emperor, seated on a white marble throne embroidered with carving,
administered justice. At his feet, on a raised stone flag, the divan,
his prime minister took down the despot's words, to transmit them to the
people who were kept at a respectful distance under a colonnade, forming
a verandah round the imperial palace.
And this morning I had seen in the place of Akbar or Jehangir, a sturdy,
blowsy soldier, in his red coatee, his feet raised higher than his head,
spread out in his wicker deck-chair, and reading the latest news just
brought by the mail from Europe.
The sultana's mosque is quite small, of translucent milky-white marble,
and close by it is a red wall, hardly pierced by a narrow window with a
stone screen, behind which Shah Jehangir was kept a prisoner for seven
years.
Dewani Khas, the great hall of audience, on columns open on all sides to
the sky and landscape, overlooks a pit about thirty paces away where
tigers and elephants fought to divert the sultan and his court. At the
threshold is a large block of black marble--the throne of Akbar the
Great. At the time of the incursion of the Jâts, who drove the emperor
from his palace, as soon as the usurper took his seat, the stone, the
legend tells, split and shed blood; the iridescent stain remains to this
day.
Above the throne, in the white marble wall, is a round hole, the mark of
a cannon-ball at the time of the Mutiny. Out of this came a parrot,
gravely perching to scratch its poll; then, alarmed at seeing us so
close, it retired into its hole again.
Further on we came to a courtyard surrounded by a cloister, where the
market for precious stones was held. The empress, invisible under her
wrappers of gauze as thin as air, and surrounded by her women fanning
her, would come out on her high balcony to choose the gems that pleased
her for a moment by their sparkle, and then disappear into the gardens
behind insurmountable walls. In another court, a pool kept stocked with
fish gave Shah Jehangir the pleasure of fancying he was fishing.
At one corner of a bastion of the rampart rises the Jasmine tower, the
empress's pavilion, built of amber-toned marble inlaid with gold and
mother-of-pearl. A double wall of pierced lattice, as fine as a
hand-screen, enclosed the octagon chamber; the doors, which were of
massive silver jewelled with rubies, have been removed. The golden
lilies inlaid in the panels have also disappeared, roughly torn out and
leaving the glint of their presence in a warmer hue, still faintly
metallic. Recesses in the wall, like porticoes, served for hanging
dresses in, and low down, holes large enough to admit the hand, were
hiding-places for jewels, between two slabs of marble. In front of the
sultana's kiosk, basins in the form of shells, from which rose-water
poured forth, go down like steps to a tank below.
The subterranean passage leading from the empress's rooms to the mosque,
has in the roof a thick flagstone that admits a subdued glimmer as
through amber or honey, lighting up all one end of the dark corridor.
The sultan's bath is lined with panels of lapis lazuli framed in gold,
and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, or looking-glass, and the walls have
little hollow niches for lamps, over which the water fell in a shower
into a bath with a decoration of scroll-work. And in front of Jehangir's
room, again a series of basins hollowed in the steps of a broad marble
stair, where a stream of water fell from one to another.
We saw the Jasmine tower from a corner of the garden in the glow of
sunset. With its gilt cupola blazing in the low beams, its amber-hued
walls as transparent as melting wax, and its pierced screen-work, it
looked so diaphanous, so fragile, that it might be carried away by the
evening breeze. And beyond the pavilion, above the ramparts carved with
huge elephants, lies the old Hindoo palace, deserted by Jehangir for his
house of pale marbles--an endless palace, a labyrinth of red buildings
loaded to the top with an agglomeration of ornament supporting flat
roofs. And pagodas that have lost their doors, a work of destruction
begun by Aurungzeeb. One court is still intact, overhung by seventy-two
balconies, where the zenana could look on at the dancing of bayadères.
Perfect, too, is the queen's private apartment, with two walls between
which an army kept guard by day and by night.
A road between ancient trees and green fields which are perpetually
irrigated leads to Sicandra-Bagh. Here, at the end of a wretched village
of huts and hovels, is the magnificence of a stately portal of red stone
broadly decorated with white; and then, through a garden where trees and
shrubs make one huge bouquet, behold the imposing mass of the tomb of
Akbar the Great. The mausoleum is on the scale of a cathedral. There are
two stories of galleries in pink sandstone crowned by a marble pavilion
with lace-like walls; and there, high up, is the sarcophagus of white
stone, covered with inscriptions setting forth the nineteen names of
Allah.
Near this tomb is a stele with the dish on the top of it in which the
Koh-i-noor was found. In the crypt of the mosque, at the end of a
passage, is a vaulted room lined with stucco and devoid of ornament, and
here is the burial place of Akbar, a mound covered with lime. The
sarcophagus above, at the foot of which the Koh-i-noor once blazed, is
but the replica of this.
This cell is as dark as a cellar, barbarously squalid. But to all our
questions the moollah who was our guide only replied:
"Nothing could be fine enough to be worthy of Akbar, so this was made
in a hurry that he might at least rest in peace without delay."
In the heart of Agra towards evening people were busy in the square of
the Jumna Musjid stretching pieces of stuff over rather low poles to
form a tent. Then in long file came the labourers from a famine-camp,
with their sleep-walking gait, their glassy eyes, their teeth showing
like those of a grinning skull. Rags in a thousand holes scarcely
covered the horrors of their fleshless bodies.
The children of the bazaar watched them pass, holding out in their
fingers scraps of food--the remains of cakes, green fruit, or handfuls
of rice, and the famishing creatures quarrelled for the morsels,
frightening the little ones, who fled. Then they disappeared silently
under the awnings, filling the air with a smell of dust and pepper,
scaring the pigeons away from the pool for ablutions, and the birds
fluttered up in dismay in the rosy sunset glow, seeking some other
refuge for the night.
JEYPOOR
Broad streets crossing each other at right angles; houses, palaces,
archways flanked by towers, and colonnades, all alike covered with
pink-washed plaster decorated with white. And all the buildings have the
hasty, temporary appearance of a town run up for an exhibition to last
only a few months.
There is a never-ending traffic of elephants, baggage-camels, and
vehicles with shouting drivers; and on the ground are spread heaps of
fruit, baskets for sale, glass baubles and weapons. In all the pink and
white throng not an European dress is to be seen, not even one of the
vile compounds adopted by the baboo, a striped flannel jacket over the
dhoti. Men and women alike wear necklaces of flowers, or flowers in
their hair; the children are gaudy with trinkets and glass beads.
The Rajah's residence, of plaster like the rest of the town, is pink too
outside, but the interior is aggressive with paint of harsh colours. In
the living rooms is shabby furniture, gilt chairs turned one over the
other, as on the day after a ball. The curtains over the doors and
windows are of silk, but frayed and threadbare. In the shade of a
marble court with carved columns, clerks are employed in counting
money--handsome coins stamped with flowers and Indian characters, laid
out in rows. They count them into bags round which soldiers mount guard.
Outside the palace is a large garden, devoid of shade, with pools of
water bowered in flowers and shrubs that shelter myriads of singing
birds. At the end of the park is a tank full of crocodiles. A keeper
called the brutes, and they came up facing us in a row, their jaws open
to catch the food which the Rajah amuses himself by throwing to them.
In the bazaar a light, glossy cheetah was being led round for an airing.
The beast had on a sort of hood of silk stuck with peacock's feathers,
which its keeper pulled down over its eyes when it saw a prey on which
it was eager to spring; and with its eyes thus blinded, it would lick
the hand that gave it an anna with a hot tongue as rough as a rasp.
A salesman of whom I had bought several things, wishing to do me a
civility, called a tom-tom player, who was to escort me home rapping on
his ass's skin; and when I declined very positively, the poor man
murmured with a piteous, crushed look:
"What a pity that the sahib does not like music!"
All about the town of pink plaster, in the dust of the roads and fields,
are an endless number of dead temples--temples of every size and of
every period; and all deserted, all empty; even those that are uninjured
look like ruins.
And for an hour as we drove along towards Amber, the old town deserted
in favour of modern Jeypoor, the same succession of temples wheeled
past. The crenated walls enclose three hills, one of them crowned by a
fortress, to defend erewhile the white palace mirrored in the waters of
an artificial lake.
All round the Rajah's palace crowds a town of palaces, mosques, and
temples dedicated to Vishnu; and outside the walls, on a plain lying
between the hills of Amber, is another town, still thick with ruins amid
the forest of encroaching trees. And it is all dead, deserted,
dust-coloured, unspeakably sad, with the sadness of destruction and
desertion in the midst of a landscape gorgeous with flowers and groves.
In the palace of Amber, guides make a good business of showing us the
public rooms, baths, and bedrooms, all restored with an eye to the
tourist. In the gardens, heavy with perfume, the trees display swinging
balls of baked earth full of holes, which protect the ripening fruit
from the monkeys; a whole tribe of them scampered off at our approach,
and went to torment the peacocks that were solemnly promenading a path,
and that presently flew away.
DELHI.
In the centre of the modern fort, a belt of walls with gates that form
palaces under the arches, is the ancient residence of the Moguls. Beyond
the barracks full of native and English soldiers, we reached the cool
silence of the throne-room. Colonnades of red stone surround a throne of
white marble inlaid with lilies in carnelian on tall stems of jasper.
All round this throne, to protect it from the tourists, but also as if
to emphasize its vanity, is a railing.
On the very edge of the Jumna, where russet fields break the monotony of
its white sandy banks, is the private state-room, the residence of the
sovereigns of Delhi, built of translucent milky marble, warmed by the
reflection of gold inlaid on the columns and merged with the stone that
is turned to amber.
Under the white dome a wooden ceiling, gilt in the hollows of the
carving, has taken the place of an earlier ceiling of massive silver,
worth seventy lacs of rupees, which was carried off by the conquerors
after some long-ago seizure of the city. Inside, by way of walls, are
carvings in marble of twisted lilies, inconceivably graceful and light.
And then, at one of the entrances, those marble lattices, once gilt and
now bereft of their gold, look just like topaz in the midday sun. After
that magic splendour of gold and marbles fused to topaz and amber, the
rest of the palace--the sleeping-rooms, the couches inlaid with mosaic
flowers, the pierced stone balconies overlooking the Jumna--all seemed
commonplace and familiar.
From a quite small garden close to the palace a bronze gate with three
medallions of lilies in high relief, of marvellous workmanship, opens on
the Pearl Mosque, exquisitely white, at the end of its forecourt of
immaculate pavement enclosed by a marble balustrade. Three polished and
shining domes are supported by columns of snow made of a hard white
marble, scarcely broken by ornament, and carrying a roof hollowed into
three vaults. The rings are still to be seen on the marble walls
outside, to which, when the great Mogul came to prayer, curtains were
attached made of gold net and spangled with diamonds and pearls.
In the evening I was to dine with the officers of the Artillery mess,
and in going I lost my way. Suddenly before me stood the amber palace,
with blue shadows, moon-coloured, the carvings like opal in changing
hues of precious gems. Half hidden by a growth of jasmine that loaded
the air with fragrance, up rose the cupolas of the little mosque, like
pearls reflecting the sparkle of the stars.
Outside the town of Delhi a road bordered by great trees leads across
the white plain, all strewn with temples and tombs, to Khoutab, the
ancient capital of the Moguls--a dead city, where the ruins still
standing in many places speak of a past of unimaginable splendour. There
is a colossal tower of red masonry that springs from the soil with no
basement; it is reeded from top to bottom, gradually growing thinner as
it rises, with fillets of letters in relief, and balconies on brackets
as light as ribbands alternating to the top. It is an enormous mass of
red stone, which the ages have scarcely discoloured, and was built by
Khoutab-Oudeen Eibek to commemorate his victory over the Sultan
Pithri-Raj, the triumph of Islam over Brahminism.
To reach this tower in its garden of flowering shrubs the way is under
the Alandin gate of pink sandstone; the name evokes a tale of wonder,
and the pointed arch, exquisitely noble in its curve, looks like pale
vellum, graven all over with ornaments, and inscriptions to the glory of
Allah.
Close to the monumental trophy of Khoutab is a temple with columns
innumerable, and all different, overloaded with carvings incised and in
relief, with large capitals; beams meet and cross under the roof, also
carved in the ponderous stone, and the whole forms a cloister round a
court; while in the centre, amid Moslem tombs, an iron pillar stands,
eight metres high, a pillar of which there are seven metres sunk in the
ground--a colossal casting placed here in 317, when half the civilized
world was as yet ignorant of the art of working in metal. An inscription
records that "King Dhava, a worshipper of Vishnu, set up this pillar to
commemorate his victory over the Belikas of Sindhu."
And side by side with history a pleasing legend tells that King
Anang-Pal yearned to atone for his faults and redeem the earth from sin.
So by the counsels of a wise Brahmin he caused this vast iron spike to
be forged by giants, to be driven into the earth and pierce the serpent
Sechnaga, who upholds the world. The deed was done, but because certain
disbelieving men denied that the monster was dead, the king caused the
weapon to be pulled up, and at the end of it behold the stain of blood;
so the iron beam was driven in again. But the spell was broken--the
creature had escaped. The column remained unstable, prefiguring the end
of the dynasty of Anang, and the serpent still works his wicked will.
Only one entrance to the temple remains, built of polished red stone
mingled harmoniously with marble, toned by time to a warm golden hue
almost rose-colour. All the profusion of Indian design is lavished on
this gateway framing the marvel erected by Pal. Tangles of interlacing
letters incised and in relief, mingling with trails of flowers as lissom
as climbing plants, and supporting figures of gods; while a fine
powdering of white dust over the dimmed warm yellow of marble and
sandstone softens yet more the carved flowers and sinuous patterns, amid
which the images sit in tranquil attitudes.
A roofless mausoleum is that of the Sultan Altamsh, who desired to
sleep for ever with no vault over his tomb but that of the heavens; a
vast hall, its walls wrought with inscriptions in Persian, Hindostanee,
and Arabic, built of brick-red granite and yellow marble softened to
pale orange in the golden sunshine. Here and there traces may be seen of
wall-paintings, green and blue, but quite faded, and now merely a darker
shadow round the incised ornament. Hibiscus shrubs mingle their branches
over the tomb and drop large blood-red blossoms on the stone
sarcophagus. Further on is another mausoleum, in such good preservation
that it has been utilized as a bungalow for some official.
After passing the temples and tombs that surround the Khoutab, the town
of ruins lies scattered over the plain of pale sand and withered
herbage.
A prodigious palace has left the skeleton of its walls pierced with
large windows, and in the blackened stone, almost at the top of the
building, a balcony with a canopy over it, resting on fragile columns,
is still uninjured; of a pale yellow, like lemon-tree wood, it looks as
if it had come into existence only yesterday, a flower risen from the
death of the ruins.
Huge vultures were prowling about the place. At our approach they
flapped a little away, and then perching on a heap of stones preened
their feathers with clumsy, ungraceful movements.
A tank here is deep below ground, down three flights of galleries. Quite
at the bottom is a little stagnant water, into which children leap from
the top of the structure, a plunge of twenty metres, ending in a great
splash of green mud that smells of water-lilies and grease.
More and yet more palaces; remains of marble porticoes and columns,
walls covered with tiles glittering in the blazing sunshine like topaz
and emerald; and over all the peace of dust and death, the only moving
thing those vultures, in shades of dull grey almost indistinguishable
from the colour of the stones.
And suddenly, emerging from the ruins, we came on a Moslem street with
high walls, windowless, and waving plumes of banyan and palm trees
rising above the houses.
At the top of the street a caravan of moollahs were performing their
devotions at the tomb of a Mohammedan saint, whose sarcophagus was
enclosed within a balustrade of marble and a border of lilies,
alternately yellow and green, with large full-blown flowers in blue,
fragile relics that have survived for centuries amid ruins that are
comparatively recent.
The road goes on. Trees cast their shade on the flagstone pavement, but
between the houses and through open windows the sandy plain may be seen,
the endless whiteness lost in a horizon of dust.
And again ruins. Under an archway still left standing on piers carved
with lilies and foliage, lay a whole family of pariahs covered with
leprosy and sores.
Close to a village that has sprouted under the baobab-trees, in the
midst of the plain that once was Khoutab, in the court of a mosque, is
the marble sarcophagus of a princess. Grass is growing in the hollow of
the stone that covers her, in fulfilment of the wishes of the maiden,
who in her humility desired that when she was dead she should be laid to
rest under the common earth whence the grass grows in the spring. And
not far from the rajah's daughter, under a broad tamarind tree, in the
blue shade, is the tomb of Kushru, the poet who immortalized
Bagh-o-Bahar. On the sarcophagus, in the little kiosk, was a kerchief of
silk and gold, with a wreath of fresh flowers renewed every day by the
faithful.
A humble poet, more venerated than the kings whose superb mausoleums
are crumbling to dust in subjugated India, who, though she forgets her
past, is still true to her dreams.
Another magnificent temple, with marble arcades wrought to filigree,
curved in frilled arches, on spindle-like columns that soar to support
the cupolas, as light as flower-stems. A gem of whiteness and sheen in
the desert of ruins where yet stand three matchless marvels: the tower
of Khoutab, the gate of Alandin, and the column of Dhava.
Toglackabad, again an ancient Delhi, a rock on the bank of the Jumna
after crossing a white desert; walls of granite, massive bastions,
battlemented towers of a Saracen stamp, rough-hewn, devoid of ornament,
and uniform in colour--bluish with light patches of lichen. The
enclosure has crumbled into ruin, in places making breaches in the
walls, which nevertheless preserve the forbidding aspect of an
impregnable citadel.
Entering by one of the fourteen gates in the ramparts of stone blocks
scarcely hewn into shape, the city of palaces and mosques is found in
ruins, matching the fortifications, without any decoration, and all of
the same cold grey hue, like a city of prisons.
At a short distance from Toglackabad, on a solitary rock, stands a
square building of massive architecture, sober in outline, and crowned
by a stone dome. It dwells alone, surrounded by walls; the mausoleum of
Toglack, containing his tomb with that of his wife and his son, Mohammed
the Cruel.
And there are ruins all the way to Delhi, whither we returned by the old
fortress of Purana Kila, with its pink walls overlooked by a few aerial
minarets and more traces of graceful carving, the precursors of the
Divan i Khas and Moti Musjid the Pearl Mosque.
In the town camels were harnessed to a sort of carriage like a hut
perched on misshapen wheels, and rumbling slowly through the streets,
seeming very heavy at the heels of the big beast with its shambling
gait.
To the Chandni Chowk--the bazaar. In a miniature-painter's shop was a
medley of ivories, of boxes inlaid with silver and ebony, and toys
carved in sandal-wood.
The artist sat at work in a corner of the window, copying minutely, for
the thousandth time perhaps, a Taj or a Moti Musjid. Quite unmoved while
his shopman displayed his wares, he worked on with brushes as fine as
needles; but when, on leaving, I asked him where I could procure some
colours I needed, "Then the sahib paints?" said he; and he rose at once,
insisted on my taking a seat, pressed me to accept a little sandal-wood
frame, as a fellow-artist, and then would positively paint my portrait.
In a little alley of booths was a shop with no front show, and behind it
a sort of studio full of carvers and artists working on sandal-wood
boxes, ivory fans as fine as gauze, and wooden lattices with elaborate
flower patterns, used to screen the zenana windows. And in little
recesses workmen dressed in white, with small copper pots about them in
which they had brought rice for their meals, were chasing and embossing
metal with little taps of their primitive tools, never making a mistake,
working as their fancy might suggest, without any pattern, and quite at
home in the maze of interlacing ornament.
In order that I might be far from the noise of the street the merchant
had the objects I wished to see brought to me in a little room over the
shop. Everything was spread before me on a white sheet, in the middle of
which I sat. Refreshments were brought, fruits and sweetmeats, while a
coolie waved a large fan over my head--a huge palm-leaf stitched with
bright-hued silks.
In the distance we heard a sound of pipes, and the merchant hastened out
to call the nautch-girls, who began to dance in the street just below
us, among the vehicles and foot-passengers. There were two of them; one
in a black skirt spangled with silver trinkets, the other in orange and
red with a head-dress and necklace of jasmine. They danced with a
gliding step, and then drew themselves up with a sudden jerk that made
all their frippery tinkle. Then the girl in black, laying her right hand
on her breast, stood still, with only a measured swaying movement of her
whole body, while the dancer in yellow circled round, spinning as she
went. Next the black one performed a sort of goose-step with her feet on
one spot, yelling a so-called tune, and clacking her anklets one against
the other. Then, after a few high leaps that set her saree flying, the
dance was ended; she drew a black veil over her head, and turned with
her face to the wall. The other boldly asked for backsheesh, held up her
hands, and after getting her money, begged for cakes and sugar.