_Proves conclusively the Existence of the Dark Tower visited by
Childe Rolande, and of “Bogey” who frightens Children._
The Gamberi river--clear as a trout stream--runs through the waste round
Chitor, and is spanned by an old bridge, very solid and massive, said to
have been built before the sack of Ala-ud-din. The bridge is in the
middle of the stream--the floods have raced round either end of it--and
is reached by a steeply sloping stone causeway. From the bridge to the
new town of Chitor, which lies at the foot of the hill, runs a straight
and well-kept road, flanked on either side by the scattered remnants of
old houses, and, here and there, fallen temples. The road, like the
bridge, is no new thing, and is wide enough for twenty horsemen to ride
abreast.
New Chitor is a very dirty, and apparently thriving, little town, full
of grain-merchants and sellers of arms. The ways are barely wide enough
for the elephant of dignity and the little brown babies of impudence.
The Englishman went through, always on a slope painfully accentuated by
Gerowlia who, with all possible respect to her years, must have been a
baggage-animal and no true Sahib’s mount. Let the local Baedeker speak
for a moment:--“The ascent to Chitor, which begins from within the
south-east angle of the town, is nearly a mile to the upper gate, with a
slope of about 1 in 15. There are two zig-zag bends, and on the three
portions thus formed, are seven gates, of which one, however, has only
the basement left.” This is the language of fact which, very properly,
leaves out of all account the Genius of the Place who sits at the gate
nearest the new city and is with the sightseer throughout. The first
impression of repulsion and awe is given by a fragment of tumbled
sculpture close to a red daubed _lingam_, near the Padal Pol or lowest
gate. It is a piece of frieze, and the figures of the men are worn
nearly smooth by time. What is visible is finely and frankly obscene to
an English mind.
The road is protected on the _khud_ side by a thick stone wall,
loopholed for musketry, one aperture to every two feet, between fifteen
and twenty feet high. This wall is being repaired throughout its length
by the Maharana of Udaipur. On the hill side, among the boulders, loose
stones and _dhao_-scrub, lies stone wreckage that must have come down
from the brown bastions above.
As Gerowlia laboured up the stone-shod slope, the Englishman wondered
how much life had flowed down this sluice of battles, and been lost at
the Padal Pol--the last and lowest gate--where, in the old days, the
besieging armies put their best and bravest battalions. Once at the head
of the lower slope, there is a clear rundown of a thousand yards with no
chance of turning aside either to the right or left. Even as he
wondered, he was brought abreast of two stone chhatris, each carrying a
red daubed stone. They were the graves of two very brave men, Jeemal of
Bednore, and Kalla, who fell in Akbar’s sack fighting like Rajputs. Read
the story of their deaths, and learn what manner of warriors they were.
Their graves were all that spoke openly of the hundreds of struggles on
the lower slope where the fight was always fiercest.
At last, after half an hour’s climb, the main gate, the Ram Pol, was
gained, and the Englishman passed into the City of Chitor and--then and
there formed a resolution, since broken, not to write one word about it
for fear that he should be set down as a babbling and a gushing
enthusiast. Objects of archæological interest are duly described in an
admirable little book of Chitor which, after one look, the Englishman
abandoned. One cannot “do” Chitor with a guide-book. The Padre of the
English Mission to Jehangir said the best that was to be said, when he
described the place three hundred years ago, writing quaintly:--“Chitor,
an ancient great kingdom, the chief city so called which standeth on a
mighty high hill, flat on the top, walled about at the least ten English
miles. There appear to this day above a hundred ruined churches and
divers fair palaces which are lodged in like manner among their ruins,
as many Englishmen by the observation have guessed. Its chief
inhabitants to-day are Zum and Ohim, birds and wild beasts, but the
stately ruins thereof give a shadow of its beauty while it flourished in
its pride.” Gerowlia struck into a narrow pathway, forcing herself
through garden-trees and disturbing the peacocks. An evil guide-man on
the ground waved his hand, and began to speak; but was silenced. The
death of Amber was as nothing to the death of Chitor--a body whence the
life had been driven by riot and sword. Men had parcelled the gardens of
her palaces and the courtyards of her temples into fields; and cattle
grazed among the remnants of the shattered tombs. But over all--over
rent bastion, split temple-wall, pierced roof and prone pillar--lay the
“shadow of its beauty while it flourished in its pride.” The Englishman
walked into a stately palace of many rooms, where the sunlight streamed
in through wall and roof, and up crazy stone stairways, held together,
it seemed, by the marauding trees. In one bastion, a wind-sown peepul
had wrenched a thick slab clear of the wall, but held it tight pressed
in a crook of a branch, as a man holds down a fallen enemy under his
elbow, shoulder and forearm. In another place, a strange, uncanny wind,
sprung from nowhere, was singing all alone among the pillars of what may
have been a Hall of Audience. The Englishman wandered so far in one
palace that he came to an almost black-dark room, high up in a wall, and
said proudly to himself:--“I must be the first man who has been here;”
meaning thereby no harm or insult to any one. But he tripped and fell,
and as he put out his hands, he felt that the stairs had been worn
hollow and smooth by the tread of innumerable naked feet. Then he was
afraid, and came away very quickly, stepping delicately over fallen
friezes and bits of sculptured men, so as not to offend the dead; and
was mightily relieved when he recovered his elephant and allowed the
guide to take him to Kumbha Rana’s Tower of Victory.
This stands, like all things in Chitor, among ruins, but time and the
other enemies have been good to it. It is a Jain edifice, nine storeys
high, crowned atop--Was this designed insult or undesigned repair?--with
a purely Mahomedan dome, wherein the pigeons and the bats live.
Excepting this blemish, the Tower of Victory is nearly as fair as when
it left the hands of the builder whose name has not been handed down to
us. It is to be observed here that the first, or more ruined, Tower of
Victory, built in Alluji’s days, when Chitor was comparatively young,
was raised by some pious Jain, as proof of conquest over things
spiritual. The second tower is more worldly in intent.
Those who care to look, may find elsewhere a definition of its
architecture and its more striking peculiarities. It was in kind, but
not in degree, like the Jugdesh Temple at Udaipur, and, as it exceeded
it in magnificence, so its effect upon the mind was more intense. The
confusing intricacy of the figures with which it was wreathed from top
to bottom, the recurrence of the one calm face, the God enthroned,
holding the Wheel of the Law, and the appalling lavishness of
decoration, all worked towards the instilment of fear and aversion.
Surely this must have been one of the objects of the architect. The
tower, in the arrangement of its stairways, is like the interior of a
Chinese carved ivory puzzle-ball. The idea given is that, even while you
are ascending, you are wrapping yourself deeper and deeper in the tangle
of a mighty maze. Add to this the half-light, the thronging armies of
sculptured figures, the mad profusion of design splashed as impartially
upon the undersides of the stone window-slabs as upon the door-beam of
the threshold--add, most abhorrent of all, the slippery sliminess of the
walls worn smooth by naked men, and you will understand that the tower
is not a soothing place to visit. The Englishman fancied presumptuously
that he had, in a way, grasped the builder’s idea; and when he came to
the top storey and sat among the pigeons his theory was this:--To attain
power, wrote the builder of old, in sentences of fine stone, it is
necessary to pass through all sorts of close-packed horrors,
treacheries, battles and insults, in darkness and without knowledge
whether the road leads upward or into a hopeless _cul-de-sac_. Kumbha
Rana must many times have climbed to the top storey, and looked out
towards the uplands of Malwa on the one side and his own great Mewar on
the other, in the days when all the rock hummed with life and the
clatter of hooves upon the stony ways, and Mahmoud of Malwa was safe in
hold. How he must have swelled with pride--fine insolent pride of life
and rule and power,--power not only to break things but to compel such
builders as those who piled the tower to his royal will! There was no
decoration in the top storey to bewilder or amaze--nothing but
well-grooved stone-slabs, and a boundless view fit for kings who traced
their ancestry--
“From times when forth from the sunlight, the first of
our kings came down,
And had the earth for his footstool, and wore the stars
for his crown.”
The builder had left no mark behind him--not even a mark on the
threshold of the door, or a sign in the head of the topmost step. The
Englishman looked in both places, believing that those were the places
generally chosen for mark-cutting. So he sat and meditated on the
beauties of kingship, and the unholiness of Hindu art, and what power a
shadow-land of lewd monstrosities had upon those who believed in it, and
what Lord Dufferin, who is the nearest approach to a king in this India,
must have thought when A.-D.-C.’s clanked after him up the narrow
steps. But the day was wearing, and he came down--in both senses--and,
in his descent, the carven things on every side of the tower and above
and below, once more took hold of and perverted his fancy, so that he
arrived at the bottom in a frame of mind eminently fitted for a descent
into the Gau-Mukh, which is nothing more terrible than a little spring,
falling into a reservoir, in the side of the hill.
He stumbled across more ruins and passed between tombs of dead Ranis,
till he came to a flight of steps, built out and cut out from rock,
going down as far as he could see into a growth of trees on a terrace
below him. The stone of the steps had been worn and polished by naked
feet till it showed its markings clearly as agate; and where the steps
ended in a rock-slope, there was a visible glair, a great snail track,
upon the rocks. It was hard to keep safe footing on the sliminess. The
air was thick with the sick smell of stale incense, and grains of rice
were scattered upon the steps. But there was no one to be seen. Now this
in itself was not specially alarming; but the Genius of the Place must
be responsible for making it so. The Englishman slipped and bumped on
the rocks, and arrived, more suddenly than he desired, upon the edge of
a dull blue tank, sunk between walls of timeless masonry. In a
slabbed-in recess, water was pouring through a shapeless stone gargoyle,
into a trough; which trough again dripped into the tank. Almost under
the little trickle of water, was the loathsome Emblem of Creation, and
there were flowers and rice around it. Water was trickling from a score
of places in the cut face of the hill, oozing between the edges of the
steps and welling up between the stone slabs of the terrace. Trees
sprouted in the sides of the tank and hid its surroundings. It seemed as
though the descent had led the Englishman, _firstly_, two thousand years
away from his own century, and _secondly_, into a trap, and that he
would fall off the polished stones into the stinking tank, or that the
Gau-Mukh would continue to pour water placidly until the tank rose up
and swamped him, or that some of the stone slabs would fall forward and
crush him flat.
Then he was conscious of remembering, with peculiar and unnecessary
distinctness, that, from the Gau-Mukh, a passage led to the subterranean
chambers in which fair Pudmini and her handmaids had slain themselves.
Also, that Tod had written and the Station-master at Chitor had said,
that some sort of devil, or ghoul, or some thing, stood at the entrance
of that approach. All of which was a nightmare bred in full day, and
folly to boot; but it was the fault of the Genius of the Place, who made
the Englishman feel that he had done a great wrong in trespassing into
the very heart and soul of all Chitor. And, behind him, the Gau-Mukh
guggled and choked like a man in his death-throe. The Englishman endured
as long as he could--about two minutes. Then it came upon him that he
must go quickly out of this place of years and blood--must get back to
the afternoon sunshine, and Gerowlia, and the dak-bungalow with the
French bedstead. He desired no archæological information, he wished to
take no notes, and, above all, he did not care to look behind him, where
stood the reminder that he was no better than the beasts that perish.
But he had to cross, the smooth, worn rocks, and he felt their sliminess
through his boot-soles. It was as though he were treading on the soft,
oiled skin of a Hindu. As soon as the steps gave refuge, he floundered
up them, and so came out of the Gau-Mukh, bedewed with that perspiration
which follows alike on honest toil or--childish fear.
“This,” said he to himself, “is absurd!” and sat down on the fallen top
of a temple to review the situation. But the Gau-Mukh had
[Illustration: Page 130--“And behind him the Gau-Mukh guggled and choked
like a man in his death-throe.”]
disappeared. He could see the dip in the ground, and the beginning of
the steps, but nothing more.
In defence, it may be urged that there is moral, just as much as there
is mine, choke-damp. If you get into a place laden with the latter you
die, and if into the home of the former you ... behave unwisely, as
constitution and temperament prompt. If any man doubt this, let him sit
for two hours in a hot sun on an elephant, stay half-an-hour in the
Tower of Victory, and then go down into the Gau-Mukh, which, it must
never be forgotten, is merely a set of springs “three or four in number,
issuing from the cliff face at cow-mouth carvings, now mutilated. The
water evidently percolating from the Hathi Kund above, falls first in an
old pillared hall and thence into the masonry reservoir below,
eventually, when abundant enough, supplying a little waterfall lower
down.” That, Gentlemen and Ladies, on the honour of one who has been
frightened of the dark in broad daylight, is the Gau-Mukh, as though
photographed.
The Englishman regained Gerowlia and demanded to be taken away, but
Gerowlia’s driver went forward instead and showed him a new Mahal just
built by the present Maharana. If a fourth sack of Chitor could be
managed for a Viceroy’s edification, the blowing up of the new Mahal
would supply a pleasant evening’s entertainment. Near the Mahal lie the
remains of the great tanks of Chitor, for the hill has, through a great
part of its length, a depression in the centre which, by means of bunds,
stored, in the old time, a full supply of water. A general keeping in
order is visible throughout many of the ruins; and, in places, a
carriage-drive is being constructed. Carriage-drives, however, do not
consort well with Chitor and the “shadow of her ancient beauty.” The
return journey, past temple after temple and palace upon palace, began
in the failing light, and Gerowlia was still blundering up and down
narrow bye-paths--for she possessed all an old woman’s delusion as to
the slimness of her waist--when the twilight fell, and the smoke from
the town below began to creep up the brown flanks of Chitor, and the
jackals howled. Then the sense of desolation, which had been strong
enough in all conscience in the sunshine, began to grow and grow:--
“The sun’s eye had a sickly glare,
The earth with age was wan,
The skeletons of ages stood
Around that lonely man.”
Near the Ram Pol there was some semblance of a town with living people
in it, and a priest sat in the middle of the road and howled aloud upon
his Gods, until a little boy came and laughed in his face heretically,
and he went away grumbling. This touch was deeply refreshing; in the
contemplation of it, the Englishman clean forgot that he had overlooked
the gathering in of materials for an elaborate statistical, historical,
geographical account of Chitor. All that remained to him was a
shuddering reminiscence of the Gau-Mukh and two lines of the “Holy
Grail.”
“And up into the sounding halls he passed,
But nothing in the sounding halls he saw.”
_Post Scriptum._--There was something very uncanny about the Genius of
the Place. He dragged an ease-loving egotist out of the French bedstead
with the gilt knobs at head and foot, into a more than usually big
folly--nothing less than a seeing of Chitor by moonlight. There was no
possibility of getting Gerowlia out of _her_ bed, and a mistrust of the
Maharana’s soldiery who in the day time guarded the gates, prompted the
Englishman to avoid the public way, and scramble straight up the
hillside, along an attempt at a path which he had noted from Gerowlia’s
back. There was no one to interfere, and nothing but an infinity of
pestilent nullahs and loose stones to check. Owls came out and hooted at
him, and animals ran about in the dark and made uncouth noises. It was
an idiotic journey, and it ended--Oh horror! in that unspeakable
Gau-Mukh--this time entered from the opposite or brushwooded side, as
far as could be made out in the dusk and from the chuckle of the water
which, by night, was peculiarly malevolent.
Escaping from this place, crab-fashion, the Englishman crawled into
Chitor and sat upon a flat tomb till the moon, a very inferior and
second-hand one, rose, and turned the city of the dead into a city of
scurrying ghouls--in sobriety, jackals. Also, the ruins took strange
shapes and shifted in the half light and cast objectionable shadows.
It was easy enough to fill the rock with the people of old times, and a
very beautiful account of Chitor restored, made out by the help of Tod,
and bristling with the names of the illustrious dead, would undoubtedly
have been written, had not a woman, a living, breathing woman, stolen
out of a temple--What was she doing in that galley?--and screamed in
piercing and public-spirited fashion. The Englishman got off the tomb
and departed rather more noisily than a jackal; feeling for the moment
that he was not much better. Somebody opened a door with a crash, and a
man cried out:--“Who is there?” But the cause of the disturbance was,
for his sins, being most horribly scratched by some thorny scrub over
the edge of the hill--there are no bastions worth speaking of near the
Gau-Mukh--and the rest was partly rolling, partly scrambling, and mainly
bad language.
When you are too lucky sacrifice something, a beloved pipe for choice,
to Ganesh. The Englishman has seen Chitor by moonlight--not the best
moonlight truly, but the watery glare of a nearly spent moon--and his
sacrifice to Luck is this. He will never try to describe what he has
seen--but will keep it as a love-letter, a thing for one pair of eyes
only--a memory that few men to-day can be sharers in. And does he,
through this fiction, evade insulting, by the dauberie of pen and ink, a
scene as lovely, wild, and unmatchable as any that mortal eyes have been
privileged to rest upon?
An intelligent and discriminating public are perfectly at liberty to
form their own opinions.