore and walked some distance over the wide burning sand for the best view of the bridge. A number of cattle were down upon the sand near the water-edge seemingly well content, as I have seen great herds baking in summer heat on level sand on the West Coast of Ireland at the edge of the Atlantic. Here at Ruri, however, the sun beat with greater fury and a group of Sindi boatmen and their families, who had been busy mending sails spread out on the sand, had all stopped work till cooler hours arrived.
In the summer, that engineer assured me, the thermometer reaches 240° and even 250° in the shade! "I have been here twelve years," he said, "and during all that time we have had six rainfalls." He pointed out to the right of the bridge the magazine where dynamite was stored for blasting purposes, and, farther to the right, another small island with a very old temple on it. This island is called Khwajah Khisah and the temple shrine, although the building is in the form of a mosque, is frequented by both Hindoos and Mohammedans.
There is a very important project in hand for damming the Indus just above this temple so as to raise the water-level and so feed the canals during the dry season as well as at periods of flood. I could make out the head of the Begari Canal, then quite dry, in the distance between Khwajah Khisah and the island of Bhakkur.
When I returned by the trolley to Sukkur there was a local train in the station and the carriage in front of the waiting-room where I sat resting in the shade seemed to contain the most obviously authentic prototypes of that famous Asiatic "forty," more celebrated even in Europe than the French Academy. Red faces with large mouths agrin between thick moustaches and short bushy black beards, blue turbans and dirty finery—the very perfection of stage villains, but Morgiana? No, I could not see her and the music of the opera, The Barber of Baghdad, with its superb iterations of that lady's name came drifting through my head.
The reflections of the dull red girders of the bridge were now almost green.
I again slept in the train that night and woke up in the Bolan Pass in British Baluchistan. At half-past nine in the morning the sky was very pale and although the shadows of the hill-clefts were clear they were not hard. On each side of the line there was a flat boulder-strewn plain which was stopped abruptly a quarter of a mile away by steeply rising heights of rock. Then suddenly the flat plain itself would be trenched and split into huge cañons, clefts going deep down into the earth. A few grey dried plants, almost the same colour as the stones, were the only visible signs of vegetation.
In the early morning at Sibi Junction I had branched off on the Western (or Quetta) arm of the great loop which extends from Sibi to Bostan Junction. By ten o'clock the train with two powerful engines was ascending a gradient of one in twenty-five beyond Hirok. From the window I could watch, upon the old Kandahar Road below, the old slow-creeping progress of a camel caravan. The pass was now narrowing, closing up on each side and the cliffs rose steeply where at a sharp turn I caught sight of a square block-house perched on a jutting crag.
At Quetta I had the double annoyance of missing luggage and of being taken, on account of my dark beard, for an expected French spy. The latter misunderstanding was put right by a subdivisional officer from Chaman (the present terminus of the railway beyond the end of the Kojak Pass) whither I was bound and where, having left the loop at Bostan Junction, I arrived the same evening to get a peep across the border into Afghanistan—to set foot in the Amir's country, that land of Mohammedan freebooters, waiting and waiting in vain for an autonomous India whereunto their co-religionists would be able to welcome an invading army.
Going out into the sunlight from the gloom of the dak bungalow everything seemed at first only brightness, as if the external world were like a cup brimmed with a throbbing intensity of light. Then, as my eyes accustomed themselves, I saw that near the bungalow were peach and apricot trees holding sprays of blossom, rose and white against the pale blue of the sky, and that in the distance on every side mountains rose out of the plain, not grey and cold but warm with faint tints of amethyst and delicate red, and that snow lay upon their higher peaks.
Chaman lies in the plain within a horseshoe of mountains, and the space of clearly seen country is so vast that the mountains look almost as if drawn upon a map. The little town is entirely of wattle and daub, a grey blanket colour with just a little paint and whitewash about a Hindoo temple, and here and there a peach tree in flush of blossom. The main street is very wide and in front of some of the shops there are tiny enclosures, five or six feet square like miniature front gardens. Two patriarchal looking old Pathans were walking along in front of the shops. They wore the same kind of stout leather boots, and from above the turban peeped the same type of conical head-covering that I had seen worn by pedlars in Ceylon and throughout the length and breadth of India. They were Achakzai Pathans and one, whose name was Malik Samunder Khan, said he was eighty years old.
Seeing the entrance of a caravanserai I was going in when Tambusami demurred. It was a long way truly from his home near Tuticorin, and he gave these Northern folk his favourite epithet calling them "jungle people." Seeing that I was going into the sarai in spite of his remonstrance, he said submissively, "Where you go I come," but added, "Where you not go I not go."
There were not many camels within, but in one corner some Afghans were pouring raisins into heaps, and inviting me to eat, gave me larger and finer dried grapes than I had ever seen. The raisins were called "abjush" and the men were Popalzais (Candaharis). Alas! we could exchange no talk but they made me welcome, and while we squatted silent in the sunlight and the clear delicious air, one, taking up a stringed instrument called a "rahab," sang to its accompaniment. It was certainly not a song of fighting: there was gladness in it—even passion now and then—but no fury—I think it was a love-song. It was not a song of fatherland: there was pride in it but no arrogance. Nor was it assuredly a song of religion: there was faith in it and adoration, but no abasement. Yes, I'm sure it was a love-song.
Quetta with its gardens and orchards, its fortified lines and its command, by reason of natural position, of both the Kojak and the Bolan Passes, is one of the most important of Indian Frontier posts. I returned to it from Chaman and drove and walked about its wide and well-metalled roads such as the "High School Road," the "Agent Road," and the "Kandahar Road." Trees, as yet bare of leaves, lined the sides, and fruit blossom looked gaily over walls and fences.
The "Holi" festival of the Hindoos coloured these days. The throwing of red powder or red-tinted water seemed pretty general, and hardly a white dhoti was to be seen that was not blotched with crimson or vermilion splashes. People danced in the streets, and one came suddenly on a crowd watching folk wild as bacchanals, both men and women dressed in gay finery, garlanded with flowers and dancing with strange fantastic gestures in obedience to the universal song of spring's new advent. I went early to bed in another dak bungalow, having somewhat of a fever about me since the blazing hours two days before at the Lansdowne Bridge, and awoke in the early hours. My great-coat had fallen down at one side of the charpoy, and I felt as if a cold plaster lay upon my chest. Tambusami was crouched in front of the fire and had fallen asleep covered in his blanket. From the blackened broken hearth a little acrid smoke puffed fitfully into the room. On the floor lay a torn and extremely dirty dhurrie which had once been blue. Between the dhurrie and the damp earth mildewed matting showed here and there through the holes. A decrepit looking-glass in a broken frame stood upon one rickety table against the wall, and on another an iron tray of uncleaned dinner-plates added to the general air of dirt and squalor.
Leaving Quetta by a morning train I was again passing through a region mountainous on either side beyond a plain white with leprous-like tracts of salt. It resembled neither frost nor snow, but was a strange blotchy incrustation as if the earth were smitten with some fearful pestilence.
On one side the mountains were grey with violet shadows following their clefts and scoriations, spotted in places by dark leafless shrubs, and on their summits lay a little snow. On the other side the hills were red with only soft warm hints of shadows, and beyond them was a band of filmy blue almost as light as the sky. Soon, as the train raced on, the intervening plain became strewn with small loose boulders and isolated tufts of dry dead prickly bush. Two long tents like giant slugs hugged the ground with their black bodies, and near them a few scattered sheep hunted the sparse nourish of aridity.
Again I passed Bostan Junction, this time, however, instead of going on towards Chaman, turning to follow round the Eastern arm of the loop by what is called the Harnai Route. The landscape had quite altered, but was still strange and unhealthy looking. A veritable pigment seemed to exude from it, varying in different parts of the same field of vision. The outlines were noble but the colour, instead of being the effect of light and air upon masses either of local uniformity or varied by differences as of flowers or vegetation, was by this frequent change in the hue of the earth itself too prismatic for majesty and too trivial for grandeur. A rugged pile of grey rock will receive from the procession of the hours indescribable glories, but a mass of mixed French fondants squashed into the same shape could never capture a tithe of such beauty. In chalky half-tones the landscape ran the entire gamut of reds, yellows, blues and greens, with an appearance of false sweetness as if the face of earth had been smeared with pigment destroying all natural glow.
And yet—and yet—as noon grew nearer and the hovering heat made all things hazy and indistinct, where all merged and was lost, and nothing began or ended, surely that was beautiful—earth mother—mother-o'-pearl.
After leaving Mangi Station the train approached the famous Chappa Rift where a vast and sudden break in the mountain makes a wide stupendous chasm, with steep perpendicular sides. I was permitted to ride upon the locomotive for this part of the journey and watch this wild and desolate magnificence of nature's architecture unfold its terrible titanic grandeur. At one point the railway crosses the rift by an iron bridge called after the Duchess of Connaught. Entering a tunnel in the vast wall of rock the train emerges again at one end of the bridge, and after crossing the gulf turns along the other side so that for some long time this narrowest part remains in sight, the maroon red ironwork of the bridge staring dramatically in the centre of a desolate landscape of silver grey. No patch of grass or shrub or any other live thing is to be seen—only the immensity of the scale is marked by one small block-house, a minute sentinel which shows against the sky on the tallest height of cliff.
As the journey continued, the rocks took more fantastic shapes and above a steely gleaming river and its grey beach of stones, the cliff became like serried rows of crumbling columns as if some cyclopean Benares uplifted by earthquake reared its line of petrified palaces against the sky.
Jaipur was stricken by plague: the number of deaths had gone on increasing and the living were thrown into a state of bewilderment. The Rajput princesses had fled in panic to the old palace of Amber and strangers were, for the time, asked not to visit that ancient capital. The dinner-table that evening, spread in the open courtyard of the hotel, became heaped with moths attracted by the lamps and dying through their ardour, and it almost seemed as if some spiritual light were attracting in the same way human souls to leave their bodies tenantless.
In company with the Nazim (district officer) I started out betimes in the morning—passed the large grey bungalow of the Rajah's chief minister, the lunatic asylum, long cactus hedges and gardens in which white-domed cenotaphs of buried chiefs gleamed among graceful acacia-like Aru trees, while peacocks arched their jewelled necks upon the walls,—and entered the city by that one of its seven gateways called the Moon Door (Chand Pol), crenelated and covered with painted decoration which included a guardian figure on each side of the entrance, turbaned soldiers with fixed bayonets supported on different shoulders in the artist's desire for symmetry.
The gateway was really like a large square tower with considerable open space inside, thatched huts leaning up against its outer wall. Inside the city the wide well-paved streets looked so clean and spacious and the pink-coloured stucco of the houses so bright and gay, that Death seemed a cruel intruder there without excuse. Yet three corpses were carried past us while we stopped for a moment. "The one in yellow is a woman," said the Nazim. I asked why a group of Mohammedans sat in the courtyard of a house near us, and the Nazim said: "Someone has died there—these are friends met to read some of the aphorisms of the Koran."
The day before there had been fifty-four deaths in the city, which was some decrease as the daily toll had quite recently reached one hundred.
In the Chand Pol Bazaar there were not many people about, though to the stranger there was no evidence of calamity beyond the occasional passing of corpses. The sunshine was so bright and the air so pleasant, and a crowd of pigeons fluttered and strutted with such animation round a sacred bull! Near us a small peepul tree hung over one wall of a red sandstone temple—the Sita Ramjika—like a fountain of green and gold.
At the famous observatory Mr Gokul Chandra Bhawan Raj Jotshi, who is in charge of it, showed me round the strange gigantic instruments. We examined the largest sundial in the world, with gnomon 75 feet high; and standing in the paridhi, the circumference of the dial, I could see, above some pink dwelling houses, the clock in the palace tower which is regulated by the old dial.
Very curious are the twelve houses of the Zodiac (Rashi Valya) each with a little painting of its celestial landlord upon the thickness of the wall under its four-centred arch.
The Nazim took me on to see the Maharajah's Palace, and in its lovely gardens, near a tree of Kachnar in full bloom, we came upon the tomb of a pet dog whose memory had been honoured with a sculpture of his canine incarnation carved in black marble and protected by a dome-topped marble kiosk. The Nazim said the dog had been loved for his extreme obedience, and there was a tale of some gold bangle lost in a billiard-room which he had restored to a despairing owner. It was a graceful monument in beautiful surroundings and a great contrast to the unpleasing tombstones in that crowded little canine cemetery near the Marble Arch in London, but there was another piece of sculpture in that garden which I was more anxious to see, but which, alas for me! was hidden that morning.
Gobindaji, said to be one of the most beautiful of the carved figures at Muttra, was brought here for safety by the Maharajah Mon Singh, and is apparently treated as if the stone has quite corporeal needs, for the Nazim said: "True he lives at the bottom of this garden. He has his hours: sometimes he has just taken his food and sometimes he is sleeping. Just now he sleeps, so you are not able to see him."
I love most gardens where old statues sleep, but without any wish to disturb their slumbers possess some little of Aladdin's curiosity—or Coventry Tom's; besides, had I known Gobindaji's hours I would have timed my visit more opportunely. As it was, in this garden where dogs have monuments and statues lunch, I could at least enjoy the jasmine flowers and the blossoms of the pomegranates and the grapevines trailing over rough stone uprights.
At the bottom of the garden we passed through a door in the wall, and walking down a narrow flight of steps beheld the Rajah's crocodiles under the windows of the zenana quarters. The keeper of the crocodiles was an old white-bearded man, extremely tall and thin—so thin in fact that his charges must have long ceased to wait with any eagerness for indiscretion in too near approach. The spacious tank was enclosed on three sides by a wall, and on the fourth by the palace itself. We had descended by the steps from a terrace and stood on a small piece of muddy ground on to which the thin keeper enticed his huge charges by throwing a bundle of rag towards them and withdrawing it by a string. In the middle of some beautiful public gardens close to the city stands Jaipur's "Albert Hall," a large building in white marble, which contains a durbar hall and a fine collection of examples of Indian art and industry. Its courts are decorated with mottoes translated from Persian and Hindoo literature, and as maxims for guidance they are not at all easy to reconcile with each other. From the Hitopadesa, for example, on one wall is quoted:—
"Fortune attends the lion-hearted man
Who acts with energy; weak-minded persons
Sit idly waiting for some gift of fate."
And on another from the same source is written:—
"He has all wealth who has a mind contented.
To one whose foot is covered with a shoe
The earth appears all carpeted with leather."
After all they represent different aspirations and only mystify because they are marshalled here as from the same authority. One man would rather have a rough road tearing his defenceless feet as he treads it with a purpose, while another would prefer to watch a garden sundial marking contented hours that leave no record behind them. And the first might fall powerless on the wayside, and the second shatter a kingdom by the report of quiet words.
There are aviaries of beautiful birds in the gardens about the museum—rose-coloured flamingoes and Rajput parrots with heads like peaches and pale grey "Mussulmans" from Mecca, with primrose crests and orange cheeks.
At his bungalow not far away I had the pleasure of a chat with Sir Swinton Jacobs, the dear old engineer and architect who has done so much to keep alive traditions of Indian craft-work, and is one of the very few Englishmen who has not flown from India when white hairs came.
In all India no spot has been so rapturously praised for its beauty as Udaipur in Rajputana and its lake-reflected palaces. Travelling towards it from Jaipur I found myself a day later in the State of Mewar, passing fields of the white opium poppies for which the State is famous.
Udaipur is a white town and comes quite suddenly into view after you have been watching from the train a lovely range of hills, warm and glowing. The bright railway station is a grey stone building with a square tower, and the lower part of it is half smothered in pale convolvulus. The flowers are glorious at Udaipur, and I found the white house of the British Resident bowered in magnificent bougainvillias. This gentleman kindly promised to ask the Maharana to grant me a sitting for a painting.
Driving over a bridge past crenelated walls, a road hedged by dense broad-leaved cactus, led me on to a forest of leafless trees softer in colour than an olive wood. It was like a forest from a fairy-tale, with troops of wild long-legged swine and peacocks, their bright tails rushing through the branches like a coloured wind. Then I came out upon the waterside where the white group of palaces with their long sloping ramps, their many flights of steps and galleries, their towers and cupolas, rose up majestically, unrivalled save by their own reflection in the lake. What part was plaster looked like marble, and what was marble glowed tremulously warm like some white mineral counterpart of flesh.
THE PALACE OF THE MAHARAJAH OF UDAIPUR. [DRYPOINT ETCHING.]
THE PALACE OF THE MAHARAJAH OF UDAIPUR. [DRYPOINT ETCHING.]
Four rowers pulled me in a long boat to the Jag Mandar, one of two palaces which, completely covering the small islands on which they are built, appear to be floating upon the water. I landed at some wide steps at one end of a terrace on which four stone elephants stand with raised trunks saluting. A band of darker colour upon their legs and on the walls showed that the water was at a lower level than it sometimes reached. There was a garden within the walls of the palace from which three palms rose high above the rounded shapes of lower growing trees.
The Maharana had consented to give me a sitting of one hour at four o'clock in the afternoon. A two-horse carriage took me through the city to the lake-front and then along under the white walls of the palace. More than ever as I passed close beneath them was I struck by the similarity in general shape of one great series of towers to those of old Baynard's Castle; but never have the waters of the Thames reflected so white a building! And the beauty of that vast whiteness destroyed for me forever the old argument which tries to explain the former strong coloration of Greek architecture by saying that large surfaces of white building would have been intolerable under Southern sun.
After I had arranged my easel in the room, which had been fixed upon for the painting, the Maharana entered, carrying a long sword in a green scabbard. We bowed to each other and after moving to the chair which had been placed for him he motioned me to be seated also.
Of all the native princes in India, the Maharana of Udaipur has the longest pedigree, and his kingdom is the only Rajput State which can boast that it never gave a daughter in marriage to a Moghul emperor. This tall and dignified chieftain is High Priest of Siva as well as ruler of the State of Mewar, and is revered for his religious office no less than for his temporal sovereignty. He is thoroughly and proudly loyal to the British rule, but a brother of the Englishman who did his utmost (in accordance with expressed wishes from high quarters) to bring him to the Coronation Durbar of 1903, once told me that on the morning of the great function "my brother found Udaipur on the floor of his tent, stark naked and ill with fever, so that he could not go."
His beard and moustache were brushed upwards and stained with some dye which made them a metallic blue colour. A small turban came down over the left temple. He wore no orders or decorations, and his only jewellery consisted in a double row of pearls round the neck and one diamond ring on the right hand. A long gown, with close-fitting sleeves, made of maroon-coloured cloth, and bound at the waist by a belt and a white sash, clothed him from the neck to the velvet-shod feet.
He had agreed to sit for me for one hour but I thought, in spite of his gentle dignity, the first quarter was for him a long while going. During that time no one had spoken, and I asked whether he had not in the palace some teller of stories who might keep him from feeling the irksomeness of sitting so long in one position. When the interpreter explained my suggestion he smiled and asked whether it could trouble me if he talked with his ministers; and two of these, coming forward at my acquiescence, talked with him throughout the rest of the sitting, and as he still kept well his position for me the change was mutually agreeable.
To my left, beyond an outer gallery, lay the beautiful lake, and, crowning a hill immediately opposite, shone the whiteness of the Summer Palace.
On my way back from Udaipur I stopped at Chitorgarh, fifty miles away, to drive to the famous fortress city of Chitor, the former capital of Mewar.
The hill of Chitor lies on the flat land like a long mole or hog's back. All along its crest old tawny buildings with towers and turrets stretch in a broken line as if they formed the ridge of some old saurian's back with many of the spines broken. Rather beyond the centre the Tower of Victory, yellow and tawny as the rest of the buildings, appears sharply prominent. Trees circle the hill at its base and rising from among them the road leads steeply along and up the side of the cliff in one long zigzag. The slopes of the hill looked grey as I approached.
The tonga I had engaged to drive me from Chitorgarh crossed by a stone parapeted bridge the almost empty River Ghamberi, in the bed of which the bare rock jutted up in sloping shelves. We passed a cemetery and several fields of green barley, and the zigzag road up the hill looked more imposing the nearer we drew, with its eye-holed curtain wall, its bastions and towers. Still in the plain below, we now entered through the pointed arch of a gateway the bazaar of modern Chitor. It was full of dogs, pigeons, cattle and people,—a narrow crowded street at right angles to the hill. We turned by the large white Kotwali and a beautiful temple porch and passed houses with elaborately carved fronts having stone balconies with grey reliefs of elephant processions.
Then we entered the "fort" itself, and began our progress through the long series of its seven gateways that close the zigzag road at intervals. First came the "Padal Pol" of Akhbar's time, and then a new gate with two monuments and the sacred emblems of Siva. The third was the Gate of Hanuman, the monkey friend of Rama. Set within a grand stone arch, the old wooden doors covered with large iron spikes were dropping to pieces with age. Between this and the preceding gateway Akhbar himself is said to have shot the besieged leader in the great siege of 1568. The Ganesh Gate followed, and just at the turn of the zigzag far above our heads the rough masses of bare rock—here, blood-red ochre, and there, pale purple grey—reared up and up to yet higher steeps of masonry to the line of the great road wall above. Here and there stunted trees clutched the stones or straddled some projection with clinging roots. The fifth gateway was the Jorla Pol with a rough, stone house built over it. The Lakshman Pol was close to this last, and had a group of nine brown-legged native soldiers lounging in the gate-house. Beside this part of the road there were some hundreds of small monuments like double cubes from two to three feet high, and I was told that in past days anyone of Chitor who had been to Benares built one of these.
In front of the Ram Pol, the seventh and last gateway, there is a wonderful old stone building with carved pillars and a long beam-like piece of stone, now used as a bench to sit upon, carved from end to end with alternate balusters and figures. The carving round the base of this gateway is very remarkable, being in three tiers together, not higher than three feet, with human figures in the upper course, horses in the middle one and elephants below.
Beyond this gate are the ruins of old Chitor. Blue-glazed tiles still gleam from broken walls of palaces and time takes leisurely its slow revenge. There are two towers in Chitor—one, the Tower of Fame and the other the Tower of Victory. The first is close to an old Jain temple, and is itself of Jaina architecture, built probably about the time when Saxon pirates looked on the Roman ruins of Londinium.
In a niche over the very tiny doorway and on each of the other three sides at the same level, stands a perfectly nude figure which I suppose to be that of the deified saint or Tirthakarai to which the tower was dedicated. Throughout its seven storeys the tower is covered with elaborate sculpture and horizontal mouldings. The door was locked with a brass lock, and it took some hunting to find the keeper of the key.
When I bowed down and crept at last within, the dusk was filled with a great whirring sound of many things. I clambered up to the open storey at the top, and as I climbed grew more used to the subdued light and could distinguish in the carving dancing-girls with strings of jewels, strange stags among trees and lines of geese, while a myriad long-eared bats squealed about my head. There was no lightning-conductor on the Tower of Fame.
The Tower of Victory, glowing a golden yellow in the declining sun, was obviously more used to visitors, and has an easier and a cleaner stairway. It is a fifteenth century monument built to commemorate a victory over Mahmud, King of Malwa, and has nine storeys covered with carved decoration. Within this also there are many sculptures of the Hindoo mythology—Brahma, Vishnu and Siva and their various incarnations. On the top storey but one there are eight carved marble columns very old and yellow, in an inner rank, and on the outer projecting portion of the storey other marble columns. By a wooden ladder I ascended from here to the top storey which is roofed with a dome restored last century, and now protected by a lightning-rod. There were no marble pillars on this upper storey which is octagonal in shape with four open sides and four closed by stone screens. Inside, against the latter, four stone slabs about two feet square are let in to a stone framework, and two of these are old and covered with inscription.
As I was driven away, all the edges of the tower glowed like burnished copper in the sunset light.
The twin cradles of the Jaina sect were the States of Mewar and Marwar; and while the former is still independent, the latter forms with Ajmere an isolated British district in the middle of Rajputana. I had now seen at Chitor one of the most famous Jain monuments in the Tower of Fame, and was next to journey to Mount Abu to see there the celebrated Jain temples which are not much later in date.
Mount Abu is a detached hill about fifteen miles on the south-west of the Aravalli Range. From Chitor I, therefore, went northwards to Ajmere, the city which Akhbar had so frequently visited on his pilgrimages to the shrine of its saintly anchorite. This saint was of the same Persian family as the Sheik Salim Chisti whose tomb I had seen at Fatehpur Sikri. His burial-place is known as the Dargah, whither I drove from Ajmere Railway Station.
There were steps up and steps down, and then a gateway painted bright blue with gold Persian lettering upon it and doors covered with repoussé metal. In the large courtyard within, the most noticeable object is the larger of two metal cauldrons—an iron pot of gigantic size—set in stepped stone, over a furnace. This is for cooking the rice and other food, offered for charitable distribution by wealthy pilgrims. In the same courtyard there are also tall metal candelabra with niches all the way up for small oil votive lamps. The great area covered by the Dargah includes mosques and other tombs, as well as that of the saint which last is entered through a series of silver doors.
The traveller in India soon grows accustomed to the wearing of garlands; but at Ajmere not only was I adorned at the tomb of Akhbar's saintly councillor, with long strings of roses and marigolds, but when I came to remount the tonga which had been left at the entrance to the Dargah, I found that it also had been decorated and now carried on each side a tree of pink and yellow paper flowers.
At Ajmere, a really beautiful treasure of architecture is a magnificent carved screen of sandstone arches and five rows of columns behind them, the remains of an otherwise ruined mosque called the Arhai-din-ka-jompra built from the materials of a former Jain temple about the end of the eleventh century. A lake which was made about the same date as the Arhai-din-ka-jompra has an embankment used as a public promenade on which there are white marble pavilions. When I reached the edge of this lake, through the beautiful trees of public gardens, the sun was nearly setting and suffused everything with the inevitable enchantment of its golden light.
But there are ugly sights as well as beautiful ones at Ajmere, and one of the worst pieces of gaudy modern barbarism is that called the Moolchu Temple, with painted images of elephants and painted corrugated iron and common plush and gilding seen through glass screens. It must not be supposed, however, that there is no good modern native building, and not far away I saw one of the best examples in the handsome Mayo College, a splendid pile of white marble built for the education of young Rajputs of high birth.
From Ajmere I travelled South again down the other side of the Aravalli Range on the way to Abu Road. In the background the Chinwan Mountains could be faintly seen beyond nearer hills, and masses of blue-grey rock split and cracked with dark fissures. The landscape was spotted with wriggling snatches of shadow from stunted trees with dried grey leaves.
Where any earth was visible it was yellow, and where it was covered by any kind of vegetation that was yellow too. Cotton plants here and there showed maroon-coloured heads, but the only really bright colour in the general white glare was the brilliant scarlet of the dak tree blossoms which glowed like red embers. Late in the afternoon I reached Abu Road and drove thence by tonga to Mount Abu. It was a terrible journey through choking dust. I could not get at my sand-glasses, and against a scourging wind kept my eyes shut as much as possible, only opening them now and then to peep at the black-faced monkeys that stared from roadside rocks. It was like the ordeal of some fairy story where the hero has to climb an enchanted mountain with sinister and malevolent powers fighting against his ascent. Dead trees gnarled and twisted shook with fantastic menace, and countless boulders seemed to cry out like the black stones to which previous wayfarers had been transformed by the mountain demon.
It was evening and quite dark when the tonga finally stopped at the equivalent of a livery stable, and I learned that the last part of the way was expected to be done by rickshaw. In the darkness, and being weary enough besides, I offered no resistance, and at length attained food and shelter at the dak bungalow of Mount Abu.
I had come to see the Dilwarra Temples, and the next morning after I had obtained the necessary permit I walked by an easy path to these curious buildings. There was no dust-storm now but clear fresh air and plenty of greenery.
I entered an outer court and seeking for some one who should open the gate of the temples came upon a man curled up on a bench in such a way that he seemed to show all the possible creases of his fat little body. He was an effeminate-looking creature and not, I imagine, a priest—are not Jain priests always clad in white?—dressed in two pieces of silk, one of an orange colour round his chest and the other of crimson partly covering his legs. He had short black hair and wore three large pearls on a thin ring through one of his ears.
When this decorative object at last arose he consulted with another who was rubbing down sandalwood on a stone to mix it with saffron powder for painting marks or spots on the temple images. Together they admitted me and I was shown round these famous and typical examples of Jain architecture. There were the cross-legged seated stone figure of the saint at the back of the image cell, the pyramidal or domed roof, and the pillared portico. Every part, and especially the curious struts of the pillars and the interior of the roof, was covered with elaborate carving, and the whole stood within a large yard surrounded by colonnades having a series of separate image cells against the wall. All these seated marble figures were alike, and all had fishy-looking eyes of glass or crystal with black centres.
In a separate building there was an equestrian statue of Vimala Shah, who built one of these temples. The horse was clumsy and droll-looking, with a broad nose, and had a small marble elephant on each side of him.
I only saw one priest inside the temple, and he was furnished with the traditional bib of the Jainas, the white cloth over mouth and nostrils. The attendant told me this was worn in order that the priest's breath might not contaminate the image of the saint which he called God, whereas the accepted purpose is to prevent the possible destruction by the priest of even minute forms of life which would otherwise be drawn in with his breath. Absolute respect for life in all its forms is one of the chief tenets of the Jaina sect which is very much akin to Buddhism, and may have somewhat preceded it in date.
"His Highness has sent a carriage for you." This was a two-horsed, two-wheeled vehicle in which I was speedily whirled away from the railway station of Idar Road, four hours' journey from Ahmadabad, along a very rough road. The Highness in question was Sir Pratap Singh, now the Maharajah of the little State of Idar.
The town of Idar itself was eighteen miles away, but close at hand beyond yellow ruined walls I could see the city of Ahmednagar at the palace of which Sir Pratap was in residence. Presently, leaving the road, we rumbled and bumped and lurched over a tract of sand covered with coarse, low bushes to the State guest-house which looked like a very ordinary dak bungalow. It was built on a square plan with doors in such positions as ensured a through draught. A large lizard scampered over the wire of the outer gate as I walked in over the matting of the verandah. Outer gates were placed on all four sides to permit the four pairs of inner double doors to be left wide open.
"I shall inform the Resident of your honour's arrival and he will arrange for your honour to pay his respects to His Highness at four o'clock." This fluent English proceeded from the man who had "met" me at the railway station.
I walked into the central room of the house which had eight double doors opening into it. All the walls and the ceilings were washed over with very pale blue. Great bees were booming and buzzing in and out over the bedsteads of which there was a large variety from the native charpoy to an iron double four-poster with brass ornaments and painted with flower garlands. In addition to the beds the furniture consisted of square wooden cane-seated chairs of ugly pattern covered with brown varnish—what is commonly known as a "nursery" table—with turned and varnished legs and no cloth, and part of a dressing-table by way of writing desk in one corner with pen, ink and paper.
In front of the bungalow, planted in the sand but quite out of the perpendicular, two square-sectioned blue wooden posts supported crookedly set lamp glasses in the blinding glare of noon sunlight.
There was no punkah in spite of the intense heat, but I counted no less than nineteen large iron rings in the ceiling. If these were not intended for punkahs perhaps they were to dissuade intending suicides by the difficulty of choosing which one to hang by!
The man who had driven me had disappeared with a promise that tiffin would come immediately, and while I was noticing the above-mentioned details I sat on one of the cane-seated chairs and Tambusami waited with an eye on the outer sand. A long time seemed to have gone by with no sound breaking the intense hush except the noise of the bees when Tambusami said: "One basket coming I see: one man coming I see," and from a blue palace beyond the tawny sandstone walls over the sand and out of the heat at last came—breakfast.
The one man carried a series of pans, fitted into one another like a tall cylinder in a frame, as well as the basket, and was accompanied by several little black Sambos carrying chatties of water on their heads. And now there were placed on the table a tea-cup with a hare-lip and the motto "Remember me," some marmalade in another tea-cup with blue cornflowers on it, and in gold the words "Think of me," and a third cup with the same motto containing some butter which looked like thin melted white lard, but when the contents of the cylinder of pans were put before me I forgot to notice what they were in my eagerness to consume them.
When four o'clock came and no one had called for me I started out alone with umbrella spread leaving Tambusami to watch our baggage at the bungalow. The heat was intense as I ploughed through the sand and scrub towards the arch in the broken wall which extended for a long distance on either side. It must at one time have been magnificent, being built of very large blocks of stone cut and squared with towers at intervals, and the gateway, with its deep but simple Gothic arch, was an imposing structure with handsome square pillars in the corners having brackets as in Jain work. As I passed through this archway I saw about forty yards ahead of me a line of houses, several storeys high, the lower part of which had evidently been built of stones from the dismantled wall. They were roofed with the half-tube tiles lipped over and under exactly like those of houses in the Pyrenees, and as I entered a street I was reminded of an old home of the former Dukes of Montmorency near Carcassonne by the carved woodwork of a house front.
Asking my way—by what must have seemed to native ears uncouth sounds and weird signs—I gradually reached what I supposed was the palace, and approaching a kind of guard-room with a number of soldiers lounging about, I asked to be directed to the Vakil. Another building was pointed out to me a little below where I was standing and thither I next turned my steps. It was a curious structure without any pretence at design, an iron spiral outside staircase in one portion and a long verandah in another upon a raised platform. I passed a few rose-bushes and walked up on to the verandah and found a long series of doors, and between them on wall and sideboards, rifles, polo-sticks, horse-trappings, bits, shields, revolvers, field-glasses, and one much dented cricket bat.
I knocked at one door after another pausing at each in hope of some response, and at the fifth door this was forthcoming and I found myself quite suddenly in the presence of His Highness the Maharajah Dhiraj Major-General Sir Pratap Singh.
Beyond the door was a vast apartment which seemed in semi-darkness as I entered from the outer glare. A young native gentleman in riding breeches and a khaki shirt came towards me and asked if I was the gentleman who had arrived that morning. It appeared there had been a misunderstanding about sending over for me, and I was at once led up to a charpoy with a white quilt on it upon which was reclining a strong-looking little man with a grizzled bullet head, kindly brown eyes and a grey moustache. He wore just a white cotton shirt and a thin pair of riding-breeches and had his well-shaped feet bare.
Rising into a sitting posture, Sir Pratap—for it was he—shook hands, and as soon as a chair had been brought for me we were chatting comfortably. It seemed that he had had fever badly two days before through the sudden and untimely heat and was only just recovering. Another native gentleman sitting at some distance was Sir Pratap's doctor.
Close by stood a man swinging a large fan punkah rhythmically with both hands, and outside the three window openings nearest to us bheesties (water-carriers) kept constantly pouring water upon the grass tatties or blinds.
His Highness spoke English well and was quick to understand and we talked for more than an hour on many subjects. He said he had fought plague successfully at Ahmednagar in what he believed was the only practicable way—namely by building two small cities of detached houses at some distance away and compensating the poorer people for turning out of their old dwellings. In this way he had made a clean sweep of the dirtier part of the town.
Sir Pratap expressed a great affection for our royal family and reverence for the memory of Queen Victoria, whose portrait he showed me with pride within two little folding doors of a shrine of elaborately-worked metal about two feet high and one and a half feet deep.
Spare and wiry in figure, simple and unaffected in dress, quick and alert in manner, there seemed little that was Oriental in this man, and in spite of the tatties and the fan very little suggestion of luxury in his surroundings. He said he had travelled a great deal but liked his own part of India better than any other place in the world.
"One difficult question for India," he said, "is the increasing consumption of cows' flesh and the consequent recent large increase in the slaughter of cattle. I do not believe it is good for our people in this hot climate to take to the eating of flesh. It is quite a different thing in Europe where the colder climate makes it practically a necessity. Here the price is already three times what it was a few years ago, which alone shows the diminution of cattle, and their continued slaughter for an agricultural people must produce harm. In any case we lose great numbers of cattle in our famine times which are more frequent of late, and even this year, though we shall not lose human lives through the famine, numbers of cattle must starve. Also I do not think our grain should be sent out of the country. This is no doubt good for the traders, but they are few and the continued export of grain is disastrous for the agricultural population."
Two trays of tea were brought in, one for each of us, and we poured out for each other, His Highness taking saccharine tabloids instead of sugar, and the motto "forget-me-not" upon my tea-cup suggested near relations to my breakfast furniture.
"The chief trouble of all in India," continued Sir Pratap, "is that the Mussulman will not be friends with the Hindoo. The Mussulman says the Hindoo is a bad man, and the Hindoo says the Mussulman is a bad man, and these, together with people in your English Parliament who call out and make a great noise, are all bad for India."