and gems, and sparkling with stones, and a wide rose-coloured sash
fringed with pearls. He wore no jewels but priceless diamond buckles in
his shoes. As I had lingered long in the morning at a jeweller's shop,
the prince wished to show me his possessions. Servants, as solemn as
gaolers, brought in many trays covered with enormous emeralds cut into
beads and strung on white cords, necklaces of pear-shaped pearls
threaded on almost invisible silk. And then, from among the goldsmith's
work, modelled into impossible flowers and chimeras twisted to make
heavy anklets, from among coat-buttons, rings and sword-guards sparkling
with diamonds, the Rajah took up a costly snuff-box and begged me keep
it as a remembrance.
The elephant of ceremony, covered with a velvet cloth embroidered with
gold, on which was placed a massive silver howdah edged with gold, was
in waiting to take me for a ride. Round the beast's neck hung a huge
necklace of balls as large as apples and long pendants from his ears,
all of silver, tinkling as he moved and glittering in the sun. The
mahout rested a ladder against the elephant's head for me to mount by,
and we set out, following the Rajah and escorted by sowars, to the very
modern tennis club of Palitana.
The game had begun. The prince's cousins, dressed in light white muslin,
seemed to fly as they ran after the ball in the fluttering of the
diaphanous stuff.
The guards' band played Indian tunes, to a measure I could not yet
catch, and Strauss' waltzes very oddly accented. Suddenly the princess
appeared, in soft rose-pink lightly touched with blue. She wore a pearl
necklace with slides of ruby and emerald, shoes thickly worked with
gold, and a broad pink sash somewhat darker in colour than her
silver-striped tunic.
Evening fell, purple and orange tinging the princes' muslins to delicate
hues; then very quickly all was dark. Deep melancholy came over us; we
all sat without speaking a word, while from afar came the clatter of
tom-toms from the temple, sometimes drowning the music, which droned on
in a minor key, a maundering strain without a close but constantly
repeating itself.
The Rajah, a prisoner in his little state, a ruler only in name and
deposed from his power, as I rose to take my leave, cast a glance of
deep melancholy towards a last golden beam that quivered on the sacred
hill, and seemed to awake from a dream.
BHAWNAGAR
The little palace of Nilam Bagh, panelled inside throughout with carved
wood, looks like a jewel-casket dropped in a vast park of green shade
and broad lawns. Rawl Shri Bhaosinhji, Rajah of Bhawnagar, is very
young, almost a child, and still very shy, dressed in the European
fashion in a long grey overcoat, with a voluminous turban of
turquoise-blue gauze.
As soon as he had bid us welcome, bunches of chrysanthemums were
presented to us tied round a little stick. The Rajah hung garlands of
jasmine round our neck, and a servant sprinkled us with otto of roses.
The conversation turned on Europe, which Rawl Shri regards as a land of
marvels, where fairy-like manufactures are produced and extraordinary
forces have subjugated nature. He, like his cousin of Palitana, has a
passion for horses, and he took me to visit his stud.
On the edge of a pool, where, like a huge, full-blown lotus flower,
stands a kiosk of sculptured marble, dedicated to the Rajah's mother, we
came upon the shoe market, the last survival of a time not so very long
ago, when shoemakers, as working on the skins of dead beasts, dared not
come within the precincts of a town.
It was a miserable assemblage of booths and tumble-down dwellings,
crowded round a sumptuous old palace with porticoes carved with
divinities. The new town consists of modern buildings, devoid of style,
the residence of wealthy Parsee merchants. Here are libraries,
archives--all kinds of offices, which seem so useless here, and which,
till I was told what they were, I took to be a prison.
A long train of wailing women, loud in lamentation, came slowly out of a
house where one lay dead whom they had just been to look at, on their
way now to wash their garments, defiled by contact with the body. But
all dressed in red, with gaudy embroidery in yellow, white, and green,
and large spangles of looking-glass glittering in the sun, they did not
look much like mourners.
Really the prison this time! in the midst of a large enclosure with high
walls; a building on a star-shaped plan, with large windows to admit air
and daylight. The prisoners, in a white uniform, with chains on their
feet, were manufacturing various articles in basket-work, and in a shed
with a cotton awning a hundred or so of convicts were weaving carpets.
The brilliancy of colour was indescribable; the vividness of the medley
of worsted piled by the side of the gorgeous looms, the light hues of
the dresses, the faded turbans touched with light, the glitter of the
steel chains, the bronze skins, glorified to gold in the quivering
sunshine, which, scarcely subdued by the awning, bathed the scene in a
glow so intense that it seemed to proceed from the objects themselves.
Behind each loom sat a warder, with the pattern of the carpet on his
knees, dictating the colours to the weavers, chanting out his weariful
litany of numbers and shades in a monotonous voice.
A poor old fellow, behind a grating that shut him into a kind of hovel,
called out to us, first beseeching and then threatening, rushing
frantically to the back of his hut and at once coming forward again with
fresh abuse. He was a dangerous madman, placed there to keep him out of
mischief and to be cured by the Divinity.
In the bazaar I sought in vain for the petticoats embroidered with
rosettes, flowers, and elephants pursued by tigers, such as the women
wear here; these robes are made only to order and are not to be found.
Then Abibulla simply asked a beggar-woman to sell me hers. The poor
creature, hooted at by some old gossips, retired into a corner to
undress, and, wrapped in the packing-cloth in which she had been
carrying some rags, brought me the petticoat.
A tame white antelope was wandering about the garden of the old rajahs'
palace, under a shower of gardenia-like flowers that hung by a stem
scarcely thicker than a thread. The whole of one avenue was strewn with
this snow, on which the graceful little beast, with its large sad eyes,
was feeding. Further on, under some other trees with red blossoms,
stands a little mausoleum built by the prince over Jacky, his dog, "who
was faithful and good."
Some native lancers were manoeuvring; they charged at top speed in a
swirl of golden dust, which transfigured their movements, making them
look as though they did not touch the earth, but were riding on the
clouds. They swept lightly past, almost diaphanous, the colour of their
yellow khaki uniforms mingling with the ochre sand; and then, not ten
yards off, they stopped short, with astonishing precision, like an
apparition. Their lances quivered for an instant, a flash of steel
sparks against the sky--a salute to the Maharajah--and then they were as
motionless as statues.
The regiment is housed under sheds, the horses picketed to the ground by
one fore and one hind foot. They are thoroughbred and magnificent
beasts, almost all from the prince's stud, and affectionately cared for
by the men, who were delighted to be complimented on their steeds.
A New Year's dinner this evening at the Guest Bungalow. The prince,
forbidden by his religion to eat with men who are not of his own caste,
was represented by Mr. S----, the English engineer at Bhawnagar.
The long table was filled with officials and their wives, as happy as
children--pulling crackers at dessert, putting on paper caps, singing
the latest music-hall nonsense; while outside, jackals whined, suddenly
coming so close that they drowned the voices and the accompaniment on
the piano.
At the railway station a woman, who would accept no gratuity, strewed
flowers on the cushions of my carriage, and put garlands along the
grooves of the open windows--bunches of ebony flowers, of Indian
cork-flowers, lilies, and China roses on the point of dropping, only
hanging to the calyx by the tip of the petals.
In the distance, across the plain, herds of deer were feeding, and
hardly looked up as the train went by.
At a station where we stopped, a man with a broad, jolly, smiling face
got into the carriage. He was a juggler and a magician, could do
whatever he would, and at the time when the line was opened he
threatened that if he were not allowed to travel free he would break the
trains into splinters. The officials had a panic, and the authorities
were so nervous that they gave way; so he is always travelling from one
station to another, living in the carriages.
He came into ours as if he were at home, and amused himself by worrying
me. At first he made believe to throw my rings out of window,
substituting others, I know not how, which I saw fall on the line and
roll into the grass on the bank. My watch got into his hands and
vanished; I found it in my friend T----'s pocket, and afterwards in a
basket of provender closed at Bhawnagar, and which I unpacked with my
own hands.
The man was dressed in blue and silver, his belt studded with four-anna
pieces; hanging to his girdle was a whole array of small knives,
sheaths, and boxes. With his sleeves turned up to his elbows, he fairly
amazed me, conjuring away into the air eight rupees that filled his
hand, and finding them again one by one in our pockets, bags, or plaids.
He turned everything topsy-turvy, swaggered as if he were the master,
and then went off, with his broad smile, to amuse other travellers.
At another station, a man, standing on the carriage step, held out a
broad sheet to a servant, the two ends falling to the ground. Then a
lady stepped out, hid herself under the stuff, which wrapped her from
head to foot, and walked along the platform with a woman-servant. She
was the wife of some superior clerk, not rich enough to have a palankin,
but of too high caste to uncover her face--a white bundle tottering
along the platform. One of her antelope-skin slippers came off; for a
second a tiny foot was put out with silver anklets. The woman put her
mistress's shoe on again, and then both went to the waiting-room
reserved for ladies.
BOMBAY
A town in mourning. In the suburban stations, so crowded but three weeks
since, there was nobody, and nobody in the train we travelled by. No
coolies for the baggage, no carriages, and the tramcars running down the
wide, deserted road carried no passengers. The hotel was closed, all the
servants had fled in terror of the plague, which was raging with
increased violence. Every shop had the shutters up; the great market,
full of golden fruit and shaded by the flowering trees, was equally
empty, and in the bazaar the rare wayfarers hurried by in silence.
In the evening at Byculla, in the street of the disreputable, in front
of a house hermetically closed, and painted with a round red spot for
each person who had died there, a fire of sulphur was burning with a
livid glow. Only one gambling-house tried to tempt customers with a
great noise of harmonium and tom-toms; and from a side street came a
response of muffled tambourines and castanets. First the dead, wrapped
in red stuff and tied to a bamboo, and then the procession turned into
the lighted street. White shapes crowded by, vanishing at once, and the
harmonium again rose above the silence with its skipping tunes, and the
tom-toms beating out of time--and attracted no one.
HYDERABAD
At night, in the crowded station, a guard of honour was waiting,
composed of sepoys. There was shouting among the crowd, a fanatical
turmoil, a storm of orders, and heavy blows. Some great magnate got out
of the train, surrounded by secretaries and officers. The soldiers,
bearing torches, attended him to his carriage; they remounted their
horses, following the vehicle, in which a light dress was visible. Very
fast, and with a great clatter, they rode away into the silent night
fragrant with rich scents; they were lost under the trees to reappear in
the distance on a height, the torches galloping still and the smoke
hanging in a ruddy cloud above the bright steel and the white cruppers.
Then, at a turn in the road, they all vanished.
Beyond the new town of broad avenues planted with trees and bordered
with gardens, was a brand-new bridge of gaudy bricks over a river,
almost dry, where a swarm of naked natives were performing their
ablutions--washing linen and shaking out red and white cloths, as far as
the eye could see. Buffaloes lying in the mud were sleeping among the
tame ducks, the ibis, and the herons, all seeking their food. An
elephant plunged into the water, splashing it up and scaring thousands
of bright birds, which flew up against the intensely blue sky.
A tall wide gate beyond the bridge opens into the ferocious fortress of
Hyderabad.
Soldiers, bristling with daggers and pistols in their belts, are on
guard at the gate. Pikes and long muskets stand piled in the background;
over this arsenal, flowering jasmine and convolvulus with enormous bell
flowers hang their graceful shade.
In the streets, swarming with people, every woman who is not a pariah,
walks veiled in all the mystery of her unrevealed features, her long,
dreamy eyes alone visible.
Country folks bring in cages of birds full of the poor little fluttering
things, which are bought by children and by many men, captive at the end
of a long string; pretty black-headed bulbuls, so bold in the land of
the Buddhists, and victims here to the Moslems.
A palankin, hung with heavy red curtains, went by very quickly, borne by
five men. They chanted a sort of double-quick march, marking the time
with a plaintive sigh and a slight bend of the knees, which gave their
pace the appearance of a dance, the litter swaying very gently.
A spell seemed to linger over this little bazaar, to slacken every
movement and give the people an indolent grace. They spoke languidly in
the shade of the awnings spread by the flower-sellers and the jewellers,
who, with little ringing taps, were hammering out minute patterns on
silver anklets and necklaces.
Traversing the narrow avenues that intersect the bazaar, we came to a
series of quiet courts; here were the police-station, the small
barracks, and stables for camels and elephants. In a blind alley we
found a white mosque, where men were praying robed in pink and green;
while opposite, below a house consisting of three stories of arcades,
some Syrian horses, as slender as gazelles, were exercising on the
bright-hued mosaic floor of the open stable.
Between the houses tiny garden-plots full of flowers surround
gravestones, on which fresh roses are constantly laid.
Elephants came along, stepping daintily, but filling the whole width of
the street, looking, with one little slanting eye cocked, as if they
were laughing at the foot-passengers who were compelled to squeeze
against the wall.
Presently three beggar-women came up to sing from door to door. In their
arms, like babies at the breast, they carried shapeless idols painted
red, bedizened with spangles and gilt paper. They wailed out a ditty
repeated again and again, knocked perseveringly at the doors, insisting
on alms; and then, when they had received it, they touched the
threshold with their blood-coloured puppets and departed.
In the shops the salesmen, to weigh their merchandise, had a strange
collection of curious weights--dumps, rings, balls of copper, iron, or
lead, stamped or inlaid with symbols and flowers; fragments of spoons to
make up too light a weight, even pieces of wood; and they used them all
with perfect readiness and never made a mistake.
Where the roads cross there are basins where flowers are kept fresh, and
above them white pigeons are always fluttering. Public scribes,
squatting cross-legged on the ground, trace letters that look like
arabesques, on rice-paper with a reed pen. Those who dictate them crouch
beside them with an absorbed and meditative expression, dropping out the
words one by one with long pauses between.
Then some men go past who have a stick like a distaff thrust through
their belt with a net wound round it; they net as they walk, heedless of
jostling, their eyes fixed on their work.
In the distance is the great mosque which no unbeliever may enter; the
doors stand wide open. The only ornaments on the white walls are the
lamps, hung with red. In the court of the mosque, under magnificent
trees, are the tombs of the Nizams, with stone lattices, jewellery of
marble, fragile pierced work, whereon wreaths of pale flowers are
wrought with infinite grace. Near these tombs are two large fountains,
where a crowd of men were bathing, talking very loud; and a large basin
of porphyry full of grain was besieged by grey pigeons.
All round the mosque, in narrow alleys, are more and yet more tombs,
strewn with roses and enclosed in little plots. Some stand out in the
street unenclosed, like milestones.
There was a children's garden-party to-day in the grounds of the English
Resident; a crowd of fair-haired babies, excessively _Greenaway_ in
their long, light frocks with bright-hued sashes. They shouted with joy
at the swings and wooden horses, clapping their hands when it came to
their turn to ride the elephant that marched about the park--so fair, so
bright, with their nurses or Indian ayahs wrapped in crude showy
muslins.
And as they went home at nightfall enormous bats came out and flew
across above the tall trees in heavy, steady, straight flight. Without a
sound they made for the last gleam on the horizon, where the vanished
sun had left a crimson line; and what an insistent image of death and
oblivion were those great black fowl, slowly flapping their
five-fingered wings spread out round their bodies, headless as they
would seem, so small is the head, and so close-set on the neck. One
might fancy that they were bearing away the day, gliding noiseless and
innumerable towards the west, where already the last gleam is dead.
Outside the fortifications is a peaceful township of large gardens with
row on row of tombstones and mausoleums; some of enormous size, palaces
of the dead, and others smaller, but wrought like lacework of stone. For
a league or more the necropolis lies on both sides of the road. Across
the door of each mausoleum hangs a chain by the middle and the two ends.
But this suburb is now no more than a heap of huts and hovels. The
tombs, ruined and overthrown, are few and far apart, heaped with sand,
and showing as arid hillocks amid the level of withered grass. The plain
beyond, laid out in rice-fields of a tender green, furrowed with silver
streamlets, spreads unbroken to the foot of a huge wall of the hue of
red gold enclosing a hill; and on entering the precincts, behold, in
the bays of the thickness of the wall, a whole village where dwell the
families of the soldiers who guard this citadel.
An inner fortress, another portal held by armed men, and a walled
enclosure, is Golconda, the former capital of the sovereigns of the
Deccan. The entrance is through a magnificent archway of gigantic
proportions; to close it there are two gates of heavy wood studded all
over with long iron spikes, against which, during a siege, elephants
charged to their death.
All round the Royal Hill ancient buildings are piled in stages, the
remains of still majestic magnificence. The thorn-brakes cover
supporting walls as broad as crenellated terraces; fragments of light
and fantastic architecture stand up from amid golden blossoms; tottering
colonnades overhang tanks, all green at the bottom with a pool of
brackish water.
At an angle of the stairs of violet-tinted stone, which lead to the
summit of the hill, a tablet of green marble, engraved in flowing Arabic
characters, remains uninjured, the record of the great deeds of some
emperor of Golconda.
At the top, facing two immense rocks that look like couchant lions,
there was another palace; one wall alone is left standing; on the
creamy marble a peacock spreads its tail, carved into very delicate
sprays and flowers.
The view spread to the horizon of mauve-pink sky, very faintly streaked
with green. We could see the white mass of Secunderabad, a town of
English barracks, at the foot of chaotic red-brown rocks, looking like
the heaped-up ruins of some city of the Titans; and among trees shrouded
in blue smoke, Hyderabad, conspicuous for its two mosques--the tomb of
the Empress and the Jumna Musjid, the mausoleum of the Nizams.
Further yet lay the artificial lake of Meer Alam, reflecting the palace
of Baradari and the russet plain, infinite as far as the eye could reach
towards the north, where other superb mausoleums were visible in their
whiteness.
At our feet were the two walls, the outer wall enclosing the palace, the
gardens, the arena, where fights were given between elephants and
tigers; the inner wall, ten metres high, built round the zenana--the
women's palace--of which even the foundations have almost disappeared
under the overwhelming vegetation.
Mystery broods over this ruined past; grandeur seemed to rise up in the
sunset glow. We went down the hill, while behind us a saffron haze
veiled the Royal Hill, effaced every detail of architecture, and shed
over all an amethystine halo.
It was melancholy to return under the gloomy, spreading banyans, through
the dimly-lighted suburbs, where the people were still at work and
selling their wares; and the dungeon, the dead stones, the guns now for
ever silenced and pointed at vacancy, were lost in blue darkness.
Our last evening at the Residency, where I had spent days made
enchanting by music.
The servant who came to tell me that dinner was served went barefoot,
like all native servants, in spite of his livery--a sash and a
shoulder-belt arranged over the Indian costume, and bearing the arms of
England, and a monogram placed in his turban.
He appeared without a sound, visible only as a white figure, his brown
face lost, effaced in the gloom of the dimly-lighted room. For a moment
I had a really uncanny sensation at this headless apparition, but in an
instant there was the gleam of a row of brilliant teeth, the light in
the eyes, and the eternally smiling face of the household coolie.
On quitting Hyderabad, to the right and left of the iron road, the
landscape was for a long way the same; rocks, that looked as if they had
been piled up and then rolled over, lay in russet heaps among peaceful
little blue lakes without number, breaking the monotony of the wide,
scorched fields, a sheet of pure gold. At one of the stations a beggar
was rattling his castanets furiously, and singing something very lively
and joyous. At the end of each verse he shouted an unexpected "Ohé!"
just like the cry of a Paris ragamuffin.
Here in southern India the women wear hardly any trinkets, and their
garb consists of sarongs and sarees, so thin that their shape is visible
through the light stuff. In their hair, which is knotted low on the
neck, they stick flowers, and occasionally light trailing sprays fall
down on the throat. They all have gold studs screwed into the two upper
front teeth; hideous are these two red-gold teeth among the others,
sound and white under young lips!
Then, on the right, endless pools and rivers; naked men were ploughing
in the liquid mud and splashed all over by the oxen drawing a light
wooden plough, their bronze bodies caked ere long with a carapace of
dry, grey mud.
The rice, lately sown, was sprouting in little square plots of dazzling
green; it was being taken up to transplant into enormous fields
perpetually under water. All the "paddy" fields are, in fact, channelled
with watercourses, or if they are on higher ground, watered from a well.
A long beam is balanced over the mouth of the well, and two boys run up
and down to lower and raise the bucket; a man tilts the water into the
runlets out of a large vessel of dusky copper, or perhaps out of a
leaky, dripping water-skin.
The ripe rice, in golden ears, is cut with sickles; a row of women in
red gather it into sheaves, which men carry on their back, at once, to
the next village, and there it is threshed out forthwith on floors but
just swept.
And so, on both sides of the way there are rice-fields without end;
those that were reaped yesterday are ploughed again to-day.