for women on one side by a hanging of mats. The public were English
soldiers and baboos with their children, and in the cheapest places a
packed crowd of coolies.
The manager also traded in clocks, and a selection was displayed for
sale at one end of the stalls.
The orchestra, consisting of a harmonium, a violin, and a darboukha,
played a languishing, drawling air to a halting rhythm, while the
chorus, standing in a line on the stage, sang the introductory verses.
The actors were exclusively men and boys, those who took female parts
wore rusty wigs over their own long, black hair; these were plaited on
each side of the face, and waxed behind to fall over the shoulders. The
costumes of velvet and satin, heavily embroidered with gold and silver,
were hideous.
The scenery was preposterous: red and green flowers growing on violet
boughs, with forests in the background of pink and yellow trees;
perspective views of streets, in which the houses were climbing over
each other, and finally a purple cavern under a brilliant yellow sky.
The actors spoke their parts like lessons, with a gesture only now and
then, and invariably wrong; and they all spoke and sang through the
nose in an irritating voice pitched too high.
The play was _Gul-E-Bakaoli_.
King Zainulmulook has lost his sight, and can recover it only if someone
will bring to him a miraculous flower from the garden of Bakaoli. His
four sons set out in search of it. Zainulmulook has a fifth son, named
Tazulmulook. At the birth of this child the king has had his horoscope
cast by the astrologers of the palace, who declared that the king would
become blind if he should see his son before his twelfth year; but
hunting one day the king has met Tazulmulook, who was walking in the
forest, and has lost his sight.
In a jungle we now see Tazulmulook banished and solitary, and he relates
his woes.
The four sons of the king presently come to a town. They ring at the
door of a house inhabited by a woman who, as the little English
translation tells us, carries on a foul trade, and Dilbar the
dancing-girl appears.
This Dilbar was a boy with a more woolly wig than the others, and to
emphasize her sex wore a monstrous display of trinkets round her neck
and arms, in her ears and nose.
Dilbar dances and sings before the brothers, and then proposes to play
cards. The stake is the liberty of the loser. The four princes play
against the dancing-girl, who wins and has them imprisoned on the spot.
Tazulmulook arrives in the same town, and is on the point of ringing at
Dilbar's door when he is hindered by his father's vizier, who tells him
how many times this dangerous woman has been the ruin of kings' sons.
But Tazulmulook, in a discourse on valour addressed to the audience, who
stamped applause, rejects the counsels of prudence and rings at the
dancer's door. Tazulmulook wins the game with Dilbar, and compels her to
release his brothers, but only after branding each on the back of his
neck.
The young prince then goes on his way in search of the magical flower.
He is about to rest awhile in a cavern, but at the moment when he lies
down on a stone it is transformed into a monster made of bladder, which
rears itself enraged in the air with a trumpet-cry. By good luck the
king's son calls upon the aid of the prophet Suleiman, whom the dragon
also reveres, and the pacified monster conveys Tazulmulook to the garden
of Bakaoli, and, moreover, gives him a ring which will be a talisman in
danger.
Tazulmulook finds Bakaoli asleep in her garden, and after plucking the
miraculous flower he exchanges the ring for that of the princess and
departs. Bakaoli awakes, and discovering the theft of the flower and of
her ring is much disturbed, and gives orders that the thief is to be
caught.
Tazulmulook on his way meets a blind man, whom he restores to sight by
the help of the magical flower; the man relates the story of the cure to
the four brothers, who quickly follow up Tazulmulook and presently
overtake him. After a short conflict they rob him of the talisman and
fly. The young prince is in despair, but as he wrings his hands he rubs
Bakaoli's ring and the dragon instantly appears. Tazulmulook commands
him forthwith to build a palace in front of that of King Zainulmulook.
While all this is going forward in the jungle, Bakaoli, disguised as an
astrologer, comes to the king, to whom she promises the coming of the
miraculous flower, and even while she is speaking the return of the four
princes is announced.
The old king is at once cured; he embraces his sons again and again.
After this emotion the first thing he remarks is the new palace that has
sprung from the ground exactly opposite his own.
He, with his four sons, goes to pay a call on Tazulmulook, whom he does
not recognize in his palace, when suddenly Dilbar arrives to claim her
prisoners. The fifth son then relates to the king the deeds of his elder
brothers, and in proof of his words points to the mark each of them
bears on his neck. The king anathematizes the princes, and sends them to
prison, but loads Tazulmulook with honours and affection.
Bakaoli, having returned to her own country, sends her confidante, named
Hammala, with a letter to Tazulmulook, who at once follows the
messenger. The prince and the queen fall in love with each other.
Bakaoli's mother finds them together, and furious at the disobedience of
her daughter, who is affianced to another rajah, she calls up a djinn to
plunge Tazulmulook in a magic fount. The prince finds himself
transformed into a devil with horns, and wanders about the jungle once
more. There he meets a pariah woman with three children, who begs him to
marry her. Tazulmulook in despair leaps back into the spring to die
there, and to his great surprise recovers his original shape.
Bakaoli bewails her lover's departure, for which no one, not even her
mother, can comfort her.
Tazulmulook, again an outcast in the jungle, rescues a lady related to
Bakaoli from the embrace of a demon, and she in gratitude takes the
prince to Bakaoli's court. So at last the lovers are united and married.
This interminable piece, with twenty changes of scene, dragged its weary
length till two in the morning. One by one the soldiers went away; even
the baboos soon followed them, and only the coolies remained,
enthusiastically applauding every scene, every harangue, in a frenzy of
delight, before the final apotheosis of Tazulmulook and Bakaoli, as man
and wife, lovingly united against a background of trees with golden
boughs.
AMRITSUR
In the midst of the Lake of Immortality stands a marble temple with a
roof and decorations of gold. All round the sacred lake palaces of
delicate hue form a circle about the sanctuary, which glistens in the
sun, its gilding and pale-tinted marbles reflected like the gleam of
precious stones in the calm, sheeny, deeply transparent water.
A causeway of white stone, with a fragile balustrade and columns
bearing lanterns of gold, leads from the shore to the temple.
Inside the building, under a silken Persian rug, stretched like an
awning, there were piles of coin on a cloth spread on the ground, with
flowers, rice, and sweetmeats offered there. In a recess was a band of
musicians--tom-toms and fiddles--scarcely audible in the turmoil of
shouted prayers and the chatter of the faithful.
At the end of a passage that runs round the temple an old woman who had
just been bathing was changing her wet saree for a dry one, and appeared
quite stripped, dropping her garments, and careful only not to let her
face be seen.
There was at the top of the temple a sarcophagus in a shrine, on which
were masses of impalpable silk gauze embroidered with gold, which looked
like a peacock's breast, so subtle were the transparent colours lying
one above another--green, blue, and yellow predominating, gauze so light
that the slightest breath set it floating in glistening and changing
hues; and on the snowy white pavement of the floor was strewn a carpet
of very pale lilac lilies and _mindi_ flowers.
LAHORE
The same ubiquitous terminus on a sandy plain, remote from everything;
then a drive jolting through bogs, and we reached the dirty, scattered
town crowded with people who had collected round a sort of fair with
booths for mountebanks, and roundabouts of wooden horses.
In an alley of the bazaar girls were lounging in hammocks hung to nails
outside the windows, smoking and spitting down on the world below.
A delightful surprise was a museum of Indian art, the first I had seen,
a fine collection and admirably arranged;[A] but the natives who
resorted hither to enjoy the cool shelter of the galleries talked to
each other from a distance, as is their universal custom, at the top of
their voices, which rang doubly loud under the echoing vaults.
The ancient palace of the kings of Lahore. Amid the ruins there is a
mosque of red stone flowered with white marble, the cupola of a
material so milky that it might be jade; and the structure is mirrored
in a pool of clear water, dappled with sun-sparks over the rose-coloured
stones at the bottom.
Another mausoleum is of lace-like carving in marble, the roof painted
with Persian ornament; and the whole thing is uninjured, as fresh as if
it had been wrought yesterday, under the broad shade of theobromas and
cedars that have grown up among the ruins.
Behind a ponderous wall, dinted all over by shot, and showing broad,
light patches once covered by earthenware tiles, is the palace of
Runjeet Singh, inlaid with enamelled pictures in green, blue, and yellow
of tiger-fights and horse-races, mingling with flowers and garlands of
boughs. The durbar, the hall or presence chamber, opens by a verandah on
a forecourt paved with marble; in its walls are mirrors and panels of
coloured glass over a ground of dull gold, agate-like tints iridescent
with a nacreous, silvery, luminous lustre.
In one vast hall were ancient weapons, swords and pistols, enriched with
precious stones; suits of armour damascened with gold, guns with silver
stocks set with pearls, and a whole battery of field-pieces to be
carried on camels' backs and spit out tiny balls--enormously, absurdly
long, still perched on their saddle-shaped carriages. And in a window
bay two toy cannon made of gold and silver, with which Dhuleep Singh
used to play as a child before he lost his realm.
At two or three leagues from Lahore, in a city of ruins, opposite a
tumble-down mosque which is strewing a powdering of rose-coloured stones
on its white marble court, stands the tomb of Jehangir, splendid, and
more splendid amid the squalor that surrounds it.
The sarcophagus rests in the depths of a vaulted crypt lighted only by
narrow latticed loopholes, and it is shrouded in a mysterious glimmer, a
mingling of golden sunbeams and the reflections from the marble walls
inlaid with precious stones.
On the tomb, in elegant black letters, is this inscription:
"_Here lies Jehangir, Conqueror of the World._"
As we returned to Lahore the palace rose before us among trees, a strip
of wall, uninjured, covered with sapphire and emerald tiles; a fragile
minaret crowning a tower bowered in flowering shrubs--and then the
vision was past. The carriage drove on for a long way by ruins and
vestiges of beauty, and re-entered the town, where lanterns were being
lighted over the throng that pushed and hustled about the fair.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] By Mr. John Lockwood Kipling, for many years the curator and head of
the art schools at Lahore.--_Translator._
RAWAL PINDI
From Lahore hither is an almost uninterrupted series of
encampments--English and native regiments established in huts in the
open fields far from every town, close only to the railway line. At one
station a detachment of Indian guards were drawn up, and Abibulla
declared from the number of men that they must be expecting a general at
least; but nothing was discharged from the train but some cases of
rupees, checked off by two English officers, and then carried to the
barracks under the escort of sepoys.
This Rawal Pindi is an English town of cottages surrounded by lawns and
shrubberies; about two streets of bazaar, and red uniforms everywhere,
Highland soldiers in kilts, white helmets, and the officers' and
sergeants' wives airing their Sunday finery in their buggies. The ladies
drive themselves, under the shelter of a sunshade on an all too short
stick, painfully held by a hapless native servant clinging to the back
of the carriage in a dislocating monkey-like attitude.
A regiment of artillery was marching into quarters. The Highlanders'
band came out to meet them: four bagpipes, two side drums, and one big
drum. They repeat the same short strain, simple enough, again and again;
in Europe I should, perhaps, think it trivial, almost irritating, but
here, filling me as it does with reminiscences of Brittany, especially
after the persistent horror of tom-toms and shrill pipes, it strikes me
as delightful--I even follow the soldiers to their quarters.
Among the officers was a young lady on horseback, her black habit
covered with dust. Instead of the pith helmet that the English ladies
disfigure themselves by wearing, she had a straw hat with a long cambric
scarf as a pugaree. She was pretty and sat well, and at the last turning
she pulled up and watched the men, the ammunition and the baggage all
march past, saluted them with her switch, and cantered off to the town
of "cottages." I saw her again in the afternoon, taking tea in her
garden as she sat on a packing-case among eviscerated bales, and giving
orders to a mob of slow, clumsy coolies, who were arranging the house.
All round the post-office there is invariably a crowd of natives
scribbling in pencil on post-cards held in their left hands. Their
correspondence is lengthy, minute, and interminable; in spite of their
concentration and look of reflection I could never bring myself to take
them seriously, or feel that they were fully responsible for their
thoughts and acts--machines only, wound up by school teaching, some
going out of order and relapsing into savages and brutes.
Stones flying, sticks thrown--at a little pariah girl, whose shadow as
she passed had defiled the food of a Brahmin. He merely threw away the
rice, which the dogs soon finished; but the bystanders who had witnessed
the girl's insolence in going so near the holy man--she so base and
unworthy--flew at the unhappy creature, who ran away screaming,
abandoning a load of wood she was carrying on her head.
PESHAWUR
As we approached the Afghan frontier, camp followed camp, clustering
round the railway stations that lie closer together on the line. In the
morning and towards evening there was a constant hum round the train, of
bagpipes, bugles, and drums, and the red or grey ranks were to be seen
of soldiers at drill.
Near the sepoys' tents long lines of mules picketed by their feet stood
by the guns; and further on baggage-camels, lying down, were hardly
distinguishable from the russet grass and the scorched ochre sand.
There are two towns of Peshawur: one a distracted, silly place, with no
beginning nor end, straggling along something in the manner of Madras,
with an embryonic bazaar and all the amusements demanded by soldiers;
the other enclosed in walls of dried mud, which are preserved only "to
protect the town from robbers."
In this Peshawur the houses are crowded along narrow, crooked alleys,
and there is but one rather wider street of shops, which here already
have a quite Persian character, having for sale only the products of
Cabul or Bokhara. The balconies, the shutters, the verandahs and
galleries are of wood inlaid in patterns like spider-net. The timbers
are so slight that they would seem quite useless and too fragile to
last; and yet they are amazingly strong, and alone remain in place, amid
heaps of stones, in houses that have fallen into ruin. In the streets,
the contrast is strange, of tiny houses with the Afghans, all over six
feet high, superb men wearing heavy dhotis of light colours faded to
white, still showing in the shadow of the folds a greenish-blue tinge of
dead turquoise. Solemn and slow, or motionless in statuesque attitudes
while they converse in few words, and never gesticulate, they are very
fine, with a fierce beauty; their large, open eyes are too black, and
their smile quite distressingly white in faces where the muscles look
stiff-set. Even the children, in pale-hued silk shirts, are melancholy,
languid, spiritless, but very droll, too, in their little pointed caps
covered with gold braid, and the finery of endless metal necklaces, and
bangles on their ankles and arms.
In one of the alleys by the outer wall was a little house with a door in
carved panels framing inlaid work as delicate as woven damask. A crowd
surrounding it could not be persuaded by Abibulla's eloquence to make
way for me, a suspicious-looking stranger.
In this house abode the postmaster of the Persian mails, and I wanted to
register a letter for Cabul.
Abibulla delivered a long harangue through the closed door; at last a
wicket was opened, framing an eye. I was invited to approach, and then,
after examination, the wicket in the polished door was abruptly closed!
There was a sort of murmur behind the door, like reciting a prayer, then
louder tones, indeed a very loud shout, repeated three times by several
voices at once; and then the one alone continued in a dull chant. The
door was half opened and I was beckoned, but to enter alone.
On the threshold I was desired to take off my shoes, because I was going
into the presence of a holy man. As I crossed the forecourt fresh and
ferocious shouts rang out; a curtain was lifted, and in a room scarcely
lighted by a tiny window, the air thick with smoke, I could just make
out a number of men, all standing, very excited, gesticulating wildly,
and once more they shouted their savage cry.
At the back of the room the master of the house squatted on the floor,
dressed in green richly embroidered with gold, and on his head was a
vase-shaped cap or tiara of astrakhan. Near him, in an armchair, sat a
perfectly naked fakir, his breast covered with jade necklaces. His face
was of superhuman beauty, emaciated, with a look of suffering, his eyes
glowing with rapt ecstasy. He seemed to be entranced, seeing nothing but
a vision, and intoxicated by its splendour.
Then starting to his feet, and stretching out his arm to point at me, he
poured forth invective in sharp, rapid speech. The words flowed without
pause:--
"Dog! traitor! cruel wretch! eater of meat!----"
And then seeing that I did not go, that on wakening again from his dream
I was still there, he fixed his eyes on me and caught sight of a medal
that I wear.
"Kali?" he asked.
"No; the Virgin Mary."
"What is the Virgin Mary?"
"The mother of Christ."
"Ah, your Kali, then?"
"No; Kali is a cruel, bloodthirsty goddess, while the Virgin----"
He interrupted me:
"She is the mother of Christ, you say? You are a stranger, and you
cannot know all the mischief they do us in the name of her Son."
While I was talking to the postmaster the fakir smoked a hookah, burning
amber powder and rose-leaves. The air was full of the narcotic
fragrance; a piercing perfume that mounted to the brain.
Another fakir, a young man, had come to sit at the elder's feet, and
when I had finished my business the "holy man" began to knead his
disciple's muscles, wringing and disjointing his arms and dislocating
his left shoulder; and, as if in mockery of my distressed expression, he
bent the lad's back inwards till his face was between his heels, and
left him for a long minute in that torturing position.
When at last the boy was allowed to return to his place in a corner he
sat quite still, his eyes staring stupidly and shedding large tears,
though not a muscle of his face moved.
In the close-shut room the air, loaded with scent and smoke, was quite
unbreathable; musicians playing behind a partition added to the
irritating effect of all this perfume and noise.
As I was leaving, the fakir rose amid the cries of all the people, who
clamoured for his blessing. He silenced them by a sign, then laying one
hand on my shoulder, after looking at my medal--
"Farewell," said he, "and may the Almighty protect you, for you look
kind."
The throng outside had increased; Abibulla could scarcely make way for
me to the end of the street, and for a long time I could still hear the
cries that reached us at a distance.
Off next morning to the Khyber Pass. The road lay across the vast
monotonous plain, richly productive all the way from Peshawur to the
foot of the hills. At one end of a field some men had spread a net and
were beating the field towards the corners with a heavy rope that broke
down the tall oats; before long the birds were seen struggling under the
meshes, but they were soon caught and carried away in cages.
Outside the fort which guards the opening of the pass there was
confusion; a mad scurry of men, running, shouting, hustling. Quite a
complicated _mêlée_ of animals bolting, elephants and camels let loose
and impossible to overtake, but caught at last.
After the delay, which in India is a matter of course, the caravan set
out--the last to go; for during the past three months no European had
crossed the pass, and in consequence of misunderstandings with some of
the rebel tribes to the north, even the natives were prohibited
henceforth from going to Cabul.
First went six armed regulars, then a party on horseback, for the most
part Persians, one of whom was carrying in his arms an enormous sheaf of
roses, which hid him completely and drooped over the saddle.
Suddenly there was a panic among the horses; they shied, reared, and
bolted across the fields, and the road being cleared, the elephants
belonging to the Ameer of Cabul went by, to march at the head of the
caravan. Next came a thousand camels, also the Ameer's; like the
elephants, they carried no baggage, but on the back of one female was a
young one, tied into a basket, born only the day before, all white and
woolly.
Asses followed, oxen and more camels, loaded beyond their strength with
old iron, tin pannikins, a whole cargo of goods in cases from Manchester
and Sheffield--so badly packed that things came clattering down as the
beasts pushed each other amid oaths and blows.
Women porters came on foot, hidden under bales, nets full of crocks,
faggots, and trusses of hay. Children, and women in sarees--fine
ladies--had nothing to carry; some were wrapped in _yashmacks_,
shrouding them from head to foot with a little veil of transparent
muslin over their eyes.
And to close the procession came more soldiers.
After inspecting my little permit to visit the Khyber, the officials at
the fort had placed in my carriage a soldier of the native Khyber
rifle-corps, six feet six in height, placid and gentle. When I got out
of the carriage to walk up a hill he would follow a yard or so behind,
and watching all my movements, looked rather as if he were taking me to
prison than like an escort to protect me.
We left the caravan far behind. In the gorge with its rosy-pink soil the
silence was exquisite, the air had the freshness of a mountain height,
and quite inexplicably amid these barren rocks, where there was not a
sign of vegetation, there was a scent of honey and almonds.
Children were selling whortleberries in plaited baskets; they came up
very shyly, and as soon as they had sold their spoil hurried back to
hide in their nook. Further on a little Afghan boy, standing alone and
motionless by the roadside, held out three eggs for sale.
At a turn in the road the view opened out to a distant horizon; the
plain of Peshawur, intensely green in contrast with the rosy tone of the
foreground; and far away the Himalayas, faintly blue with glaciers of
fiery gold in the sun, against a gloomy sky where the clouds were
gathering.
Between the cliff-walls of the defile, in a sort of bay, stands Ali
Musjid, a little white mosque where travellers tarry to pray.
Deeply graven in the stone of one of the walls is the giant hand of Ali
the Conqueror, the terrible, who came from the land of the Arabs,
killing all on his way who refused to be converted to Islam. And he died
in the desolate Khyber, where all who pass do him honour, and entreat
his protection on their way.