_Does not in any sort describe the Dead City of Amber, but gives
detailed information of a Cotton Press._
And what shall be said of Amber, Queen of the Pass--the city that Jey
Singh bade his people slough as snakes cast their skins? The
Globe-Trotter will assure you that it must be “done” before anything
else, and the Globe-Trotter is, for once, perfectly correct. Amber lies
between six and seven miles from Jeypore among the “tumbled fragments of
the hills,” and is reachable by so prosaic a conveyance as a
ticca-ghari, and so uncomfortable a one as an elephant. _He_ is provided
by the Maharaja, and the people who make India their prey are apt to
accept his services as a matter of course.
Rise very early in the morning, before the stars have gone out, and
drive through the sleeping city till the pavement gives place to cactus
and sand, and educational and enlightened institutions to mile upon mile
of semi-decayed Hindu temples--brown and weather-beaten--running down to
the shores of the great Man Sagar Lake, wherein are more ruined temples,
palaces and fragments of causeways. The water-birds have their home in
the half-submerged arcades and the _mugger_ nuzzles the shafts of the
pillars. It is a fitting prelude to the desolation of Amber. Beyond the
Man Sagar the road of to-day climbs up-hill, and by its side runs the
huge stone-causeway of yesterday--blocks sunk in concrete. Down this
path the swords of Amber went out to kill. A triple wall rings the city,
and, at the third gate, the road drops into the valley of Amber. In the
half light of dawn, a great city sunk between hills and built round
three sides of a lake is dimly visible, and one waits to catch the hum
that should rise from it as the day breaks. The air in the valley is
bitterly chill. With the growing light, Amber stands revealed, and the
traveller sees that it is a city that will never wake. A few _meenas_
live in huts at the end of the valley, but the temples, the shrines, the
palaces, and the tiers-on-tiers of houses are desolate. Trees grow in
and split open the walls, the windows are filled with brushwood, and the
cactus chokes the street. The Englishman made his way up the side of the
hill to the great palace that overlooks everything except the red fort
of Jeighur, guardian of Amber. As the elephant swung up the steep roads
paved with stone and built out on the sides of the hill, the Englishman
looked into empty houses where the little grey squirrel sat and
scratched its ears. The peacock walked upon the house-tops and the blue
pigeon roosted within. He passed under iron-studded gates whereof the
hinges were eaten out with rust, and by walls plumed and crowned with
grass, and under more gateways, till, at last, he reached the palace and
came suddenly into a great quadrangle where two blinded, arrogant
stallions, covered with red and gold trappings, screamed and neighed at
each other from opposite ends of the vast space. For a little time these
were the only visible living beings, and they were in perfect accord
with the spirit of the spot. Afterwards certain workmen appeared, for it
seems that the Maharaja keeps the old palace of his forefathers in good
repair, but they were modern and mercenary, and with great difficulty
were detached from the skirts of the traveller. A somewhat extensive
experience of palace-seeing had taught him that it is best to see
palaces alone, for the Oriental as a guide is undiscriminating and sets
too great a store on corrugated iron-roofs and glazed drain-pipes.
So the Englishman went into this palace built of stone, bedded on stone,
springing out of scarped rock, and reached by stone ways--nothing but
stone. Presently, he stumbled across a little temple of Kali, a gem of
marble tracery and inlay, very dark and, at that hour of the morning,
very cold.
If, as Violet-le-Duc tells us to believe, a building reflects the
character of its inhabitants, it must be impossible for one reared in an
Eastern palace to think straightly or speak freely or--but here the
annals of Rajputana contradict the theory--to act openly. The crampt and
darkened rooms, the narrow smooth-walled passages with recesses where a
man might wait for his enemy unseen, the maze of ascending and
descending stairs leading no-whither, the ever present screens of marble
tracery that may hide or reveal so much,--all these things breathe of
plot and counter-plot, league and intrigue. In a living palace where the
sightseer knows and feels that there are human beings everywhere, and
that he is followed by scores of unseen eyes, the impression is almost
unendurable. In a dead palace--a cemetery of loves and hatreds done with
hundreds of years ago, and of plottings that had for their end--though
the grey beards who plotted knew it not--the coming of the British
tourist with guide-book and sunhat--oppression gives place to simply
impertinent curiosity. The Englishman wandered into all parts of the
palace, for there was no one to stop him--not even the ghosts of the
dead Ranis--through ivory-studded doors, into the women’s quarters,
where a stream of water once flowed over a chiselled marble channel. A
creeper had set its hands upon the lattice here, and there was dust of
old nests in one of the niches in the wall. Did the lady of light virtue
who managed to become possessed of so great a portion of Jey Singh’s
library ever set her dainty feet in the trim garden of the Hall of
Pleasure beyond the screen-work? Was it in the forty-pillared Hall of
Audience that the order went forth that the Chief of Birjooghar was to
be slain, and from what wall did the King look out when the horsemen
clattered up the steep stone path to the palace, bearing on their
saddle-bows the heads of the bravest of Rajore? There were questions
innumerable to be asked in each court and keep and cell; aye, but the
only answer was the cooing of the pigeons on the walls.
If a man desired beauty, there was enough and to spare in the palace;
and of strength more than enough. By inlay and carved marble, by glass
and colour, the Kings who took their pleasure in that now desolate pile,
made all that their eyes rested upon royal and superb. But any
description of the artistic side of the palace,
[Illustration: Page 30--“Bearing on their saddle-bows the heads of the
bravest of Rajore?”]
if it were not impossible, would be wearisome. The wise man will visit
it when time and occasion serve, and will then, in some small measure,
understand what must have been the riotous, sumptuous, murderous life to
which our Governors and Lieutenant-Governors, Commissioners and Deputy
Commissioners, Colonels and Captains and the Subalterns after their
kind, have put an end.
From the top of the palace you may read if you please the Book of
Ezekiel written in stone upon the hillside. Coming up, the Englishman
had seen the city from below or on a level. He now looked into its very
heart--the heart that had ceased to beat. There was no sound of men or
cattle, or grind-stones in those pitiful streets--nothing but the cooing
of the pigeons. At first it seemed that the palace was not ruined at
all--that presently the women would come up on the house-tops and the
bells would ring in the temples. But as he attempted to follow with his
eye the turns of the streets, the Englishman saw that they died out in
wood tangle and blocks of fallen stone, and that some of the houses were
rent with great cracks, and pierced from roof to road with holes that
let in the morning sun. The drip-stones of the eaves were gap-toothed,
and the tracery of the screens had fallen out so that zenana-rooms lay
shamelessly open to the day. On the outskirts of the city, the strong
walled houses dwindled and sank down to mere stone-heaps and faint
indications of plinth and wall, hard to trace against the background of
stony soil. The shadow of the palace lay over two-thirds of the city and
the trees deepened the shadow. “He who has bent him o’er the dead”
_after_ the hour of which Byron sings, knows that the features of the
man become blunted as it were--the face begins to fade. The same hideous
look lies on the face of the Queen of the Pass, and when once this is
realised, the eye wonders that it could have ever believed in the life
of her. She is the city “whose graves are set in the side of the pit,
and her company is, round about here graves,” sister of Pathros, Zoan
and No.
Moved by a thoroughly insular instinct, the Englishman took up a piece
of plaster and heaved it from the palace wall into the dark streets
below. It bounded from a house-top to a window-ledge, and thence into a
little square, and the sound of its fall was hollow and echoing, as the
sound of a stone in a well. Then the silence closed up upon the sound,
till in the far away courtyard below the roped stallions began screaming
afresh. There may be desolation in the great Indian Desert to the
westward, and there is desolation upon the open seas; but the desolation
of Amber is beyond the loneliness either of land or sea. Men by the
hundred thousand must have toiled at the walls that bound it, the
temples and bastions that stud the walls, the fort that overlooks all,
the canals that once lifted water to the palace, and the garden in the
lake of the valley. Renan could describe it as it stands to-day, and
Vereschagin could paint it.
Arrived at this satisfactory conclusion, the Englishman went down
through the palace and the scores of venomous and suggestive little
rooms to the elephant in the courtyard and was taken back in due time to
the Nineteenth Century in the shape of His Highness the Maharaja’s
Cotton Press, returning a profit of 27 per cent., and fitted with two
engines of fifty horsepower each, an hydraulic press capable of exerting
a pressure of three tons per square inch, and everything else to
correspond. It stood under a neat corrugated iron roof close to the
Jeypore Railway Station, and was in most perfect order, but somehow it
did not taste well after Amber. There was aggressiveness about the
engines and the smell of the raw cotton.
The modern side of Jeypore must not be mixed with the ancient.