Wmw^^ EV / // EDWIN ARNOLD. CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY __ Cornell University Library DS 413.A75 1891 India revisited. 3 1924 022 984 136 All books are subject to recall after two weeks Olin/Kroch Library DATE DUE uilto:. jUrti^l! IW"" ^W "^fi 2001 > mjMiii 1 1 '"frof PRINTED IN U.S.A. ^ (rf> ttaii L Q>, '^U.C - ' ^ ^''/ INDIA REVISITED Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022984136 The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved. Hn HMcu. India, farewell ! I shall not see algain Thy shining shores, thy peoples of the sun Gentle, soft-mannered, by a kind word won To such quick kindness '. O'er the Arab main Our flying flag streams back ; and backwards stream My thoughts to those fair open fields I love, City and village, maidan, jungle, grove, The temples and the rivers ! Must it seem Too great for one man's heart to say it holds So many many Indian sisters dear, So many unknown brothers ? that it folds Lakhs of true friends in parting ? Nay ! but there Lingers my heart, leave-taking ; and it roves From hut to hut whispering "he knows, and loves!" Good-bye ! Good-night ! Sweet may your slumbers be, Gunga ! and Kasi ! aud Saraswati I EDWIN AENOLD. March 5, 1886. S.S. Sum. CONTENTS. IfO. 1. ON THE QUEEN'S HIGHWAY . II. THE MEDITEEEANEAN . III. THE CANAL AND THE RED SEA . IV. PEEIM TO BOMBAY V. NEW BOMBAY .... VI. THE GHAUTS AND POONA . VIL NAUTCH DANCES, PLAYS, AND JEWELS VIII. A MODEL NATIVE STATE IX. THE MOSQUES OF AHMEDABAD . X. THE CITY OF VICTORY . XL ULWUE TO DELHI . XIL THE CAMP OF EXERCISE AT DELHI XIIL AGRA AND THE TAJ XIV. BENARES AND THE LAND OF THE " LIGHT XV. THE "CITY OF PALACES" AND MADRAS XVL CEYLON AND THE BUDDHISTS XVIL THE SOUTH COUNTRY AND "DOTY" . XVIIL HYDERABAD OF THE NIZAM OP ASIA PIOF. I 12 25 4« 54 69 82 99 117 133 161 179 19s 214 237 262 285 303 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. ENTBANOE TO THE ELEPHANTA OAVES FOBT SAID ...... THE SUEZ OANAL .... PILLAR IN ELEPHANTA CAVE* THE AKDHANAEI8HWABA, ELEPHANTA OAVES BOMBAY, EEOM MALABAR HILL THE BUND-ROAD, POONA POONA, FROM BEYOND THE BUND PAEV ATI's TEMPLE AND HILL, POONA NAUTOH GIBLS AT HOME OUR ELEPHANT AT BAKODA . THE queen's tomb, AHMEDABAD . THE KANKARIA TANK, AHMEDABAD PALACE AT AMBER, JEYPORE THE KASHMIR GATE, DELHI . THE DIWAN-I-KHAS, DELHI , THE OLD FORT, DELHI . THE KUTUB MINAE THE JUMMA MUSJID, DELUi . TOMB OF ITMAD-OOD-DOWLAH, AGRA THE TOMB OP AKBAB, SECUNDRA . EOOF OF ZENANA IN THE FOET, AGRA TEE TAJ MAHAL, AGRA THE MOSQOE AND GHATS, BENARES t A BURNING GHAT, BENARES . BUDDHIST STUPA AT SARNATH, BENARES + CARVING ON TOWER AT SARNATH + JUGGLERS AT BENARES . THE EDEN GARDENS, CALCUTTA . GOVERNMENT HOUSE, MADRAS A ROAD IN CEYLON THE GREAT BUDDHIST TEMPLE AT KANDY SENSATION BOOK (ON THE LINE FEOM COLOMBO TO KANDY) TOMBS OF THE KINGS AT GOLCONDAH . Frontispiece To face page 28 .l2 63 65 68 72 74 76 84 94 120 124 152 174 176 182 184 194 198 202 204 212 216 218 226 228 238 250 253 266 276 284 312 ♦ Borrowed ty pennisslon from Dr. Burgess' " Arohseologloal Survey of India " Vol V. t Borrowed by permission from Sherring's " Sacred City of the Hindus." INDIA REVISITED. ON THE QUEEN'S HIGHWAY. " The sailor sighs, as sinks his native shore." So does the landsman. However pleasant the circumstances of the expedition which take him abroad, however agreeable its anticipations of fair and familiar scenes to be revisited, old associations to become renewed, and new ones profitably created, the fading coasts of England must and will inspire the voyager's mind with a clinging melancholy. A Continental citizen hardly knows at what precise point he has crossed the frontier of his mother-country. The train whirls him past some painted post, some guarded gateway, or some new-fashioned sentry-box, and he is already " abroad." But these Channel seas which roll at the white doorsteps of Britain, and upon which one must embark to quit her, prolong and accentuate leave- taking with every succeeding landmark of grey down and silvery cliff. It is as though an interminable company of dear and faithful friends stood ranged along the coast-line waving adieux which cannot, and A 2 INDIA REVISITED. must not, be disregarded. How, indeed, should one turn away indifferently from headland after headland, from woodland, valley, town, and roadstead, when each is so full of memories accumulated in the mind during many bygone years, and when each recalls some happy or at least some interesting events ? So, after a peaceful night at anchor in the mouth of the Thames, it was one long day of perpetual, if unexpressed, farewells all down the Channel for the passengers of the Peninsular and Oriental steamer ' Parramatta, bound to Bombay. A chill October breeze had set the light green waves dancing, but our powerful vessel of Sooo tons did not deign to move seriously to these land-locked billows ; and the greater part of the hundred and iifty ladies, military officers, children, nurses, and travellers embarked for the Indian passage were able to keep the deck as point after point of that well-known and well-loved coast passed into the misty horizon astern. Shakespeare's great bright cliff; the folded downs above Polkestone, half -veiled by sea clouds and half-lighted by pale sun- shine ; the low chine of Dungeness and the lofty white buttresses of Beachy Head ; the faint gleams of houses and hanging smoke, to show where Eastbourne, Hast- ings, and Brighton sate on the sea's brink, — these, every one of them recalling unforgotten friends and bygone scenes, rise up from the West and glide away into the East, until the Parramatta steams within her own length of the Eoyal Sovereign Light Ship, steering for the southernmost corner of the Isle of Wight. ON THE QUEEN'S HIGHWAY. 3 There, in the still water under the lee of the Ventnor hills, a yawl is seen tacking about, with the familiar Peninsular and Oriental colours — ^the four triangles of blue, white, yellow, and red — at her masthead. The huge steamer slackens her speed, and finally stops altogether ; the cessation of her immense engines, after such long throbbing upon their course thus far, producing a sensation of impressive silence even amidst the wail of the wind and the seething of the faint- coloured waves. The yawl casts off and sends along- side her dingey, into which our pilot descends, in the proud consciousness of having seen so big a vessel safe through the perils of the narrow seas. He waves an adieu to the ship, and by his departure the last link seems severed with those familiar home shores, which are seen by the eyes of more than one gentle exile among us through a mist apparently not altogether due to the chill autumn weather. But the link hansrs by a thread still, for the pilot rises suddenly in the stern-sheets of his receding boat to hail us that he has left a coat behind him. A pilot's coat may con- tain important papers — it is a special and respected ■garment. The mighty engines accordingly suspend their re-commencing energies for a moment, in order that somebody may drop the pilot's garment into his outstretched arms. Then he raises his hat from his white hair once more — Channel pilots always wear a black silk hat even in the wildest weather — waves another and a last adieu to captain, ship, and com- pany; and the Parramatta churns the green tideway 4 INDIA EEVISITED. into foam again with the lash of her screw — heading for Ushant and the Bay of Biscay. In November it is permitted to the landsman, and yet more, of course, to the landswoman, to be a little anxious about crossing the Bay of Biscay. Even to the least professional eye that "Gulf of Gaseony" looks upon the map a terribly open corner of the vast Atlantic. A westerly or south-westerly gale, it is evident, must drive the whole fury of the broad and gloomy ocean upon the shores of France and Spain. In such weather it was that the northern waves of the dreaded Bay engulfed the ill-fated London ; that its southern billows capsized and over- whelmed her Majesty's ship Captain ; and the bottom of this prodigious inlet must, in fact, be more thickly bestrewn with wrecks and relics of foundered ventures than any other sea in the world. Yet the least seasoned and most nervous passenger on board may take comfort from the strength of our splendid ship and the skill of the officers and crew in charge of her. Old Anglo-Indians will remember, as I do, the vessels of a C[uarter of a century ago in which they used to cross the Mediterranean, and pursue what was then' the newly-developed " Overland Eoute " down the Eed Sea and over the Indian Ocean. Two little steam- ships especially there were, sailing under the Penin- sular and Oriental flag, named the Vectis and the Valetta, which were wont to go almost as much under as over the water, while they plunged with rolling paddles and diving prows from Marseilles to Malta ON THE QUEEN'S HIGHWAY. 5 and Alexandria. The Parramatta might almost carry one of those old-fashioned ferry-boats on her deck, which is flush and quite unbroken from the taffrail to the stem except by surface constructions. Twelve alternate promenades from extreme end to end of this street-like vista afford a walk of a mile, and, over the whole way, from forepeak to taffrail, the weU-laid teak planks are always kept as " clean as a new pin," the morning task of the Lascars in fine weather being constantly to tidy up the ship. Her spacious and handsome saloon easily seats 130 first-class passengers at dinner. At night terraces of commodious cabins absorb them for slumber ; by day there are for their use and comfort music saloons, libraries, and a luxurious smoking-room forward, lined with slabs of veined white marble, very prettily adorned in the Japanese manner with inlaid gold palm-fronds and flying cranes. It takes days of exploration to know one's way thoroughly about such an immense floating labyrinth, which finds in her endless recesses space, without the least crowding, for an equipage of some 1 60 officers and hands, including the Asiatic sailors. Captain Anderson, in command of this stately and noble vessel,, is not less attentive to the comfort of his enormous family of passengers than to the safety of the ship, the discipline of which is perfect, but maintained in a quiet and British manner. Everybody knows and does his duty, from the veteran commander to the little Bengali boys scour- ing ;the screw of the ParramattcCs steam, pinnace, and to the jet-black Seedees glistening like the coal they 6 INDIA REVISITED. shovel into the huge furnaces. It is pleasant to observe how well the native sailors are treated, and how satis- fied they appear with their service. The "tindal," a small, wizened, wiry, indefatigable Muslim from Chittagong, with sparse beard reddened by lime and grizzled by many tempests, might have been boatswain to Sinbad, he has such a weather-beaten look. There are brown, lively Bombay men, cofiee-coloured Malays, ink-dark Africans, and, most notable of all, an Afghan stoker, while the quiet, patient ayahs glide about like cats, purring Hindustani songs, and ceaselessly watch- ing and fondling the blue-eyed English children, those tender shipmates of our bronzed colonels and captains, married Indian ladies, unmarried belles on their first visit, and travellers for pleasure. The Bay was forbearing, and did not by any means put forth its utmost power of storm and turmoil. A strong north wind drew down from the chops of the Channel, filling the square sails of the Parramatta, and speeding her along over a rolling but never tempestuous surface at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. The sea, changed now from the meadow-green hue of soundings to the cold, deep, glassy /owc^ blue of ocean, ran in long glistening hollows, laced with creamy foam, on either side of the flying steamer, the pallid track of which lay broad in her wake far under the grey archway of the sky. As each billow reaches its highest point of elevation the wind seizes the crest and snatches some of it violently to leeward in fine spindrift, upon which the fitful sunlight paints ON THE QUEEN'S HIGHWAY. 7 evanescent but lovely little rainbows. The more solid portion falls back upon the sinking bre9,st of the wave in white sheets, which spread out into woven nets and swaying chains of tangled and delicate sea-em- broidery, draping the dark purple hollow from ridge to base, till the ocean, seen from certain points, looks as if wine were veiled with curded milk. Now and again one observes — besides the big gulls which follow the vessel over hundreds of miles for the sake of what food may be cast overboard — flocks of pretty small marine birds, which skim the face of the sea with unwearied pinions, gliding down its moist valleys and ascending its hissing hills, but never wetting a foot or feather. " Mother Carey's chickens " — also seen occasionally — often touch the water, or light upon it; but these maritime coveys of russet and silver plumage raze the face of ocean as neatly as swallows shoot along a lake. Mid way in the Biscay Deep a school of sportive porpoises — the white variety — espy the ship, and join in headlong chase of her, springing out of the water a full half-fathom into the air, and tumbling back again one after the other with a smack and splash into the body of the wave, only to reappear instantly and renew the race. Is it wonder at the big black ship, or wild pride to outstrip her, or the sheer pleasure of healthy fish-life, which prompts these little " pigs of the deep " — the porco-jpesci — to try their fins against the bronze blades of the Parramatta's gigantic screw ? Twice or thrice in mid gulf a poor little twittering finch or saffron-breasted Spanish robin 8 INDIA EEVISITED. flutters to the ship, and sits exhausted on a " swifter " of the shrouds. These are belated migrants, or birds blown off the coast in the dark ; and they must oft- times perish by thousands in the pitiless sea. One is so glad to see them conquer their panting terror and stay; and to know that a short spell of rest will enable the tiny tired wings to expand again, and safely reach yonder far coast of Spain, just rising in a dim fawn-coloured sierra — which ends in Cape St. Vincent — over the now deeper roll of the water. While I was crumbling a biscuit for these small " stow- aways," a full-breasted billow sweeping past the ship happens to lift its crest highest just as she dips her waist lowest to the starboard sea. The whole upper body of the wave washes solidly upon deck through the latticed bulwark, and the Parramatta has taken on board her first and only " green sea," wetting more than one pretty foot. The windy day is followed by a night full of sea- noises ; the lashing of the screw, the hiss of the sweeping seas, the thunder of the flapping square sails ; but the Parramatta passes at grand speed out of the Bay, and runs down the picturesque coasts of Portugal and Spain, sighting on her passage many a point of interest. Inside those arid hills nestles Corunna; lower down the sails of more than one outward-bound Portuguese bark denote Oporto ; the " Berlings," a terror to mariners, are passed; and the Tagus tints the dark Atlantic with lighter waves, flowing forth from the rich vineyards of Estremadura. At sunset ON THE QUEEN'S HIGHWAY. 9 the steamer doubles the gilded promontory of Cape St. Vincent, and heads for Trafalgar, of immortal memory ; — for who can forget the , record connected with these heaving waters, Nelson's long cruise, and glorious sea-fight, and how the shattered but trium- phant Victory bore the hero's body under these jealous shores into the friendly shadow oi Gibraltar, under the victorious standard of England ? " Time was, when it was praise and boast enough In every clime, and travel where we might, That we were born her children ! " Now there are statesmen who would destroy her unity, and make separation from her a boon and a reward ! Audax lapetum genus ! Across these same seas Columbus in his tiny carvels put forth from Cadiz to find the New World, which lay so long unknown nine hundred leagues beyond those clouds of purple and amber, robing "the setting orb. The good ship goes towards the " Gates of Hercules " lighted by a splendid sundown. In the west soft masses of tinted vapour, drifting against a background of tender turquoise- green, fleck the sky with wonderful jewel-work of ruby, jacinth, and amethyst. Southwards the heaven is full of violet-grey cumuli bordered and embroidered with tender rose. Through the indigo spaces of the darker east the stars gleam suddenly forth, sparks of diamond, and we are already so far downward in lati- tude that the Great Bear has dipped its lowest star near to the sea's edge. Orion's Belt shines vertically [o INDIA REVISITED. over the narrowing straits, and constellations new to the eye gem the horizon over the African mainland. Morning finds the Parramatta steaming close in to Tarifa, its white fortress and pharos backed by cork- woods and the rocks and ravines of yellow hills. On the other hand rise the spurs of Atlas, holding up the sky, as of old; for piles of gathered clouds lie on the head of the ancient range. Then Gibraltar towers over the water, sombre, massive, blue, impregnable, the first of the linked stations along the " Queen's Highway'' to India. Those who have never before seen the Eock can survey it to perfection as we glide into the bosom of the bay. The broad western slope of Calpe, illuminated by a brilliant sunrise, displays every crag and pinnacle, every olive and cactus patch, with the grim bastions and gun-platforms frowning from all available ledges ; and the town opens on us — yellow, white, red, and brown — cradled in the lap of the great eminence. One thinks anew of the Victory, with her precious burden, dropping anchor here from her wounded and blood-stained bows, and furling the topsails riddled with French and Spanish round-shot. One thinks also of the memorable siege, when all the ships of the Gaul and the Don vainly assailed the British garrison during three years and eight months, and, as a local guide briefly remarks, " were finally dispelled by a judicious use of red-hot shot." The hostile fleets of the whole world could not nowadays lower the ensign which waves on yonder flagstaff by the Governor's quarters. ON THE QUEEN'S HIGHWAY. ii As the steamer enters we hear the Eock's warlike accents, for a Swedish man-of-war follows us in and fires a salute of seventeen guns to the British flag. The saluting battery ashore returns the compliment with as many discharges, and the echoes of the cannonade roll in thunder-claps of ear-splitting sound from Europa Point to the Neutral Ground, while tongues of sharp bright fire lance the shaken air, and clouds of cannon- smoke drift over the dancing ripple of the bay. What would the voice of this great " Eock " be like, if it spoke from all its thousand iron mouths in anger and defiance ? On its western face are ranged all the vast batteries and water-forts, the hidden galleries and armed works from which would spring, against any rash assailant, torrents of flame and tempests of heavy shot and shell. The eastern side, sufficiently fortified by Nature with precipices and scarped peaks, dipping into the sea by cliffs of a thousand feet altitude, can be scaled only by sea-birds. A knife edge — upon which sits perched the signal station — divides the Mediterranean from the Atlantic side of the redoubt- able Crag, which a Spanish guide-book on board airily describes as a "first-class fortalice of Spain, in the temporaiy occupation of her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain." When the millennium comes, muy honrado Seiior ! and everybody has turned Buddhist, you shall have Calpe back again ! ( 12 ) II. THE MEDITERRANEAN. The sunshine, which lay broad upon the Great Eocb, lighted the Parramatta pleasantly into the Mediter- ranean. On the eastern side the commanding fortress built by Nature to guard the gates of the Sea of Ulysses hardly needs, as has been observed, a gun or a sentry. It is patrolled by a ceaseless surf which beats upon unsheltered crags, and is defended by unscalable precipices, along the brows of which roads have been engineered, looking from the deck of a passing steamer like mere ledges for sea-birds. Beyond it the waters widen rapidly along the coast of Spain towards Malaga, under a wall of picturesque hills, through the clefts of which are seen the summits of a higher sierra, whitened here and there with early snow. Opposite, and also gradually receding, the African range from Ceuta to Melilla shuts in grandly the bright horizon of the sea, now heaving in such tranquil wavelets that the clouds of rose-colour and gold are reflected in long shadows of the same hues on the surface. Amid such agreeable weather as this — which must not long be counted upon, however, in November, THE MEDITERRANEAN. 13 for any portion of the capricious Mediterranean — our large family of passengers make general holiday. Some pursue with immense devotion the effort to pitch grummets of rope, carefully prepared for the purpose, into huckets set about twelve yards apart. This game of sea-quoits, which is not without its fascinations, depends for success upon a dexterous twist that the player must give to the ring of hemp. Another party gathers with eager excitement in front of a black board marked with numbered and lettered squares, placed upon the deck at a slight slope. The object here is to throw little discs of canvas upon the winning numbers, and keen is the rivalry displayed. Sea-quoits may be diversified by establishing a mar- line-spike on a stand for the mark, in place of the bucket ; but uncommon skill is then required to drop the grummet precisely upon the point, and the move- ment of the ocean must be slight. On one placid evening of our Mediterranean voyage the younger passengers improvised a dance. The after-deck was cleared of the innumerable chairs which ordinarily encumber it ; the electric lamps with which the ship is lighted were clustered under the awning, and an effective, if unpretending, orchestra was mustered by the aid of two stewards, who played flute and fife, and a quartermaster who had quite a remarkable gift upon the violin. The Nereids of the Middle Sea heard with astonishment "The See-Saw Valse," "Blue Danube," "Myosotis," and other terrestrial strains, until the waves themselves took to dancing, and the deck soon 14 INDIA REVISITED. became rather too much like the roof of a house for any more of such pastime. Generally speaking, the Anglo-Indian passengers are of a graver fashion on board ship than those from and to the Antipodes. Conversation in the saloon and smoking-room with us takes oftentimes an Imperial and administrative tone. A military group gathers about a general ofificer who bore part in the second Burmese War and has interesting personal experiences to give of Mandalay, Eangoon, King Theebaw, and the Eiver Irrawaddy. Irrigation in India and the merits of the rival railway gauges absorb another knot of civil engineers. In a third corner some colonels and majors of native regiments discuss with energy the terrible heats of Suakin and the Nile, and deplore the alleged want of generosity with which the Sepoy has been treated in Egypt, returning as he does to Bombay with worn-out boots and khakee- suits to replace from his pay, and no rupees in his belt for wife and children. All agree that any policy would be better, any expenditure wiser, than to send these Indian volunteers home discontented, thereby discouraging the enlistment of good recruits, and diminishing the credit and honour of the Sircar. From another cool nook of our ever-speeding steamer, where Indian shikaris are collected, float fragments of animated chat about jungle and forest ; talk of the man-eating tiger and of the desperately-charging bison ; while the merits of the Express rifle and different forms of the blade of a hog-spear are being keenly discussed. THE MEDITERRANEAN. 15 So our idle hours glide, in alternate fair and troubled weather — ^in long days, which begin at dawn with the deck-scrubbing, and nights of sleep rendered fitful by the beat of the screw and the hissing of the waves — until the Gulf of Tunis opens on the starboard bow, disclosing an archipelago of lofty islands, seated on these broad African waves. The Parramatta passes close to one of them, called Zambra, a bare and craggy mass, rising in sterile pinnacles from the deep indigo waters. It is apparently uninhabited, except by flocks of sea-birds, and, indeed, seems inaccessible. Others, larger and lower, show signs of human^ occupation. There are goats to be made out on the green slopes clad with macchie — the aromatic shrub which covers all these islets of the middle Mediterranean — and here and there a white-washed hut may be spied amid the black rocks. A finer air cannot blow on land or sea than these hermit shepherds and fisher folk have to breathe, warmed by the Libyan deserts from one quarter, and cooled by five hundred leagues of water on the other. At mid-day the important island of Pantellaria lies close under our beam and hardly more than a mile from the steamer's side. This is a con- vict station of the Italian Government, and certainly appears one of the pleasantest places for transporta- tion which social sinners could inhabit. A tiny town nestles under the terraced red hills, with a little harbour in front, full of lateen-rigged fishing craft; and all the western and northern faces of the fair prison are dotted with gleaming stone cottages, where, f6 INDIA EEVISITED. no doubt, the " good-conduct " criminals reside, and cultivate their vines and olives. The Eomans used Pantellaria for the same purpose, as a place of exile, and that Imperial adulteress, Messalina, is said to have expiated her offences on these same sea-girdled crags, amid solitudes of land and sea and sky, which, beautiful as they are, must have seemed hateful, after the splendour and luxuries of the sensual capital. How she must have pined in her fierce discontent — lassata, nondum saiiata — for the wings of the fishing eagles which circle in the azure vault above the island, or plunge from time to time into the heaving sea, everywhere fringing it with a belt of surf ! How her angry and guilty thoughts must have oftentimes flown back over these northern waves to her Eoman palaces and her Eoman lovers ! The Farramaita goes forward at half-speed all night, so that she may not make the somewhat difficult approach to the harbour of Malta in the dark. In the early morning Gozo shows close over her bows, and we soon have the entire length of the larger island unfolded to the eye. Malta is by no means merely the "garrison and a garden" which many suppose. There is plenty of elbow-room behind the stronghold and harbours of Valetta, roads where you may drive for seven or eight miles away from the capital; fields and large fruitful gardens and inland plains; villages and even little towns to be visited. Everybody knows the "streets of stairs," up which the visitor climbs to the Strada Eeale from the " Nix THE MEDITEREANEAN. 17 Mangiare " landing-place, under the projecting win- dows of the fine old mansions built by the various Commanderias. Everybody also knows the green par- terres of the Governor's residence, where the oranges hang in golden profusion, and the scarlet hibiscus, the snowy moon-flowers, the caper-tree, and the blood- red poinsettia show that winter is here unknown. Trees are very rare in the island ; yet in the inner square of Government House there stands a !N"orfolk pine, planted by the Duke of Edinburgh while a mid- shipman, which in twenty-eight years has grown to goodly stature, and shelters innumerable sparrows of English breed, as unmistakable in their origin as is that of the fresh-cheeked Hampshire recruits who march through the gay streets. The armoury here contains some interesting relics of the Knights of St. John and of the tremendous sieges which the island has witnessed. The custodian shows you many hauberks, greaves, and breastplates — some richly in- laid with Damascene work of gold and silver — dinted, but not pierced, with Turkish bullets ; primitive breech-loading guns, ferocious-looking spears and hal- berds ; sabres delicately adorned with ivory and jewels, captured from the infidel, in the grim militant days when they fired the heads of slain Saracens from the fortress howitzers, and the besiegers answered by lashing their prisoners to lighted fireships. Here, too; is the solemn rescript signed by Charles of Spain — ■ " Yo el Eey " — granting the island and its f ortalices " for ever " to the Knijrhts ; and here is the ancient B ,8 INDIA REVISITED. carriage of state, with its faded gilding and moulder- ing silk brocade, in which Napoleon proudly rode up the steep street, after the German Grand Master had surrendered the stronghold to the Emperor. So formidable was Malta, in its natural strength, even at this time, that, when the first French commandant begged for special instructions upon the method of its defence, Buonaparte answered with scornful confidence, "Tell him to lock the fort gates and put the key in his pocket ! " Since then millions of money have been spent in perfecting these bastions of masonry and living rock which frown upon the grand harbour and the quiet inlets under Valetta ; nor is it possible to over-estimate the naval and military value of Malta to the Empire, as a station upon the " Queen's High- way" to the East and to the Colonies, and as a re- fitting port for the Mediterranean Fleet. Of that important division of the British navy there is no- thing anchored in the harbour at present except the Thunderer and a corvette or two, but the quarantine cove is full of steamers from cholera-smitten Spain and Italy, forbidden to hold communication with the shore, and disconsolately flying the yellow flag. A drive across the island to Civita Vecchia reveals the reason why it wears so arid an appearance from the sea. Innumerable stone walls are built, enclosing the little fields, and these, seen k fieur de I'eau, com- pletely obscure from view the not unfertile patches of cabbage, potatoes, and garden ground which diversify Malta and still more Gozo. The high road, or Strada THE MEDITERRAIfEAN. ig Beale — which is crossed in the midst by a small railway — has well-built villas and peasants' dwellings along its whole course, and the islanders seem prosperous and contented : weaving, working in the fields, or carrying stores. Near to Civita Yecchia opens in the coast that rugged little inlet into which St. Paul's captain was " minded, if it were possible, to thrust his ship ; " and a statue of the Apostle stands on the hill, erected, so they say, on the very spot where the snake fastened upon his hand. Hard by is a church consecrated to St. Paul, full of ill-wrought pictures delineating this and other incidents of the Apostle's career ; nor does it seem doubtful, after learned investigations, that the Eoman galley was indeed driven out of the Sicilian sea upon this island, and not, as used to be thought, upon the little islet of the same name in the Adriatic. One or two days of the wild weather experienced by the Parramatta might make the traveller wonder how those ancient navigators ventured to launch their small and unwieldy craft upon such wide waters, for even St. Paul's vessel must have been a mere " Margate Hoy." But the fact is they seldom sailed in winter, and in sum- mer the sea itself is a roadstead : for it is quite true, as the Spaniards say, "There are four good harbours in the Mediterranean — May, June, July, and Port Mahon." From October to March they hauled their craft upon the- beaches and only put forth for voyages in the fair weather, with a wind over the stern or broad on the beam ; since fore-and-aft sailing was as unknown to them as the compass or steam. 20 INDIA EEVISITED. Not far from the Church of St. Paul are to be seen some very curious excavations, of considerable extent, made in the limestone rock. They are styled " The Catacombs," and have undoubtedly been hollowed out with considerable pains, for the purposes of sepulture, by some race, which had Egyptian or Etruscan notions about preserving the dead body against the future revisi- tation of the spirit. Here are family vaults, opening on each side of long underground passages, where couches are cut in the white rock side by side for husband and wife, with a little special cleft to form the head-rest of each body, and, round about, smaller niches for the children of the household. There are scores of such cellar-like sepulchres in the hills near St. Paul's Bay, and the strange caverns burrow about the limestone in all directions, lighted and ventilated here and there by a shaft pierced in the roof. These dismal sub- terranean works may have been used as dwelling- houses in later times, as the Maltese tell you, but it is clear that they are originally the memorials of a primitive people, who brought hither from Semitic or Egyptian lands the customs of a cave-burying race. All the way from Cape Spartel to the Impregnable Island, the Parramatta had steamed through a zone of rain-squalls alternating with sunshine, for this is the wet season on the African coast. Malta, which had lacked her usual allowance of moisture during October, was making it up during our stay in port by copious downpours, emphasized with thunderstorms ; and the steamer sailed out of the busy harbour with wet decks. THE MEDITEEEANEAN. 21 But after reaching the Tripoli and Egyptian waters, where too often the Mediterranean can behave in a very unpleasant manner, the ship ran into one of the most golden and soft-skied spells that cotild be desired. From dawn to nightfall our great vessel sped under a sky of turquoise unbroken by any cloudlets, and over a deep so smooth that the light airs, here and there touching the surface, seemed like breaths breathed upon a polished mirror, disappearing as soon as they appeared. The " Bahr-el-Abiad," or White Sea, as the Arabs always call the Mediterranean, deserves its Syrian name on such a perfect day, for its face gleams all silver and pale blue, and nobody could believe it capable of soon rolling again in black and destructive billows. The light wind, coming from the south over the Libyan Desert, is now warm as new milk, and brings out the pretty muslin dresses of the ladies, and sets the punkahs swinging in the saloon. To-morrow in the afternoon we shall enter Port Said, and finish our prosperous run of some two thousand miles through the whole length of the " Middle Sea." It is a sign of the vast expanses of this land-locked water that in all the long distances between the Straits and the Canal, with so prodigious a commerce coming and going, and upon the very main road of maritime trade, we have yet not sighted more than eight or ten sail of all sorts, beside the troopship Serapis and a French man-of-war. On such a voyage, so often made and over waters so familiar, the incidents aie necessarily few. I have but three trivial ones 22 INDIA KE VISITED. to mention. In the Straits of Gibraltar a whale, with her calf, gambolled about the ship for some time, to the great diversion of the passengers. Early one morning, after a windy night, we passed a ship's boat, full to the gunwales with water, drifting drearily upon the waves, the token, it might be, of fruitless efforts to escape death, or, perhaps, more happily, merely washed from the davits of a labouring ship. And about eleven at night, when near the Cartagena coast, the clouds obscuring the stars, and the sea and sky being black as ink, the Parramatta's lights suddenly fell with a startling flash upon a Spanish schooner wallowing slowly over the seas in our direct path. There was time to give the wheel turn enough to carry the great steamer clear by about a biscuit's throw of the Spaniard, who, as we swept by, could be seen hastily getting out a flare-up light and heard shouting imprecations and adjurations. If the shadow of his sails had not caught our watchful third officer's eye the steamer would have run clean over the hapless Spaniard, and another crew would have been added to the populous graves of " the tideless, dolorous Midland sea." But nothing really untoward has thuS far marked our prosperous course from the hour the Parramatta warped out of dock until the moment at which the low sandhills of Damietta have come close on our starboard-beam. The water has changed from indigo to emerald, and shoaled to thirty fathoms ; and the light wavelets are alive with little flying-fish. In regard to flying fish, I may here remark that I THE MEDITERRANEAN. 23 studied their habits with much attention in the Medi- terranean and the Eed Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. I must range myself, in the contro- .versy about the method of their volitation, with those who believe that they can and do prolong their aerial course by continued efforts, and that it is not due merely to one initial impulse. The jerad-ul-lahr, the exocetus volitans, springs from the surface of smooth water with a vibration of the pectoral fins, so rapid that it makes a slight whirring noise as the fish leaves the sea. Then the wing-fins seem to be motionless as the little pink and green creature skims away, but if the surface be smooth you will see it freckled with a sharp ripple every time the fish touches, which will be at such distances as a "duck and drake" stone would graze ; and it becomes plain that the fins are moving slightly but very swiftly in a direction to impel the fish by contact with the sea. When he can move closely along the top, striking the water at swift intervals thus, and holding his tail straight, the flying-fish will go as far as 250 yards, which would not be the case if this flight were unsupported by fresh impulses. Moreover, the wing-fins bear him up like the feathers of an arrow, as well as propel him like little paddles, and no bullet from a rifle keeps so low a trajectory. When waves are rolling, the exocetus does not often appear; and if he is suddenly fright- ened from his course or blown off from it, or alters it sharply, the little fish loses headway immediately, and drops quite abruptly and awkwardly into the sea. 24 INDIA REVISITED. I feel convinced, from hundreds of observations, and notwithstanding the absence of any considerable mus- cular apparatus about the pectoral fins to account for such strong and elaborate action, that the fish can. keep his fins vibrating for quite half a minute at pace enough to drive him along the wave-tops almost as fast as a swallow, and that the initial effort, even before a wind, does not count for more than some twenty yards or so. ( 25 ) III. THE CANAL AND THE RED SEA. The Parramatta steamed placidly into the mouth of M. de Lesseps' magnificent ditch in the afternoon of a perfect Mediterranean day. Much farther out to sea than at the line where the lighthouse and masts of Port Said could be discerned, the Nile had already shoaled the water to fifteen fathoms with the silt brought down from the equatorial hills of Africa, thereby changing its colour to a pale green. The mole which forms the western wall of, the entrance to the canal is a fine rough piece of work, composed of tumbled blocks of concrete, each weighing twenty tons, and extending for more than two miles seaward. Behind it the wash of the Mediterranean is busily and usefully engaged day by day in piling up a beach of grey sand, which will help the masonry to preserve a clear and deep gateway to the port ; but steam- dredgers are still obliged to work at the silt which drifts in round the lightship. In the harbour a large collection of vessels will almost always be found lying. The first we pass in entering is a neat-looking Egyptian corvette named the SaJer, or " Sabre," flying the flag of the Khedive ; 26 INDIA REVISITED. her sailors on the forecastle have spread their seggddeTiA and are devoutly reciting the afternoon prayers. Astern of her is moored a melancholy craft — a ship of death and terror — the French troop-vessel Ghdteau-Yguem. At her fore-peak is seen flying the yellow flag of quarantine, and as we glide past her open ports and crowded decks the French soldiers and sailors on board her wear anything but the usual alert air of homeward- bound Gauls. They have brought cholera with them all the way from Tonkin, and it is given out that nearly 140 men have already died upon the voyage, while many are still sick or sickening. This unhappy steamer is forbidden intercourse with the shore or with other vessels, and some unfortunate Arabs who had gone on board tb get work have been impounded there, and cluster despondingly on the forecastle, doomed to a voyage they never desired or expected. Late last night, the agent tells us, the melancholy sound was heard of her ship carpenters nailing up coffins — for the dead cannot, of course, be cast over- board in the canal — and the ill-fated vessel, named so inappropriately after the bright and fragrant Bordeaux wine, will put to sea to-night, to everybody's great relief. Next in order to the unlucky Frenchman rides the Almora, of the British India Line, and then we steer close alongside her Majesty's great white troopship the Crocodile, full of time-expired and invalid soldiers returning from Bombay and Suakin, with faces tanned by the sun, but for the most part healthy and cheery THE CANAL AND THE RED SEA. 27 in appearance. The high, clean sides of the trooper, swarming with life ; her deck-houses and double awn- ings set fore and aft, and her strangely-shaped stem, make the Crocodile look like a vast Noah's Ark among the other steamers. The graceful Bosetta, of the Peninsular and Oriental fleet, rides close by, newly, arrived through the canal from China. She was one of the ships taken up by the British Government as an armed cruiser in the days of the Penj-deh scare, and no handsomer craft could easily be seen. The Coro- mandel, another of this splendid navy of the Penin- sular and Oriental, upon her first voyage, arrives from Calcutta while we lie at the buoys ; and the Assam is now working her way up the canal from Bombay. Other steamers and local craft are constantly arriving and departing, while launches, feluccas, dahabeeahs, nuggars, and little local boats, with fluttering awnings and flags, may be seen everywhere shooting about, amid wild Arab cries and violent gesticulations, giving the newly-created port a wonderful animation. The town, upon its water face, is Levantine rather than Egyptian in aspect, and has sprung into exist- ence like a bush of tamarisk from the sands, while it continues to grow in all directions. The climate is good, the situation commanding, and the time must surely arrive when Port Said will replace its present slight and unsightly buildings with streets and houses more worthy of the position, thereby becoming the modern Pelusium of Egypt. A few years ago the place was a den of thieves and assassins, nor could 28 INDIA REVISITED. any one safely traverse its back streets and byways after dark. Incautious persons who were seen to win money at the roulette tables, or who showed too much of it in making their purchases, were often followed at night and stabbed in the back by the ruffians infesting the suburbs. Even now there is a quarter at the back of the town, where, if crime is not to be feared, vice is about as shameless and as rampant as in any part of the world. But things are greatly improved. Baker Pasha's gendarmes patrol the streets night and day, and there are no serious disturbances, except those due to the nocturnal yelling of the Egyptian and negro coal-heavers, who, by the light of blazing beacons, fill up the bunkers of the steamships which are for ever arriving and departing. That there still exist thieves, however, in Port Said was rather painfully proved to us by the fact that on the night of our stay in the poj:t a new hemp hawser was carried off by marauders from the ship. It had been stretched as a warp from the Parramatta's stern to some bollard- heads on the eastern bank ; and during the darkness a boat with Arabs or Greeks must have glided alongside, cut the cable close to the ship, coiled it silently into their stern sheets, cast the shore end loose, and dis- appeared with the plunder. The thieves would doubt- less bury it for a while in the sand on the Canal-bank, until the hue and cry had subsided, and afterwards realise heavily upon their spoil at Damietta, or perhaps Alexandria. Honest folk may find plenty of work in Port Said with the perpetual coming and going of THE CANAL AND THE RED SEA. 29 passengers and the ever-increasing commercial business of the town. The interest of it to a visitor is soon exhausted. The streets are well laid out as regards proportion ; on the bare sand, however, without any attempt at road- making, except where the stone carts and donkeys tread the middle of the way into hard ground. There are cafis, of the third-rate Continental sort, with ladies from third-class Smyrna and Naples music-halls, who nightly sing and act, dividing the attention of their polyglot customers with roulette tables, where the votary of Fortune stakes florins and two-franc pieces, arriving at the usual result of promptly and regularly enriching the proprietors. There is a small public garden, feebly nourishing some locust trees and plan- tains, for the soil is hereabouts all mere sea-sand. The fruit and fish markets are, nevertheless, well supplied, the former from Damietta; while the port swarms with large and small fish, which at night glide through the water like electric lamps, their forms perfectly visible in the luminous sea that fiashes and curdles with milky light at every disturbance. By day the porpoises roll about the harbour, helping themselves to endless banquets of finny fry. The town is therefore well furnished with mullet, rock-fish, " Port Said salmon," and great ugly siluroids ; but now that refrigerators have come in fashion steamers de- pend very little on fresh fish or meat. Eggs are cheap and good, though very small, for the Egyptian hen — although the natives paint her here and elsewhere with 30 INDIA EEVISITED. green, yellow, and crimson tints — seems incapable of any serious effort in the direction of omelettes. The Arab quarter consists at present of booths and ■wooden huts, and the bazaars possess for experienced travellers little interest or picturesqueness. In one of them, however, we found a native cafi where two Ghawazi girls were languidly dancing before the usual audience of low-class Arab and negro connoisseurs. One, clad in scarlet, was a novice of no skill; the other — graceful and clever, with a handsome face of the old Egyptian type, worn hard and marked deep by a life of vice — was prettily dressed in wide trousers of purple and gold, a spangled jacket, and head-dress of coins and beads, with a jingling girdle of silver amulets. Asked if she could perform for us the " Balance Dance," she consented to exhibit that well- known Egyptian ^as for the modest consideration of two francs and a bottle of English beer. The cork of this contribution being drawn, a lighted candle was fixed in the neck of the bottle, which was then placed upon the crown of her black and glossy little head. A carpet was next spread upon the sand, and, extend- ing her hands, armed with castanets, and singing iu a high but not unpleasing voice to the accompaniment of a darabouka and rabab, she swayed her lithe body in slow rhythmical motions to the words of her song and the measured beat of the musicians. " I am black, but it is the sun of thy love which has scorched me ! Send me some rain of help from thy pity. I am thirsting for thee." The Ghawazi began with Arabic THE CANAL AND THE RED SEA. 31 words of this tenor, keeping exact time to her strain with foot and hand and the tremors of her thrilling, slender frame ; now slowly turning round, now softly advancing and receding, now clasping her hands across her bosom or pressing them to her forehead — but per- petually keeping the bottle and lighted candle in per- fect equilibrium upon the top of her head. Suddenly she sank, with a change of musical accompaniment, to the ground, and — while not only maintaining the com- pletest harmony of her movement, but even making this strange posture one of grace and charm — she con- trived in some dexterous manner, without touching it, to shift the bottle from the top of her head to her forehead, and thus reclined on the mat, her extended fingers softly clapping the castanets, her light, girlish frame palpitating from crown to feet, always in the dreamy passionate measure of the ancient love-song. This was really an artistic piece of dancing, though the performer was only a common "almeh" from the Delta, but the dance is, no doubt, as old as the Pharaohs, and every step and gesture traditionally handed down. The Canal sets forth from Port Said, in a breadth quickly to be diminished, between the vast marsh of Menzaleah and the dusty Pelusiac plain. On one side interminable sheets of stagnant water, broken by spits of mud, on which stand legions of flamingoes, storks, pelicans, and geese ; on the other equally far-reaching levels of greyish-yellow sand, on the distant edge of which the mirage lifts the dunes and rocks into the 32 INDIA REVISITED. sky, and draws a flickering white line of what seems like a lake or pool at their Base. The illusion of this " false water " is at times astonishingly perfect. The Arabs call it lahr-li-la-moya, the "sea that is not water," and even the most experienced camel- drivers are sometimes deceived by it. Yet it is a curious fact that animals never make any mistake on the subject, and the pictures in verse or prose which tell how " Panting cattle press to reach the dream," are false to natural history. The cattle judge proximity of water by smell and other signs, nor does the mirage ever cheat a camel or a donkey. It is most striking in the early morning when dew lies on the ground: then the desert bushes are magnified into trees, and their reflec- tions sleep imder them, precisely as if mirrored in dis- tant water. In Kelat and the wildnesses of the Indus frontier the Belooch calls it Lum pari ah, the " Min- strel's white lake," from an old legend that a Lum or travelling minstrel, crossing the desert, saw the bright fresh water, as he thought, sparkling in the sun, with green trees and cool banks, and emptied out the muddy liquid from his leathern bottle that he might the more quickly speed to the pool ; the end being that he perished of thirst. In other parts of India the optical illusion is also common, and is styled Ohitram, "the picture." Between boundless fowl-haunted swamps and dreary barren flats the ship thus continued to thread her slow THE CANAL AND THE EED SEA. 33 course, guided by small painted buoys, placed at inter- vals of some four hundred yards. The great bulk of our steamer passing through the narrow channel pushes a bow wave upon the flat margins of the Canal, which meets, in receding, the stern-wash from the screw, the two together forming a formidable roller that surges back alongside the vessel and eats the light banks away in a decidedly menacing manner. The sooner M. de Lesseps increases the width of his canal the better, especially in the middle of the Eed Sea portion, where the passage — commenced on too ambitious a scale — diminishes to a veritable ditch, so narrow that two vessels cannot pass each other. At night every steamer "ties up," laying warps out to either bank. Thus we spent the dark hours of Thursday, November 12, proceeding next morning between high shores of drab-coloured sand, loosely bound by the roots of tamarisk-bushes, and the creeping colocynth with its pretty but nauseous little melon-like fruit, until Lake- Timsah was reached — the "Crocodile Pool," whereon the town of Ismailia is seated, in a patch of refreshing verdure. The Parramatta steams forward, however, anxious to get clear of the Canal before sunset, but is- again and again obliged to " tie up " by reason of vessels coming northwards and having the "right of way." We are, therefore, occupied two nights and days in traversing the famous " short cut," the most picturesque part of which is certainly at the Bitter Lakes. Here a little inland sea, nine miles in width, is crossed — a light green, gaily dancing, but intensely saline water. 34 INDIA REVISITED. bordered by yellow plains of sand, and on the far south by the purple walls of Gebel Attaka. The arid waste has little or no vegetation, even up to the foot of the hills, except scrappy grass, and the nebbuk bushes. These latter shine with a bright thorny leaf, but bear a horribly bitter fruit, said by the Arabs to be given to the danine4 in hell by the Angels of Judgment when they complain, too loudly of hunger. At the southern exit of the Lakes we are brought once more to a stand by seven steamers in Indian file worm- ing their way up from Suez, and are obliged a second time to anchor for the night. Next morning an early start enables the Parramatta to emerge by the break- fast hour into the roadstead of Suez, which town has grown from a collection of mud hovels to a place full of buildings which look almost important from a distance. Here are docks and store sheds, moreover, and ships from all Eastern ports, grouping their masts and funnels against the vast dark rampart of Gebel Attaka. The Gulf of Suez widens down, in beautiful perspective of expanding sea and folded mountain ranges, between that Egyptian ridge and the Sinaitic masses upon the east. On the left the well-known Ayn Moosa, " the well of Moses," dots the dry Arabian plain with a ]pannus of green acacias and palms. Lower down, on the same side, are the " Baths of Pharaoh," and the beginning of those high and weather-eaten hills about Tor, which completely shut out the " Mountain of the Law " from the voyager's inquiring eye. The hopelessly barren peninsula of Sinai ends in the bold headland of THE CANAL AND THE BED SEA. 35 Eas Muhammed, opposite to which the setting sun brings broadly out the peaks of Gebel-ez-Zayt, the Hill of Oil; now revindicating its ancient name by the discovery of petroleum springs in the range. ' Then we steam forth into the Eed Sea, rolling hereabouts as blue as sapphire, the Parramatta running gaily along at fourteen knots an hour, in full chase of the Orient steamer Potosi, which started an hour or two before us from the buoys at Suez. Our third Sunday on the waves falls in the Eed Sea off the ancient port of Kossayr, on a splendid but burning -hot dawn. There are few religious functions, I think, more impressive than a service on the open waters in the saloon of such a vessel; and some of those amongst us who seldom go to church ashore are drawn to bear part in the simplicity and pathos of this maritime act of reverence. The table draped with the Union Jack ; the hymnals all " coiled down " against the moment when the harmonium shall resound ; the books of worship decorously laid out by the quartermaster for the captain's use ; the captain himself, gallant, solemn, his hair "sable-silvered," his gold eye-glass rigged to tackle properly and with a fair course the psalms and prayers; the long rows of beautiful or gentle and high-bred feminine faces, of brave and dutiful English gentlemen bound on the service of the Queen, or the honourable toils of busi- ness abroad — all these assembled upon the bosom of the great deep for worship, combine into a noble pic- ture of British gravity and veneration. Near to. the 36 INDIA HEVISITED. illustrious General who restored our name and fame in Afghanistan by his wonderful march from Cabul to Candahar kneel veteran colonels with every one of them an honourable history, and young officers who will by and by make it ; and when the captain has finished his supplication for the " safety of all those who sail in this ship," the harmonium, touched by skilful fingers, leads off a song of pious praise, and the sound of a hundred blended voices passes with the wind over the blue expanse upon which we are speed- ing. The little children, kneeling round their mothers ; the dark-skinned ayahs in their gay saris, grouped outside the saloon-doors ; the punkahs waving to and fro, the Indian boys at the window, in snow-white garments and scarlet turbans, dreamily working them ; the beat of the tireless screw ; the hiss of the sweep- ing seas ; the rattle of cordage and chains, and the ship's bell striking the watches, furnish elements of grace, colour, and incident to our little floating church which deepen the solemn effect when the good cap- tain's voice is heard praying for the peace and welfare of the Queen, and of that glorious British Empire, of which we are here a small moving, isolated fragment. Ko wild theorist has as yet proposed to democratise a ship. There are famous men in plenty on board the Parramatta, men with names known all over the civilised world, but the authority of Captain Anderson is disputed in nothing ; what he says and does is law for all alike ; we live under a benevolent but absolute monarchy, our accepted sovereign being the man who, THE CANAL AND THE RED SEA. 37 by forty years of experience, knows better tlian anybody else what is safe for the ship, and has, humanly speak- ing, the lives of all in his hands. The Caucus would have no chance of influence upon the deep sea, where people come face to face with the elemental powers, and with the eternal law that the wisest ought to command and the unwise ought gladly and gratefully to obey. Midway between Suez and Aden we had true Eed Sea weather — brilliant dawns, burning noons, blazing sunsets, and starry placid nights. This is the hottest zone of sea and land on the globe excepting the Persian Gulf and the coast of Senegambia. The Hedjaz Arabs themselves leave the oven-like shores of their country in summer, and hide, for coolness' sake, in the islands. The middle of this long and torrid water is clear to the passage of ships save for the deadly " Brothers " and the " Daedalus Shoal," both of which, however, are now lighted. The latter lying (nfleur d'eau, in mid-channel, was a constant terror of navigation, and could not safely be passed at night-time. Along each coast stretches a belt of reef, where the fatal branched coral, white and red, breaks the sea so gradually that a ship is dashed upon it before she knows her danger. The Arab pilots will only steer into the sherms, or inlets of this coral- line belt, when the sun is behind them, so as to show instantly where the water changes colour, for there is no tell-tale surf, and currents whirl and suck treacherously near to each opening into the shelves. Dismal and grim are the names given to such rocky death-traps all the way from.Akaba, which the Arab sailor never crosses 38 INDIA REVISITED. without prayer, down to the " Gate of Affliction," that leads out into the Indian Ocean. Here and there the frinsins; islands have colonies of sun-baked, adventurous men, who catch the turtle, sharks, and seals frequent- ing the ledges, and export, in occasional buglas, oil, fins, and shell. The old mariners found emeralds in some of these furnace-like spots, and Mersa Dahab, the " Golden Port," in the Gulf of Suez — one of them — was King Solomon's Ezion Geber. Eve died and was buried — the Arabs say — at Jeddah, the port of Mecca, where her tomb, sixty feet long, is devoutly shown ; and near it is Yembo, the harbour of Medina, the city where lie the bones of Mohammed, "upon whom be peace." Peace also be to all those brave gentlemen and gallant soldiers who sleep in the fiery sands of Suakin, opposite to the Prophet's home. As we steam, half-roasted even at this season, through the glowing air and over the boiling billows of the " Erythraean," we realise better than in England what our brave soldiers and sailors must have undergone on those disastrous uplands of Teb and Tamai. Bristling with hidden perils, lashed by wild , winds, and obscured by sand- storms ; haunted by enormous sharks in the water, by ferocious tribes upon the shores, and by jins and afreets in the air, it seems no wonder that this terrible yet beautiful sea is lined along both coasts with ancient Arabic names of rui» and lamentation. Every cape and reef and islet has no doubt witnessed some untold tragedy, and the bones of hadjis and merchants strew hereabouts a thousand nameless coral banks. THE CANAL AND THE RED SEA. 39 The Bahr-el-Ahmar, for Arabs also know it as the " Eed Sea," is no doubt named from Edom, the " Buddy Land " which borders it ; but you do sometimes, in traversing it, pass over large patches of water stained to a crimson tint with the Oscillatoria rubescens and the Trichodesmium Urythrceum which are filamentous algoe, like shreds of blood, and cover the surface far and near. The average depth is 500 fathoms, but goes over 1000, and the tide rises and falls about four feet. The rocks are mainly volcanic, and many of the islands send forth smoke and a glare by night. Those old navigators who first explored it, Scylax, the admiral of Darius, Eudoxus of Cyzicus and others, must have had an awful experience with their ancient craft under its fierce suns and fiery winds. From Alexander's time until the officers of the Bombay navy and Waghorn reopened the Sea, its waters remained a wilderness of solitude, with not a sail on their bright blue face, except where timid African and Arab boats crept up and down inside the shoals, or put across in the quiet intervals with infinite fear and tribulation. You see them now occasionally, the Katera Baye or coasting boat ; the Sambuh with short cut- water, the ■ Bugla with bluff bows, and the Dhow, or Bhpwranjah, with huge clumsy stem and sloping stern. But the Canal has filled the Erythrsean with large and small steamers coming and going independently of winds and waves, not only those of the Peninsular and Oriental, which must have left broad pathways of cinders on the coral bottom, nor of the other regular lines, but hordes 40 INDIA REVISITED. of " ditchers " or " water-tramps," as the Canal traders are called, beside the vessels now regularly plying with " the faithful " at the season of pilgrimage to Mecca. As for ourselves, this splendid vessel — an example of admirable discipline and perfect comfort — takes us through all the wonders and perils of the Bahr-el Ahmar at fourteen miles to the hour, and the three great sharks which have followed us from the Daedalus Shoal will get nothing for their cruise except the cook's refuse. It is so hot, however, that even the young ladies have almost ceased to flirt, and languidly fan themselves under double awnings and waving punkahs; while those human salamanders, the Seedee stokers, emerge from time to time, glistening with perspiration, from the Hades of the furnace-room, and lie, with nothing save a scanty cloth round their middle, cool- ing their black bodies in the wet refreshment of the scuppers. Early on Tuesday morning, Nov. 17, we spy the lighthouse on Perim, and emerge into the Gulf of Aden, glad to breathe the less relaxing airs of the Sea of Sinbad. ( 41 ) IV. PERIM TO BOMBAY. The sea has extraordinary caprices ! In the narrow waters of the Straits of Gibraltar, and again where the Eed Sea contracts towards Bab-el-Mandeb, we had rolling billows which would have made a line-of-battle ship dance, and which set even the stately Farramatta in somewhat lively motion. Here on the Indian Ocean, which stretches without a break in its vast expanse from the Arabian Mountains and the sun-baked crags of the Hadramaut Coast to the Antarctic Circle, the sea has once again slumbered like an inland lake. There have been days and nights when the surface of this broad waste lay undisturbed by even a ripple, so that the splash of the fiying-fish — startled from the deep by the sharp bows of our steamer, and skimming away right and left, like birds frightened up from a furrow by a ploughshare — became quite an event upon that world of sleeping silver. Yet on these same waters, in the early part of the year, a cyclone was raging which caused the loss of the fine vessel Speke Hall, and overwhelmed, with every soul on board, a, (rerman corvette and a French warship, That, how- 42 INDIA REVISITED. ever, -was during the first and worst of the monsoon ; we are traversing the Indian Ocean in ahnost the best season ; at the time when even the little dhows and buglas of the Arab and Persian ports put fearlessly forth to sea with cargoes of coffee, honey, dates, and horses ; and such little craft may be occasionally seen from our decks wallowing along with high lateen sails and turbaned steersmen. Their greatest peril lies in the dead calms, which render our large steamer's voyage so pleasant, for the heat here is at least fifteen degrees below that which was experienced in the middle of the Eed Sea, and the little children and ladies on board no longer lie listlessly about, gasping for fresh air. In long-continued calms the native craft sometimes run sadly short of water, and Captain Anderson related to us at tiffin to-day how, in this latitude, he was once brought to by a dhow's crew signalling piteously for water. The Arabs who rowed to the steamer's side could hardly pronounce the word " moya " with their parched lips, and when full goblets of water were handed to them, the poor fellows, says the captain, " drank like horses," as if their thirst could never be> assuaged. The gratitude of the despairing people, grew boundless when beaker after beaker of the precious fluid was passed down into the boat, and a big cask of it given them to take in tow to their dhow. In such ill-found and often helpless vessels Nearchus sailed his Periplus, and Sinbad made his seven voyages on this ocean ; indeed, even at the moment of writing PEEIM TO BOMBAY. 43 there is a whale on our port beam basking upon the surface, almost big enough, to give some warrant to the story of the Thousand and One Nights. Who does not remember how that "Ancient Mariner" of the East with his companions landed on what seemed an island in the deep, and only discovered that it was an immense fish when the fires lighted upon its back tickled the monster, and set him diving down five hundred fathoms ? What, indeed, may not seem pos- sible amid such an universe of waters ? If we sailed far enough, we might perhaps see the great Eoc flying over the evening waves to some unnamed islet where her prodigious egg lies a-hatching on shingle composed of dead men's bones mixed with sapphires and rubies. We might come upon that green and opulent valley of diamonds, where you fling raw legs of mutton into the ravine and find them afterwards carried up into the eagles' nests, stuck full of brilliants. Baghdad and Bassora are not very far away to our north-west ; northwards lie Ormuz and the pearl grounds of the Persian Gulf; southward, beyond sight, but not at any great distance, gleam the Laccadives, "Lakh-dwipa," the "one hundred thousand islands'' of the Indian Ocean; and underneath our keel, so some geologists believe, lurks the buried continent of " Lemuria." Nothing ought to appear too wonderful to happen on such waters, not even if we heard in the middle watch that mystic aerial voice of which Shelley sings : " Never such a sound before To the southern skies we bora : 44 INDIA REVISITED. A pilot asleep on the Indian Sea Leaped up from the deck in agony, And cried aloud, ' Oh, woe is me ! ' And died as mad as the wild waves be." Periin, which we skirted on Wednesday morning the 1 8 th, has put on quite an inhabited air during the last twenty years. It used to look as empty and barren as the neighbouring islets of the Dhalak Archi- pelago, except for one or two provisional structures which housed a sergeant's party. ;N"ow there exists a substantial lighthouse on the Arabian side and a group of solid edifices on the high ground of the island, where the garrison of eighty men and officers find shelter. The ' islandette ' was called Diodorus by the ancients, and is named Mayoon by the Arabs. Albu- querque christened it Vera Cruz, on his voyage in 1 5 1 3 A.D., and built a cross on its summit. Moreover, we ourselves occupied it once in 1799 before that little stroke of sharp practice which gave us renewed possession in 1857. Perim, as a place d'armes, closes the " Gate of Affliction " only in the sense of affording a spot which could be made the nucleus of a strong station for armed cruisers, because on the African side of the islet, as is well known, there stretches a passage of deep water eight miles wide, which is always open, and cannot possibly be denied to an enemy except by superior naval force present on the spot. Our little appanage would, of course, be reinforced for such a purpose from Aden, of which most important station it is an annexe, distant about eighty miles. There has been no element of politics hitherto in PERIM TO BOMBAY. 45 these slight sea-letters, but the Parramatta carries on board more than one authority of great eminence upon the naval and military interests of the Empire, and it is right that public attention should be directed to views taken by such upon the extremely momentous questions connected with this portion of the " Queen's Highway" to India. Those responsible for the pro- tection of that highway, and of the valuable stations which guard it, ought without delay to make up their minds as to the policy to be adopted in regard of Trench, Italian, and German annexations in the vicinity of Aden. All three Powers are hovering about these waters, and their flags are seen somewhat too often and too ubiquitously not to compare disadvantageously for us with the paucity of English ships of war, and the passiveness of our conduct. The Italians are at Zeila and Berbera, as well as Massowa ; the French are buying or seizing islands and ports of the Eed Sea and Somauli littoral ; the Germans are demanding cessions from the Sultan of Zanzibar. It is absolutely necessary that England should make her mind up about the regions or stations at the further end of the Eed Sea, which are vital to the supply and safety of Aden and Perim; and that having so resolved, she should announce and execute her resolution with the greatest promptitude. There is really no time to lose. The conditions of these flying notes of travel forbid me to offer any full details and explanations upon the subject; but the British public may be positively assured that the Empire has come of late nearer to 46 INDIA EEVISITED. graver perils in connection with Egypt and India, as regards foreign ambition and intrigues, than has been openly mentioned ; and that one element of future safety, imperiously demanded by the secret designs of those who are jealous of British supremacy, is to attend more closely and courageously to the exigencies of our Empire at the southern exit of the Eed Sea. It is much to be wished that our gallant fellow- subjects and comrades, the Australians, who helped the mother-country so gladly in the Soudan, would take up this matter. If they could see their way to establishing a settlement or maritime station on the African mainland there are plenty of localities where they might find a fertile background, and a convenient harbour for their cruisers ; moreover, it is the opinion of very distinguished and competent authorities that such a step on the part of Australia, while it would give expansion and political dignity to the Colony, would be of inestimable help to the Empire at large. " Australian papers please copy ! " A run from breakfast-time, at nine a.m., until four in the afternoon, under the barren hUls of Eas Arar, brought our good ship to Steamer Point and into the harbour of Aden. This "Cinder-heap" looks always, what it is by nature, the driest, most sterile, most savagely forbidding spot on which man ever settled. But here also, buildings, public and private, have in- creased remarkably during the past twenty years, and the sea-face of her Majesty's Arabian fortalice wears at present quite a populous appearance. Aden — the PBEIM TO BOMBAY. 47 "Eden" of Ezekiel xxvii. 23, and the Midaimon of the " Periplus " — was known to the Komans, who called it Poi'tvs Eomanicus, and there exists, contrary to belief, a constant supply of good water on the northern side of the peninsula. When we passed inside Steamer Point our ship was, of course, soon surrounded by a crowd of Somauli Arabs in their little "dug-out" canoes, naked except for a white loin-cloth, and clamorously begging that coins might be thrown into the water for them. As soon as a four or eight anna piece was flung into the sea, three or four eager little glistening savages hurled themselves after it, plunging fathoms down in the pale green water, where they gradually vanished from sight, leaving canoes, paddles, and the world above to take care of themselves. After quite a long interval their woolly pates — reddened, as is the fashion, with lime and henna leaves — emerge one after the other, and somebody has the coin between his shining teeth. The bonitos, leaping up and down in the harbour, could not seem more thoroughly in their element than these f eayless, symmetrical, brown-skinned barbarians, the most wonderful swimmers in the world, excepting, perhaps, the South Sea Islanders. As there were spotted sharks about one of the Somaulis was asked whether he did not feel afraid of them, but answered, grinning from ear to ear, " Shark not like eat Somauli boy." That was unnecessarily self-depre- ciative. The sharks, if hungry, would be glad enough to nip an arm or a leg from these lively young Africans, and, indeed, I talked with one who had thus 48 INDIA REVISITED. lost a limb ; but the Somaulis can see under the water almost as well as out of it, and take particular care to have the locality clear of their ferocious enemies when they dive. Those claiming the pleasure of personal acquaint- ance with the Eesident of Aden, General Hogg, formed a party invited to dine at the Eesidency. An excel- lent opportunity was thus afforded of inspecting the town and cantonment. We were rowed from the Parramatta's ladder to the bunder by the stalwart Arab crew of the Eesident's launch, neatly attired in white shirts and red turbans. A French man-of-war and an Italian corvette lay in port, with any number of dhows, buglas, and fishing-boats, but no British pennant was seen floating there. On shore a squadron of the Aden Horse — a smart body of well-mounted men — with a party of the 40th Infantry Eegiment, were observed moving down to salute our distinguished shipmate the Commander-in-Chief of India. Carriages were also waiting for Sir Frederick Eoberts and the rest of the guests of General Hogg, and, mounting into these, some of us started for a thorough inspec- tion of the extraordinary settlement. All around, above, about, is hard, barren, arid, volcanic rock ; cal- cined, contorted, ejected from ancient earth furnaces, and everywhere exhibiting the dry, drear colours of extreme heat — brick red, sulphurous yellow, Tartarean black. A faint green tint here and there in the clefts of the sterile hills, where infrequent rain has trickled and dust has lodged, manifests the presence of sparse PERIM TO BOMBAY. 49 thorn-bushes and of the Aden lily, a pretty white-flower- ing bulb, which is well-nigh the only growing thing redeeming the utter desolation of the landscape. The eye turns with relief from those gaunt burnt moun- tains, shutting off the sky, to the gay and motley popu- lation thronging the roads, returning at sundown from the day's labour. In the throng are lively, chattering Somaulis, brown-bodied and red-headed, many among them models of savage grace and symmetry ; white- coated English soldiers ; Arabs of the mainland on fast- trotting camels ; ringletted Jews — a colony of whom live here precariously on the trade in ostrich feathers — negroes from Zanzibar; Hindus, Turks, Egyptians, and Europeans. The road, which looks as if made of clinkers, slag, and ashes (scientifically it is " pisolitic paperino, cemented together by glassy, crystallised gypsum "), skirts the great coalyards which make Aden so precious — where we see some tame gazelles playing among the heaps of Wallsend — and then mounts by a zigzag into a marvellous cutting in the hot rocks, which presently develops into a deep ravine, guarded by a gate of masonry, with ditch, drawbridge, and heavy mounted guns. Passing through this one traverses what is evidently the lip of an extinct crater, and enters the basin of the ancient fires. There, in the hollow ' of the treeless, frowning mountain called Gebel-Shumsam, lies the little town proper of Aden, or Aidenn, " the Paradise ; " surely so called in antique irony, for Dante might have derived from its position and surroundings new conceptions of 50 INDIA REVISITED. a circle in the Infernal Eegions. The place itself is animated enough, with its swarms of light-hearted people, its strings of camels, donkeys, and family parties trudging home, and the beating of Arab drums and tambourines at the lighted cafds. All around it, however, rise these seared and savage rocks, reflecting the sun's rays by day, and radiating a heavy heat under the moonlight, without one blade of grass or leaf of foliage to relieve the weird scene. If there were townships in Hades this is assuredly the aspect which such infernal boroughs would wear. Yet we were assured by residents here that you grow q^uite attached to Aden after a stay of one or two years. It has climatic advantages even — so they declare — in the steadiness of the temperature and the pure dry atmos- phere ; but it enervates Europeans very palpably, and after six in the morning, by which time all parade and military work is done, the day, they all confess, is one long and slow siesta, • until the evening star, rising over Lahedj, brings a little coolness to the brazen sky. From the town of Aden we drove onward to the farther lip of the black volcanic crater in which it sits seething, and so reached the famous tanks. They lie, three in number, under a deep ravine of the moun- tain, where it opens towards the mainland; and are evidently not so much excavated works as hollows under the ridge, "bunded up" to catch the rainfall, and afterwards lined and faced with blocks of lava, and " chunamed." The great middle pool was full of PEEIM TO BOMBAY. 51 good-looking liquid, said to be equal to eight months' supply; but the garrison is not permitted to drink this, being furnished instead with condensed water. A Parsee hires the tanks from Government, and retails the valuable contents at about the price of beer to the native population and also to the Arabs' of the near interior, who are now fairly friendly, at least for some thirty miles beyond the outer gates. The proximity of the waters permits some plants, and even trees, to be grown hereabouts, of which the Hindu mcdli is enormously proud. There is even a temple in the vicinity, sacred to a Hind]z god ; so " Luximan " was quite happy and felt himself " at home," To pass from this wild spot, and from the town bosomed in the burnt-out volcano, through long, dark tunnels cut unfier the hills, and by black dusty roads, to the bright, well-lighted Eesidency, was a striking and pleasing contrast. The Governor's House is of the type of the Indian bungalow — a large, commodious, but perfectly plain building, surrounded by latticed verandahs. At the porch, the kindly, courteous General, surrounded by his staff, was receiving his flying guests; and after Sir Frederick Eoberts had briefly inspected the bodyguard, and had been heartily cheered by some of his old soldiers, we all sat down to a brilliant improvised banquet — a party of fifty or more. If anything could have reconciled such birds of passage to a longer stay in Aden it would have been the charming society enjoyed under the Eesident's hospitable roof ; but our time was soon up, and, towed 52 INDIA REVISITED, out to the Parramatta by the steam-launch, accompanied by some of the Aden officers, we once again mounted to the populous deck of the steamer, and the renewed throb of the engines soon carried us far down the Gulf of Yemen. We have" now been four days upon the Indian Ocean, and expect to drop anchor in Bombay Harbour on Tuesday next, the 24th of November, about noon. Since leaving Aden the days have all proved cloudless, the nights delightful, the sea either smooth or swelling gently under the breath of light head winds. " "With- out hasting, without resting," the Parramatta easily accomplishes about 320 miles in each twenty-four hours, and could do a great deal better. It would be ungrateful in the last degree not to speak in terms of warm praise of the ship, her officers, ^nd the general management of the voyage. None, indeed, but the most exacting could find anything to complain of, though we are so large a party of passengers, and the voyage is one of twenty-seven days from the London Docks to Bombay. Our table is „ almost too bountifully pro- vided ; nothing is neglected for the ventilation and good management of the vessel, and all its daily and nightly work has been performed with a quiet disci- pline and precision which could not be surpassed. The country has reason to be proud of such a Company as the Peninsular and Oriental, which keeps in constant and perfect service this floating bridge of regular and well-ordered communication to its Eastern Empire. And the Company may be proud of such a ship as PERIM TO BOMBAY. 53 that in which we sail ; for a finer vessel never took the sea, nor one — as all on board agree — better com- manded and officered. It used to be said in old days that no Indian voyage came to a close without a marriage and a duel. As regards the latter there has been no quarrel or contretemps of the slightest sort among us ; yet for the other contingency it is not easy for a quiet but observant person to answer so positively. There have been prolonged moonlight conversations and late continued promenades on the deck under the southern stars noticeable even by the careless eye in more 'than one quarter, which forbid any rash statement on my part that the old saying may not prove true as regards the first and most serious of the two dangers attending the passage to India. ^ 54 ) V. NEW BOMBAY. The transformation effected in this great and popu- lous capital of Western India during the past twenty years does not very plainly manifest itself until the traveller has landed. Prom the new lighthouse at Colaba Point, Bombay looks what it always was, a handsome city seated on two bays, of which one is richly diversified by islands, rising, green and pic- turesque, from the quiet water, and the other has for its background the crescent of the Esplanade and the bungalow-dotted heights of Malabar Hill. He who has been long absent from India and returns here to visit her, sees strange and beautiful buildings towering above the well-remembered yellow and white houses, but misses the old line of ramparts, and the wide expanse of the Maidan behind Back Bay which we used to call " Aceldama, the place to bury strangers in." And the first drive which he takes from the Apollo Bunder — now styled the Wellington Pier — reveals a series of really splendid edifices, which have completely altered the previous aspect of Bombay. Close to the landing-place the pretty fagade of the Yacht Club — one of the latest additions to the city — is the first to NEW BOMBAY. S5 attract attention, designed in a pleasing mixture of Swiss and Hindu styles. In the cool corridors and chambers of that waterside resort we found a kindly welcome to the Indian shores, and afterwards, on our way to a temporary home, passed, with admiring eyes, the Secretariat, the University, the Courts of Justice, the magnificent new railway station, the Town Hall, and the General Post Office, all very remarkable struc- tures, conceived for the most part with a happy inspi- ration, which blends the Gothic and the Indian schools of architecture. It is impossible here to describe the features of these very splendid edifices in detail, or the extraordinary changes which have rendered the Bombay of to-day hardly recognisable to one who knew the place in the time of the Mutiny and in those years which followed it. Augustus said of Eome, " I found it mud ; I leave it marble," and the visitor to India who traverses the Fort and the Esplanade-road after so long an absence as mine might justly exclaim, " I left Bombay a town of warehouses and offices ; I find her a city of parks and palaces." Even the main native streets of business and traffic are considerably developed and improved, with almost more colour and animation than of old. A tide of seething Asiatic humanity ebbs and flows up and down the Bhenjii bazaar, and through the chief mercantile thoroughfares. Nowhere could be seen a play of livelier hues, a busier and brighter city life ! "Beside the endless crowds of Hindu, Gujerati, aiid Mahratta people coming and going — some in gay 56 INDIA REVISITED. dresses, but most with next to none at all — between tlie rows of grotesquely painted houses and temples, there are to be studied here specimens of every race and nation of the East. Arabs from Muscat, Persians from the Gulf, Afghans from the Northern frontier, black shaggy Biluchis, negroes of Zanzibar, islanders from the Maldives and Laccadives, Malagashes, Malays, and Chinese throng and jostle with Parsees in their sloping hats, with Jews, Lascars, fishermen, Eajpoots, Pakirs, Europeans, Sepoys, and Sahibs. Innumerable carts, drawn by patient, sleepy-eyed oxen, thread their creaking way amid tram-cars, buggies, victorias, palan- quins, and handsome English carriages. Pamiliar to me, but absolutely bewildering to my two companions, under the fierce, scorching, blinding sunlight of midday, is this play of keen colours, and this tide of ceaseless clamorous existence. But the background of Hindu fashions and manners remains unchanged and unchange- able. Still, as ever, the motley population lives its accustomed life in the public gaze, doing a thousand things in the roadway, in the gutter, or in the little open shop, which the European performs inside his closed abode. The unclad merchant posts up his account of pice and annas with a reed upon long rolls of paper under the eyes of all the world. The barber shaves his customer, and sets right his ears, nostrils, and fingers, on the side- walk. The shampooer cracks the joints and grinds the muscles of his clients wherever they happen to meet together. The Guru drones out his Sanskrit shlokes to the little class of NEW BOMBAY. 57 brown-eyed Brahman boys ; the bansula-player pipes ; the sitar-^inger twangs his wires ; worshippers stand with clasped palms before the images of Eama and Parvati, or deck the Lingain with votive flowers ; the beggars squat in the sun, rocking themselves to and fro to the monotonous cry of " Dhurrum ; " the bheesties go about with water-skins sprinkling the dust ; the bhangy-coolies trot with balanced bamboos ; the slim, bare-limbed Indian girls glide along with baskets full of chupatties or "bratties" of cow-dung on their heads, and with small naked babies astride upon their hips. Everywhere, behind and amid the vast commercial bustle of modern Bombay, abides ancient, placid, conservative India, with her immutable customs and deeply-rooted popular habits derived unbroken from immemorial days. And overhead, in every open space, or vista of quaint roof-tops, and avenues of red, blue, or saffron-hued houses, the feathered crowns of the date trees wave, the sacred fig swings its aerial roots and shelters the squirrel and the parrot, while the air is peopled with hordes of ubiquitous, clamorous grey-necked crows, and full of the " Kites of Govinda," wheeling and screaming under a cloud- less canopy of sunlight. The abundance of animal life even in the suburbs of this great capital appears once more wonderful, albeit so well known and re- membered of old. You cannot drop a morsel of bread or fruit but forty keen-beaked, sleek, desperately audacious crows crowd to snatch at the spoil ; and in the- tamarind tree which overhangs our verandah may S8 INDIA REVISITED. at this moment be counted more than a hundred red- throated parrokeets, chattering and darting, like live fruit, among the dark-green branches. India does not change ! One cannot be a day in this land without observing how the ancient worship of the cow still holds the minds of the Hindoos. Those baskets of "bratties" are the established fuel of the country, which everywhere burns the hois de vache. The Banjaras are the only sect in British India which allow the cow to labour, and good Brahmans will feed a cow before they take their own breakfast, exclaiming, " Daughter of Surahbi, formed of five elements, auspicious, pure, and holy, sprung from the sun, accept this food from me. Salu- tation and peace ! " Everything which comes from the cow is sacred and purifying, — the droppings are plastered with water over the floors and verandahs of all native houses, and upon the cooking-places ; the ashes of the same commodity are used, with colouring powders, to mark the foreheads, necks, and arms of the pious, and no punctilious Hindu would pass by a cow in the act of staling without catching the hallowed stream in his palm to bedew his forehead and breast. I have observed this morning my hamal reverently touch the compound cow as she passed him, when nobody was looking, and raise his hand to his mouth. He doubt- less muttered the mantra, " Hail, cow ! mother of the Eudra, daughter of the Vasu, sister of the Aditya, thou who art the source of ambrosia ! " India does not change ! NEW BOMBAY. 59 Yet, a visit yesterday at the house of a well-known Hindu gentleman revealed that certain social altera- tions are silently operating at this Indian metropolis. Sir Munguldass Nathabhai, K.C.S.I., is of course a remarkably advanced and enlightened Hindu, re- nowned for his freedom from prejudices ; but twenty years ago even this courteous and kindly personage could not have received me to the intimate hospitality of his mansion as he did. Meeting us at the door of his mansion, albeit in feeble health, he led the ladies of our party up his staircase to the drawing-room, where they were at once joined by the wife and daughters of the Hindu knight. These amiable native ladies could talk English perfectly, chatted on social topics, compared tastes in dress and tints, and in all respects observed our own usages of intercourse except in the graceful local addition that at the close of our visit they presented to their English friends deliciously fragrant bouquets of roses and jasmine, and offered the aromatic jpan supdri and the rose water. . Later on in the same day we again met the daughters and sons of Sir Munguldass at a " musical afternoon" given in a large house on Malabar Hill by a Parsee gentleman, Mr. Kabraji. Here there were assembled in a really magnificent pillared hall, paved with white and blue marble, some eighty or a hundred of the leading members of Parsee, Hindoo, and Mohammedan society, including at least forty native ladies. Sir Frederick Eoberts, Mr. Ilbert, Sir William Wedderburn, Mr. Justice Birdwood, and a 6o INDIA REVISITED. number of English residents, mingled with the large native party on perfectly easy and equal grounds, but no London drawing-room could have presented a scene so bright in colour and character. The Parsee and Hindoo ladies — many of them personally most charming in appearance, and all gentle and graceful in demeanour — wore lovely dresses of every conceivable hue, rose colour, amber, purple, silver, gold, azure, white, green, and crimson. A Guzerati girl in red and gold sang the " Last Eose of Summer " with notable skill to the piano played by her sister, and then a ring of Parsee maidens, in flowing silk robes and dark glossy tresses, chanted a " song-circle," softly singing in chorus, and beating time with their hands, while they moved round and round in a rhythmical ring of singular grace. The music ended with " God Save the Queen," quite acccurately sung by a number of these Indian maidens in native words; and after refreshments had been handed round, chaplets of flowers and little balls of rosebuds and the fragrant champa buds were distributed, and the well-pleased company separated by the light of innumerable oil lamps set among the shrubs and trees of the compound. If it were possible to depict the golden background of the Indian sky, and the sleeping surface of the Indian Ocean, which made the setting of this fair and friendly gather- ing — ^until the quick twilight suddenly closed upon us — some better artistic idea might be derived of the pleasant and novel afternoon thus spent. For assuredly such a gathering is a great and signal token of the NEW BOMBAY. 6i increasing friendship arising between the races ; nor could anything be calculated more to impress and gratify a fresh observer coming back, after many bygone years, to«nodern Bombay. One point was particularly notice- able to those accustomed to mark signs of fresh ideas in the native mind. It is incumbent on Parsee ladies to wear a rather ugly white band drawn tightly over the crown and brows, and this remnant of early times has resisted even the new taste for silk stockings, satin shoes, and European ornaments. But the pretty Zoroastrians, who possess the finest and glossiest black tresses in the world, object nowadays to conceal entirely this great charm, and so the white head-band is pushed farther and farther back, until it threatens to disappear altogether under the silk sari of violet or rose, sea- green, or sapphire, drawn so coquettishly over the head. Every Parsee, man and woman alike, must put on the Sadaro, or sacred shirt of cotton gauze, and the Kusti, or thin woollen cord of seventy-two threads representing the chapters of the Izashne, with two tails of twelve knots denoting the months of the year. The new municipal institutions of Bombay are also very notable. In that collection of handsome and spacious halls called the " Crawford Market," fish, flesh, vegetables, flowers, fruit, and general commodities are vended in separate buildings, all kept in admirable order and cleanliness, and all opening upon green and shady gardens. The Hindu or European housewife finds printed lists af&xed at the gates giving the day's 62 INDIA REVISITED. prices. At a glance she can see what she must pay in the fish-markets for pomfret, pommelo, surmaye, jiptee, palah, bouie, shoall, bheng, and all the finny varieties brought in by the quaint fishing craft of the harbour. The quotations are given for cocoa-nuts, plantains, pomegranates, and limes — for meat, poultry, and green stuff; and shoals of bright-eyed naked Hindu boys attend each customer, with basket on head, eager to carry their purchases. Great as the morning heat was when we strolled through the crowded thoroughfares of this fine market, everything seemed fresh and clean, and even the Mohammedan butchers' stalls were as neatly kept as so many boudoirs. In the side-walks of the place Persiahs with white bushy-tailed cats for sale, bird-catchers with quails, floricans, and snipe, jungle people with monkeys and wild animals, pitch their little camps ; and on all sides there seemed evidence of plentiful supplies and general well-doing. In fact, the population of Bom- bay, to judge from the streets and marts, are well employed, well fed, and contented, with few beggars about and perfect public order. Here and there, under the walls of a temple or bridge, will be seen rows of professional mendicants, exhibiting their de- formed limbs or personal ailments as a means of livelihood ; and strings of blind people, led in a long queue by a sharp-sighted lad, go about in the morn- ing from shop to shop, asking for the pice, or handful of grain, which is seldom refused by the charitable native. But there seems little general pauperism in NEW BOMBAY. 63 the busy ways, and its death-rate at the present moment would be considered good even for a European city. Everybody who comes to Bombay pays a visit to the island of Elephanta, to inspect the cave cut in the rock, which is at the same time one of the first and riLLAE IN ELEPHANTA CAVE. one of the most striking sights in the country. We were invited by Mr. and Mrs. Gratton Geary to join a large breakfast-party which was to cross to Elephanta by a steain-launch on a visit to the island and the caves. The run of six miles across the shining waters 64 INDIA REVISITED. of the harbour was quickly accomplished, and before, eight o'clock we were picking our way over the stepping-stones which lead to the shore of the verdant and hilly islet. Its steep acclivities, divided by a cleft in which the caverns lurk, are clothed with a thick covering of Karunda bushes, wild indigo, and palms, amid which countless sulphur-coloured and purple butterflies flutter. A pious worshipper of Shiva — to which god the spot is especially sacred — has con- structed a wide and well-built flight of stone stairs, by which the visitor now ascends the slope much more conveniently than of old. Little brown-skinned boys, resident in the place, beset you with bunches of jungle- blossoms or collections of green and diamond beetles, and those odd gilded wood-lice with transparent horny cases which while alive are the most beautiful creatures imaginable, but fade into hideous objects when dead. A two-anna piece purchases the whole collection, and makes the small naturalists vociferously happy. In ascending the steps from the mangrove swamps at the foot of the hill, the loveliest prospect opens of the harbour, with Karanja, Trombay, and the other islands studding its surface. But Elephanta, although so fair, has ever been pestilential with malaria, and haunted with numberless serpents. The sergeant in charge of the place, who meets us at the top, is yellow and quivering with fever, and mentions that he has himself killed one hundred and fifty-eight reptiles — cobras, carpet snakes, and rock snakes — since May last, when he came upon his post. He encounters NEW BOMBAY. 65 them chiefly basking in the sun upon the stone stairs leading to the excavations, and, although unpleasant inhabitants, it is quite in harmony with the genius of the spot that an island sacred to Shiva the Destroyer should be peopled with the hooded snake, which was always the emblem of his awful power. In one corner of the gloomy but marvellous caverns — where a heap of broken stones lay under an image of this dread deity, and the overhanging rock, delicately sculptured with friezes of elephants, attendants, and fluted capitals, cast heavy shadows upon the hanging creepers and datura bushes — a cobra glided into the crevices just as we approached. It was the one presence needed to com- plete the sombre melancholy of this deserted fane, cut so laboriously out of the solid mountains, and tenanted by these vast carved effigies of antique Hindu gods. The cave-temples of Elephanta have, however, been too frequently described to render a repetition of their contents permissible here. Dr. Burgess, in an admir- able treatise published by the Bombay Government in 1 87 1, well-nigh exhausted the whole subject from the archseological point of view. Yet there is one gigantic statue, sculptured from the black hill-side, called the " Ardhanarishw^ra," which must always, astonish and impress the visitor, even on repeated inspection. The name signifies " The Lord who is both male and female," and it stands forth from the dark matrix of the crag on the right-hand side of the "Threefold Face," or "Tri-Murti," which is the chief image in the shadowy cavern. This statue, of colossal; E 66 INDIA EEVISITED. size, is nevertheless very delicately cut, and the limbs and features possess an almost tender beauty. But the right half of the deity from head to foot is male, and the left moiety female. On one side of the figure are the knotted hair, the breast, the limbs of a god-like man ; on the other the smooth and braided tresses, the swelling bosom, the rounded contour of a goddess. Such incongruous elements are blended by a daring art into a whole which, in the subdued light of the vast cave, looks harmonious, majestic, and even natural. The Upanishad named Sw6taswatara has a passage which says, " He is the man and woman, youth and maid ; " and this strange ef&gy, no doubt, represents Brahma so conceived of as uniting all forms and both sexes. It was odd to pass from the cool dark air of the cavern-temple, and from the profound thoughts sug- gested by such ancient art, to the breakfast table spread outside in the broad daylight under the shade of a large tamarind, tree and of cocoa-palms, some of which had lost their leafy crowns in the past monsoon. Laughter and gay conversation, with champagne-cup, soon dissipated for most of those present all thought of the antique lessons carved on the living rock of the mysterious temple ; and the island, girdled by glad waves and lines of distant mountain lying golden and red in the sunshine, seemed as if made for happy people to sojourn safely in. Yet every rock and thicket held those creeping venomous horrors, the symbols of Shiva's destructiveness ; and fever brooded NEW BOMBAY. 67 like a spirit of evil in the hollows and green mangrove flats; while behind the waving trails of bloom and foliage veiling the mouth of that awful cave, stared forth for ever from the black wall Shiva himself, with his grim omnipotent consorts, holding the eternal secrets of life and death. We did not quite escape the maleficent powers of the island. Our charming hostess, while botanising, plucked inadvertently a pod of the pretty but horribly stinging kiwaeh, which we call "cowhage," or "cow- itch." The microscopic hairs upon the pod are so many poisonous daggers, and these sadly blistered and inflamed her hand and wrist, giving as much pain as though they had been scalded. Warm water re- lieved the smart, which presently passed away; but she will never carelessly touch again those beaded woolly seed-cases which look so graceful and burrf so cruelly. In bad old days this Macwna pruriens was employed to poison wells. We visited^ the same day a large school for Parsee girls, where some one hundred and fifty of the Zoroas- trian maidens, of all sizes and ages, were learning wisdom of the modern sort, the little ones with black tresses flowing from beneath embroidered caps, the older girls in the sari, the pretty bright choli, and the skirt. They sang " Home, sweet home," to Guzerati words, and proudly exhibited their achievements in sewing, knitting, and crochet-work. Wherever you encounter Parsees in India you will find intelligence, enlighten- ment, and energy ; it is only a pity that this admirable I ■< n < i B o n 68 INDIA REVISITED. people are not more numerous. As we drove in the evening to dine on Malabar Hill, a marvellous display of shooting stars attracted attention. The unclouded sky was perpetually crossed by flights of meteors, radiating apparently from the zenith, and sometimes of extraordinary brilliancy. We must have seen many hundreds fall within three quarters of an hour. The date (for the information of astronomers) was Kovember 27. ( 69 ) VI. THE GHAUTS AND POONA. That section of the Great Indian Peninsular Eailway which runs from Bombay to the capital of the Mahratta country may compare in interest with any hundred mUes of iron road in the world. Leaving BycuUa Station the traveller threads the thoroughly " Hindu " suburbs of Parel, Dadur, and Chinchpoogly, his train flying through groves of date and cocoa palms, amid temples, mosques, synagogues, and churches ; dyeing- grounds spread with acres of new-dipped brilliant silks and calicoes; by burning-ghauts and burying-places; by mills, stone-yards, and fish-drying sheds, through herds of wandering brown sheep and grey goats, droves of buflkloes and kine, and great throngs of busy people; all these combining into a continuous picture. Crossing an inlet of the sea at Sion Causeway, the line next coasts the island of Salsette amidst the most char- acteristic Oriental scenery, and arrives, by many a low-roofed village and tangled patch of jungle, at Tanna. Here the outlying spurs of the Syhadri Mountains — steep eminences, coloured red and black, and- capped with extraordinary' square rocks, like walled fortresses, or domes and pinnacles constantly 70 INDIA REVISITED. resembling temples — shut in the sea-flat upon which the town stands ; and we are advanced to a spot where, with natural beauty on all sides, the thickets on the hills shelter tigers and panthers, and the water swarms with alligators. Of late years these wild creatures have been largely evicted by sea and land, and even the pretty striped palm squirrel — whose back is marked with Parvati's fingers — and the green parroquets with rosy neck-rings, are becoming rare in places which once abounded with them. Tanna is interesting historically. Portuguese, Mahrattas, and British have fought stoutly for these rich fields and tree-clad acclivities, and in the old fort here was once confined Trimbukji, the wily minister of Baji Eao, last of the Peishwas or Deccan kings. That famous chief was under guard in Tanna, watched by a strong force of European soldiers ; but a Deccanee groom, pretending to exercise a horse beneath the prison walls, managed, while singing a Mahratta song, to convey to Trimbukji by the words of his loudly chanted ballad all the information necessary to enable the prisoner to know where and when the fleet horses would be waiting which the same night carried him away. Near at hand, moreover, are the Caves of Kanheri, unquestionably Buddhist, for in them have been found classical inscriptions enshrining the doctrines of Gautama, and it is even believed that the sacred relic at Kandy — the tooth of the Buddha — was first treasured up in a Daghoba of the Kanheri hill. -The island of Salsette is very rich in such memorials of THE GHAUTS AND POONA. 71 " the Light of Asia." Next, crossing to the mainland, the railway proceeds along the banks of a creek — lined with palm-groves, mangoes, and fig-trees, and peopled with snowy egrets and flocks of the green bee-eaters — to Callian, which was in far-away times a very large and flourishing place, and the abode, among other ancients, of Chanakya, the teacher of King Sandro- cottus or Ghandra-gupta. Cosmos Indicopleustes came also hither, and in the Batna-Mdld, or " Jewel-wreath," it is written how, in the time of Vikram, A-D. 6g6, " the capital city, Kalyan, lies full of the spoils of conquered foes, of camels, horses, cars, elephants. Jewellers, cloth-makers, chariot-builders, makers of ornamental vessels, reside there, and the walls of the houses are covered with coloured pictures. Physicians and professors of the mechanical arts abound, as well as those of music, and schools are provided for public education. It is in order that he may at leisure compare the capital city of Ceylon with Kalyan that the sun remains half the year in the north and half in the south." By this time the vast wall of the Syhadris — black in the sunrise and golden in the sunset — is closely approached. The pointed buttress of the Parsik, the flat rampart of Parbul, the two sharp peaks of Jano Machchi, the " Cathedral Eocks," and many another striking mountain mass, appear prominently along this great barrier which runs north and south for two hundred and twenty miles, affording only two breaks in all the extent of the continuous ramp where a cart 72 INDIA REVISITED. road or railway could be constructed — the Bhor and tlie Tal Ghauts. At Kurjat the railway boldly attacks this enormous obstacle, beginning to climb aloft by a zigzag route of sixteen miles from the steaming Concan up to the breezy Deccan. In that distance the power- ful engines lift the train nearly two thousand feet into the sky, by gradients oftentimes as steep as i in 37, dashing over aerial viaducts, diving into tunnels, rushing into dark cuttings, amid scenery alternately terrible and lovely, which now presents fair and far- stretching plains, dotted with rice-grounds and villages, and now abysses of awful depth, down which the gaze plunges a thousand feet, awed yet fascinated by the combination of gloomy rock and gleaming verdure, of streams trickling or foaming through the bottom of the lonely glens, and solitary hamlets shrouded by palms. Emerging at last under the level of Khandalla, a bungalow is seen perched upon the utmost edge of the very wildest crag of the range. The garden wall of this singular abode skirts a ravine fifteen hundred feet deep, which used to be the haunt of numberless tigers, leopards, bears, and other forest denizens. Wolves, wild boar, and the great Indian deer, called " bara-singh," or " twelve-horns," are still comparatively common about Lanowli and throughout the brink of the table-land, which here brings us into the plateau of Central India, upon the wide maidans and rocky flats of Maharashtra, the " Great Kingdom," the Deccan of the Peishwas. In this region — familiar enough to myself in bygone years, but very strange in its new vegetation THE GHAUTS AND POONA. 73 and curious isolated villages to my two dear companions — our train still flies along under the shadows of the quick-falling night, until Poona is reached, and we descend, in clouds of dry, white, fragrant Indian dust, at the capital of the Mahrattas. A drive next day about the cantonments and a walk through the native bazaars serve to disclose how little India changes amidst all the alterations, embellish- ments, and ameliorations which have come with the British reign. Twenty-three years will naturally make a difference alike in men and cities, and Poona in that period has become a much larger and handsomer station. Maidans, which once stretched without a tree or hut to the feet of the flat hills of Kirkee and Singhur, are now covered with bungalows and gardens ; a fine new bridge spans the Moota-Moola, and my ancient College of the Vishrambagh has been replaced by a magnifi- cent new edifice beyond the Bund, where the Brahman students find lodging as well as tuition. A charming public garden overlooks the water opposite Eroda, where fields of bajri and jowari once harboured quail and gave me many a good morning's sport; and all the suburbs outside the native city have been so trans- formed that I must confess to have wandered wholly lost amidst the labyrinth of new roads and houses, unable to identify the spot where I lived until after considerable research. The city itself, however, remains almost exactly what it was a quarter of a century — or, indeed, a century — ago. The same picturesque crowd of Brahmans. Purbhoos, Mahrattas, 74 INDIA EEVISITED. Koombies, Gosaeins, Banias, bright-eyed women, and naked brown babies fills the narrow lanes and the great bazaar of the Moti-chouk. The same painted house- fronts open their little shops — with the merchant a-squat amid his small commodities — to the chattering street. There still are the old temples in full swing ; Nandi the stone-bull is staring, as always before, into the open Ihut-khana at the corner of the potters' quarter, where Siva sits in red and gold under his canopy of snake-heads. Eound the great red Lingam ia the next street on the right hand used to be ranged in succession a sweetmeat shop, a dyer's shed, a tobacco-stall, and a store for the sale of purple and green glass bangles. We turn, and there they are, the old-established emporiums, about as large as a piano- case, son succeeding father in the usual Hindu fashion, so that he who comes in the same way after another quarter of a century's absence will probably find the next generation of Poona dealers keeping up in the same abodes the same settled business. Here and there fire has destroyed some well-remembered building, and the outer quadrangle of my pleasant old Vishrambagh lies, alas ! in ruins. We enter, and pass up the familiar stairs into the familiar diwan-Tchana, its windows looking out as ever through the carved teak- columns and arches of Hindu grace, upon the palms and plantains stUl waving over the same stone tanks. Underneath the College walls the same potter, so it seems, is banging a gindi into conventional shape, who was at work upon it in 1861 ; and the same women THE GHAUTS AND POONA. 75 — one would almost say — are beating their wet clothes upon the slabs by the well, or pouring lotas of water over their comely bodies. An old gatekeeper of the College — not so much older than he used to look, not- withstanding these many years — makes many salaams, and " Sadhoo " presently brings up other people of the quarter who recognise the former "Principal." A good many well-remembered faces have, however, quitted this world of illusions for " Swarga." Krishna Shastri is dead, Kero Punt is dead, Baba Gokhley is dead ! The list is long and sad, but the quiet, happy life of my little quarter of Aitwar-Pet goes on, and things are generally pretty well with everybody. Then we visit the grand new College, which has replaced that ancient Mahratta Palace where I taught my Brahmans and Parsees ; and find, with a certain feeling of envy, mixed with satisfaction, Gunpati, the God of Wisdom, much better lodged now than in the days when education was beginning in the Deccan. The Persian Professor and the Acting-Principal show us the halls and lecture-rooms of their imposing edifice, which stands finely amid an extended pros- pect stretching from the battlefield of Kirkee to Kore- gaon, beyond the " Sister-hills." The same afternoon is fixed for a little expedition to Hira Bagh, "the Diamond Garden," and to the temple of Parvati, which takes us again through the unchanged, unchanging Hindu city. The vegetation of the Deccan is seen to perfection in this pretty retreat, where sacred fig- trees and palm-clumps, bamboos and tamarinds, man- 76 INDIA REVISITED. goes and the gold-flowering baubul make a delicious shade. As we wander by the large lake covered with Indian rushes and aquatic plants a brown and white snake slips from beneath our feet into the clear water, and swims quickly away to the shelter of a ruined walL This silent ubiquity of deadly serpents in India gives a watchful feeling to the wanderer about her groves and buildings. They turn up just when you expect them least. Last week, at Malabar Hill, a resident, sitting in his verandah, heard a rustling beneath his chair, and taking the sound for his little dog's move- ment, snapped his fingers under the seat, calling the animal. Nothing answering, he looked, and, to his horror, saw two cobras there dallying with his suspended palm. All the same, one may sometimes pass half a year without ever seeing a snake ; but how really awful is the power of their fangs may be judged from the fact that between 1875 and 1880, 103,000 persons died from snake-bite in British India, and 1,073,546 poisonous reptiles were kUled for the Government re- ward. It is a curious fact that you may boil snake- poison without diminishing its venomous properties, which seems to prove that there are no germs in it. Permanganate of potash, however, renders it quite inert. Parvati's Hill, with the renowned temple on its sum- mit, overlooks the "Diamond G-arden." A long and winding flight of spacious stairs leads up to the shrine, so gradual that mounted elephants can quite easily carry visitors or pilgrims to the platform of the Deity. Parvati, the " Mountair> Goddess," the Mater Montana THE GHAUTS AND POONA. 77 of Eome, was Siva's consort, and is worshipped everywhere in India under forms now terrible, now lovely and benign. Among the latter is her personifi-^ cation as Annapurna, "the food-giver" of the house- hold, which sounds strangely like the Anna Perenna of the Eomans, also adored as the Dispenser of Plenty. Moreover, the great festival of Parvati occurs in Chaitra, just as that of the Latin goddess in the Ides of March. India has taught the West more than people dream ! Parvati was also the presiding Deity of Sati sacri- fices. Half-way up the ascent to the holy hill is seen a stone memorial of a Sati, with the usual hand, arm, and foot marks engraved which show that a Hindu widow here immolated herself. The bright-eyed Brah- man lad who conducts us points to the spot with pride, and is astonished to learn, when he speaks half regret- fully of the abolition of this antique rite of self-sacri- fice, that it was never in any way common in India, the instances of Deccan Satis not amounting in any one year to more than eight or nine hundred. That unsel- fish and perfect love which could make a woman forego life for her husband was naturally never so particularly common that, even in India, every city could furnish a Hindu Alcestis once or twice a week ; as seems occasionally supposed. Here, however, was, at any rate, the place where one such great-hearted wife — believing the Shastras, which promise union in heaven with the dead man, and as many lakhs of happy years with him as there are hairs upon the dead man's body — here was the spot where some Hirabaee or Gungabaee 78 INDIA REVISITED. gave her gentle life to the flames, undeterred by the heaped-up wood and lighted torches, unrestrained by the beauty of this Deccan prospect which stretches, fair and fertile, to Sivaji's distant fortress-peaks. The Eomans — Stoics as they were — knew the custom, and admired it. Propertius writes : " Uxorum fusis stat pia turba comis ; Et oertamen habet Icedi, quee viva sequatur Oonjugmm ; pudor est non licuisse mori. Ardent victrices, et flammte pectora praebent, Imponuntque suis ora perusta viris." It was not very wrong of me, it may be hoped, to lay a flower upon the carved stone which recorded where the Sati — the "Excellent One" — had last set her fear- less foot upon this earth of selfish hearts and timid beliefs. The verse translated from the "Hitopadesa" came vividly to my mind : " When the Hindoo wife, embracing tenderly her husband dead, Mounts the funeral pyre beside him, as it were a bridal bed ; Though Ms sins were twenty thousand, twenty thousand times o'er told, She should bring his soul to Swarga, for that love so strong and bold." The " Adi Granth " of the Sikhs well says, no doubt, against the old practice, " They are not Satis who perish in the flames, Nanuk ! Satis are those who live on with a broken heart." Yet it was a splendid courage and a beautiful faith which inspired those Indian wives. The ritual was most solemn. The widow bathed, put on new and bright garments, and, holding Kusa grass in her left hand, sipped water from her right palm, scattered some tila grains, and then, looking eastward. THE GHAUTS AND POONA. 79 quietly said, " Om ! on this day I, such and such a one, of such a family, die in the fire, that I may meet Arundhati, and reside in Swarga; that the years of my sojourn there may be as many as the hairs upon my husband, many crores multiplied ; that I may enjoy with him the felicities of heaven, and bless my maternal and paternal ancestors, and those of my lord's line ; and that, praised by the Apsarasas, I may go far through the fourteen regions of Indra ; that pardon may be given to my lord's sins, whether he have ever killed a Brahman, broken the laws of gratitude and truth, or slain his friend. Now do I ascend this funeral pile of my husband, and I call upon you, guar- dians of the eight regions of the world, of sun, moon, air, of the fire, the ether, the earth and the water, and my own soul. Yama, King of Death ! and you Day, Night, and Twilight ! witness that I die for my beloved by his side upon his funeral pile." Is it wonderful that the passage of the Sati to her couch of fiame was like a public festival ; that the sick and sorrowful prayed her to touch them with her little fearless, conquering hand ; that criminals were let loose if she looked upon them ; and that the horse which carried her was never used again for earthly service ? The bright-eyed Brahman lad, Hari Govind, was son of the hereditary priest of the temple, and would him- self some day succeed to the charge of the great goddess and of her house upon the hill. He talked English volubly and well, and was reading Macaulay's History. A promise of some English books pleased him more 8o INDIA REVISITED. than the offering he was expecting to receive for the poor of the temple ; and he did us the honours of the shrine with alacrity and grace. He lighted up the largest "adytum" of the goddess, in favour of such very special and interested visitors ; showing the great silver image of Mahddeo sitting in the darkness, with Parvati his consort on one knee, and Gunpati on the other, both wrought in solid golden plates; also two great snakes in silver and gold rearing their shining hoods overhead. When it was laughingly suggested that, since I knew it, I should recite the sacred verse, the Gayatri — which only Brahmans must ever utter, and which it is unspeakable profanation to hear from other lips — the boy took it very lightly, only observing, "Nako" — "Please don't!" Hari Govind, I think, cared very little, but he had the proprieties to observe and defend. There were worshippers in the temple precincts, laying little offerings in front of the barred shrines — flowers, nuts, leaves of holy trees, anything — for Mah^deo values the motive more than the gift, and the Bhagavad-Gita says : " He who shall proflfer me, in heart of love A flower, a leaf, a fruit, water poured forth. Hath worshipped well." There is no regular ritual for a Hindu temple. The priests keep the lamps alight day and night before the god, and say the befitting mantras at sunrise, noon, and sunset; but every man and woman comes, when he or she will, to clasp their palms, make nawMskdr-, present their gift, and prefer their silent requests. The THE GHAUTS AND POONA. 8i people believe in such things, to tell the truth, rather more than the educated priests. A Hindu official of the shrine, who called upon us the same evening — an old pupil of mine in the Government College — was quietly sceptical about the power of Parvati, and the value of prayers to her. This dialogue occurred: " You live with the goddess, Shastri ! Is she beneficent ? Does she tell you secrets of this life and of the next which Science in our West can never understand ? " He answered : " Who knows more than is known, Saheb ? We do as our fathers taught us, and we believe as we were taught; but the goddess is silent, and nobody comes back from the burning-ground to say if we are right or wrong." The best thing about the Temple of Parvati is, after all, the horse- shoe window — part of the palace built here by Baji Eao, and since destroyed by lightning — whence that last of the great Peishwas watched the battle of Kirkee. The view thence is simply perfect, as a landscape of Deccan bills, fields, and woods. It can, however, have attracted very little of Baji Eao's attention on the fatal day when he saw his eighteen thousand horsemen broken and routed by Colonel Burr's smaU force of two thousand Sepoys and eight hundred English. That day the " Goddess of the Hill " must assuredly have been offended or ungrateful, in spite of the vast gifts which the Peishwa bestowed on the Brahmans, since, under her own temple, she allowed the Jari Patkfi., the golden pennon of Moro Dikhshah's Deccan chivalry, to be trampled under foot, and this fair land to pass for ever to the stranger. ( «2 ) VII. NAUTCH DANCES, PLAYS, AND JEWELS. Ok the evening of our visit to the city of Poona and to the sacred hill of Parvati, we were invited to a nautch dance at the house of an old pupil and most esteemed friend, Mr. Dorabji Pudumji. It is the custom on festive occasions to illuminate the gardens and house-fronts with numberless oil-lamps set on pyramidal stands, or suspended in the trees. A flood of light, therefore, welcomes the guest on arrival, and he passes into spacious apartments equally bright, with candles in brass buttis, or handsome glass chandeliers. There is nowhere greater grace or cordiality of greeting than among the educated families of India ; but, in truth, this is the land of fine and noble man- ners, and, from the cultivated Parsee and Mohammedan to the peasant and the peon, the Western traveller may receive, if he will, perpetual lessons of good breeding. The ladies of my old friend's family were ranged round the large central room in dresses of light gauzy muslins or silks delicately embroidered, and dyed with all the loveliest tints imaginable, rose colour predomi- nating. The effect was like a garden of beautiful flowers. The gentlemen wore black coats and hats of . NAUTCH DANCES, PLAYS, AND JEWELS. 83 the well-known Parsee fashion, with trousers of crimson or white. In the centre of the apartment sate the two nautch girls, Wazil-Bukhsh, a Moham- medan, and KrishnS,, a Hindu, both amazingly arrayed in skirts of scarlet and gold, with saris of bright hues, plentifully spangled, tight gilded trousers, and anklets of silver and gold bells, which make a soft tinkling at every movement of the small brown feet. Behind them stand their three musicians, one playing the saringi, a sort of- violin, the other the tamboora, a deep-sounding kind of violoncello, and the third pro- vided with a bass and treble drum tied round his waist on an ornamented scarf. The girls rose to their feet, salaamed, and one of them began a slow pas, advancing and retreating with rhythmical waving of hands and measured beat of foot, which the other dancer then repeated. Next followed a song, or series of songs, delivered in high head notes, and principally of an amatory character. " My beloved is absent, and by day there is no sun in the sky, no moon for me at night ! But he is coming, ek hath Khali — ' with one hand empty ' — yet in that he carries me back my heart." Then KrishnS, sang the " Taza ba Taza," the musicians advancing and retreating with her tink- ling paces, leaning over the absorbed performer, and seeming in the intensity of their accompaniment to nurse the singing and draw it forth note by note. After this the Muslim girl and her Hindu sister executed together a famous dance called the " Kurrar," which consists of a series of character pictures. They 84 INDIA REVISITED. placed coquettish little caps of spangled velvet on their black hair, and acted first of all the Indian jeune amoureux, adjusting his turban, stroking his moustache, and pencilling his eyebrows. Then it was Govinda, one corner of the sari twisted up to represent the hansula, on which the light-hearted god piped to the shepherdesses, and Eadha listening and singing. Next — to the same never-ending rise and fall of the amorous music — Wazil Bukhsh became a love-sick maiden in the jungle, picking blossoms to fasten in her hair, and Krishna followed, enacting a serpent-charmer. Blow- ing on the beaded gourd that snake music which brings the hooded cobra forth from his deepest hole, she swayed her lithe body over the imaginary reptile, chanting the notes of the dreamy, bewildering, be- guiling song ; bent herself over the half-entranced snake, coaxing him out with long, low, weird passages of wild melody, until the charm was supposed to have triumphed, the serpent was bewitched and captured; whereupon Krishna rose to her feet and, drawing the glittering fringe of her sari over her forehead, expand- ing it with both hands, so as to resemble a cobra's hood, she finished with the snake-dance, amid cries of " Shabash " (well done) ! which were acknowledged with deep salaams. We were favoured after this, upon special request, with the Holi and the Wasanta songs, albeit not of the season ; for Hindu singing is always more or less religious, and there are certain of these melodies set apai-t for the time of year, and for the daylight, and I NAUTCH DANCES, PLAYS, AND JEWELS. 83 others which must never be given except after the hour of midnight. When the first portion was con- cluded the mistress of the house hung "hars," or garlands, of sweet-scented blossoms on the necks and wrists of the Nautch-dancers, since it is the custom always to honour them in this way before any other guests. Nor does anybody slight or abuse these Deva-dasas, or "servants of the god," though their profession is perfectly understood. In Southern India the nautchnee is married solemnly to a dagger, by a ceremony called Shej, and lives afterwards as a Bhavin, dedicated to the temple and the dance. But because so many of them can read, write, and are in fact the cleverest and most accomplished, as well as the most generous of their sex, the Hindus have come to shudder at the idea of education for their wives, and this is one of the greatest obstacles to female instruction. While they rested, and munched betel-leaf, a skilful player from Canara discoursed singular passages upon an eight-stringed sitar, accom- panied by a boy upon the tamboora ; and afterwards followed sweetmeats, and attar of roses, whereupon some of us had had enough, and we made adieux. The natives wiU, however, sit out whole nights, listening to such music, and watching the soft move- ments of the Nautchnees, which are the more inter- esting, of course, the better they are comprehended. In the evening the conversation turned upon the administration of justice, the inveracity of Hindu witnesses, and such like topics; and I was led — in 86 INDIA REVISITED. defence of the thesis that Indians are as true as most people, and that their religions and lawgivers earnestly inculcate truth — to repeat some verses long ago written upon an old judicial theme in this very city of Poena. They ran : THE INDIAN JUDGE. A cloud was on the Judge's brow, The day we walked in Aitwar-P§t ; I knew not then, but since I know What held his earnest features set : That great cause in the Suddur Court ! To-morrow judgment should be given ; And in my old friend's troubled thought Conscience and prejudice had striven ; — Nay, nay ! No juster Judge on bench ! But justice in this cause of " Wheatstone's " Was hard to do. I could not wrench His sombre eyes from Poona's street-stones. Silent we threaded Moti-chouk, Paced silent past the Dharma-sS,la ; At last, half petulant, I spoke ; " Here is our Sanskrit School — Pat-sh&la ! " " See ! Listening to their grey Gooroo, The Brahman boys read Hindu cases ; Justinian and the Code for you, Manu for them ! What solemn faces " Range, in dark ring, around the book Wherefrom the grim Ach&rya preaches ! " He paused, and, with a wistful look, Said : '' Might one know what Manu teaches J' So drew we nigh the School, and paid Due salutations ; while the Master — Proud to be marked by Sahebs^-made The strong shlokes roll, fuller and faster. NAUTCH DANCES, PLAYS, AND JEWELS. 87 " A^a vismayita tapasd VadMis/itwa cha nanritan Na parikirttay it datwd ' NartW pyapavadid vipran." " Namutra hi sahdyartham Pita mata cha tishiatas Na jnatir na putrad&ratn TisKtati dharma Mvalas." All down to Kasaririnam Gravely the Shastri chants the verses, Kocking his head ; while, after him. The turbaned class each line rehearses. " What is the lesson 1 " asked my friend, With low salaam, reply was given : " Manu's Fourth Chapter — nigh the end — At Shloke two hundred thirty-seven." Then, turning to the brightest-eyed Of those brown pupils round him seated, " Gunput," the Shastri said, with pride, " If it shall please my lords, can read it." We nodded ; and the Brahman lad — At such great charge shy, but delighted — In what soft English speech he had The DevanSgiri recited : " Be not too proud of good deeds wrought ! — When thou art come from prayer, speak truly !- Even if he wrongeth thee in aught Eespect thy Gooroo ! Give alms duly j " But let none wist ! Live, day to day. By little and by little swelling Thy tale of duty done — the way The wise ant-people build their dwelling ; "Not harming any living thing : That thou mayst have — at time of dying — A Hand to hold thee, and to bring Thy footsteps safe ; and, so relying, 88 INDIA EEVISITED. " Pass to the farther world. For none Save Justice brings there ! Father, mother, Will not be nigh ; nor wife, nor son, Nor friends, nor kin ; nor any other " Save only Justice ! All alone Each entereth here, and each one leaveth This world, alone ; and every one The fruit of all his deeds receiveth " Alone — alone ; bad deeds and good ! That day when kinsmen, sadly turning. Forsake thee, like to clay or wood, A fragment fitted for the burning. " But Justice shall not quit thee then, If thou hast served her ; therefore never Cease serving ; that she hold thee, when The darkness falls which falls forever j " Which hath no road, nor ray to guide. But Justice knows the road ; the midnight , Is noon to her. Man at her side Goes through the gloom safe to the hid light. " And he who loved her more than all. Who purged by sorrow his offences, Shall shine in realms celestial With glory, quit of sins and senses." What made my friend so softly lay His hand on Gunput'g naked shoulder With gentle words of praise, and say — His eyes grown happier and bolder — " I too have been at school ! Accept Thanks, Gooroo ! for these words imparted." And when we turned away he kept Silence no more, but smiled, light-hearted. And, next day, in his Indian court, That summing-up he did declaim us — Straight in the teeth of what was thought — Which made " His Honour " feared and famouB. NAUTCH DANCES, PLAYS, AND JEWELS. 89 Later on there was a special performance at the Hindu Theatre, in the Boodwar Pet, for our behoof. The play was to have been a dramatised version of " Tara," the well-known Indian tale of Meadows Taylor ; but the .Hindu girl who always took the principal part was unable to attend, and the piece given was therefore — so the bill informed us — " A Sataric drama" in twenty-six acts, and with countless scenes. It was a recent production of two Poona authors, and interesting chiefly as a picture of modern Mahratta life. As an acting play its flow was spoiled by the incessant and measureless soliloquies of one Eambhao, a designing person who plots against the loves of Krishnaji Punt and Eam§,, the pretty and clever heroine. The female parts' were very well sustained by Hindu girls, which is of itself a vast innovation, as women used never to be seen on the Indian stage. These, indeed, were Nautchnees, who had been trained for the unusual task, and discharged it intelligently, mingling dancing and singing with acting. It was notable to have a Eamoosie, one of the robber tribe of the Deccan, introduced as a man capable of any crime, quietly engaging to set fire to Krishnaji Punt's house for a reward of three rupees. The scene which ensued was managed with much spirit and effect. Krishnaji is entertaining his friends with a nautch, which is duly performed before the seated company from the first scrape of the saringi to the hars placed pn the neck of the dancer, when a glare of light breaks through the tatties, and a conflagration is be- go INDIA EEVISITED. held that threatened to wrap spectators, actors, and edifice in one common ruin. The theatre was merely a kutcha building, put together with scaffolding-poles and mats, and furnished with sofas and chairs for the quality, and with rude benches for the pit and gallery. The latter was set apart for women and girls, of whom a good many attended ; and the body of the theatre was full of the vast white and scarlet turbans of the Poona Brahmans and Purbhoos. At act xii. we left, — having to retujn to Bombay by an early train — after about four hours of the woes and joys of the Mahratta lovers; but their fortunes were faithfully followed by an excited and attentive audience until four or five o'clock a.m., when the drop-scene — terrible with a gaUy-coloured picture of " Bhowani destroying the Demons "- — would be finally lowered. At Bombay we dined — a large party of Europeans and Parsees — at the house of an eminent and very accomplished Mohammedan gentleman, Mr. Bedroodeen Tyabji, who not only did the- honours of his mansion with the_ dignity natural to weU-bred Moslems, but sat at meat with us, and received afterwards English and Hindu guests, until the large apartments were crowded. Next day an even more numerously attended reception took place at the residence of a Parsee magistrate of distinction, where, once again, this new and happy mingling of the races in the utmost harmony was witnessed. Before quitting Bombay for Poona it was also our good fortune to visit a Hindu household, very well known, where all the ladies of the family NAUTCH DANCES, PLAYS, AND JEWELS. 91 iErankly met and conversed with their English friends, abandoning wholly the old restrictions of the " purdah." One of them wore what seemed to an unlearned judg- ment simply the most beautiful dress ever draped about a woman. It consisted of an under-skirt of silver tissue with silver edgings, and over this a sari of aquamarine silk — dyed in a delicate indescribable tint between the green of the robin's egg and the blue of the turquoise — with rich embroidery of crimson and gold. The wearer was as graceful and charming as the costume was lovely ; and, indeed, it needs the soft brown face and limbs of an Indian lady to bring out the contrast of such exquisite garments. For yet another instance of the relaxing bonds of old Hindu seclusion it may be mentioned that we were received in a specially friendly manner at her house in Poona by the Princess Kamabaee, daughter of the late Guicowar of Baroda. Her Highness sate uncere- moniously outside the purdah, with the Princes, her sons Bapoo Saheb and Bhao Saheb ; and chatted in Mahratta as freely as an English lady. She had certain political woes and grievances, of which she earnestly spoke — not at all necessary to mention here — but the time was when no male eye except her husband's and brothers' could have gazed on the un- veiled countenance of a Princess of the great House of the " Cow-Herds." From Bombay to Baroda by the night mail is a run of about 250 miles — the train passing along the sea-shore, among endless groves of date and cocoa 92 INDIA EEVISITED. palms, and through the towns of Broach and Surat. Baroda is a Mahratta capital, and we were to be the guests there of his Highness the Guicowar, whose princely hospitality was dispensed in his absence by his Dewan, or chief minister, the Kazi Saheb Shaha- buddeen, one of the most enlightened and accomplished statesmen of India. The young Guicowar was away in the jungle, shooting panthers and spearing wild boars upon his vast game preserves at Dekhl ; but we were made free of his city in the most generous way, with elephants, horses, carriages, and every comfort at our disposal, the Kazi being our courteous entertainer. Mr. Elliot, who educated the young prince, gave in- teresting particulars of his character and intentions, which are such as to promise favourably for the future of this important State. Suddenly called from humble life in a village of the Deccan to ascend the proudest gadi of Maharashtra, he has shown his royal breed by developing a princely disposition — becoming studious, earnest, and full of noble projects for the good of his people. Under his rule, guided by the high intelli- gence of his Dewan, barbarous customs, like the beast- fights, have become more or less thoroughly abolished, education is being extended to the low-castes and villagers, and municipal improvements of a sweeping kind are in progress. Beneath a gentle exterior he possesses a strong mind and royal decisiveness, and will live, it may be hoped, to prove a blessing to his subjects, who have suffered much under the cruel Khunderrao, and the vicious and guilty Mulharraa NAUTCH DANCES, PLAYS, AND JEWELS. 93 A splendid palace is in course of construction for him near the station. It is of Oriental architecture, embellished with domes and pinnacles, and enriched with endless carved stone and marble work. This lordly abode will cost ;^7SO,ooo when finished, and the Guicowar will bring thither the young bride just found for him among his own people of the Mahratta blood. It is somewhat odd to hear Hatti taiyar Jiai, "the elephant is ready," announced as naturally as though it were a cab or carriage which stands waiting at the door. Yet the least experienced might safely climb to the mountainous back of Bhairava, one of the Guicowar's quietest and biggest tuskers. Caparisoned in scarlet and yellow, with a forehead-cloth of kincob, which the mahout pushes aside when he desires to prod the mighty beast on the occiput with the pointed hook, Bhairava seemed grand and ponderous enough to be wholly above serving as a sort of colossal omnibus. At the word " baitho," however, he meekly folded his hind legs and stretched his front legs for- ward, lowering his body to the earth, whereupon a ladder of ten steps, set against his side, enabled us to climb to the silver howdah, where a party of four can be comfortably accommodated. Then Bhairava heaved majestically aloft — a movement which demands pre' caution on the part of the passengers — and rolled forward on a trip of circumambulation round the city and its suburbs. Behind him ran a hattiwallah, utter- ing gruffly many a " sum ! " and " chutt ! " to keep the 94 INDIA REVISITED. monster going, and sometimes emphasizing these ejacu- lations with a tremendous blow upon the elephant's tail-root from a staff four inches thick, which would have broken the leg of a horse, but seemed to be regarded by Bhairava as the merest and most playful hint to "move on." Our first turn was in the " Public Park," outside the city, a charming expanse of flower-gardens, lawns, and pools, established for the use and enjoyment of the citizens. Baroda means, by its Sanskrit deriva- tion, the " Place of Pair Waters," and is well provided by its little river, the Vishwamitra, with the element which cools and fertilises these hot plains. In the park are pretty pavilions and white marble bridges, as also a menagerie, where we saw some tame and quite gentle panthers, two furious young tigers, fresh from their jungles at Pawangurh, the " Hill of the Winds," and three Guzerat lions ; for in Kattiawar, whither we next repair, is the only spot on the earth's surface where lions and tigers are found in the same district. A panther-cub five months old, about as big as a large cat, was nursed and caressed by the ladies, the beautiful little beast being entirely docile; and we observed antelope and wild boar tethered close by upon the grass. In the trees the birds supplied another and gratuitous portion of this Indian collection, for the foliage was full of green parrots, chattering mynas, bee-birds, Malabar pheasants, shrikes, bulbuls, blue-winged rollers, sun-birds, and "coppersmiths." The striped palm-squirrel was of course everywhere, (S NAUTCH DANCES, PLAYS, AND JEWELS. 95 chirping and chevying up and down the neem and peepul trees; and now and then a monkey gravely descended and sate, with pendent tail and wide brown eyes, to watch the visitors. Afterwards, Bhairava rolled along, in a movement resembling a prolonged earthquake, to the farther gateway of the city, stopping to let us remark a huge rhinoceros chained up under a grove of trees, who used to do battle with men and elephants for the sport of the Guicowar's court. "Gonda," we were informed, had had many a tough tussle, and would " go " at anybody or anything, when well fed and irritated by the sight of fire. We traversed on the elephant's back the wide sandy enclosure wherein these Beast Fights were held — a large oblong shut in by high walls, and provided with strong places of refuge. Here elephants in must were periodically turned loose to be baited by mounted desperadoes, who pricked them with sharp lances and goaded them to combat each other, or charge their assailants. Barodians say it used to be a splendid spectacle to watch a well-horsed Mahratta cavalier, exasperating and then evading the furious elephant, allowing the beast to touch with his trunk the flank of his steed, and then, with a spur-stroke, lifting himself out of the difficulty, and wheeling round in the rear of the trumpeting, maddened Behemoth. Khunderrao would sometimes give a bill for ten thousand rupees to be fastened upon one of the tusks of these infuriated creatures, promising it to the man who dared to snatch 96 INDIA EEVISITED. the prize, and more than one " pailwan " was crushed to death endeavouring to win that cruel guerdon. . At the eastern corner of the enclosure is a roofed pavilion, whence the Princes of Baroda were wont to view these exciting scenes; hut the present Guicowar has practically abolished them, and the old rhinoceros, who has waged many a battle there, and grunted savagely at Bhairava, is now a retired pensioner. The four main streets of Baroda intersect each other at a curious central arched structure, something like a Chinese pagoda. They are thronged with an ever-moving crowd of brightly-clad and busy people, and the windows of the upper storeys, and the little galleries of the painted houses, into which you look familiarly from the howdah of your elephant, are equally full of men, women, and children, living the open-air life of Hindu citizens. Nothing astonishes after a certain experience of these picturesque popu- lations. It is quite ordinary to meet a cheetah, led along the public pathway ; to see a naked, muttering fakir smeared with ashes, squatted on the pavement; hundreds of square painted kites flying across the narrow lane ; the dead man on his bier blocking the way of the living ; the snake-charmer with his basket of cobras ; the devotee prostrate at the temple, or per- ambulating the sacred tree; mingled in the endless files of women with children and chatties, and the moving mob of coloured turbans, like countless flowers. Before our elephant rode two sowars of the Guicowar, in blue and gold, and behind us the Fouzdar himself NAUTCH DANCES, PLAYS, AND JEWELS. 97 in a carriage, so that Bhairava clove the sea of heads •without difficulty, the people good-humouredly suspend- ing their work or pleasure with kindly salaams, to let the guests of their Prince pass through the narrow or broad thoroughfares. The ride concluded with a call at the Guicowar's city palace to inspect the State jewels. Indian ladies call these santosha, "contentments;" and she indeed must be hard to satisfy, of whatever complexion or country, who would not be made happy with but a small portion of the Eegalia of Baroda. The chief Karkoon of his Highness first drew forth from an old marmalade pot of tin seven or eight splendid articles of gemmed work, a lovely emerald ring, a "bunch of rubies like sultana grapes, a priceless diamond bracelet, an engraved dark-tinted sapphire, and earrings of pearls to marvel at and to covet. Next he opened a series of silk-covered cases disclosing, among other wonders, a necklet of five hundred table diamonds clasped with great emeralds, one of the diamonds being as big as a thrush's egg, and known as the " Star of the Deccan." There was a necklet also of pearls — seven rows and a pendant — each picked to a nicety, and swelling gradu- ally from the size of a pea to that of a grape, all perfect for milky beauty. Altogether, the precious vanities represented a value of over three-quarters of a million, and we were not surprised to find them guarded by Sepoys with fixed bayonets, and provided with a barred iron strong-room for greater security. At the Eesident's table that evening the Kazi Saheb quoted G 98 INDIA EE VISITED. the line of Saadi, where the poet praises poverty and humility, and says that "the branch which is most full of fruit hangs lowest down." Still, there are in this world some branches at the top of the tree, tolerably stiff in their carriage, which seem pretty well supplied with fruit. ( 69 ) VIII, A MODEL NATIVE STATE. We are living in a bungalow allotted to us by the hospitality of the Thakoor of Bhaonagar, his Highness Eawul Shri Tukhtsinghjee Saheb. Plentiful verdure of acacia and mango trees relieves the dry grass and cloudless sky, and a sea breeze sighs lightly through our painted kus-kus curtains from the creek vrhich runs into the little city out of the Gulf of Cambay. A Hindu temple, sacred to Mahadeo, peeps, white and graceful, over one corner of the compound, and over another rises the roof of the Thakoor's palace. Two of his sowars^ — stalwart Eajput cavalry-men, in uni- forms of scarlet and amber, with long curved sabres, and mounted on wiry Kattiawar stallions — sit motion- less in their saddles outside, ready to ride on even the most unmilitary errand. A water-wheel creaks, not unmelodiously, beyond the gate, pouring incessant streams and refreshing moisture over the thirsty plants and flowers in the Moti Bagh, the " Pearl Garden." Servants of the Prince, in scarlet liveries, told off for our comfort and tendance, sit about in groups, under the trees, or stand with crossed arms, waiting every order The people of the city come and go in full lOo INDIA REVISITED. view, the men in white, with high turbans, the women in many-coloured garments, bearing heavy loads on their heads ; indifferent to the afternoon heat,, which, for the European, seems considerable enough to render the hour of sunset desired. The great, milky-coated, high- humped cattle of Guzerat plod along the hot white road, with heads bent low in the wooden yoke, doggedly dragging huge loads of cotton, grain, or fodder. Some striped tents pitched in the grounds lend picturesque- ness to the scene, and cast broad black shadows on the burned-up grass. Kites circle in the sky ; parrokeets and mynas fly about ; and the merops, glittering in his bronze and emerald plumage, dashes at every fluttering butterfly, returning on each capture with his prey to the neem-branch, where he plucks off the jewelled wings of the insect, and devours its body, until the ground beneath becomes like a kaleidoscope with scattered colours. The Mihtarani passes, in crimson and blue sari, the lowest of the low for caste and for functions, yet walking under her load of refuse with erect figure and graceful gait like a brown statue. The Bhisti, with his cream-skinned bullock, laden with the heavy leathern mussaks of water, goes hither and thither, sprinkling the dusty paths. A pariah dog or two — " whose home is Asia and whose food is rubbish " — sleeps in the sun, having ascertained that nobody is energetic enough at present to throw stones at him. It is a typical afternoon in the Indian " cold weather," bright, placid, and salubrious. "V^e left Baroda by the mail train for Ahmedabad A MODEL NATIVE STATE. loi and Bhaonagar, vid Wudhwan, starting in the pleasant coolness of an Indian dawn. Guzerat is known as "the garden of India," and Baroda is the best wooded part of Guzerat, so that the day broke upon endless groves of clustered trees and broad stretches of fields green with many crops. Everybody seemed glad of the fair, cheerful morning ; and I thought of that best of all Sancho Panza's proverbs : " Ouando Bios amanece for todos amanece." The popularity of every railway in India is remarkable. The third-class carriages, divided into compartments for male and female pas- sengers, are crowded with chattering friendly swarms of natives, who have, apparently, heaps of relations and acquaintances at every station, and an immense deal to say to them. As soon as the train stops the p&,ni-wallahs — ^the men with water — come round, and dispense a fresh supply of the element to thirsty lips, for it soon grows hot and dusty. A high-caste Hindu is always selected to carry up and down the station- chatty; the Brahman can then drink directly from this store: if a low-caste person is athirst a lota is emptied into his hands, and he quaffs from his hollowed palms, and then washes his perspiring face and mouth. Nevertheless, for aU that strong survival of caste, the Hindus are a democratic and easy-going people, so that you will see a Thakoor's son, in turban of red and gold, with coat of delicately embroidered muslin, and strings of precious pearls round his neck, jostling amicably among coolies, cattle-drivers, and bunia folk. He would not, however, eat a morsel of bread with I02 INDIA REVISITED. one of them, or, for the matter of that, with ourselves if he were pinched with utmost hunger. As a rule, the natives hereabouts are remarkably good-looking. One hardly observes an ill-favoured face — many have countenances of the highest refine- ment and gentleness of expression ; whilst some of the children of from eight to twelve are positively beautiful. But the mothers do not like to see them too openly admired. For this reason they often intro- duce into their dress some common article as a foil and counter-charm to the " evil eye," just as they will occasionally plant one ugly, rough, wooden post among the handsome stone pillars of a house-front, and hang an old shoe round the neck of the most comely cow in a herd. To avert the chashm-i-lad from houses, the Hindu puts a whitened chatty on the gable, or amid his crops. A Hindu mother, if she thinks an evil glance has fallen on her little one, waves chillies and salt round its head, and afterwards burns them. One of the reasons for displaying jewels on the children is that the mischief-darting eye of the malevolent may fall there, and not on the boy or girL Virgil's Shepherd exclaims : " Nesoio quis teneros oculus mihi fasoinat agnos,'' and the Indian mother, if her babes fall sick, says just the same thing. •As the train proceeds between Mehmulabad and Ahmed abad, it comes into a country full of apes — Shylock's veritable " wilderness of monkeys." At first A MODEL NATIVE STATE. 103 the traveller can hardly believe they are not grey old men, squatted under the hedges, or grouped upon the embankments. Soon, however, he sees no end of monkeys " loUopping " off on either side of the advanc- ing train in half-dozens and dozens, their long tails erect in the air, their puckered faces superciliously scrutinising the passing carriages. There are two varieties — the black-faced and the Hanuman — and hundreds of them are to be observed from the windows of the train, walking meditatively ahead on the rails, jumping over the cactus fences, perched with long droop- ing tails upon the branches of the trees, or solemnly assembled on some open field in a grave parliament of " four-handed folk," discussing the next plundering expedition. They steal in truth a good deal of fruit and grain, but the natives seldom or never molest them — thanks to the legend which recites how the Monkey-God helped Eama to recover Sita — and it is the oddest thing to watch a knot of Guzerati peasants walking through another knot of monkeys as if all alike were fellow-citizens. After stopping during forty minutes for breakfast at Ahmedabad, the train turns into this remarkable peninsula of Kattiawar by way of Viramgam and Wudhwan. Near the latter place the territory of his Highness Tahkt-Singhi commences, and thence the Maharaja has, with his own resources, constructed an excellent railway which runs one hundred and four miles to his sea-coast capital of Bhaonagar. It is managed as well as any first-rate line in England, and 104 INDIA REVISITED. passes over several bridges and viaducts of a very solid character. In an engineering sense it was easy enough to make, for almost all this part of Kattiawar is as flat as Lincolnshire, and you travel hour after hour through endless fields of cotton and wheat, the surface unbroken by anything bigger than an ant-hill. And here, again, it is astonishing how the people enjoy and value their railways. Every third-class is full of happy, chattering excursionists, in dresses which make a crowd of them look like a bed of tulips, the red sari and white puggree of the Rajput men and women pre- dominating. The rivers which we cross, from tune to time, are already much shrunken in their beds since the rains, and trickle to the Gulf of Cambay between broad expanses of sand. Yet there has been a good monsoon, and Kattiawar will this season supply many a yard of calico and many a loaf of bread to Manchester and London. There are no monkeys hereabouts, but a black buck is occasionally seen, with flights of sand- grouse ; and the asoka, the " sorrowless tree," grows freely. Its spear-shaped, wavy leaves are not now diversified by the bright blossoms of orange, scarlet, and saffron which Wasanta-time will bring, but there is no tree more celebrated in Indian poetry. It was to the asoka that Damayanti addressed her pretty appeal, in the MahdlMrata, when she adjured the " Heart's Ease " to tell her where Nala had gone, and said to it : " Truly ' Heart's Ease '—if, dear 'Heart's Ease,' Thou wouldst ease my heart of pain." The beautiful asoka is sacred to Siva as the lotus A MODEL NATIVE STATE. 105 to Lukshmi, the jasmine and the crimson ixora to Vishnu, and the round golden blossoms of the kadamba to all the gods. It grows about as high as a large apple tree, and women love to cast its blooms into their bathing water. One charming superstition has it that the buds upon the asoka will instantly open into full splendour if the foot of a beautiful person touches its roots. The soil hereabouts is full of nitrous salts, which dry in a white crust wherever water has been deposited. Yet it is evidently very fertile, and full of wells, built with the sloping platform, where white bullocks draw the big skins of water up, and then go backwards to plunge them in again to the monotonous song of the byl-wallah. But Kattiawar wants trees. Trees will save India, and are saving her, from the fate of Cen- tral Asia, desiccated by the nalcedness due to waste of wood. The Forest Conservancy, promoted by the British Edj, is one of its greatest benefits to the penin- sula. India would have been a " howling wilderness " if the sway of the Mogul or the Mahratta had lasted. It is her trees which hold the precious water in the earth and give shade, moisture, life. The peepul, the asoka, and the aswattha have never been half enough worshipped. Every forest officer is the priest of a true religion. We were received with kindliest welcome at the Bhaonagar Station by a very old friend, Mr. Muncherji Bhownagri, the accomplished agent of the Maharaja, and also by the Diwan and the revenue officers of his io6 INDIA REVISITED. Highness, who conducted us to the comfortable quarters provided by this enlightened Prince. The hospitality of an Indian sovereign comprehends everything — • house, carriages, servants, cooks, fuiiniture, kit, flowers, books, letter paper, fruit, food, whatever possibly can be needed — all is found foreseen and prepared. Dinner and a quiet night soon dissipate the fatigues of travel, and early next morning the chief representatives of the State pay their visit of welcome. They are Nagar Brahmans of the best class, speaking' English fluently — for this is the Court language here — and among them are gentlemen in the highest degree experienced and capable as administrators. It would be difficult, indeed, to encounter anywhere statesmen bettew in- formed upon the affairs of their own and other coun- tries than the Diwan and the Finance Minister of Bhaonagar ; but we are arrived, as I have noted already, at a model Native Principality. Nor does Poona or Bombay contain many Shastris with clearer conclusions on Hindu theology and philosophy, better command of lucid language, or ideas more enlightened and pro- found, than Mr. Manilal Nabubhai Dvivedi, Professor of Sanskrit in the Samuldas College here, whose book just published on the Rdja Yoga ought to become widely known among the learned in Europe ; and to converse with whom has been a real privilege. In company with these gentlemen, the city and its environs have been pleasantly explored. Trade is brisk in Bhaonagar; the well-kept streets are full of busy crowds ; the little shops do a constant commerce ; A MODEL NATIVE STATE. 107 in tha port lie more than a hundred dhows, bugks, or bunder-boats which have^come from Kurrachee and Surat, Muscat and Mocha, Zanzibar and the Islands. The Thakoor spares no expense or pains to develop his capital. He has completed an excellent supply of pure water by " bunding " the lake at Gadechi ; he has established a College, a High School, a Dispensary, a Horse-breeding Establishment, and a Cotton Ex- change, and is building a spacious and handsome hospital. He has beautified the town with temples, tanks, and country villas, and is now erecting upon the " Pearl Lake " a lovely ckhatri, or pavilion, in white Carrara marble, to the memory of his late favourite wife. Eawul Saheb is a prince of pleasant demeanour, courteous and frank, but with a truly royal dignity, evidently full of desire to develop his State and to benefit his subjects. We spent an agree- able afternoon at the palace, where all the " society " of Bhaonagar was gathered. The Maharaja — wearing his riband of the Star of India and a string of priceless pearls — received his guests at the door, who were led through spacious apartments to the Badminton court. There his Highness played a capital game with his Prime Minister, State Treasurer, and the English ladies, exchanging his scarlet and gold turban for a skull- cap, and thoroughly enjoying the pastime. A Court musician gave some native airs by striking basins of water of different sizes ; and refreshments were handed round with champagne cup. IText we passed through lines of mounted guards to the Palace Gardens, prettily io8 INDIA REVISITED. kept with all sorts of plants and flowers, where there were tame antelopes running about, and cages con- taining two Guzerat lions, a wild boar, some monkeys, civet cats, and other aniinals. On returning from the gardens the conversation diverged to Eajput legends, one of which I was enabled to remember, and recited it to the satisfaction of many of the Eajput gentlemen present, if I might judge by the patriotic delight exhibited. A native poet was introduced, who has the gift of improvising interminable Guzerat verses upon ancient themes. The land is indeed full of strange folklore and legends, to collect which would repay the labour of any intelli- gent resident. The chiefs of Bhaonagar belong to the Gohil clan, which descends from the Solar Dynasty of Udaipore. They have fought, and " drunk from the white cup of peace," and fought again, ever since Akbar's time in 1580 A.D., and have a whole litera- ture of bardic ballads. Every village possesses its martial or religious legend. At Dandretia is a well of sweet water, in the midst of the salt plain of the BhM. The story is that a merchant, named Dantasha, resided at DIntretia, whose son married a wife from Benares. When she came to her husband's house she was given salt water for bathing, but she refused to bathe in salt water, and washed with the water which she had brought from her home in a large earthern vessel. Her mother-in-law mocked her and said, " You had better arrange for your father to send you bathing-water daily." The bride, however, declared A MODEL NATIVE STATE. 109 she would die of hunger rather than bathe in salt water, and for three days and nights she fasted, wor- shipping Gangaji with great devotion. At the end of the third night the river goddess appeared to her and told her to take all her relatives with her to a spot north of the village, and that there they would see her (Ganga) flowing. In the morning the bride begged her relatives to accompany her to the spot, but they laughed at her. At last they went, and to their sur- prise saw a stream of pure sweet water flowing out of a cleft. They then congratulated the bride, and after all bathing therein returned home. This stream is still sweet, and has ever since been named Gangwo. Then, again, at M§,ndw4, near Bhaonagar, there is a red Mah^deo stone which marks where L§, Gohil the Eajput rode into the sea to please his lord. The Eaja Sidhrdj had visited the sea coast, and come amongst other places to Mandwa. On a certain day the waves were very violent and the sea much agitated, at which time Sidhraj had gone down to the sea-shore attended by several horsemen. The King said, " He would be a brave man who would ride a hundred yards into the sea on a day like this." One of the horsemen replied, "There is no race so loyal and gallant as the Gohil ; one of them might do it, but no one else would dare to do so." A Kattiawari answered, " The Gohil race is brave in talk, but their bravery shows itself by boastings in the market-place ; there is no Eajput who would throw away his life for such a challenge." On hearing this La Gohil placed no INDIA REVISITED. his hand on his moustache, bade them all farewell, and urged his horse into the ocean, where he was quickly overwhelmed. And, once more, by way of a Buddhistic legend, there is the folk-tale told by the villagers of Moldi, a spot sixty miles south-west of Bhaonagar. Here- abouts is a large pasture (vid) close to Moldi, of which the Jhinjhwa grass is very sweet, and the milk of both the cows and buffaloes of Moldi is of excellent quality. Some Charans of the Panchdl, who were dealers in grain, happened to visit Moldi and pur- chased a large quantity of grain in the neighbourhood. They loaded their animals and placed a quantity of Jhinjhwa grass beneath their packs. Then they set out for Marwar, and when they reached Pali they alighted and sold their grain to a wealthy Wania merchant. This merchant had a very beautiful wife. She put a straw of the Jhinjhwd grass in her mouth and chewed it, and then smiled. Her husband, who was standing by, asked her why she smiled. She begged him not to press her to tell, but he insisted. Finally she informed him that in a previous incarna- nation she had been a doe antelope, and had been used to graze in the lands of Moldi, and that the grass there was specially sweet. When she put the straw in her mouth she at once recognised the flavour of the Moldi grass. Her husband questioned the mer- chants, and they confirmed her statement that the grass came from Moldi, but after telling her husband this she fell down and died. A MODEL NATIVE STATE. in The reception at the Maharaja's concluded with the accustomed distribution of Attar and P&n, the Prince himself placing garlands of 'flowers on the necks of every guest, giving to each a little gilded flask of rose essence, and sprinkling each bouquet with the gulab- dani, A similar visit was paid, by invitation, to the present Diwan, and also to his predecessor, the very accomplished Mr. Udaiyashankar Gouriashaukar, O.S.I., a statesman who, for forty years, administered the affairs of Bhaonagar with great renown. Although now upwards of eighty years of age, this venerable Hindu gentleman retains all his faculties, together with a most retentive memory, which allows him to talk with singular erudition of his favourite Sanskrit studies. The apartment where he sate was full of ancient MSS., old inscriptions and carvings, fossils, coins, and bound books in Sanskrit, evidencing the wide and cultivated taste of the retired Minister. Two other visits of the utmost interest must be men- tioned. These were to the High School and to the Bhaonagar College, both handsome and commodious buildings, which stand near each other in the city. A large number of bright, intelligent lads were gathered in the former, reading a lesson from the "Lady of the Lake." One of them, named Hari Shankar, had pre- pared for me a complimentary ode in Sanskrit, and chanted it in the true orthodox manner, not to be attained accept by long training. In this college, however, only the Shastris, the native professors, were present, the students being away on examination. 112 INDIA REVISITED. After a courteous and cordial welcome from these learned Brahmans, a very interesting conversation arose, with the aid of Mr. Manilal, upon various philosophical and religious points. The Pundits were questioned ahout the origin of the Samas in Sanskrit writing, on the authorship and authenticity of the text of the Mah^bharata, and the real meaning of Maya, or the "Doctrine of Illusion." We grew so friendly that no objection was made to the request that a passage from the Yajur-Ved should be recited in the ancient way — the way only known to very far- seen Brahmans after long years of instruction. A dark-faced " Twice-born " from Southern India, with dreamy emaciated face and ardent sunken eyes, cast off his shoes, bared his right shoulder, and covered his hands, while he began in the three mystical manners his recital of the sacred text. Some of those present, even among the Brahmans, had never listened before to those chanted formulas, the mere sound of which, fantastic as it seems to foreign ears, is salvation even to hear, and much harder to repeat correctly than the wildest and quickest patter song. We spoke next of the Bhagavad-Gita, which calls all this verbal exer- cise " mere words ; " and it was generally agreed that names and forms are nothing, that truth in all religions is one and the same ; that — at the last — the Vedan- tist, the Buddhist, and the illuminated Western Philo- sopher see by one light. It is, in truth, rather sad to perceive how com- pletely some European observers mistake and mis- A MODEL NATIVE STATE. 113 interpret these Indian people on the question of their religion. They style them " idolaters " — imagine that Hindus attribute divine qualities to the uncouth figures, the red stones, the lingams, carved snakes, and grim JBhowanis which they worship. Because they find Mahadeo adored in one place, Gunpati in another. Kali elsewhere, and trees, rivers, and cows objects of prayer, they suppose the Hindus, one and all, poly- theists. Yet it would be almost as unjust to ascribe polytheism to Londoners because one church is dedi- cated to St. Matthew, another to the Holy Trinity, a third to St. Bridget. All these various gods and sacred objects are for the educated Indian mere " aids to faith," manifestations — more or less appropriate and elevated — of the all-pervading and undivided Para-Brahm. Even the poor peasant of the fields, and the gentle Hindu wife, perambulating a peepul tree smeared with red, will tell you that the symbol they reverence is only a symbol. There is hardly one of them so ignorant as not to know that commonplace of Vedantism, "Every prayer which is uttered finds its way to the ears of Keshava." Take the Salagram, for instance, that fossil ammo- nite which the Hindu wraps in cloth, anoints, wor- ships, and places near persons about to die. He will not even show it, it is so sacred to him ; and he sup- poses that Vishnu is actually crystallised in the shell. But that is originally because of the marvel of the con- volutions and chambered symmetry of the ammonite, with its glittering walls of silex and violet quartz. H 114 INDIA REVISITED. The first consecrator of these things found the wonder and beauty of creation " writ small " upon the mys- terious petrifaction, and in a sense he was right to adore it. In Bengal the household god is oftentimes a basket-full of rice, or a water-pot ; and every Vaishnava abode has a Tulsi plant in its front (ocimum gratissi- mum) which is venerated as the wife of the Great Cod, but the family is aware, as well as any Christian, that Parvati is there only by grace, and fragrance, and beauty. Among other agreeable experiences at Bhaonagar was a morning excursion to the country seat of the Minister, and a Nautch party, with fireworks, given at his city residence. The Maharaja himself attended on the latter occasion, when all the seven Nautchnees of the Court performed, and everybody in Bhaonagar gathered in front of the house to see the pyrotechnic display. I must confess that I entirely enjoy Indian dancing and music of a really superior style, and can- not understand how people find them tedious. You must not fidget and chatter ; you must let the restless and feverish impatience of the European mind float peacefully on the stream of sustained song; you must orientalise the attention into a contented dreamy state, and then a good N"autch lulls and restores. These dancing-girls were very accomplished, and one of them chanted such a pretty Persian air, beginning Ldh ruhhd samanhard, that we got her to repeat the words, which are here translated : — A MODEL NATIVE STATE. nj ZANOUBA'S SONG. " face of the tulip ! and bosom Of the jasmine ! whose Cypress are you 1 Whose Fate are you, cold-hearted Blossom ? — In the garden of grace, where you grew, The lily boasts no more her fragrance, And the rose hangs her head at your feet ; Ah ! whose is that mouth like the rose-bud. Making honey seem no longer sweet 1 " You pass, taking hearts ; you ensnare one Like wine ; and your eyes dart a light As of arrows. Whose are you, most fair one ! With brow like the crescent of Night ? Have you come to make me, too, your victim ? So be it ! oli, loveliest lip, Give now to this Slave who adores you One drop from that death-cup to sip." We paid our farewell visit to the Thakoor Saheb, feeling a real regret to quit so hospitable a capital. His Highness showed us his jewels, which are splendid, especially an emerald of unparalleled size and colour, a belt of sapphires and table diamonds, and some mar- vellous clusters of rubies for the ears and turban. He spoke with earnestness of his wishes to develop and benefit his State, and engaged us all never to forget Bhaonagar, which was an easy thing to promise after such boundless kindness. It is evident that the elo- quent speech made by Mr. Peile at the accession of his Highness has been made the programme of the Tha- koor's rule. Nursed by many years of British adminis- tration, during the minority of the Prince, Bhaonagar has become in every sense a " Model State " — destined, i;i6 INDIA REVISITED. beyond doubt, to increasing prosperity and renown. We are breakfasting on nil-ghai steaks this morning — before starting for Ajmere and Jeypore — having re- ceived the present of a fine young " blue bull " from a Norfolk sportsman who has dined occasionally with us at Bhaonagar. ( "7 ) IX. THE MOSQUES OF AHMEDABAD. Ahmedabad, the finest city in the rich province of Guzerat, owes its origin, according to popular legend, to a beautiful face and to a remarkable spiritual mani- festation. When Ahmed Shah, flushed with con- quest, marched down to the banks of the Sibarmati, he was pleased with the flat yet fair prospect; but still more pleased with the beauty of Sipra, the daughter of Assa, the Bheel chieftain. So he was minded to found a city by the river, where his dark favourite dwelt ; but for this purpose desired to con- sult the Prophet Elijah, who was a sort of tutelary saint of the family. Accordingly the prophet was invoked with the aid of the Sultan's religious teacher. Sheikh Ahmed Kattu, who seems to have been a clairvoyant of the first order. The prophet appeared, and gave permission to establish the city, provided the Sultan could find four "Ahmeds" who had never once missed afternoon prayer. His Majesty and his religious instructor both bore that name, and could both boast that they had invariably attended the " Azan ; " and after much search two other pious men were discovered in Guzerat, Kazi Ahmed and Malik ii8 INDIA REVISITED. Ahmed, who had been as irreproachably regular in their devotions. Thereupon the foundations of the stately capital were laid, and the ruins visible to the south and east of the existing town show how splen- did it must have appeared in the earlier part of the fifteenth century. To build his new city the con- quering monarch freely pillaged the marble masonry of Ohandraoti and Anhilw^da, the two antique Hindu capitals of Guzerat ; and, later on, Mahmud Shah built the great wall which now encircles it, a massive ram- part nearly six miles in circumference, having round towers at every fifty yards, the curtain being thirty feet high in many portions, and six feet thick. There are eighteen gates in this wall, each of them provided with huge folding-doors of teak, in the upper section of which sharp iron spikes are thickly planted, in order to prevent the elephants of a besieging enemy from battering them open with their heads. Those curious little black and savage people, the Bheels, are proud of the memory of Assa, and also because, when a Eajpoot prince is installed, the tillca upon his forehead must be marked with a drop of blood taken from the toe or thumb of one of their wild chiefs. They inay be seen with their bamboo bows and arrows, and amulets hung on the right side of the forehead, all along the Tapti and Nerbudda, and in the vicinity of this city, which was born of Sipra's dark loveliness. Akbar, in his turn, greatly embellished the place, and opened broad streets where ten bullock-carts could THE MOSQUES OF AHMEDABAD. 119 drive abreast. Afterwards it declined, in consequence of the uprise of Champanir near at hand and of inter- necine strife, until the Marathas occupied the fortress, from whom General Goddard and the British captured it in 1780, fighting against great odds. Now, Cham- panir is a wilderness of ruins, overgrown with bind- weed and milk-bush, where tigers couch and jackals litter ; and Ahmedabad is grown again into a thriving city, containing a hundred and twenty thousand in- habitants, the headquarters of the Northern Divi- sion of the Bombay Army, and possessing one of the most picturesque and salubrious cantonments in India. There is, indeed, no finer road to be seen anywhere than that which leads from the city to the camp, under a three miles long avenue of red tamarind and peepul trees. And, crowded as the busy capital has become, its sanitary condition has so much improved that it is difficult to believe the dreadful record of 18 13, -when the plague swept through these lively bazaars and slew half of the population. The great boast of Ahmedabad, as regards archi- tecture, lies in its old Mohammedan mosques, built mainly of white stone, delicately and marvellously carved. Northern Guzerat and Eajpootana abound in a milky marble, often as pure in grain as Parian ; and having this material, and all the debris of the Hindu capitals at hand, the Sultans of Ahmedabad reared during their reigns some of the loveliest little buildings in the world. They are all ruined and defaced now, and in more than one instance — such 120 INDIA REVISITED. are the chances of Fate ! — a Hindu custodian keeps the shrines of Islam ; but their ancient beauty shines through their decay, and weeks of study would not exhaust the treasury of delicious things wrought here in snow-white blocks by the carvers and masons of the Mohammedan period. The city itself, in all- its streets and lanes, is full of wonderfully fine work of the same kind, executed upon the timbers and wooden pillars of the houses. There winds, in fact, hardly a byway in Ahmedabad where you will not observe some main beam or " king-post " of a trader's dwelling sculptured by the patient chisels of those true artists of old into admirable arabesques or fanciful figures of gods, men, and animals ; for wood and stone carving seems to be an indigenous Hindu taste which the conquerors adopted. There are joists to be seen here- abouts, mouldering with sun and sand, that would have taught Grinling Gibbons new possibilities of his art, so marvellous and fantastic are the designs im- pressed upon the wood. Among the many edifices which display the skill of those old artificers we visited the E&ni-ki-Masjid, or " Queen's Mosque," in the Mirzapura quarter. The minarets of this monument are broken off short at the level of the mosque-roof, and the place is so wild and neglected that some years ago a tiger is said to have been shot sleeping within a few yards of the fakir who always occupies the platform under the rozah. Bats hang in clusters beneath the fretted dome, and long- tailed monkeys squat upon the cornice, where Arabic THE MOSQUES OF AHMED AB AD. 121 inscriptions in mother-of-pearl, or glazed colours, pro- claim the glory of Allah and the merits of the pious founder. The window-work of pierced marble, however, remains utterly wonderful for its variety and delicacy. The silky stone is cut into patterns, which change with every lattice. They are all, no doubt, geometrical, for it is the Hindu only who revels in imitations of Nature, and loves to reproduce in marble climbing plants or the leaves and blossoms of the lotus. The Moslem, shunning all likeness of living things, has yet woven out of lines, circles, and triangles, and above all, from the plastic characters of his Arabic alphabet, designs of exhaustless fancy, through the fairy-like tracery of which the bright light winnows as if golden wine were poured through lace. There will be seen in all these buildings, first, a mosque proper, with minarets, a praying-place, and mimbar; and next, a rozah or garden- canopy, covering the tomb or tombs of those in whose name the edifice was erected. This is generally an open pavilion, with double rows of columns, supporting a central cupola surrounded by four small cupolas at the angles, the area being paved with marble, and approached by marble steps. The columns, symmetrically designed, are crowned with capitals, en- graved, rather than merely sculptured, into minute luxurious embroidery of volute and scroll ; and every- where — on plinth and abacus, frieze and entablature — appears the same lavish wealth of work and fancy ; for it is characteristic of the Hindu art, which the Moslem also in this respect adopted, to leave no naked places 122 INDIA REVISITED. in the stone. Wherever artistic toil can be bestowed it is freely given ; so that even the lower surfaces of all platform edges, and the hidden recesses of domes and niches are completely covered with beautiful labour, on the old Greek principle that " the gods see everywhere." Near the Jamalpur Gate rises another exquisite mosque, possessing still unbroken its graceful minarets of white marble, and embellished in the same, or even in a more astonishing manner, with elaborate carvings and pierced work. One of the panels upon the prin- cipal building here, fashioned in a fairy-like pattern, is worked out of the solid stone, and all the lines " under-cut " like a Chinese ivory-ball, so that a finger inserted behind the work can feel the marble studs left to support the tracery. It would have been easier, and little less effective, to leave the solid stone beneath the pattern; but the faithful mason scorned such scamping work. An upright lamp-stand, wrought from the solid side of a column, stands here, of a conception admirable for elegance and utility; and the pillars sustaining the five cupolas of the rozah are well worthy to form a canopy for the relics of that beautiful princess, the Eanl Siprk, to whose memory the mosque was erected. Briefly, words fail to describe the dainty loveliness of many among these Mohammedan me- morials, dusty and decayed as they are at present. Some of them, like Haibat Khan's mosque, interest by exhibiting the way in which Muslim and Hindu styles of architecture were combined. The Manek Burg or " Euby Tower " contains a window of perfor- THE MOSQUES OP AHMED ABAD. 123 ated alabaster, by some Hindu master-hand, where the stems and foliage of a creeper are so simulated that nature is not more lithe and living than the stone. The carving on the Tin Darwaza, or "Triple Gate- way ; " the lacework round the Tomb of Shah Alum ; the sculpture at Dhaee Harir's Well, might each of them supply pages of admiring comment ; and the by- gone opulence of Ahmedabad in these delicate triumphs of art may be gathered from the fact that in the sixteenth century there were not less than a thousand stone and marble mosques, tombs, and kiosques in or near her walls. We visited also the pretty Kankaria tank and Nagina Gardens, near the city. This is' an artificial lake, surrounded by steps of masonry and colonnades of marble, with an enchanting island in the middle, linked by a bridge and a causeway to the shore. The little palace in the island has been restored by the British Government, and affords a pleasant water- side retreat for the citizens of Ahmedabad. King- fishers, green and blue, were hovering over the placid surface ; the monkeys gambolled and chattered in the tamarind trees, and flowers of a hundred hues were reflected along the edges of the verdant island. A ByrS,gi, or religious ascetic — of an excellent taste in landscape, although personally much besmeared with ashes and hideous with holy rags — had pitched his station under a peepul tree near the bridge, and was being devoutly worshipped by some Hindus, with offerings of meal and fruit. It was a very good 124 INDIA REVISITED. position for a man bent on carrying out the injunction of the Shastras, which say : " When the householder sees grey hairs in his beard, and the face of the son of his son, let him take a black antelope's skin, and, sitting under a sacred tree, meditate upon the Infinite." But the Byrfi,gi could of course have no son. His name, derived from the Sanskrit Vi-Bag, implies a person freed from all earthly desires ; and — though not such a self-denying ascetic as the man whom Colonel Tod saw here, who had stood upright for thirty-seven years supported by a cross-bar, without once reclining — the saint at Kankaria declined a rupee, with polite contempt for earthly comforts. The tank' covers seventy-two acres, and is one of the largest in India. On a temple near its further extremity was stamped the impress of a hand in red ochre, which marks where a Sati had perished in the flames. The gates of cities, and the walls of burning- ghats, as has been before remarked, often bear the same token of that passionate love or deep despair which in old days moved so many Hindu widows to die beside their husbands on the funeral pyre. One such Sati is commemorated at Karjaia.near Bhaonagar, in verses said to have been uttered by the victim. Her husband was called away to fight some plundering BabriSs at the moment when he was putting on the wedding coat, and fastening the mindhol berries to his right wrist. He was killed, and his bride before mounting the pile beside him, recited the lament still preserved in the place. It may be translated : THE MOSQUES OF AHMED AB AD. 125 " I shall not pace around the fire with thee, Lord of Karj&ia, the red wreath is torn ! I shall not wear the bridal-cloth, nor see Shel's happy hanks ; for this I am forlorn ! Thy men came back, but thou wilt never come ! Lord of KarjSlft ! bloody thou dost lie ; Oh, Wfij& ! when the ship was well-nigh home It sank, and in these deep waves I must die." Such instances of wifely devotion — as has been also observed — were never very common in India ; ■which, indeed, the eager perpetuation of their memory proves. Some of them may have been due, no doubt, to the miserable prospects of widows here, for the lot of a Hindu widow was, and still too often is, almost worse than any death. Some may be ascribed to the absence of any such fear of death in Hindustan as that which darkens the hearts and minds of European peoples. The Hindu is quite assured that he has lived many previous lives, and has many more to experience, and, whether Vaishnav or Shivaite, is troubled with none of the dismal doubts of modern materialism. It may be safely believed that the great majority of these little red hands stamped upon temple wall, city gate, or house-front commemorate martyrdoms of faithful love, well meriting the respect in which they are held by the common people, as examples forbidden henceforward, but in bygone times holy, admirable, and elevating. One passes from Guzerat into the classic Hindu region of Eajputana over a plain, gradually losing its thickly wooded character. "We stopped for a day, how- ever, short of the southern confines of the Eajput 126 INDIA EEVISITED. country, at the seldom- visited station of Palanpur, the police magistrate of the district heing a relation. Hence the road goes across a bare and glowing plain to Deesa, the well-known cantonment on the Banas, which river, although rising hereabouts so close to the Indian Ocean, runs eastward into the Chumbul, and this into the Jumna, the latter uniting with the Ganges, so that the watershed for the Bay of Bengal, little as one would suspect it, is really here. Strings of camels were perpetually traversing the sandy track, entering and leaving the town — which is one of the dustiest places to be seen — governed by a Mohammedan Diwan. His ancestors are splendidly buried in a series of marble tombs outside the city gates, and the Palanpur masons were busy, when we visited these monuments, constructing one of especial magnificence for the present ruler's father, Jewahir Khan. It will cost fifteen thousand pounds when completed, and is to be of the same artistic character as the white marble mosques and rozahs at Ahmedabad, having similarly delicate fluted columns, arabesqued and diapered panels, and pierced screens or windows. It was strange to watch the native masons squatted under the neam trees in the burial-ground, chipping out from the pure marble, with no guide except their natural taste and traditional designs, the involved patterns of the capitals and the tracing of the perforated screens. Next morning, a walk in the jungle, gun in hand, with my kinsman — who, by the way, proved an excellent shot — gave me a good idea of the rural look THE MOSQUES OF AHMEDABAD. 127 of this portion of Guzerat. The cultivated ground was covered with cotton just coming into pod, with maize and millet ripening, and pulse of various kinds growing vigorously. The baubul, or " camel-thorn," seemed the most common tree ; but mangoes and pee- puls also occurred in groves, tenanted by large families of the Hanuman monkey. Nothing can be more amus- ing than the maternal solicitudes of the she-apes. Dis- turbed by our dogs, a large band of the " four-handed people " crossed the nullah from one clump of trees to another, a mother-monkey among them, with two babies, which clung to her furry sides, leaping down some fourteen or sixteen feet to the ground, and then bounding up to a branch at least as high, without in the least displacing the comical little offspring holding on to their long-tailed parent. Quails — the grey and red variety — were plentiful in the patches of grass, and hares broke constantly from the cactus-hedges. In the grey light of the dum-i-gurg, or " wolfs brush " — that dim gleam which comes before the true dawn —jackals were to be seen stealing home from their nocturnal forage, and the rising sun shone on the far-off backs of a herd of antelopes. A green round little gourd, which the natives called kalungera, covered the open spaces with its creeping stems, and our shikaries gathered the pretty small globes for eating with their ■ curries. The sandy soil was full of the burrows of the kangaroo-rat, a kind of jerboa abundant hereabouts, but very shy. This Hurna, the " Gerbillus Indicus," is the prettiest of field-rats, 128 INDIA REVISITED. fawn-coloured, and with lovely large eyes ; immensely prolific, littering fifteen to twenty at a birth, and living in societies, which are sadly decimated by the snakes, foxes, and owls. The English dogs with us had become too wise to hunt these nimble creatures, as they disappear into the earth in the twinkle of an eye, and have a hundred underground runs, ending in neat little chambers, nicely lined with grass and leaves. Two of our friend's little pack had just perished by a snake-adventure. The dogs found a Daboia elegans, or " Eussell's viper," under a mUk-bush, and tore it to pieces, but not before the venomous reptile had bitten a couple of them in the tongues. While the terriers were still playing with their mangled prey, these two suddenly fell to the ground with eyes fixed and staring coats, and were dead within twenty minutes. I shall not easily forget the charm of that dawn, and of the pleasant tramp across country beyond the Deesa Eoad. I did not draw a trigger myself, having a rifle, and being ready only for deer or a wolf. But the glory of the daybreak on the plains and hills ; the sweetness of the cool air; the countless objects of interest in the field and forest ; the going forth of the birds and beasts to the pursuits of the light, and the sense of the pleasure of life, filled us full. We en- countered, as I remarked, all the eight things which make a day lucky for Hindus, namely, a brindled cow, a still pool, the sun, a rich person, a prince, a priest, a giver of rice, and a beautiful woman. The people, too, were THE MOSQUES OF AHMED ABAD. 129 so happy. In the dust at the door of the peasants' huts the small brown children, "mother-naked," crouched in groups, gravely playing ekee-dokee — " odd and even." Inside the huts the " two women " were "grinding at the mill," preparing the meal for the day, with the accompaniment of soft and pleasing songs. Villagers, on , their way to work, stopped to prostrate themselves before the reddened Lingam-stone, or the marble Bull of Shiva, enshrined under the fig- trees ; and deposited there a bright flower or two, a sweetmeat, or a nut. The pilgrims with their hhugwa or salmon-coloured flags, passed over the field-path on their march to the holy places of Siddhpur. The noise of the water-wheels, and the creaking of the ox-carts, mingled with the cry of parrots and the " cheep " of the sand-grouse coming for their early draught and bath to the pools. The beautiful morn- ing of India in the "cold weather" made even the sandy fiats of Palanpur picturesque, and lighted up in the distance the massive and majestic peaks of the isolated range of Mount Abu. In the afternoon, on the way to Jeypore, we passed close under those same grand masses of mountain, rising from the teak and acacia jungle of Sirohi; a rocky isolated highland region, four or five thousand feet in altitude and fifty miles in circumference. Time and our arrangements forbade an inspection of the splendid Jain Temples at Dilwara on the middle eminence, which are, perhaps, the most remarkable of their kind in India. They are said to have cost I I30 INDIA EEVISITED. eighteen million pounds, and to have occupied fourteen years in building. Mount Abu is the sanatorium for all this region of Guzerat and Eajputana, and easy roads take the weary or sick Anglo-Indian to the Nakhi Talao, 4000 feet above the burning plains, •where he finds the climate of an English October. The wooded slopes and tangled jungles of these great ramparts of rock are fuU of bears, panthers, and tigers ; but such " fearful wild fowl " keep close to their own haunts, and the paths through the beautiful forests at the mountain foot are unconcernedly traversed by women and children, wearing the white and yellow jasmine and wild roses in their hair, and by cowherds tending large droves of diverse-coloured cattle. I venture to quote the subjoined description of the lonely glens which open above these densely-timbered lowlands. "No human form appears to disturb the charm of the enchanting solitude, except perhaps the grave figure of some Eajput cavalier, a pilgrim to Ambaji, who, with shield at his back and spear swaying on his shoulder, fills the vista of a long and narrow gorge, in which a handful of stout hearts might stand against a host ; or a group of quiet grain-carriers, with piled-up sacks and grazing cattle, occupying some lovely wild spot in the heart of the defile, where the crystal stream expands into a little turf-bordered pool. By and by the hills slope away into a level valley, which, though more or less sandy, exhibits many fertile spots, producing abundant crops of grain, with little villages here and there, and rivulets flowing from the THE MOSQUES OF AHMED ABAD. 131 mountains that in the distance raise, in front and rear, their gigantic forms. Majestic Abu, shrouded in its cloak of mist, is now well seen, its varying out- line filling the imagination with a thousand suggestive thoughts. A near view is at last obtained of its pre- cipitous face ; its dark recesses lined with forest and underwood, and streaked with many a silver stream; its diverging shoulders pushed majestically forwards in their garb of sable, variegated, as the sun rises towards his meridian, with tints of brightest gold." We look, while passing, upon this fine scenery, and; now and again — as the train rattles through the thickets, or crosses a nullah fringed with wild vines and the perfumed oleander — peacocks and peahens fly up in families from the undergrowth and perch upon the red and white rocks. The ballast of the railway hereabouts is all of broken marble, and the little knolls on either side of the line are solid masses of the same glistening material. As we quit the pre- cincts of the great mountainous oasis the country sinks again into flat and open plains, covered with cotton, grain and poppy, and very thinly populated. One observes Eajputs riding lean cat-hammed horses, bearing swords, guns, and circular shields, with coloured cloth and brass ornamentation. The black buck in this land have grown so accustomed to the locomotive that they stand in herds amid the jowari, and gaze unheeding at the passing carriages. The saras — a red-headed crane — fishes in every pool ; and the Indian bird- boy, perched upon the machan, or platform of grass, reared 132 INDIA EEVISITED. in the bajri field, yells and slings stones with energy at the crowds of mynas and parroquets which circle about his grain. As evening falls, the chakurs — the partridge which by Hindu accounts feeds upon the moonbeams, and never has but one mate — comes forth with its plaintive love- call; and the titwees fly down the nullah-beds, with their strange cry of " did- you-do-it;" while little sparks of fire seen in the jungle show where wayfarers have pitched their camp. The sun sinks in a glory of crimson, amber, and purple behind the peaks of Abu, and we must be content to pass the famous city of Ajmere, with Taragurh, the " Hill of the Stars," and the Ana-Sagar lake ; catching merely such brief glimpses as moonlight can give, being due to arrive in the early morning at Jeypore. Those curious in book-lore, and the economical generally, will like to be reminded that old Thomas Coryat, the traveller of the seventeenth century, walked from Jerusalem to Ajmere ; and expended only fifty shillings upon the road ! { '33 ) X. THE CITY OF VICTORY. If the country around Delhi and along the banks of the Jumna must be called the classic district of India, Eajputana is her land of romance and chivalry — the region where Nature, Art, and a high-bred race of warriors have combined to render every aspect of the province attractive. The mountain-mass of Abu pre- pares the traveller for the change which he will ex- perience in passing from the flat verdure of Guzerat to the highland valleys of Jeypore, Ulwur, Oodeypore, Jodhpore, and the other Eajput States. And here we are arrived in an India different in many and marked ways from the British Indian provinces. The Central Districts and Eajputana, with the Sikh States and Bahawulpore, form a still independent moiety of the Peninsula, where old native manners and customs hold sway, and where one may partly see, in a popular life more picturesque, but less organised and ordered, what the country was and would be without English domination. Eajputana is especially interesting in this regard. It is the land "of the king's children," of those proud and warlike people the commonest among whom claims royal descent, and bears himself like a 134 INDIA REVISITED. soldier and a prince. A poor Eajput yeoman holds himself as good a gentleman as the richest zemindar of Bengal or the North-West. He calls his king Bapji, " my father," and in many a point of social and per- sonal etiquette preserves quite as lordly a demeanour. In the clan all are peers and brothers, and marriages within it are regarded as incestuous ; hence that terrible crime of female infanticide, which stains and shames the pride of the Eajput, who was wont to kill his daughter rather than make for her a mesalliance, or let her remain unmarried. In 1871 the Eajput population of Oudh showed 250,849 males living above ten years of age to only 184,6^3 females. The sin of infanticide had then well-nigh ceased^ — ■ and is now practically unknown — but those figures are the monument of countless domestic murders. As one draws nigh the long vale ia, which the city of Jeypore is embosomed, ranges of hills rise abruptly from the level fields, sharply ridged, and deeply cloven with glens and hollows. Some are bare and rugged, some are clad with thickets of light-green bush and belts of yellow grass to the summits. Streams wander downwards from their sides, which in the wet season lace the precipices, with picturesque waterfalls, and fill the nullahs to their brims ; but are now slowly- gliding and slender driblets of water. Upon the plains through which they wind, antelopes roam in herds, constantly visible from the passing train ; and the red-headed crane stalks about. The peacock, sacred to gods and men, spreads his jewelled train THE CITY OF VICTORY. 135 upon every village wall, and forages unmolested with his seraglio of peahens in every patch of cultivation. The little villages ; the fields divided by miid-banks, topped with tiger-grass ; the slinger upon the machan frightening away the parrots from the grain; the wandering caravans of traders ; the lonely Eajput rider with his round shield and lance ; the dark-eyed, graceful women, and the fearless-looking, handsome men, are all much as they stand described in the ancient writings. For Eajputana is measurelessly old. The bluest blood of Europe is but of yesterday com- pared witii that of the haughty families of this region. The five great Pandu Brothers of the Mahabh^rata were Eajpyts, ■' and wandered over the face of these dry plains and marbled hills. The first ancestor of the Eajput kiags ruling these valleys was the Sun himself, who was the father of Eama Chundra, the hero of the Eamayana, and an incarnation of Vishnu. The princes whom we shall visit hereabouts call them- selves, and are familiarly styled, Surya-vansa, the " Children of the Sun." The unbroken pedigree of the Maharaja of Jeypore goes back through one hun- dred and thirty-nine names to Kusa, who was the second son of Eama. Even the haughty Emperor of Delhi bestowed on Jey Singh, the renowned astronomer, king of this land, the title Skvai, meaning " one and a quarter " — still borne by Jeypore princes — as if these immemorial Houses of Eajputana, and their lords, exceeded by a fourth the standard of human pride and prowess. It was esteemed an extraordinary 136 INDIA REVISITED. condescension when a Eajput princess espoused a Great Mogul in the zenith of his power ; but, alas ! this, too, — as has been remarked — was the cruel land where, for ages, the female children of the great Thakoors were killed at their birth with poison from the milk- bush put on the breast of the nurse, because husbands high enough in rank could nowhere be found for them. Of the martial qualities of the race Indian annals are so full that whole Iliads of stirring verse could be written about the daring deeds and boundless loyalty of the Eajput clansmen. It was at Chittor, near Oodeypore, in these same highlands, that fifteen thousand Eajput women committed the joTiur, or wholesale suicide, to save their honour. And when Dulhai Eao promised the front post in all future battles to the Eajput chief who should first enter a certain besieged town, the leader of one clan was found in the hour of victory impaled upon the elephant spikes at its north gate, and the dead body of another was flung by his own men over the battlements at the south side, so eager were those dauntless Eajputs, or " king's children," to sustain their name and to conquer or die for the Surya-^ansa. I had myself put into verse a touching story of Eajput fidelity which I twice recited in India among the " king's children," and on each occasion with the effect of awakening an extraordinary emotion of patriotism and satisfaction. I shall venture to insert it here for the light it throws on the loyalty and devotion of the people of the region : THE CITY OF VICTORY. 137 "A rajpGt NXJESE." " Whose tomb have they builded, Vittoo ! under this tamarind tree, With its door of the rose- veined marble, and white dome, stately to see ; Was he holy Biahman, or Yogi, or Chief of the Rajpftt line, Whose urn rests here by the river, in the shade of the beautiful shrine V " May it please you," quoth Vittoo, salaaming, " Protector of all the poor ! It was not for holy Brahman they carved that delicate door ; Nor for Yogi, nor Rajpftt Eana, built they this gem of our land ; But to tell of a EajpUt woman, as long as the stones should stand. " Her name was M6ti, the pearl-name ; 'twas far in the ancient times, But her moon-like face and her teeth of pearl are sung of still in our rhymes ; And because she was young, and comely, and of good repute, and had laid A babe in the arms of her husband,* the Palace-Nurse she was made. " For the sweet cHef-queen of the Eana in Jeypore city had died. Leaving a motherless infant, the heir to that race of pride ; The heir of the peacock-banner, of the five-coloured flag, of the throne Which traces its record of glory from days when it ruled alone ; "From times when, forth from the sunlight,t the first of our kings came down And had the Earth for his footstool, and wore the Stars for his crown, * A Hindu father acknowledges paternity by receiving in hia arms his new-bom child, t The Rajptlt dynasty is said to be descended from the sun. 138 INDIA REVISITED. As all good Eajplts have told us ; so M6ti was proud and true, With the Prince of the land on hei bosom, and her own bro\ni baby too, " And the Bajpftt women will have it (I know not, myself, of these things) As the two babes lay on her bosom, her lord's and the Jeypore king's, So loyal was the blood of her body, so fast the faith of her heart. It passed to her new-born infant, who took of her trust its part. "He would not suck of the breast-milk till the Prince had drunken his fill ; He would not sleep to the cradle-song tiU. the Prince was lulled and still ; And he lay at night witb his small arms clasped round the Eana's child. As if those hands like the rose-leaf could guard him from ti?eason wild. " For treason was wild in the country, and villainous men haa sought The life of the heir of the Gadi,* to the Palace in secret brought ; With bribes to the base, and with knife-thrusts for the faithful, they made their way Through the line of the guards, and the gateways, to the hall where the women lay. " There M6ti, the foster-mother, sate singing the children to rest, Her baby at play on her crossed knees, and the King's son held to her breast ; And the dark slave-maidens round her beat low on the cymbal- skin. Keeping the time of her soft song— when, Saheb !— there hurried in " A breathless watcher, who whispered, with horror in eyes and face: ' Oh ! M6ti ! men come to murder my Lord the Prince in this place ! * The " seat " or throne. THE CITY OF VICTORY. 139 The^ have bought the help of the gate-guards, or slaughtered them unawares, Hark ! that is the noise of their tulwars,* the clatter upon the stairs ! ' " For one breath she caught her baby from her lap to her heart ; and let The King's child sink from her bosom, with lips still clinging and wet ; Then tore from the Prince his head-cloth, and the putta of pearls from his waist, And bound the belt on her infant, and the cap on his brows, in haste ; " And laid her own dear oflfspring, her flesh and blood, on the floor. With the girdle of pearls around him, and the cap that the King's son wore ; While close to her heart, which was breaking, she folded the Rajah's joy. And — even as the murderers lifted the purdah — she fled with his boy. " But there (so they deemed) in his jewels, lay the Chota Rana,t the Heir, ' The cow with two calves has escaped us,' cried one, ' it is right and fair She should save her own butcha ; J no matter ! the edge of the dagger ends This spark of Lord Raghoba's sun-light ; stab thrice and four times, O friends ! ' "And the Rajpftt women will have it (I know not if this can he so) That M8ti's son in the putta and golden cap cooed low When the sharp blades met in his small heart, with never one moan or wince, But died with a babe's light laughter, because he died for his Prince. " Thereby did that Rajpdt mother preserve the line of our kings." " Oh ! Vittoo," I said, " but they gave her much gold and * Indian swords. t The " little king. " }" Little one.'' I40 INDIA REVISITED. And garments, and land for her people, and a home in the palace ! May be She had grown to love that Princeling even more than the child on her knee." " May it please the Presence ! " quoth Vittoo, " it seemeth not so ! they gave The gold and the garments and jewels, as much as the proudest would have ; But the same night deep in her bosom she buried a knife, and smiled, Saying this, " I have saved my Rana ! I must go to suckle my child!" Were the capital of such a land of the ordinary Indian type it would be interesting, but Jeypore is a city that might be built in the fantastic architecture of dreams, or fabled by some poet devising strange and unparalleled combinations of colour and outline. There is nothing like it in India or the world ; and, albeit, not at all ancient — for the present metropolis was founded by Jey Singh in 1728 — ^it no doubt reproduces many traditional features of the old times, and well suits the romantic chronicles of the coun- try by its extraordinary beauty of aspect and site. Nothing, however, reveals the character of the place to the traveller as he alights at the railway station and drives to his temporary quarters. The rose-red city of Jeypore, with its beautiful streets and fairy- like palaces, is shut within the fence of high seven- gated walls, just as the Eajput ladies of proud degree are screened from view by latticed windows and jealous portals. But you turn suddenly from the open space before, say, the Amber Gateway, where THE CITY OF VICTORY. 141 camels are loading, and ox-carts toiling along, and mean mud-built hovels cluster close to the tall screen- walls, protecting and concealing the real entrance. Your carriage crosses the square, beneath the crenu- lated breastwork; rattles over the pavement of the guard-house, where the Eajput sentry, in long black cloak and red turban, salutes the vehicle of the Maharaja, and suddenly there opens on the well- pleased but astonished gaze the vista of a busy thoroughfare wholly unique and beautiful; in general effect, indeed, almost beyond description. The entire city from this iirst point of view is of one and the same tint — a delicate rosy red, relieved with white. If a conqueror could dream of building a capital with rouge-royal marble or pink coral, this is how it would look ! It is an interminable 'perspective of roseate house-fronts, bathed by soft sunlight, nowhere un- graceful in style of building, and at many spots on either side of the way broken magnificently by stately fronts of palaces, and long lines of light pavilions, embellished with columns and cupolas, and enriched with floral or pictorial frescoes in all sorts of designs. The splendid street, thus entered, runs on a perfect level from east to west, more than two miles, always of the same grand breadth of one hundred and eleven feet, and so absolutely straight that throughout its entire length each house, each palace, each trader's shop, can be seen on either side, fading away in the long perspective of rose-red to the battlements of the far-off Manek, or Euby Gate. A gay and bustling 142 INDIA REVISITED. crowd of citizens gives animation to the , charming mise en scene, which is backed by mountains, rising nobly to the pure blue sky, almost every peak of them covered with some commanding fort or fantastic pleasure-house. Two main roadways, of the same rosy colour from end to end, and each of them as wide as the great central street, cross it at right angles, forming at the points of bisection two spacious piazzas, called the " Amber Chauk," and the " Euby Chauk." These subordinate thoroughfares are each a mUe and a quarter long, and have the same pictu- resque roseate lines of dwellings and shops, broken in a similar fashion by buildings of the strangest fancy and most elaborate ornamentation. It is true that the lovely pink flush which thus clothes the entire visible city is only a wash of colour laid upon the chunam with which the rough masonry of the structures has been covered, but it beautifies the face of the capital almost as much as if Jeypore were really constructed of rose-tinted alabaster; and now and again one comes upon an edifice which is of the same prevailing hue, but architecturally impor- tant and remarkable. Such is the "Girls' School," established in the stately house of Nattani, a former Minister of the State ; the " School of Art," where young Jeypore artisans work at the enamelling, the carving, the metal trades, hereafter to be spoken of; and some of the town residences of the Eajput Thakoors near the Chandpol, the " G-ate of the Moon." All the north side of the great street between the THE CITY OP VICTORY. 143 two sq^uares is occupied by an enormous and astonish- ing palace, which covers, with its gardens and zenanas, a seventh portion of the entire city. There is a tall roseate tower here, called the Istri Lat: a roseate triple gateway, surmounted by a Nakar-Khana, or Drum House ; and a museum, all in rose colour. The grand entrance to the palace, the Siran D^orhi — also in rose colour and white marble — faces the " Maharajah's College," an arcaded building of the Hindu-Saracenic type, of the same soft hue ; and near this rises from the busy street an edifice called the Hawa Mahal, or " Hall of the Winds," a vision of daring and dainty loveliness, nine stories of rosy masonry and delicate overhanging balconies and latticed windows, soaring with tier after tier of fanciful architecture in a pyra- midal form, a very mountain of airy and audacious beauty, through the thousand pierced screens and silded arches of which the Indian air blows cool over the flat roofs of the very highest houses. Aladdin's magician could have called into existence no more marvellous abode, nor was the pearl and silver palace of the Peri Banou more delicately charming. On the dawn-lit hills above hangs a temple of the Sun, looking down into the Chdta, a deep pass through the hills filled with shrines and fountains ; and if you drive through the rosy street which opens opposite the Tripolia, the Tndianesque manner of it all is well maintained by a low, one-storied building, containing a row of strongly-barred cages. Here, full upon the open square, as if it were part of the natural appur- 144 INDIA KEVISITED. teuances of a Eajput capital, are confined eight man- eating tigers, criminals of the neighbouring jungles and hills, taken " red-handed," and imprisoned as State captives. The huge brindled beasts crouch at the bars, savagely glaring forth upon the moving crowds out- side, too busy with pleasure and traiSc to notice them. Each tiger has tasted deep of human blood — one monstrous brute, lying in the hot sunlight on his back, has devoured seven, another ten human beings, and the tigress growling in the last den is declared by her custodian to be known to have slaughtered and con- sumed fifteen men, women, and children. Most of such malefactors would elsewhere be shot, but these, after much vengeful patience, have been snared in pit- falls, where the tiger is left until hunger has reduced him to extreme weakness, upon which the captors manage to draw him forth, and shut him up in a life- long imprisonment. We were the guests at Jeypore of Surgeon-Major Hendley, M.E.A.S., an officer of high and varied accomplishments, to whom the Government of India, as well as Indian art and the sciences in general, owe a very deep debt. Not only does this gentleman, as agency surgeon, superintend the hospitals and dis- pensaries of the State — more than twenty in number — extending the benefit of the best medicine and surgery to nearly ninety thousand patients in the past year, but he supervises a first-class observatory established near his residence, wherein the automatic meteorograph of Van Eysselberghe — a marvellous instrument, and THE CITY OP VICTORY. 145 the only one of the kind now in use throughout the British Empire — has been set at work by his assiduity. Dr, Hendley has, further, gathered ihto the museum an interesting and valuable collection of objects illus- trating Indian arts, industries, and antiquities. Here are textiles, carpets, sculptures, coins, brass work, pottery, lacquer, carvings, glass, enamelling, jewellery, and natural products, which have been visited by over a million natives since its opening in 188 1. At the Albert Hall, in the public gardens given to his people by the late Maharaja, this energetic Doctor, in alliance with Colonel Jacob, had concentrated aU the articles intended for the South Kensington Exhibition; and we studied with an admiration which will soon be shared by thousands in London, the beautiful carved teak nakdr-khana, the delicate models, and the rich sample of works in marble, plaster, glass, metal, and exquisite enamels which Jeypore has sent to England. In another part of the "Albert Hall" Dr. Hendley had bands of native artificers busy at their various crafts. The wood-carvers were squatting round large beams and planks of teak, finishing the panels for the Kensington screen ; and, while all exhibited great dexterity and artistic gifts, it was positively wonderful to watch one boy of fourteen years from Shekrawati, whose nimble chisel and imerring mallet seemed to make the pattern leap, as it were, alive from the hard wood. He was receiving a man's pay, and seemed to be the pride and favourite of his fellow-artisans. Close by, some Jeypore ardish-wallas were busy in preparing 146 INDIA REVISITED. those fantastic but effective panels of plaster and glass, which are here used to decorate the interiors of palaces and mansions. The artist lays little pieces of mirror on a bed of the material, covers these with a sheet of the plaster, and then cuts down through the ardish to the glass, elaborately chasing the plaster into patterns where it borders the glass. The effect is as if white marble and polished silver had been blended, and in the gleam of lamps or torches nothing could seem more softly resplendent. Other Jeypore workmen were inlaying coloured glass in the same way between thick slabs of plaster, and cutting down from both faces to the glass, which then shines forth from the deep intaglio like jewel-work. Dr. Hendley has published a description of these indi- genous crafts, and of the manner in which the son acquires them from the father, perpetuating from gene- ration to generation that admirable precision and feeling of pure native art which will be acknowledged by all good judges. He writes of such a boy as the young wood-carver alluded to : " In his very earliest days he probably played by the side of his father as he carved, while his mother was engaged in some domestic occupation close by, or worked as a cooly near her husband. As soon as he could hold a piece of char- coal he would have begun to draw outlines on a board, sketching and re-sketching, it might be the features of Gunesh, the Elephant-headed God of Wis- dom, who should be invoked at the beginning of all labour ; or perhaps a flower. In time, without con- THE CITY OF VICTORY. 147 scious effort and with a keen sense of pleasure, he could draw these objects with his eyes shut. Hand and eye insensibly acquired power and precision, so that his art became a part of his nature at the time when his mind was most impressionable and his fingers most capable of acting in unison with it. From drawing he advanced to coarse carving of window or door frames or spinning-wheels ; and when intrusted with finer work he copied the designs of his father and his friends ; and, perhaps, when he attains man- hood, he will one day hit upon a new design which may be liked by the craft and be imitated, and so become a permanent addition to the number of grand traditional patterns which represent the experience and sense of the beautiful of all ages." Guided and instructed by this kind friend, all the gates in Jeypore were thrown open for us, and even at the third portal of the Great Palace, where every Jeypore citizen must go on foot, our carriage was allowed to proceed. At its second gate a great square is entered, with marble pavilions a,ni ehabootras in the centre, and on one side the painted lattices of the zenana, on the other a temple of Vraj Eaj, or Krishna, and the astronomical observatory of the famous Jey Singh, who founded the modern city. This Jeypore Observatory is the largest of five, which were erected here and at Delhi, Mathura, Benares, and Ujain, by Maharaja Sawai Jey Singh, early in the eighteenth century. He founded Jeypore in A.D. 1728 and died in 1743, reformed the calendar for the Emperor, esta- 148 INDIA REVISITED. blished the obliquity of the ecliptic and the position of the equinox, and patronised art and learning of all kinds, besides taking a very prominent part in the political events of his time. Before his days the instruments employed by Eastern astronomers were of brass, and on too small a scale for accuracy; hence the construction of these enormous edifices of masonry, which tower on all sides in quaint shapes of stone and metal, the huge Nariol, or sun-dial; the Druv Nal, or pointer to the North Pole ; the Yantr Samrat, " King of Dials," whose gnomon is one hundred and eighty-nine feet high, registering the true sun time; the Chakra Yantr, or Brazen Circles, to determine the declination of the stars ; and a variety of other ancient and mysterious appliances. Passing by the great astronomical court and threading next a wilderness of marvellous archways and fanciful architectures, the grand entrance of the palace, the Siran Deorhi, is now attained, beyond which stands, in another splendid square, the Hall of the Nobles, girdled with marble columns, and the Diwan-i-Am, or hall of public audience. A small gate to the west next brings you to the Chanda Mahal, or " Silver House," the heart and may- vel of all this immense abode. Seven stories of such wild and lovely structure as you would expect to see only in dreams rise here one above the other in rose- red and snowy-white balconies, oriels, arches, pilasters, lattices, and domes — gay everywhere with frescoes and floral ornaments. In the lowest floor, which is THE CITY OF VICTOSY. 149 kept^— like the second and third — as a winter resi- dence, we are permitted to inspect a priceless volume, the abstract of the MahS,bh^rata in Persian, made by the orders of Akbar the Great at a cost of forty thousand pounds, and illustrated in the most exquisite, manner with coloured and gilded miniature pictures, &B. of an incredible delicacy. The Shobha Newas, one floor above, is full of strange paintings on the wall, and arcades embellished with gorgeous shells of copper, sUver, and foil Next we ascend to the Chhabi Kewas, or " Hall of Splendour," shining with polished marbles, and coloured enamelling. Above this is the Shish Mahal, the pavilion of glass, with endless patterns wrought in little mirrors let into carved pi aster- work; and above that we step forth upon the Mokt, or " Crown " of the palace, where the vast flat roof is encircled with shady alcoves and open chambers, vaulted by graceful curved cupolas. Beneath lie the green palace-gardens, full of pomegranates, palms, and bananas ; and beyond, the spread of the countless busy streets and lanes, girdled by the walls, and over- hung by the encircling hills, topped with forts and temples. It is vain to attempt any description of that enchanting prospect of royal pavilions, busy streets, beautiful gardens, and green country-sides, more novel and absorbing than any other which India herself can offer. Nature aiid man have here allied themselves to produce the most perfect and lovely landscape con- ceivable. In green and gold, in rose-colour and white, in distant dim blues and greys, the pleasaunces and 156 INDIA REVISITED. ' the city and the far-oflF Walls and mountain ridges of Amber group together at bur feet, a picture to delight the eye and feast the mind. How should words re- produce Govinda's temple, between the upper and lower gardens ; the snow-white sides of the Badal Mahal, or " Cloud Palace," on the edge of the lake ; the dark ramparts of the fortress in the mountains ; and those long lines of rose-red streets which intersect Jeypore ? To complete the rich artistic ensemble of the scene, a feast is being given to Brahman men and women on one of the many flat roofs of the Upper Palace, and attendants go about bearing the Mahara- iah's bounty, in the form of cakes and sweetmeats, amid some three hundred or four hundred men and women clad in holiday dresses of crimson and purple, saffron and blue, glittering like flowers in the sun ; now shining upon the " City of Victory," as if its people were indeed his children. Whoever has viewed that prospect from the palace-roof of Jeypore has seen '' India of the Eajas '' in her inmost grace and beauty. We had before this received and returned the visit of the Minister, the Baboo Kanta Chund, and were to have the honour of an interview with the Maharajah himself at his hunting lodge, three miles from the city. Sawai Madho Sing, successor of Eam Sing, and thirty-fifth Maharajah of Jeypore, is a comely and rather portly young prince, who speaks only Hindu- stani, and dearly loves the pleasures of the chase. We found him but just returned from an expedition THE CITY OP VICTORY. 151 — wherein lie had killed two wild boars and three or four black buck— surrounded by a variety of English dogs, and with some fine Arab horses picketed in his courtyard. He may be said, in a sense, to owe his throne to Dr. Hendley ; and certainly Jeypore is in- debted to this good doctor for the tranquillity with which the succession was accomplished. It was our friend who, acting at once as Palace Adviser and Eesident, induced Earn Sing to name an heir before all the Thakoors, and took the necessary measures in order that the old king's latest desire should be known and obeyed. The present Maharajah is a faithful friend of his benefactor, and very kind to all English visitors. We talked of Jeypore, of sport, of Eajput history, and of the wonders of London; and then^ after ordering us elephants for our trip to AmbSr, the Prince courteously decked our necks and wrists with the usual garlands of flowers ; sprinkled attar upon our nosegays with his own hand ; and bade us farewell, with many gracious compliments and good wishes. AmbSr — the name is an appellation of the god Shiva — lies north-east of Jeypore, and about eight miles distant. It is the ancient capital of the district, and was taken from the Meenas and made a city in the middle of the twelfth century. It lies beyond a ridge, dividing the two valleys, under steep and rocky eminences covered with jungle, where tigers may fre- quently be found. Our elephants, gaily caparisoned, and with their heads and trunks painted in curious patterns, rolled us gravely down the rosy street, out at 152 INDIA REVISITED. the Zorawar-Singh gate, whereon the five-hued flag of Jejrpore — ^the jpanch-rwng — was flying, and so past the mansion of the Thakoor of Chomn, the chief of the Bajput nobles, whose acquaintance we had afterwards the pleasure of making. Then the great beasts took us through the edge of a swamp, covered with water- fowl ; along a road bordered with garden houses ; and thence to a point beyond one of Akbar's kos minars, or "Delhi milestones," where the hills drew together, and a gateway spanned the narrowed road. Here, at a temple of Mahadeo, the eye beholds the strange spectacle on one side of a great populous city in full vitality ; on the other of a city dead and silent, nine- tenths of its stone-built dwellings tumbled and ruined as though by an earthquake, wild weeds growing over its mansions and temples, and the ancient streets choked with wild fig-trees and broken blocks of carved marble and sandstone. Some hundreds of Brahmans still loiter about the least dilapidated abodes, and there is a little bazaar ; but otherwise the only in- habited edifices left in Ambgr are the fort, the palace, and one or two temples. In the midst of these silent ruins sleeps a large lake, full of amphibious snakes and alligators, and with a water poisonous and stag- nant, but reflecting every tree, building, and rocky promontory as if in a mirror. Along its noiseless borders our elephants tramp, passing the deserted pleasure-garden of Mohursbari, and grey decayed shrines where the very gods seem to be grown mouldy, and the rains of many generations have dismally THE CITY OF VICTORY. 153 blackened the white bulls of Shiva. At the end of the lake the road turns upward to the great shining palace on the ridge, leading through three massive gateways with spiked doors, the last of which admits us to a spacious square in front of the main entrance. Now, in a moment, the scene is changed frpm ruin to magnificence. A rich naMr-Tchana, with brass doorways and alcoves of embroidered marble, opens the way into a second courtyard, paved with white and red stone, and surrounded by the most graceful buildings imaginable. One is the Diwan-i-Khas, a pavilion formed by columns of white marble and red sandstone, its inner walls of laced and pierced stonework, and its roof delicately embellished with colour. On another face of this " Court of Honour " rises magnificently the Gateway of the Mardana, or "Men's Abode," which has been pronounced the finest portal in the world. It is in truth too lovely in tints, material, artistic labour, and ensemble to be described — a matchless portico, such as might provide the door to Paradise. Through this you reach, across a green and cool garden, the Jey Mandir, or " Hall of Victory," adorned by panels of alabaster, inlaid with birds, flowers, and arabesques in various colours, the roof "littering with the mirrored and spangled work for which Jeypore art is renowned. There are bathing- rooms here, all of pale, creamy marble, looking forth upon the dead city and the fair valley through screens of fretted stone; chambers painted with curious pictures of towns, temples, and hunting or 1 54 INDIA EEVISITED. ' mythological scenes ; and one beautiful apartment entirely lined with plates of mica let into the white walls and vaultings, between lines and floriated orna- ments of grey, the effect being as though this royal retreat were filled with moonlight. Then we traverse the tiny but elegant chambers of the zenana — for the palace is at present empty — shut from the world by a jealously high wall, in which pierced lattices permit the imprisoned ladies to gaze upon the world without. There is a delicious littlp pavilion above this, on the roof of the great gate, styled Sohag Mdndir, from which those secluded princesses could watch the Dur- bars in the sq[uare of the Diwah-i-Khas ; and over the " Hall of Victory " is built a Jas Mandir, or "Alcove of Light," which literally glows with bright and tender colours and exquisite inlaid work, and looks through arches of carved alabaster and clusters of slender columns upon the sleeping lake and the silent mountains. If this portion of the palace must be regarded as a prison it is the most beautiful gaol imaginable ; and the grey, old Eajput in charge explains that when the Maharaja's Court is here the men are sometimes all excluded, and the princesses have the run of the entire edifice. Yet the palace is not quite empty even to-day. At the side of the main entrance beneath the ramp exists a temple dedicated to Devi, and here it is the custom every morning in the year to sacrifice an animal. At the Durga festival a whole herd of buffaloes and a flock of sheep are offered to the dread goddess, but THE CITY OF VICTOEY. 155 the daily tribute is a goat, which replaces, it is said, the human victim whose life used to be taken every morning in this gloomy fane before the times of our British Elj. It chanced that we entered, the temple just at the hour of sacrifice, and, although the ladies would by no means view the sanguinary ceremony, a brief conversation with the attendants induced them to admit Dr. Hendley and myself to the presence of the goddess. She sate — the awful blood-loving Kali — all black and red, upon a platform inside the darkest part of the adytum of the temple, with eyes of glittering mother-o'-pearl and a necklace of skulls. At the foot of the platform was a heap of sand, and near it some wide-mouthed brass vessels, and a broad heavy-bladed sword. A Eajput was worshipping in the corner, and the priest with two assistants moved grimly about, arranging for the matutinal rite. The victim, a black goat, stood placidly enough upon the heap of sand, snif&ng curiously at the edge of the stone platform where so many of his predecessors had perished. Suddenly a bell was touched, and the priest took the heavy sword and laid it in front of the image, while he made the " ashtanga " or eight-fold prostration, and repeated the mantra of expiation. Then the two attendants laid hold of the goat quite gently, one steadying it at the tail, and one keeping its head straight with a cord lightly fastened round the neck and ears. The poor animal, quite unalarmed and un- concerned, stood perfectly still, while the priest bared his right shoulder and squared himself athwart-wise; IS6 INDIA EEVISITED. the sword, grasped by both hands, balancing under the goat's neck. Abruptly he raised it, swung it back far behind him, and then brought it whistling round with a blow which combined the cut and draw. There was a slight sound, as when a soft stick is chopped; and the blade had shred clean through the goat's neck-bone and neck, so that the boy with the cord caught up the severed head into the air before it could touch the earth. The body of the victim fell sideways, guided by the other attendant, who directed the bleeding arteries into one of the brass vessels. Taking the goat's head, the priest then laid it on the platform, before the glaring eyes of the goddess, and placing his brow on the earth repeated the prayer prescribed. Thus the horrid propitiation ended; but we learned that the priests of the temple, being of a special caste, themselves ate daily five seers of the goat's flesh, and had the right to sell the remainder in the bazaar. The palace pays seventeen rupees monthly to the contractor who supplies these innocent victims. The priest said that the goddess would be very angry if the goat were not decapitated at a single blow, and that he could cut off the head of a buffalo with equal certainty in one attempt. It is notable how deep-grained this notion of sacri- fice is, especially in India. In the villages round Chingleput they give their first-born daughter to the temple to be Deva-Dasa, a dancing-girl, a "hand- maid of the god." A good Hindoo, before he eats, breaks off the first morsel for his guardian deity, THE CITY OF VICTORY. 157 and credits him in the shop-books with a few cowries daily. Every student has read of the Eajasaya and the Aswamedh, sacrifices upon which kings expended the garnered treasures of their realms. When food, animal or vegetable, is offered to gods, all castes can then partake of it, and many people in Hindustan live regularly by the altar-scraps in this way. Sakya- Muni's teaching did away with the bloody rites of the Brahmanic period, but there are still immolations of a sad kind practised secretly in India. The Bheels, Dhers, and Chamars cast themselves occasionally from lofty rocks near Jawad, hoping to be rajas in the next state of Hfe. In 1877 a Gosain of Benares sacrificed a boy of twelve to Mahadev in order to discover treasure. In 1883 a Banya family of twelve persons committed suicide in unison to " please the gods ; " and not long ago, in ITorthern India, it was not very un- common — if a debtor could not pay — for his creditor to place a cow or an old woman on the top of a pile of wood and to burn the victim to ashes, the idea being that the terrible sin thus committed would devolve upon the debtor's soul. This was called the '' Koor." Up to 1850 human sacrifices were usual among the Kandhs, and a Eaja of Bustar, twenty years before, sacri- ficed twenty-five full-grown men at a shrine of Dantes- wari near Jagdalpur. But at Jeysulmir, in the siege, 24,000 Eajput women and girls were voluntarily put to death by the ceremony called johur, some by the sword, some by fire ; after which their husbands and fathers, with the tulsi-leaf in their turbans, and yellow 158 INDIA REVISITED. powder on their faces and garments, went fortli to dio for their faith. Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum ! On our way back we overtook a funeral procession. The dead man was borne on four bamboos to the burning-ground, which is an open space, covered with pretty domed cenotaphs, and had upon it several pyres lighted and smoking. The bearers chanted Earn, Bam, such hai ! — i.e., " Eama is the true God " — and those who followed with the pots of fire and water answered in a constant antiphone, Jo kaha ihao such hai — " What you say, brother, is true ! " Under Jaigurh, the " Tort of Victory," there lies a deep valley, which we subsequently visited, reserved for the monuments of the Maharajahs. Many of these are magnificent buildings of pure white marble, and people may see at South Kensington this year a model in brass by Jeypore artists of the finest cenotaph, that commemo- rating Jey Singh. The dead city, the dead kings, and the Eajput borne to the burning-ghS,t, turned our thoughts to the old, unsolved problems, upon some of which the next morning was spent in a very interesting discussion, shared by a Jain jeweller, named Kasinath, and by a Pundit of the agency. This Jain, who main- tained that his faith was older than Buddhism — iahwt purana mat — was a Bigambara, and held that all women must be born in another life as men before they can attain moJcsha, or release. Immensely wealthy, and still accumulating money, the Jain goldsmith's eyes were hollow with fasting, and he was acknowledged even by the Pundit — who looked on him as nastika, a THE CITY OF VICTORY. 159 heathen — to be an excellent man, .and true to the five prohibitions against killing, lyihg, stealing, adultery, and worldly-mindedness. Kasinath, however, frankly confessed that the second sin was hard to avoid in business ; and I heard, indeed, that not long ago some conscientious Jains begged the administration in Jey- pore not to plant peepul trees in the gold and silver bazaar, because every Hindu knows that the peepul leaves whisper to Eishabha, or to Yama, every word they hear, and nobody can possibly buy and sell, in a world like ours, with any chance of profit, if a peepul tree is always listening. On the same day we received the visit of the chief noble of Jeypore, the Thakoor Ananda Singh, whose high-bred manners corresponded well with the haughty history of his house, and with his own handsome Jlajput face and soldierly carriage. Altogether, Jeypore is one of the most interesting places in India, and we quitted it,, rich in abiding recollections, and in new and valued friendships. There were, however, sad as well as pleasant and beautiful things to see in Jeypore. Dr. Hendley, as has been said, supervises all the hospitals and dispen- saries of the city, and to visit these was to learn how well his skni and devotion are appreciated by the Eajputs, as also to know something of the darker side of Indian life. At one hospital — where I called on the way to see again that wonderful copy in Persian of the Mahlbharata — there was a notable example of Hindu jealousy. It was afforded by a bright-eyed and rather handsome woman, who sate up on one of i6o INDIA EE VISITED. the beds, wrapped in a chuddicr. Her husband had, for good or bad reasons, suspected her fidelity, and, accord- ing to her own account, had induced her mother-in-law and aunt to hold her down while he fell upon her with his teeth, lacerating her horribly, and finally biting off the side of her nose. The poor creature laid bare to me her smooth brown back and shoulders, and showed, with indignant exclamations, the marks upon them, which were as if some panther or hyaena had worried her. They were, nevertheless, healing well, and the accomplished doctor had fashioned her an excellent new ala to her nose, which was growing famously when I examined it, and would soon quite restore her appearance, especially with the assistance of the nose-ring. It was satisfactory to hear that the brutal husband was lying fast in prison, and about to be tried for his ferocity. Biting and cutting off noses IS only too common a crime in India, under similar circumstancea. ( i6i ) XI. ULWUR TO DELHI. Ulwue is a Eajput State, 3024 square miles in area, and containing 800,000 inhabitants, of whom the majority are those warlike Meos who used to be the trouble and even terror of the Delhi emperors. There were times when the gates of the great city had to be closed at the " Azan " prayer, after which hour none ventured forth for fear of the Ulwur Meos. They are quiet enough now, under British vigilance and the rule of the young Maharajah Mangal Singh, of the " Bdrah Kotri" an intelligent and high-minded prince, who governs excellently. As in other parts of Eaj- putana, ridges of parallel hills shut in the central and picturesque valley of the province ; game is plentiful among the dhauk and sdlar jungles, and the two large lakes of Siliserh and Deoti, near the capital, swarm with fish and fowl, the latter being also so full of water-snakes that the palace on an island in its midst has become uninhabitable. Alligators, too, occur in these Ulwur pools, and carry off goats, donkeys, and even ponies. Among the trees of the uplands are the JeJiair and tendu, yielding ebony ; the simul, a cotton tree, of which the buds are largely eaten by monkeys ; and the Jiwapot, furnishing rosaries 162 INDIA REVISITED. from its berries ; while the plains abound in neem, hilcar, or bauhul, with fig, tamarind, and jujube, bamboos, and palms. Tigers and pantheiS roam in the hills, as also sambhur, nilghai, and- Black buck, as well as the jarak or hysena, on whidi the natives say that witches ride, " one hysena having actually been caught lately with his nose bofsd for riding- strings." The wild pig is fairly frequellt, and after the twelfth year, so the shikaris A&dt&te, has a hide which becomes impene- trable to bullets. There is, moreover, the seh or porcupine — whose quill stuck in a door will make the household quarrel fearfully until it be removed — the sdla or ant-eater, together with foxes, wUd cats, badgers, otters, lynxes, flying foxes, and endless monkeys. Peacocks sun themselves everywhere, in town and wilderness; the little weaver-bird, baiya, swings his bottle-shaped nest in every grove. In almost all parts of India, indeed, one observes the swinging home of this sociable crea- ture, which does not fear man so much as snakes, and chooses a pendulous twig — if possible over water — from which to hang its exquisitely woven abode. Mahouts, however, use the nests to stuff the pads of their elephants. In Ulwur-land, moreover, two kinds of parrots abound, along with bulbuls, green pigeons, the owl called " King of the Night," the tintori, which chatters when a tiger moves in the grass, the lanklat and handdnt, " which perch upon his head, and pick meat out of his mouth as he sleeps ; " and the Jcanjan, a little dusky bird, having a black feather in its head. ULWUE TO DELHI, 163 which will render anybody invisible if he carries it. It may be inferred that Ulwur is a good field for wizards, naturalists, and sportsmen. The people have a singular custom when a person of importance enters their towns or villages. The women collect, and begin a song in chorus, the foremost carrying on her head a brass vessel, called the Tcalas, into which the visitor is expected to drop a rupee. Lady Dufiferin, the other day, in entering Ulwur, placed five golden mohurs in the halas, of which the town still gratefully speaks. The badge of Ulwur is the dagger with a wrist guard, and the chunar tree — the Oriental plane — from which Earn plucked a leaf to place in his turban, when he went to fetch Sita from Ceylon, the Eajputs being descended from Earn and Sita. Of the Ulwur Hindus half follow Shiva and half Vishnu, but the disreputable Shakti sect called Kund or Pcmth is much on the increase, and performs secret and immoral rites. The Maharaja, on befitting occasions, keeps great state. On high festivals he is accompanied by the MAM Mardtih, the famous ennobling insignia of " the Fish " received from Delhi ; by the images of Sita Eam ; by a person supporting a gilded umbrella ; people carrying pankhds representing the sun and moon ; by mace-bearers, morchal or peacock -plume bearers, chonri or yak-taU bearers, men wielding curious spears, ballam, wdlds, carriers of silver tiger- headed clubs, ghota wdlds, runners carrying guns, khds barddrs, and ordinary spearmen. Yet, personally he 1 64 INDIA REVISITEi)/ has the simplest tastes imaginable, laughs at all this mediaeval frippery, and, next to the solid business of his kingdom, cares for little except good horses and manly sports. The room in the Summer Palace where the Prince of Ulwur administers government is as plain as a bank-parlour, furnished with a few common armchairs and a second-hand writing table, and carpeted with a woollen durry. But it is a "king's room," notwithstanding ; for at its window, opening into the garden, the Maharajah receives with his own hand the petitions of all who come, and over the window is inscribed a Persian verse which says : " Heed thou the sighs of the oppressed ! they wait The tyrant's prayer, and drive it from Heav'n's gate." In the same palace are diwans and chambers as splendid as anything in India ; one especially, called the Shish- Khana, or " Hall of Mirrors," cost ;^6o,ooo to decorate, and contains a dining-table of solid silver, having curious moving channels of crystal, where coloured fish seem to dart about. But Mangal Singh administers affairs in the little garden-room, and gives audience in a very plain apartment on the roof, with no adorn- ments except a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen- Empress, and the superb view which it affords over the gardens and the city. He received us, dressed in, a Norfolk jacket, linen trousers, stockings, and spring- side boots, his shirt fastened at the neck by a large diamond. We were his guests at Ulwur, and his great solicitude was to know if we were well lodged, ULWUR TO DELUI. 165 and provided for. No one could blend better than this Eajput ruler the dignity which belongs to his line and rank with perfect ease and frankness of manner. He had . just returned, from shooting, of which, as well as of hawking, and hunting with the cheetahs, he is extremely fond. His people adore him for his love of justice and simplicity. The brother of his Diwan — Sri Eam — one of the most accomplished and amiable gentlemen in Eajputana, told us many anecdotes of the Maharajah's devotion to the welfare of his people. Sri Eam himself is a charming little man, with soft voice, the manners of a perfect courtier, gold shoes, snowy turban, and grey coat daintily embroidered. The city of Ulwur contains about 50,000 inhabi- tants. It possesses none of the picturesqueness of Jeypore, having narrow unpaved streets, and few buildings of importance. The people, however, are interesting, blending, as they do, many races and castes, and pursuing a great variety of arts and in- dustries. Some of the women^particularly those from the villages — wear the peculiar cloths of yellow and brown or blue and yellow, called phoolkaris, which are inlaid with little circular pieces of looking-glass. In the sunshine they seem, at a distance, as if clothed with gems. In the heart of the city is the Banni Bilas Palace, which commands from a pavilion on its roof a prospect so enchanting, that it may compare with the view from the top of the Eoyal Eesidence at Jeypore. The pavilion is of white marble, its roof and walls inlaid with coloured stones, and with that 1 66 INDIA REVISITED. pretty tinsel-work of glass and mother-o'-pearl or mica let into the panels and arches, which sheds the inde- scribable effect as of soft moonlight already mentioned in describing the Jeypore palaces. The open front of this beautiful apartment gives upon a large tank or lake, surrounded by white marble walls, embellished at every angle with elegant domed kiosks,. Behind the lake rise abruptly the steep hills embosoming the city, hills of a rich warm colour, belted with light green vege- tation, and crowned with the walls of an ancient fort. Ulwur is a corruption of Alpur, " the strong city,'' and the fortress was built in stormy times by the Mkumpa Eajputs; but a woman's righteous anger overthrew its owners. The old system in all these Hindu states was " despotism tempered by assassi- nation." In the case of the Nikumpas, their ruin is attributed to the practice of human sacrifice. Daily they offered to Durga Devi some wretched man or woman belonging to the lower castes. A Dom widow's son was thus put to death, and the Domni, in revenge, told the Khanzada chief of Kotila that he might easily seize the Ulwur fort by attacking it when the Nikumpas were engaged in the worship of Devi, at which time they laid aside their arms. An attack was accordingly organised. A party of Khanzadas lay in wait under the fort ; the Domni, at the proper moment, gave the signal by throwing down a basket of ashes, and a successful assault was made. The spot where the ashes were thrown down is still pointed out and called "Domni Danta." You look upon this ULWUR TO DELHI. 167 bright landscape, full of old legend and busy traffic, from balconies of pierced inarble — delicious little bowers of carved and fretted embroidery, where the satin polish of the stone, the cool smooth floors, the light filtering through sheeny windows of close and complex patterns, the tinkle of fountains falling on the pavement, the breeze sighing through the feathers of the palm trees, and the broad flags of the banana make up a sense of luxury and graceful life which words cannot convey. Close to the lake is the lovely cenotaph of the Maharajah Bakhti,war Singh, with foliated arches, copied in marble from the segmental forms which bamboos take when they are tied together for a roof. There is no dead king's spirit which might not be proud of such a tomb, and no artist who' would not confess it a perfect subject for his pencil, with the wild peacocks dropping their gorgeous trains down its white walls, and the water reflecting every line and angle of its noble contours. Inside the palace are a library, an arsenal, and a TosJia-Khana, or Treasure-House. The library is rich in Sanskrit and Persian MSS., which certain skilful scribes were copying. It contains some mar- vellous illuminated scrolls, some ancient Kurans, and one special copy of the Gulistan, for which it would be almost justifiable to break the last commandment. The book has been valued even by local bibliophiles at ;^S 0,000, but is beyond price for the purity of its script, and the splendid colour and delicacy of its picttres. Some one at Ulwur ought to reproduce 1 68 INDIA EEVISITED. these beautiful mediaeval designs, as Dr. Hendley lias popularised at Jeypore those of the Mah4bh4rata, exe- cuted by order of Akbar the Great. The old Brahman librarian — saluted by me as " Dwijasuttama," or " Best of the Twice-born " — ^was so gratified at the epithet, and at a little Sanskrit compliment written in his " name-book," that he would have detained us all day over his learned treasures. But we passed on to the armoury, where there were hundreds of choice and famous swords, hilted to outdo Excalibar itself in gold, jade, and jewelled work. Some of them had pearls enclosed in a slot within the breadth of the blade, so that the pearls run up and down as the point is raised or depressed, a well-known trick of the old Oriental sword-forgers. The Eajputs have always worshipped the sword — asi — and there are some philologists who pretend to derive the name of Asia from this cult, or from the ancient sacrifice of aswa, the horse. There were shields in the Ulwur armoury of great beauty, some of transparent rhinoceros-hide, studded with gold and jewels ; some of nilghai skin, the tuft of hair upon the breast being retained, and made to furnish the tassel of the boss. A shirt of mail . worn by Holkar's grandfather, and a rifle ten feet in length, were shown with special pride by the Maharajah's armourer, who is the best judge of the water and temper of a sword-blade in Eajputana. In the tosJia-khana were numberless chests of teak bound with iron — containing the surplus funds of Ulwur in rupees and gold mohurs — elephant trappings, ULWUR TO DELHI. 169 gilded saddles and bridles, dresses of honour, costly shawls, and the jewels of the Eoyal Household, The glories of these latter were exhibited amid a crowd of proud and respectful Eajput guards and attendants. There was a diamond worth ^ r 0,000, and two emeralds of prodigious size, with Persian couplets carved upon their lucent green, which might have made any femi- nine breast glow with passionate desire, not to men- tion a rope of pearls, for which the seas of Ormuz and of Lanka must have been ransacked. The Tosha- Kharm also buys and stores perfumes ; and the dark little treasure-chamber was sweet and subtle with all sorts of essences, laid up for State occasions and for the pleasuring of the zenana, in flasks, jars, and little leathern dulhas. Here was the Majmuah — "all the sweetnesses " and Bahat-i-Buh — " comforts of the soul," with attar, the real rose-scent, a greenish yellow oil, of which a lakh of rose-blooms will only furnish 1 80 grains. With these, as the palace steward said, an appreciative person might " dimagh mu' aitar hona" — "die of a rose, in aromatic pain," and truly those curious in the fine delights of fragrance should pro- cure some of the oil of the Keora palm. It will give a new sensation to the nose. Yet the Prince, as has been said, sets but light store by these vanities. He is devoted to horses, and has a splendid breeding stud, comprising some of the best Kattiawar, Arabian, and even English blood. The riding-stallions inhabit a vast range of stabling, tvhere every stall has affixed the name, age, and I70 INDIA KEFISITED. pfidi^ree of tlie occupant ; while' the mares are camped in a still larger enclosure, their colts and fillies run- ning about near them, in a perfect equine paradise for comfort and solitude. As a result of this estab- lishment the cavalry of the Maharajah is magnificently mounted. The Kattiawar horse has a little curled tuft to the ear, somewhat like that of a lynx; and possesses very good legs. They brought us out the little Prince's ponies for inspection — one of them a tiny creature from Burmah, the gift of Mr. Grant Duff. We had seen the Heir - Apparent at the palace, and kissed his small, tender hand — a baby of between two" and three years, with a pretty face and charming infantile' manners. He was toddling about under the early morning sun in one of the pavilions, learning little words of Persian, and said in the sweetest and most irrelevant manner, " Good evening ! Madam ! " Not far from the stables was the lane of mud-built houses where the cheetahs, lynxes, and falcons were kept. The hunting leopards — ^very fine animals — were lazily stretched on charpoys in the hot noonday, their cream-coloured hides with the black velvet dots, and their savage, sarcastic faces, making wonderful pictures under the sunlight. The lynxes mewed and snarled beneath the trees to which they were chained, whining for blood when a monkey or chicken came in sight. Both are employed in the pursuit of antelope ; and the first rush and leap of a cheetah when he breaks from cover, or bounds out of the nullah upon the Indian black buck, is one of the^ ULWUR TO DELHI. 171 sights whose cruelty is half-redeemed by the spectacle of the splendid energy developed on one side and pro- digious agility manifested on the other. That plunge of the leopard at the deer, and that spring of the buck, as he flings himself into the air to escape, are the supreme expressions of the forces of violence and fear. We dreve with the Diwan's brother, Mr. Nanoo Mull, to the great lake of Siliserh, where an embank- ment, skilfully devised, shuts iu a long valley and fills it with pure mountain water, supplying the capital and keeping all the surrounding gardens and fields green. Along the road — which wound between high red hills among endless fields of cotton — strings of Meos, men and women, passed us, the latter wear- ing crimson and amber cholis and those glittering saris, inlaid with glass, before mentioned, which sparkle with every movement. In each field and grove the pea-fowl strutted about, sacred and secure ; and the grey red-headed cranes in pairs — which nothing but death can separate — stalked along the edge of every pooL Peacocks are great favourites with the Eajputs. The bird is sacred to their war-god Kumara, and its feather was often carried in the turban of the Ulwur warriors ; the reason, they declare, why it screams so loudly when thunder is heard is because the martial fowl " takes the noise for battle-drums." If you did not see these creatures, nor notice the camels, the ox-wains, and the picturesquely attired people, Siliserh might have been Ullswater, so English were the bare hills and the bushy shores ! 172 INDIA REVISITED. Our royal friend has a palace and a steam-launch here, and sometimes brings the ladies of the zenana for a little ruralising into the pure upland air. Sri Bam's brother beguiled the way with anecdotes of the young Maharajah's goodness. A week ago he was walking staff in hand when an old Eajput met him, and this conversation ensued : " Earn ! Eam ! they say the Maharajah is here, where can I see him ? " " What do you want ? " " I have a petition to him ; I am old and poor, and have been wronged by a great man." "Give it to me, Baba!" "Not so. I will trust nobody except Mangal Singh." " But I know him, and will give it into his hand." " Tell me where he is ; they say he will always do justice." " Such hat, old man ! they say true. If he can, he will. Let me see the paper." " It's only for the King's eye, Ji ! " "Well, then, I am the King ! " And then and there the Prince read the petition, and, finding it reasonable in its demand, issued on the spot an order which repaired the Eajput's wrongs. We left the picturesque valley of Ulwur glad to have become the friends of its loyal and gracious sovereign. A short journey through a country, rapidly sink- ing from highland into lowland, brought us, as night fell, into the imperial city of Delhi. Our lodging ULWUK TO DELHI. 173 was close to the Mori Gate, and to an embattled wall of masonry which stretches from that point to the Kashmir Gate, of deathless fame. A walk on the flat roof, as morning broke, revealed, close at hand, all the chief localities of the memorable siege of the city by the British in 1857. It is one of the most striking incidents of any wandering tour thus suddenly to behold a scene, new in its features, but familiar by association. Our roof, higher than the city wall, against which it rose, commanded the entire arena of those arduous and gallant 'efforts by which the Mogul capital was wrested from the mutineers, and India saved. On the extreme left, as you face the dense belt of verdure beyond the ramparts, is seen a lofty monument of red sandstone. This, which bears the record of all the many battles which preceded the storm, and the names of the officers and men who fell during the siege, marks the crest of " the Eidge," and is close to " Hindu Eao's House," now a hospital. In the centre may be perceived, over the trees, the battle- mented roof of " Ludlow Castle," where Commissioner Fraser was murdered; and to the right appears a corner of " Metcalfe House," upon the Jumna, the easternmost point of the besieging lines. On Sept. 14, 1857, the great day of the assault, the storming parties started from those three points. By tremen- dous efforts a force of 6000 men had been gathered, batteries had been established and put to work, pound- ing all this line of wall before you, so that it still hangs m ragged ruin, with whole masses of parapet ULWUR TO DELHI. 175 of Delhi, where they captured the Kotwali, now as before a police-station, close to that " Golden- Mosque," sitting in which Nadir Shah ordered the maissacre of the inhabitants in 1739. The scene of Nadir's wrath was hardly more terrible than when, arrested in the heart of the city by a horde of 20,000 desperate mutineers, with Nicholson dead, and Wilson dis- heartened, our slender forces could only just hold their positions, and the fate of India still trembled in the balance. But the rebel troops melted away by the open southern gates; inch by inch the bloodstained capital yielded ; and we buy shawls and trinkets to- day as placidly as in Piccadilly on the very spot where Hodson laid the dead bodies of the princes of Delhi, whom he had pistolled near Humayoun's Tomb, and where the Great Rebellion practically ended in blood and conflagration. Sir Frederick Eoberts related to me how the city of Delhi was at last occupied, after the long check caused by our losses. He was at the head of a detachment which made its way by surprise into a native building where fifty or sixty wounded rebels were lying. Being threatened with death, unless they showed our soldiers how to make their way to the "Silver Street," the Sepoys offered to conduct one ofBcer to the proper spot for an attack. Sir Frederick, then a subaltern, volunteered to go, and it was notified that if he did not return alive and well in two hours the rebels would all be put to death. The guides took the General, disguised as a Hindu, through a labyrinth of back lanes and gardens, until, pushing open a shutter, 170 INDIA REVISITED. they bade him look out. He was close to Manikchund's shop in the great street, gazing upon a crowd of muti- neers, who were cooking, smoking, gambling, and in disorderly ease, but very numerous. Our pioneer re- turned thirty minutes after his time and found the soldiers about to despatch the prisoners, thinking their officer sacrificed ; but he now led them by the way thus discovered, and bursting forth with his handful of men from the shop door, terrified the mutineers into a tumultuous retreat. The main body of the support was soon brought up, and thus at last Delhi was really taken. To the right, at the end of this Chandni Chouk, is the Lahore, now Victoria, Gate, which leads by a covered bazaar to the magnificent fortress-palace of the Emperors. You traverse it, and emerge into a spacious square, where stand the majestic Diwan-i-A'm, with its thirty-two red columns, and the royal seat of white marble ; to its right the splendid and beautiful Diwan- i-Kh4s, the Private Hall of Audience of the Emperors, with close at hand the Moti Musjid, or " Pearl Mosque," a white wonder of architecture, and the sumptuous Akab Baths. In the audience hall once stood that throne — the Takt-i- Talis — which cost six millions ster- ling, being composed of two peacocks of gold with spread tails, all fashioned to the life with sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and diamonds, between them hovering a parrot of the natural size carved out of a solid emerald, and overhead a canopy of beaten gold supported by twelve golden columns. Here sate in State the Great ULWUR TO DELHI; 177 Moguls ; but an almost higher idea is given of their grandeur by the white marble Bath Chambers adjoin- ing, where rivulets of crystal water were made to wander through channels of polished alabaster, over slabs of inlaid stone, and the lips of silver and gold basins. Nothing in imperial Rome ever exceeded the magnificence of these royal retreat^ of Shah Jehan and Aurengzebe, or the delicate beauty of their zenana, lookiiig through pierced marble lattices upon the Jumna. Over one gold and satin archway of this building the architect has written in a proud Persian verse : " If on the earth there be a bower of bliss, That place is this, is this, is this, is this ! " From the splendour of such a marble paradise, the last of the Moguls, Bahadur Shah, was taken by us to die a prisoner at Eangoon, and the Queen's ensign is quietly flying over the cupolas of the Gate as we pass, nor is Derby more peaceful now or contentedly British than Delhi. You buy bulbuls at two annas apiece on the steps and in the courts of the stately and exclusive Jumma Musjid; stroll through the chattering crowd in the place where Nicholson feU, and feed monkeys in the gardens of the princesses of Baber; while outside the Walls, crumbled by our angry artillery twenty-nine years ago, the bugles ring from the Camp of Exercise, where lies an English army 40,000 strong, powerful enough and aufficiently well-equipped to march through Asia, if need were. Next month it will manoeuvre in mimic war from M I7S INDIA REVISITED. the ancient battlefield of Paniput down to the park- like plains that encircle the city. The contrast between the past and present of Delhi was very forcibly brought to mind when, standing upon the " Eidge " and studying the old fighting- ground, we suddenly encountered once again the Commander-in-Chief. Sir Frederick Eoberts was riding over from his camp to survey the scene of the forthcoming movements, and kindly explained the nature of those siege operations in which he bore part as a subaltern in 1857. So dense is now the forest- like growth of mango, tamarind, and acacia trees around the walls that a visitor is at first puzzled to comprehend how the British gunners could possibly have sighted the bastions which they desired to reduce. But the General makes it all clear by telling us that the besieging force sent parties out each night to fell all the trees within a belt of six hundred yards from the walls, and he points to a curtain, still a mass of ruin, " which we peppered night and day." And then he adds, "I am pitched at present, with my headquarters camp, on the precise spot which 1 occupied in 1857 in my little tent." The whole history of the period lay condensed in that sentence, and the explanation of it was to be had in the fear- less valour illustrated by those low twin-arches of the Kashmir Gate. In returning to the city we dis- mounted to walk with reverence and gratitude through the portal opened by the self-sacrifice of Home and his comrades. { 179 ) XII. THE CAMP OF EXERCISE AT DELHI. Delhi is astir, outside and inside her walls, with "the pomp, pride, and circumstance of glorious war." An army of forty thousand troops of all arms — the flower of the Queen-Empress' forces in India — has been gathered under the ramparts on the northern face of the city, or dispersed over its plains to the South. This powerful host, with all its vast following, its expanded encampments, its endless lines of camels, horses, asses, and commissariat carts, has been con- centrated there to perform certain elaborate martial manoeuvres, after which one division will draw off to the northward, as far, it is thought, as the famous plain of Paniput, while the other will close in from the Kootub Minar upon Delhi. Then there will be an advance made from Paniput upon the city, which, notwithstanding the gallant defence sure to be offered, must, it is said, prove successful ; and, afterwards, the Northern and Southern forces will peaceably coalesce, tod' march past the Viceroy, surrounded by his great of&cers of State, and many of the proudest princes of India, the entire proceedings furnishing, beyond all i8o INDIA REVISITED. doubt, the finest military spectacle ever witnessed in Hindostan. General Sir Frederick Eoberts is himself at the head of the Northern force; the Southern has been confided to Sir Charles Macgregor, K.C.S.I. Distin- guished visitors from foreign countries have repaired hither to witness and criticise this full-dress parade of her Majesty's Oriental troops, and for weeks past the bazaars and environs of Delhi have been gay with horse and foot soldiers wearing almost all the uniforms known from Comorin to Attock, the renowned red coat of " Tommy Atkins " conspicuously mingling' with the yellow turbans of stalwart Sikhs, the varie- gated puggris of Bengali North-Western Cavalry, the fluttering pennons of Madras and Bombay Lancers, and the familiar dark blue of our own Artillery. Along with the army thus gathered up there have flocked into the ancient capital of the Mogul innum- erable spectators, so that all the hotels are full, and every convenient spot or shady tree has been seized upon for a private encampment. On all sides may be caught the gleam of white canvas through the dense belt of foliage surrounding the city walls ; and the thunder of guns, saluting from the Port, announces from time to time the arrival of . some Indian prince with his retinue. Each of these native magnates brings a well-stocked purse, and many of the officers connected with the Army of Exercise have lodged their wives or relations in the city or the civil bunga- lows — for no ladies, of course, are allowed within the THE CAMP OP EXERCISE AT DELHI. i8i camp itself. The consequence is that trade flourishes, and the faces of the Delhi dealers in shawls, brocades, kincobs, jewellery, miniature paintings, and the like, are visibly whitened. Manikchund, in the Chandni Chouk, the famous merchant of all such glittering goods, has laid in a fabulous store of novelties from Srinuggar and from the looms of the North. His shop is occupied from morning until night with cus- tomers, at whose feet a dozen patient attendants per- petually unroll dazzling webs of woven silk and gold, shawls of tender colour, embroidered with unheard-of labour by hands contented to achieve one or two such wonders of industry in each year. The carpet of his inner jewellery room shines from dawn to dusk with heaps of bracelets, necklaces, earrings, and filagree - work of gold and silver. The grain-sellers, the gharry- wallahs, the hay and wood cutters are also all making piles of rupees by this peaceful invasion, which occu- pies everybody's mind. Exigencies of time, and engagements contracted in Ceylon and the South of India with Buddhist friends, forbade us to accept the Commander-in-Chief's polite and pressing invitation to be present at the battle and the march-past ; but we have seen latterly a good deal of the two camps, and have had the honour of dining with the staff in Sir Frederick Eoberts' tent at head- quarters. The Southern force has been lying beyond the Kootub Minar, about eleven miles from Delhi, in a country flat, like all the district round about the city, but broken with nullahs and ancient buildings, and i82 INDIA REVISITED. SO affording useful ground for the various manoeuvres in which it was desired to exercise Sir Charles Macgregor's divisions. A drive to this point takes you through some very interesting portions of old Delhi, as well as brings the explorer upon a military spectacle of singular charm and novelty. The road leads by the majestic Jumma Musjid, the largest mosque in all the nations of Islam, the boast of Shah Jehan and of Aurungzebe, in which are deposited, besides many precious copies of the " Perspicuous Book," the Kafsh- i-Miibdrak, or Prophet's slipper, filled with jasmine, and the Mui-i-Mubdrak, a hair of Muhammad's mous- tache. You may turn aside a little, to see the ruins of Indrapat, the ancient Indraprastha, capital of King Yudhisthira of the Mah§,bh&rata, the tomb of Azizah Kokal Tash, foster-brother of Akbar the Great, and also that of the poet Khosrau, whom Saadi himself visited for the sake of his " Majnun and Leila." Ee- turning to the Ajmir Gate road the observatory of Jey Singh is passed, exactly resembling that at Jey- pore, with massive gnomons and astrolabes of masonry. Farther on rises the handsome monument of Safdar Jung, who fought with the Eohillas, and, being defeated, took the fatal step of calling in the Marathas. All this district, indeed, near and far, is covered with ruined mosques and tombs, some in marble, some in sandstone, some of both materials mixed j so that wherever the eye falls it lights upon domes, cupolas, ■ arches, and columns, showing amidst the groves, or towering above them, a very wilderness of vanished THE CAMP OF EXERCISE AT DELHI. 183 pride and splendour. There must be hundreds of stately edifices thus scattered over the face of this Southern plain, and beneath their ruins lie the remains of five or six successive cities, for here is the grave of dynasties, the very Golgotha of bygone empires. Through their crumbling relics you arrive at last at the group of ancient buildings in the midst of which the Kutub Minar lifts its lofty beauty to the sky, a pillar of fluted masonry two hundred and forty feet high, embellished at each of its tapering stories with inscriptions in the Tughra character of Arabic, which is so ornamental. The second story of the marvellous pillar is completely belted with the Asma-el-husna, the "Ninety-nine Beautiful Names of Allah." The three lowest stories of this pillar of victory are made of a warm red sandstone, the upper ones of white Ulwur marble. Sultan Altamsh completed it in 1230 A.D. No one can imagine the effect of this conical column, with its deep flutings and diminishing cones, soaring, blood-colour and snow-white, into the blue — twice the height of the Duke of York's column, and adorned with flowing deep-cut Arab scripts, with sculptured lamps, bells, and bosses ? Hard by is the mosque of Kutbu '1 IsMm, which Ibn Batuta describes with such admiration, built in 1191 A.D. of the frag- ments of twenty-seven Hindoo temples, the ancient fanes of Brahmanical Delhi.' It is curious here to observe the mutilated figures of Indian mythology blended with Moslem inscriptions and Pathan cupolas ; while, close at hand, is the famous iron pillar, " the 1 84 ■ INDIA REVISITED. Arm of Eenown of Eaja Dh§,va." This is a solid shaft of malleable iron, said to be more than sixty feet long, reckoning the underground portion, and seventeen inches in diameter ; deeply planted in the earth, where it is believed to rest on the head of the Great Snake, the King of the Nagas. Many inscriptions are upon the shaft, and the dint of a cannon-ball may be seen which Nadir Shah fired at it, with the intention of breaking down the idolatrous " Lat." But it stands, and may well stand unshaken for ten thousand years longer. A group of Sikhs and Bengali Sepoys at the pillar were trying their destiny. If you have the orthodox belief and can make your hands meet round it, standing with your back to the iron, the chances are that your next existence will be agreeable. We did not consult an oracle not propitious to " Kaffirs," and, moreover, based upon such wholly gymnastic condition?. Should you diverge a few miles eastward Jughlakabad may be visited — a citadel full of ruins and tombs, haunted by panthers and cheetahs, amid its thick undergrowth of thorns and cactus. The monument of Jun4 KhS,n is there, the Khuni Svltan, or " Murderous King," a cruel tyrant, whose successor, Firoz Shah, procured written acquittances from many of those whom he had oppressed, and placed them in a chest at the foot of the King's tomb, in order that he might show them to the Angels of Judgment, Mukir and Nakir, and so, perhaps, escape punishment. Two miles beyond the Kutub Minar — the " Written Monument " — upon a fiat, sandy plain, the encamp- THE KUTUB MINAR. Page 184. THE CAMP OF EXERCISE AT DELHI. 185 meat of the Southern Division was reached. It is at a place called Sultanpur, well suited and well known for a pitching-ground, with a perfectly dry loose soil, good for health and for tent-peg driving, and supplied with many excellent wells. Topes of dark-green verdure fringe the maidan, which has near it some massive ruins and a little village with a lively bazaar. Nothing could seem more soldierly or business-like than this camp of Sir Charles Macgregor, with its nine thousand or ten thousand men. The unprofessional visitor would expect to find a luxurious city of canvas, with comfortable durbar and bechoba tents, and all those lavish appurtenances familiar to the pleasant jungle-life of Indian districts in the cold weather. But here all was stern simplicity. Long streets of little booths of canvas sheltered everybody alike ; generals and officers, non-commissioned officers and privates lodging, as far as could be seen, in the same small rowti, or eighty-pound tent, of the " Cabul scale " pattern. You can pack this up, roof-s, kanauts, pegs, ropes, and all, in a bundle weighing exactly that amount, which then goes on one side of a pony, while all the kit of the tent swings on the other. The commander himself was housed in much the same kind of tiny gipsy-booth, and only the quarter guards of each regiment and the messes had square tents. In the mile-long vista of those airy abodes which we traversed first lay the famous regiment of " Eattray's Sikhs," clad in Khaki or dust-colour suits, with turbans of mustard-tint, as stout and serviceable' men as need 186 INDIA- REVISITED. be seen, not likely to lose Delhi to anybody less irresistible than Sir Frederick Eoberts. Next were camped the Seaforth Highlanders, kilted and sun- helmeted; and facing them the splendid squadrons of the 1 3th Bengal Native Cavalry, wearing an uniform of dark blue and red, the same colours fluttering from their lance-heads, stuck by the butts into the sand in clusters before their tents, or ranged along the lines where their Australian chargers were picketed. Each stirrup-iron of these horsemen is furnished with a socket, into which the shaft of the lance can be slipped, relinquishing which he can pass his bridle hand or sword-arm through a leathern thong fastened to the black bamboo shaft and ride entirely unen- cumbered. Beyond the Bengalee cavalry lay a famous Highland regiment, and then various native horse and foot, most of them of the highest apparent efficiency. The 1 7th Lancers came next, under Colonel Boulderson, and beyond were some sappers and miners, and batteries of artillery. Enormous piles of porter-barrels testified to the deathless thirst of the British soldier, and little enclosures of dried mud, with cooking-places of the same material, showed where the high-caste Sepoys dressed their simple dinners, which would become unclean, and be thrown away, if the shadow of the Commander-in-Chief himself should pass over them. Sir Frederick Eoberts had been here recently, scouring the country on horseback, all day in the saddle ; and many useful marches and counter-marches had been performed by this force under the critical award of THE CAMP OF EXEECISE AT DELHI. 187 umpires. Par off the Geneva Cross — ^red on a white ground — floated over the hospital tents, which, happily, were, nearly empty. You beheld an encampment precisely as it would appear in war, with guns, ammunition, pontoons, transport, all in perfect order, all designed for service, not for show. It would be unbecoming in a non-professional spectator to anim- advert upon what he cannot properly judge ; but the one deficiency which struck the attention, both super- ficially and after inquiry, was the lack of English officers with the native regiments. It was good to see them wearing the turban of their regiment, and dwelling so amicably with their obedient men, but painful to note how few they were. The headquarters of the Army of Exercise lay behind the Eidge, about two miles from Delhi. There the Commander-in-Chief occupied a much more ela- borate encampment, as befitted his rank and respon- sibilities — pitched, as was before remarked, in the self-same spot where his tent, as a subaltern, stood during the great siege. The General's quarters were to the right of the AUipur road, approached upon gravelled paths, through vistas of tropical plants and broad archways leading into a spacious canvas man- sion, as handsome and well furnished as any dwelling could be. We had the honour of sojourning there, and, excellent as the banquet was, the conversation, rich with the recollections and opinions of the many dis- tinguished officers present, was even a better feast. It turned, after some talk of the forthcoming manoeuvres. 1 88 INDIA KEVISITED. upon the incidents of the siege of which every sur- rounding spot offered some memorial, and the con- viction left upon my mind was that accurate history is really impossible. I heard published accounts of the storming of the city gainsaid upon the highest authority in a hundred particulars. The chief told me himself exactly how the Chandni Chouk was gained, and that story has been already related ; albeit histories give a very different account. Then, too, it is currently stated that Outram and Campbell met at Lucknow, in the open, and sensational paint- ings have been exhibited, depicting the generals grasp- ing hands on horseback, amid a brilliant staff, and a great crowd of soldiers and spectators. The Com- mander-in-Chief, however, who was one of the reliev- ing column, laughingly explained to me that these heroes met through a hole in the Eesidency wall practised by the pickaxe of a sapper, and recounted particulars of the retirement which utterly refute the second-hand accounts of the accepted books. It seems a sad conclusion, yet nothing in fiction is so false as history. The historian pretends to know too much ; but if he came upon the ground, and spoke with the actors, he would blot every other line. All about the country, far and near, in the vicinity of headquarters, gleamed groups of tents, by scores and hundreds, with painted boards, denoting here the Commissariat, there the Pontoon Corps ; in another spot the Transport. Horses going in troops to be exercised or watered, carts in interminable lines, creaking along with fodder; ; THE CAMP OF EXERCISE AT DELHI. 189 heavy guns' rumbling, camels snorting, orderlies gallop- ing hither and thither, flags fluttering in the breeze, bugles blowing cheery calls, the roll of drums, the, tramp of feet, arms brightly glittering and brilliant uniforms glancing to and fro — the scene represented all the picturesqueness of war without its terror and sorrow. The English public have learned from other sources the details of the military movements which were to ensue, and the names and bearing of all the distinguished regiments present on the day of the grand march-past, the 19th of January. This is only a sketch, in slight and light outlines, of the aspect which the environs of the Imperial City presented during the marching and counter-marching of the various forces drawn to the walls of Delhi I had, however, a particular desire to see Paniput, the famous plain where the Northern Divisions were to concentrate, and where so many great and fatal battks have been waged. It was there that the Kuru and Pandu princes of the MahS,bh4rata fought their gigantic contest, after the god Krishna had pronounced to Arjuna in his war-chariot the divine verses of the JBhagavad-GUa. There also Baber, Timur, and Nadir Shah slew hecatombs ; and upon that same plain — like Bceotia, a very "Apeos opyfiarpa, a " dancing ground of Mars " — Akbar broke Hemu, the general of Sultan Adili, and Ahmed Shah Abdali bloodily defeated the Mahrattas. No one outside the Intelligence De- partment knew much about this place, which lies off the line of railway on the right bank of the Jumna, 190 INDIA REVISITED. about fifty-four miles north of Delhi, upon the Kurn^l road, and is seldom or never visited by Sahebs. It seemed, however, that there must be some command- ing physical conditions in the contour of the district to account for its importance in history — conditions which it would be interesting to study, besides the high classical import of the spot to any student of Hindu philosophy, as the scene chosen for the sublime " Song Celestial." I resolved, therefore, to undertake a little private expedition to Paniput, and " laid a dkk " for that purpose. The road leads over " the Eidge," past the chief localities of the English position in the siege of 1857, and through the village of Budli-ka-Serai, where the rescuing troops first met the mutineers. Thereafter it continues in a perfectly straight course, over a vast plain unbroken by the slightest acclivity during aU the twenty-seven kos of the route. This is — and must always have been — the main line of com- munication from Umballa and the Punjaub; and, admirably metalled at present with kunkar, it is shaded for the most part with groves of acacia, tamarind, and peepul trees, and bordered with far-stretching flats, sometimes grass-clad like a cricket-field, sometimes studded with clumps of palm and thorn and pretty interspersed bushes like a vast Indian park. Prom time to time a large pool lies alongside the road, where herons, bitterns, and the great grey cranes placidly fish. A stream now and then, trickling to the Jumna, necessitates a bridge ; and frequent wayside THE CAMP OF EXERCISE AT DELHI. igr wells tempt the camel-drivers aad lyl-wallahs to form a picturesque encampment. But, all throughout, the route to Paniput is level as a billiard-table, and the herds of antelope on either side may be -watched bounding away for miles. As far, fiherefore, as fight- ing-ground is concerned, any one five square miles of this enormous flat would serve as well as another, in regard to what the traveller can judge. Perhaps the entire plain was called Kv/mkshetra by the Hindus of the Mahabharata, on one side as well as the other of the sacred river. Arriving before sundown at the town of Paniput, I passed a little beyond its mouldering walls of brick to put up at a lonely d§,k bungalow, very seldom tenanted. The sandy compound of this retreat looked forth on an equally sandy maidan, where a white vulture, perched on a broken chatty, alone enlivened the scene. Yet somewhere about, in this great expanse, those antique armies had certainly struggled and bled, and, if old records were true, nigh upon a million of Hindu, Moslem, and Afghan warriors had left their bones or ashes within view of the self-same spot where my rice was cooking. There were, indeed, mounds to the southward of possible strategic importance on such an endless plain, and the flat roofs of Paniput town climbed a little upon the slope of what seemed a slight ridge. No doubt this place, occupying almost the only rising ground for leagues around, and distant about nine miles from the Jumna, on a terrain per- fectly suited for elephants and calvary, would be a 192 INDIA KEVISITED. very probable battlefield. It is about as far as a de- fending host might move forth to coyer Indraprastha or Delhi — about as near as an invader might be allowed to come unopposed after outlying victories. In the town itself some Brahman, or native of autho- rity, would be sure to know where Bhao Saheb and Ahmed Shah contended, and where ancient tradition fixed the field of the Bhagavad-Gita and of the great battle fought by the Kuru princes. Accordingly, I entered the crumbled portals of Paniput and inquired for the hurra admi, the chief personage. This was universally said to be "the Nawab Sahib," and I was led by a group of obliging residents through many narrow and mean streets to an old house, where, responding to his name, an extremely aged Muslim gentleman appeared. He was well-nigh blind with ophthalmia and quite toothless, but delightfully courteous, and much interested. He said he had heard his grandfather speak of " Bhao Saheb's" dreadful battle, and how be died on his elephant. He knew that Ahmed Shah "beat the Mahrattas, and slew a lakh of them, and shut another lakh into tliis same town of Paniput, all of whom he massacred next morning, letting them out of the gates in lots, 'like sheep at Bairam.'" We held this historical inquest, seated on rugs, in his courtyard, amid some five score of townspeople ; but he did not know, nor care one cowrie, where the ancient Pandu battle was fought. Thanking the garrulous old gentle- man, I resumed my quest, hunting now for some THE CAMP OF EXERCISE AT DELHI. 193 Brahman ; but the Christmas holidays had caused the one schoolmaster of the place to be absent, and the only other Brahman in the town, except a Shastri who was sick, had never read the Bhagavad-Gita, and did not even know the name " Kurukshetra." An intelligent Hindu boy, by way of consolation, offered to guide me to a hahut pwrdna nishan, a "very old monument ; " but when we arrived on the spot this proved to be only a marble tablet commemorating the death of Ibrahim Lodi, killed in 1526 A.D., with seven thousand of his men, at Paniput, by Baber at the head of his Cabul army. That was an important fight, for it gave Delhi to Baber ; but it was matter of yesterday, comparatively, to what I wished to learn. Eam Balaji copied for me the inscription, and it was the only record I found in the vicinity, which was, in fact, absorbed about cotton-selling, and quite oblivious of its own renown in history. When I quitted the little bungalow at one stage distant from the famous but forgetful spot, I inscribed on its whitewash this brief memorandum of my failure : " From Delhi's walls to Paniput I came, To view those scenes of immemorial fame Where Asia's sceptre thrice was lost and won, And Bhagavad-Gita told to Pritha's son. But where on " Kurukshetra " that was taught None knew, nor if the ancient fights were fought ; Therefore — ^bethinking what a dream is Fame — To Delhi, back from Paniput, I came." As we quit Delhi for Agra the thunder of guns from the Lahore Gate announces the arrival of new N 194 INDIA REVISITED. princes, a rajah from Sindh being the last comer. They have pitched handsome quarters, surrounded by high square canvas walls, for these distinguished visitors, and each pair of foreign guests deputed by the European Governments will find charming tents ready for their occupation, surrounded by flowers and plants, and marked by the flag of their nationality. It was a disappointment not tc witness the splendid military pageant, and just as we start the kind Chief despatches an orderly, inviting us to assist at a tent- pegging on the morrow, where the finest horsemanship in the army would be displayed. To linger, however, until the 1 9th, even at Delhi, would be to lose Ceylon, and the Buddhists of Kandy — to whom we are faith- fully promised — as well as other old engagements ; and, therefore, we must cross the Jumna, and take a last look at the splendid Jumma Musjid, whose minarets and cupolas arise so majestically over the city of the Great Mogul { I9S ) XIII. AGRA AND THE TAJ. It would be difficult to find a railway station any- where which lands its passengers upon a more re- markable scene than that at Agra. You emerge into the open space amid the usual brightly-clad crowd, and are arrested on the step of the carriage by the imposing spectacle presented upon either hand. To the right soar the minarets and domes of an immense mosque, the Jumma Musjid of the city, built by Shah Jehan, in 1644 A.D., in honour of the good Princess Jehanara, his daughter, who was buried at Delhi, after sharing the seven years' captivity of her father, deposed by Aurungzebe. This is a massive structure of sand- stone, the great domes of which are diversified by a zigzag pattern in layers of white marble, producing a strange but picturesque effect; and to the left the vast red walls and bastions of Akbar's Fort climb up- wards like sea- cliffs, facing the station with a huge battlemented gateway, and with long lines of crenu- lated parapet, under which runs in a broad stream, divided by many sandbanks, the sacred Yamuna, or Jumna, flowing grandly down to join the Ganges, and 196 INDIA BEVISITED. forming with that river the fertile Doab, the fairest portion of Hindustan Proper. Within these lofty walls are hidden, as the traveller will well know, the finest monuments of the Mogul time, as well as some of the favourite retreats of the Sultans ; and it is right that the first object to seize attention at Akbar's city should remind one of that truly great sovereign, whose tolerance and rare artistic taste created what may be called the new school of Hindustani architecture. Akbar loved India. The hearts of Baber and Humayoun were always away in Central Asia, where one of them died ; but the son of Hamida, the Persian girl, born at Umurkot on the Indus, who began to rule as a boy of fourteen, and lived to prove so powerful a monarch, knew no country except his empire of Hindostan, and gave himself, heart and soul, to the idea of blending in India con- querors and conquered into one people. It is notable that the Hindus believed him to be one of their own people returned to earth, and all the more when one day he dug up at the confluence of the Jumna and Ganges the dish, the bottle, and the deer-skin of an anchorite ; articles which they supposed must have appertained to the Emperor in a previous existence. He chose Hindu princesses for his wives; favoured and cultivated Hindu literature, albeit he himself could neither read nor write; took Hindu statesmen into his deepest confidence, and by employing Hindu artists and masons, and giving them free play upon the old conventional Persian and Mogul models, he AGEA AND THE TAJ. 197 founded for India what conies nearest to a national style of building, wherein her old delicate skill of detailed ornament has mingled with the original strength of the invader's designs, so that, even now, many a graceful private mansion or forgotten temple in the by-streets of Indian cities proves how thoroughly Hindustani architecture is a living art. The breadth of Akbar's religious views, his generous interest in all forms of thought, his love of the many good qualities in his Indian subjects, and his dislike of the bigotry and fierceness of his own Mogul countrymen ; the grace, the joyfulness, the courage, and the kindliness of the man, until those later years when the vices of his children disheartened him and his strong nature yielded, make Agra a veritable place of pilgrimage for those who remember Akbar's virtues and overlook his faults. He even invented a reconciling religion. Mr. Keene says : " The so-called ' Divine Monotheism ' of Akbar was an attempt to throw off the rules of Islam, and substitute an eclectic system obtained by putting together the systems of Zoroaster, of the Brahmans, and of Christianity, and retaining some Mohammedan forms. Few leading Moslems and only one Hindu (Birbul) embraced it; and it fell at the death of its founder, owing to the opposition of sincere believers and the indifference of the new Emperor Jehangir. But the Hindus continued to prosper till the time of Aurungzebe. Of Akbar's peers fifty-seven were Hindus out of about four hundred ; under his grandson Shah Jehan, out of six hundred and nine, one hundred and igS INDIA REVISITED. ten were Hindus. Neither Akbar nor Jehangir con- verted their Hindu wives to the faith of Islam." Faults the great Emperor certainly had. His city of Futtehpoor-Sikri, built at enormous cost to his people, in a place where no man could live long because of the bad air and water, was a caprice so costly as to seem cruel; and beautiful as are the buildings in this city and at Delhi, due to his hand or to his influence, who has not heard of that fatal sweetmeat box which the Emperor carried, one side of which contained innocent pastilles of honey and almonds, and the other partition sweet-scented lozenges imbued with deadly poison ? If Alibar gave you a bonbon from the kind side of his box you were in high favour at court, and likely to command a province soon or to receive the charge of five thousand horse. If he smilingly offered you one from the other part you could not refuse — for none dared to say " No ! " to Akbar — and your mouth for awhile became full of the fragrance of nard and myrrh, while you rode hurriedly home in your litter, and there died before the golden palace robes could well be stripped off. They say that Akbar himself perished by making a mistake one evening when he wished for a sweetmeat. Agra contained, however, for one of us a memory of deeper and nearer, though humbler interest. Many years ago, in the time of the great Mutiny, a dear friend of mine went out to India to join the Educa- tional Department. Frederic Cairns Hubbard was a man of noble character and a scholar of the highest AGRA AND THE TAJ. 199 promise. Educated at the King's School, Eochester, he became distinguished there for his classical and mathematical proficiency, and afterwards took a very high degree in both schools at Cambridge, when he had finished his terms in Caius College. Appointed Pro- fessor of Mathematics, first to Calicut, and afterwards to the College at Agra, he was to have joined me at the Deccan College, to which I had been elected Prin- cipal ; our hope being to pass many years together in associated Indian work. But, on the eve of my own departure for Poona, news came that the mutiny had broken out, and that among the first victims of that sad period had fallen this good and gifted friend. He had refused, with characteristic manliness, to take refuge in the Fort when almost all the other Europeans crowded into that asylum, and calmly continued his class-work, sitting at home each evening with a loaded revolver laid on either side of the mathematical papers he was revising. On July 5, 1857, it was determined by the authorities to go forth and fight the mutineers at Futtehpoor-Sikri, and Mr. Hubbard at once volun- teered for the expedition. He had set out on horse- back for the Fort, taking a short cut from his bungalow which led to a bridge over a nullah, at an open part of the city suburbs, where there stood — and yet stands — a police-station. As he approached this place, sus- pecting, of course, no danger, since the police officers were, as usual, at their post, one of these very men, passing up and down with his musket, suddenly turned, levelled the piece at Mr. Hubbard, and shot him dead. 200 INDIA REVISITED. His body lay for three days where it fell from the saddle, until a detachment from the Fort, patrolling the streets, picked up his corpse along with those of other Europeans slaughtered in the town. I met in Mr. Sheo ISTarayen, Secretary of the Municipal Board of Agra, a native gentleman who had known Mr. Hub- bard well, and been his pupil. He remembered the merry fortitude with which my friend had said, " I am a professor of mathematics, not a woman ! I shall go on with my duties, and if anybody who hates conic sections interrupts me by violence I shall defend myself." He showed me the narrow path by which Hubbard took his last ride, the bridge-foot where he received the fatal shot, the very spot where the assassin stood, and afterwards we visited together his college rooms, his dwelling-house, and the slab of grey sand- stone which marks the place in the Civil Cemetery where were laid the mortal remains of one of the best, the most gifted, and the gentlest of men, who would have assuredly done good service to the Hindu people among whom he fell. His murderer was of the Mar- warie caste, a man of Ulwur, and was afterwards hanged for the crime ; which judicial vengeance, how- ever natural, my friend would, I know, have deprecated and regretted. After paying the private debt of recollection due to this one of many unrecorded English heroes, our first duty was, of course, to visit the Taj, and the next was to see the tomb where the dust of Akbar the Magnificent lies. The site of the Emperor's burial is AGKA AND THE TAJ. 201 called Sikundra, and is distant about five miles from the Fort Gate. It is approached by a superb arch- way of red sandstone, massive and majestic, crowned with great scrolls of Arabic, being the " Chapter of the Kingdom " from the Koran. The white marble mina- rets on either side are broken, and broken is the patterned pavement by which you pass through a large but melancholy garden to the mausoleum of the Emperor. This is a vast mosque-like structure of red sandstone, diversified with marbles of maiiy colours, having an imposing central entrance, and on each side of this main arch five smaller archways. Large flowers and bold arabesques run along the architraves, inlaid in brilliant hues. The entrance-chamber was originally vaulted with diapers, of blue and gold, the -splendid effect of which may be judged by a small portion which has been recently renovated. By this grand approach you are led to the highest of four platforms, where, in the centre of a square upper pavilion, surrounded by lattice-work of wonderful pierced marble, the cenotaph of the Emperor stands. On one side of this monument are written in Arabic the words with which he used to be saluted, Allahu Akhar — "God is Great", and on the other those with which he was wont to reply to his obsequious courtiers, Jalla jallalahu — "May His glory be glori- fied." A yard or so from the monument rises a marble pillar, which was formerly coated with gold plates, and provided with a receptacle in which the Koh-i-Noor was kept. Around this central shrine, at 202 INDIA REVISITED. the base of the edifice, are many little chapels, where similar but humbler memorials exist to other mem- bers of the Imperial line, among them a daughter of Aurungzebe. But to see where Akbar's dust really reposes you must come down from the proud and lofty pavilion, and the beautiful white corridors lighted of old with that great diamond, and by the Indian sunshine filtering upon it through those pierced panels; you must descend a gloomy sub- terranean slope paved with black flagstones, steep and rugged, and rapidly retreating from the glad warmth of the Indian morning outside into chilly shadows. This brings you to a dismal vaulted chamber, of conical form, a huge sepulchral cellar, which has no touch of defunct royalty about it, ex- cept some faint vestiges of gold and blue upon the roof, dimly illuminated by one square aperture. In the middle of the floor is thus perceived a white tomb- stone, the high polish of which catches what little light flickers about the place. This plain marble bears no inscription whatever ; only on the top of it is seen the Kalamdan carved upon a man's grave-slab by the Moguls. And under this simple stone lie the bones of Akbar the Magnificent, in a darkness which daylight was wont to penetrate only once a year in the old Imperial days. Now the place is always open to visitors ; but the Khadim in charge had reverently set a tumbler of flowers on the Mecca side of the grave, and spoke in a whisper, as if the mighty Akbar might still hear and resent any want of obeisance. o S o B K K AGRA AND THE TAJ. 203 The Fort, already spoken of, contains within its vast red walls a whole town of splendid Mogul buildings. They are grouped together in a rich profusion of archi- tecture not to be understood, unless it is remembered that the Mogul was a man of camps, and imitated in walled cities his own bygone habits of the desert. Thus, alike at Futtehpoor-Sikri and in this wonderful Agra Fort, edifice is crowded upon edifice within a narrow space, just as tents would have been in a Bac- trian encampment. Moreover, the general design is vir- tually the same. The Bewan-i-Am, which you first see, with its three rows of thirty-six columns fronting the sunlight, where the place of the throne is still marked ; the Dewan-i-Khas, a marvel of elaborate work, carved and beautified beyond the power of any words to con- vey ; the Jehangir Mahal, and the beautiful mosques themselves, the Nagina and the Moti, all suggest tents and tent-poles, and the Kanauts or curtains of tents lifted high for light and air. These buildings are, in fact, all open halls, facing with tent-like fronts the square or the river on one side, and having secret apart- ments or recesses at the back, like the women's portion of a Turanian Kilifka. But, of course, from the most sumptuous green silk tent of Timur to the least of all these lovely edifices at Agra, Delhi, or Futtehpoor- Sikri, is a longer step than from the lowest Mongol camp-follower to Akbar's intellect and capacity. The Bewan-i-Khas, with its embroiderered arches and pilasters, and its inlaying of jewel-work, would alone suffice to render any city famous. Yet this is only 204 INDIA EEVISITED. one of the many treasures enshrined in the fortalice of Akbar. You pass from the columned grace and lightness of the Hall of Audience, upon a terrace overlooking the broad channel of the Jumna, with the snow-white domes of the Taj showing in the dis- tance. Close to the balustrade of this terrace is placed a broad and solid slab of black stone, on which the throne of Akbar was set, while he administered justice to the crowds of his people assembled in the courtyard below. The stone is cracked right across, and there are rusty-red stains upon it, due, no doubt, to some ferreous oxide in the marble. The Khadim, however, tells you that the seat of the Emperor broke spontaneously and in indignation when the Jat usurper first sate there ; and that the gouts of blood appeared on it because of his tyranny. Close at hand, ap- proached by hidden passages, is the Muchchi Bhawan, a quadrangle of marble kiosks and pavilions, the central hollow of which was once filled with water and stocked with gold and silver fish ; and there is a pretty open turret, with satin-white seats and pierced windows, from which the lovely ladies of the Court were wont to angle. Yet again you wander, by a corridor of marble and some shining steps, by once-secret bowers of the zenana and bath-rooms, cool in the hottest noon, to a pair of brazen gates, spoil brought by Akbar from Chittore; and these admit the delighted visitor to a small, secluded mosque, dedicated to the use of those same lovely queens and odalisques of the Great Mogul for their daily devo- AGBA AND THE TAJ. 205 tions. Here is the Nagina, or " Gem " — all of white marble, and delicately beautiful enough for the knees of the sweetest and stateliest of votaries. But it is a seed- pearl only to the Great Pearl adjoining, the famous Moti Musjid, the edifice which is a fair and perfect sister to Shah Jehan's other consummate work, the Taj Mahal. A heavy door of carved timber is thrust open by the Khadim, and you stand in a Muslim shrine, where only two colours are needed by the artist who would endeavour to depict it — the blue of the enroofing sky and the silvery white of the sur- rounding alabaster. All is sapphire and snow; a sanctuary without any ornament except its own supreme and spotless beauty of surface and material. Three milky cupolas crown the holy place of prayer, approached by milk-white steps from the white en- closure, in the middle of which opens a marble tank, within the waters whereof the fifty-eight white pillars of the cloister glass their delicate twelve-sided shafts and capitals of subtle device. It is not quite exact to write that this Pearl of all Churches has no em- bellishment. Passages from the Koran are inscribed over some of the doorways and engrailed arches, in flowing Arabic, wrought of black marble, deftly inlaid upon the tender purity of the alabaster. The delicate stone itself has here and there tints of rose colour of pale amber, and of faint blue, and is carved on many a panel and pilaster into soft fancies of spray and flower, scroll and arabesque. These slight varia- tions from the prevailing pureness of the surface 2o6 INDIA REVISITED. however, no more mar the unsullied appearance of the mosque, than the meandering veins, the flush of the blood, and the shadows of the warm flesh impair the whiteness of a beautiful woman's body : " Cool, as to tread in summer-time on snows, It was to loiter there." In 1857 this divine retreat was used by the European refugees as an hospital, and one would think that the wildest delirium of the sick or the wounded must have been calmed into peace by an asylum so quiet, so tender, and so solemn. In the south-east angle of this palace-crowded Fort they use also, as military cells, the Baoli, or "Well- Eoom, and the other basement apartments whereto the Emperor and his ladies would retreat when the fierce heats of the Indian midsummer had wearied him of statej and them of prayer in the mosque, or of bargains with the silk -merchant's slaves in the Muchchi Bhavnm. " Descending," we are told, " at early morn- ing, and followed by attendants with fruits and music, the royal party could wander about the labyrinths that honeycomb the fort in this direction, whose windows look on the river at the base of the palace. Arriving at the Baoli they could seat themselves on cushions in the chambers that surrounded the water of the well, and idle away the sultry hours in the manner dwelt on by Persian poets." If, indeed, one would realise the pomp and luxury of this ancient Mogul Court, a very just idea may be gained from M. Bernier's account, who visited Agra AGRA AND THE TAJ. 207 during the reign of Shah Jehan.' In a letter to M. de la Mothe le Vayer, dated July i, 1663, contempora- neously translated, the Frenchman writes : " The king appeared sitting upon his throne, in tlie bottom of the great hall of the Am-kas, splendidly apparelled. His vest was of white satin, flowered and raised with a very fine embroidery of gold and silk. His turban was of cloth of gold, having a fowl wrought upon it like a heron, whose foot was covered with diamonds of an extraordinary bigness and price, with a great Oriental topaz, which may be said to be match- less, shining like a little sun. A collar of big pearls hung about his neck down to his stomach, after the manner that some heathens wear here their great beads. His throne was supported by six high pillars, or feet, said to be of massive gold, and set with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds. I am not able to tell you aright neither the number nor the price of this heap of precious stones, because it is not permitted to come near enough to count them, and to judge of their water and purity. Only this I can say, that the big diamonds are there in confusion, and that the throne is estimated to be worth four kouroures of roupies, if I remember well. I have said elsewhere that a roupie is almost equivalent to half-a-crown, a lecque to a hundred thousand roupies, and a hourov/r to a hundred lecques ; so that the throne is valued forty millions of roupies, which are worth about sixty millions of French livres. That which I find upon it best devised are two peacocks covered with precious stones and pearls. 2o8 INDIA EEVISITED. Beneath this throne there appeared all the Omrahs in splendid apparel upon a raised ground covered with a great canopy of purfled gold with great golden fringes, and enclosed by a silver balistre. The pillars of the hall were hung with tapestries of purfled gold, having the ground of gold ; and for the roof of the hall there was nothing but great canopies of flowered satin fastened with red silken cords that had big tufts of silk mixed with threads of gold hanging on them. Below there was nothing to be seen but great silken tapestries, very rich, of an extraordinary length and breadth. In the court there was set abroad a curtain tent as long and large as the hall and more. It was joined to the hall by the upper part, and reached almost as far as to the middle of the court; meantime, it was all inclosed by a great balistre covered with plates of silver. It was supported by three pillars, being of the thickness and height of a bargemast, and by some lesser ones, and they all were covered with plates of silver. It was red from without and lined within with those fine chittes, or cloth painted by a pencil of Masulipatam, purposely wrought and contrived with such vivid colours, and flowers so naturally drawn of a hundred several fashions and shapes, that one would have said it were an hanging parterre. Thus was the great hall of the Am-Jcas adorned and set out. As to those arched galleries which I have spoken of that are round about the courts, each Omrah had received order to dress one of them at his own charges ; and, they now striving who should make his own most stately. AGRA AND THE TAJ. 209 there was seen nothing but purfled gold above and beneath, and rich tapestries under foot." Yet, all this while, nothing has been written of the Wonder of Agra, and the " Crown of the World " — the Taj, the Peerless Tomb, built for the fair dead body of Arjamund Banoo Begum by her lord and lover, the' Emperor Shah Jehan. In truth, it is difficult to speak of what has been so often described, the charm of which remains nevertheless quite indescribable. As a matter of course, our first hours in Agra were de- voted to contemplation of that tender elegy in marble, which by its beauty has made immortal the loveliness that it commemorates. The Tartar princes and prin- cesses from whom sprang the proud line of the Moguls were wont in their lifetime to choose a piece of pictu- resque ground, to enclose it with high walls, embellish its precincts with flower-beds and groves of shady trees, and to build upon it a Bara-duri, a "twelve-gated" Pleasure House, where they took delight during the founder's life. When he died the pavilion became a mausoleum, and never again echoed with song and music. Perhaps the fair daughter of Asuf-Khan, Shah Jehan's Sultana, had loved this very garden in her life, for her remains were laid, at death, in its confines, while the Emperor commissioned the best artificers of his time to build a resting-place for her dust worthy of the graces of mind and body which are recorded in the Persian verse upon her grave. In all the world no queen had ever such a monu- ment. You have read a thousand times all about the o 2IO INDIA REVISITED. Taj ; you know exactly — so you believe — what to expect. There will he the gateway of red sandstone with the embroidered sentences upon it from the " Holy Book," the demi-vault inlaid with flowers and scrolls, then the green garden opening a long vista over marble pavements, between masses of heavy foliage and mournful pillars of the cypress, ranged like sentinels to guard the solemnity of the spot. At the far end of this vista, beyond the fountains and the marble platform, amid four stately white towers, you know what sweet and symmetrical dome will be beheld, higher than its breadth, solid and majestic, but yet soft and delicate in its swelling proportions and its milk-white sheen. Prepared to admire, you are also aware of the defects alleged against the Taj — the rigidity of its outlines, the lack of shadow upon its unbroken front and flanks, and the coloured inlaying said to make it less a triumph of architecture than of Mosaic work, an illustration somewhat too striking and lavish of what is declared of the Moguls, that they "designed like giants, and finished like jewellers." You determine to judge it dispassionately, not carried away by the remembrance that twenty thousand work- men were employed for twenty-two years in its con- struction, that it cost hard upon two million pounds sterling, and that gems and precious stones came in camel-loads from all parts of the earth to furnish the inlayers with their material. Then you pass beneath the stately portal — in itself sufficient to commemorate the proudest of princesses — and as the white cupola AGRA AND THE TAJ. 211 of the Taj rises before the gaze and reveals its beauty — grace by grace — as you pace along the pavemented avenue, the mind refuses to criticise what enchants the eye and fills the heart with a sentiment of rever- ence for the royal love which could thus translate itself into alabaster. If it be time of sunlight the day is softened to perpetual afternoon by the shadows cast from the palms and peepuls, the thuja trees, and the pomegranates, while the hot wind is cooled by the scent of roses and jasmine. If it be moonlight, the dark avenue leads the gaze mysteriously to the soft and lofty splendour of that dome. In either case, when the first platform is reached, and the full glory of this snow-white wonder comes into sight, one can no more stay to criticise its details than to analyse a beautiful face suddenly seen. Admiration, delight, astonishment blend in. the absorbed thought with a feeling that human affection never struggled more ardently, passionately, and triumphantly against the oblivion of Death. There is one sustained, harmonious, majestic sorrowfulness of pride in it, from the verse on the entrance which says that " the pure of heart shall enter the Gardens of God," to the small, delicate letters of sculptured Arabic upon the tombstone which tell, with a refined humility, that Mumtaz-i-Mahal, the "Exalted of the Palace," lies here, and that "Allah alone is powerful." The Garden helps the Tomb, as the Tomb dignifies the Garden. It is such an orderly wilderness of rich vegetation as could only be had in Asia, broad flags of 212 INDIA EEVISITED. banana belting the dark tangle of banyan and bamboo, with the white pavements gleaming crosswise through the verdure. Yet if the Taj rose amid the sands of a dreary desert, the lovely edifice would beautify the waste, and turn it into a tender parable of the desola- tion of death, and the power of love, which is stronger than death. You pace round the four sides of the milk-white monument, pausing to observe the glorious prospect over the Indian plains, commanded from the platform on that face where Jumna washes the foot of the walL Its magnitude now astounds. The plinth of the Taj is over one hundred yards each way, and it lifts its golden pinnacle two hundred and forty-four feet into the sky. From a distance this lovely and aerial dome sits therefore above the horizon like a rounded cloud. And having paced about it, and saturated the mind with its extreme and irresistible loveliness, you enter reverently the burial-place of the Princess Arjamund, to find the inner walls of the monument as much a marvel of subtle shadow and chastened light, decked with delicate jewellery, as the exterior was noble and simple. On the pure surface of this Hall of Death, and upon the columns, panels, and trellis-work of the marble screens surrounding the tomb, are patiently inlaid all sorts of graceful and elaborate embellishments — flowers, leaves, berries, scrolls, and sentences — in jasper, coral, bloodstone, lapis-lazuli, nacre, onyx, turquoise, sardonyx, and even precious gems. Moreover, the exquisite Abode of Death is haunted by spirits as delicate as their dwelling. AGRA AND THE TAJ. 213 They will not answer to rude noises, but if a woman's voice be gently raised in notes of hymn or song, if a chord is quietly sounded, echoes in the marble vault take up the music, repeat, diversify, and amplify it with strange combinations of melodious sounds, slowly dying away and re-arising, as if Israfil, " who has the sweetest voice of all Allah's angels," had set a guard of his best celestial minstrels to watch the death-couch of Arjamund. Tor, under the beautiful screens and the carved trellis-work of alabaster is the real resting- place of the " Exalted One of the Palace." She has the centre of the circular area, marked by a little slab of snow-white marble; while by her side — a span loftier in height, because he was man and Emperor, but not displacing her from the pre-eminence of her grace and beauty — is the stone which marks the resting-spot of Shah Jehan, her lord and lover. He has immortalised — if he could not preserve alive for one brief day — his peerless wife ; yet the pathetic moral of it all is written in a verse hereabouts from the Eudees, or " traditions." It runs — after reciting the styles and titles of " His Majesty, King of Kings, Shadow of Allah, whose Court is as Heaven : " — " Saith Jesus (on whom be peace), This world is a bridge ! pass thou over it, but bmld not v/pon it ! This world is one hour ; give its minutes to thy prayers ; for the rest is unseen." i 2H ) XIV. BENARES AND THE LAND OF THE " LIGHT OF ASIA." Benaees — the Oxford and the Canterbury of India in one — has been a city of sanctity and learning ages out of mind. Kapila taught the S§,nkhya philosophy here, Gautama the Nyaya system, and Panini elaborated liis Sanskrit Grammar, although, indeed, the orthodox Brahmans believe that that famous work came straight from the gods centuries before a stone was laid of any Aryan city. Benares, as it stood in ancient days on and about Sarn§,th, was certainly older than Alexander of Macedon, for its importance and large population drew thither the Great Teacher of Buddhism, Prince Siddartha, when he had finished his meditations near Gya. Fanciful devotees love to derive its name from Var^nasi, " The Excellent Waters," as though the broad Ganges which laves its temples and ghats gave the appellation. But this comes undoubtedly from the two streams, Bama and Asi, which bound it on the north and south, and run into the great river. There are 200,000 souls in the capital of "Kasi," which sits on a high bank sloping abruptly to the water, and is built principally of Chanar freestone, a THE LAND OF THE " LIGHT OF ASIA." 215 material that gives a grey and subdued hue to its long sweeping crescent of gh§,ts, temples, stairways, and quays ; to a Hindu's eye the noblest arid holiest panorama in the world. No one, indeed, who has ever gazed upon that vast hill of hallowed architecture can afterwards forget. the aspect of the sacred city — as it rises from the shore of the Ganges in a league-long front of countless shrines and crowded bathing-places. The best plan is to take boat and pass along the broad channel from Tulsi to Earn Gh^t and back again. The city pre- sents to the view one unbroken bank of pinnacles, shrines, pillared mandirs, chaityas, pilgrim houses, towers, sacred trees, images, altars, and flights of spacious steps. Every other spot in this chaos of consecrated sites is the scene of some reputed miracle, ancient or modern. At Eao Sahib Gh^t, for instance, lies a vast effigy of Bhima, which, if you believe the Brahmans, is annually washed away by the river, to be brought punctually back again. At the Kedar Ghat is the wonderful " Well of Gauri," which will cure all diseases, particularly dysentery. In a tank close by is ■ the Mansarovar Stone, which grows daily by the breadth of a miUet-seed. At Bhairava Ghat they sell peacock fans warranted to wave away all evil spirits ; hard by is a goddess with a silver face, who infallibly protects from small-pox; and between the Bisheshwar Temple and a mosque which Aurung- zebe, the Destroyer, made out of shattered Hindu and Buddhist temples, is the Dnyan Kup, or " Well 2i6 INDIA REVISITED. of Knowledge," a fetid, dark hole, full of decaying votive wreaths, where Shiva Himself has the ill-taste to dwell. Then come the shrine of Annapurna, Goddess of Plenty, who never allows famine to visit Benares ; and Shunkareshwar's chapel, where wives pray success- fully for handsome boys ; together with the supremely holy Mani Varnika, a spot at which Devi the Divinest One dropped her earring in the well, and Charan- padak, where the feet of Vishnu have plainly impressed a circular slab rising from the pavement. These are but a very few amid the perfect wilderness of con- secrated localities, thronging and jostling each other along the steep northern rim of the river, tier rising over tier in a confused mass of domes, spires, arches, halls, and walls, making up a silvery, sun-lighted eminence of masonry, brickwork, and stucco, diversified with all sorts of colours, with red or blue and bronzed, lacquered and gilt cupolas — with palaces, some new and splendid, some mouldering and shabby — ISTepalese, Jain, and Muslim edifices mingling strange elements with the prodigious melange of Hindu architecture. Yet, far and away the most remarkable part of the spectacle presented by the river-face of the city is its population, resident and immigrant. Throughout the length of this northern shore, where the flights of steps and the slopes of the temples come down to the Ganges, is seen all day long an immense crowd of devotees, of all ages, ranks, and raiment, and of both sexes, bathing in the sacred river or praying by its edge, or washing their robes of pilgrimage, or bringing their dead to THE LAND OF THE "LIGHT OF ASIA." 217 be burned. Imagine what an artistic effect results from such a fringe of life and of colour between the steep multi-coloured background of the steps and temples and the shining waters of the stream ! Throngs of brown-skinned men and women, of boys and girls, stand waist-deep along the bathing stations, whispering their supplications and pouring the holy liquid over neck and breast and loosened black hair. Groups of bright-clad women, led by their Brahman gurus, trip joyously down the stairs from far-off towns and jungles, to lay their scarlet, saffron, green, and rose-colour saris aside with the Gh^t-keepers, and wash their innocent sins away in Gunga. Big um- brellas are everywhere erected in the sand or mud, inscribed with "Bam, Bam" and under them, shaded from the sun, family parties sit and chatter, or pray in silent accord, arrived, after immense marches, to be laved in and saved by Gunga. Sick people lie, wistful and wan, on charpoys, brought to her beneficent side, that they may hear the ripple of the " Great Mother," and feel the healing wind blow from her waves ; while, at the foot of the burning GhS,ts, where the people who sell the "death-wood" are raking for white bones in the heaps of hot ashes, and piling up fuel and cow-dung for their next batch of funeral- pyres, lie three still figures covered with white and red cloths, from which protrude only the fixed cold feet, washed by the outer edge of the tide. These are the Dead of to-day, happy — thrice happy — to have passed to the Gate of Swarga, close to Gunga's 21 8 INDIA REVISITED. good waves. Their friends sit near, well satisfied even amid their natural regrets; and, very soon, three blue curls of smoke wafted among the temple- roofs from three crackling fires upon the platform of the GhS,t wiU tell where those quiet votaries have finished their pilgrimage once and for alL Wonderful is the fervour of belief among these gentle metaphysical Hindu people ! An orthodox British Churchwoman will feel that she has done her duty if, when she visits a famous city, she goes twice to its ancient cathedral on Sunday. What would she think of these Indian wives and mothers visiting a score of temples, and bathing with such rejoicing confidence of salvation in a crowd under the Dasaswamedha Gh&t ? Some of them are " purdah women," who would never lay aside their veils and step outside the curtain except under protection of the sacred simplicity of pilgrimage. Some are old and feeble, weary with long journeys of life, emaciated by maladies, saddened from losses and troubles ; and the morning air blows sharp, the river wave runs chilly. Yet there they stand, breast-deep in the cold river, with dripping cotton garments clinging to their thin or aged limbs, visibly shuddering under the shock of the water, and their lips blue and quivering, while they eagerly mutter their invocations. None of them hesitates ; into Gunga they plunge on arrival, ill or well, robust or sickly; and ladle the holy liquid up with small, dark, trembling hands, repeating the sacred names, and softly mentioning the sins they would expiate and the beloved souls they THE LAND OF THE "LIGHT OF ASIA." 219 plead for ! I hope it is really true, as I watch these devout and shivering women, that "all the prayers which are uttered come somehow to the ears of Keshav." I took a most interesting walk through the city on the day after our voyage upon the river, in the agree- able society of a Jain gentleman of high rank and many accomplishments, the Eaja Sivaprasid, O.S.I. The Eaja received me in a spacious garden, ornamented with fountains and arhours of climbing flower-plants, situated on the outskirts of the city. He is a good Sanskrit and Arabic scholar, and deeply versed in the philosophies and histories of his country ; while a long experience in public affairs has added practical sagacity to the kindly disposition and gentle tenets charac- teristic of the Swetambara Jains, whose beliefs are closely akin to Buddhism. The Eaja is the principal native personage of Benares, after the Maharajah, and illustrates in his amiable household the tolerant spirit of modern Hinduism, his wif6 being a Vaishnavite, and his sister a Jain like himself. We drove through the chief bazaars of the city as far as a carriage can go. This is not a long way, for all along the edge of the river-slope the holy metropolis becomes a labyrinth of narrow lanes, where even a palanquin can hardly pass. Threading these on foot, amid a crowd of towns- men, pilgrims, sacred bulls and cows, flower and shrine sellers, gosains, priests, and brightly clad women, we first visited the house of a very wealthy banker and merchant. Tollowed by two armed servants, the Eaja tripped familiarly into the abode, and calling aloud 220 INDIA REVISITED. " Malek holdta ? " — " Does the Master summon ? " — led the way upstairs to the sanctum of our Hindu capi- talist. After pleasant conversation upon the state of trade, a door covered with silver plates and studs was opened with three keys, and the little apartment became inundated by a dazzling flood of gold and silk hincdbs, embroidered cloths and scarves, cashmere shawls of marvellous make, texture, and tints, slippers for prin- cesses, turbans for kings, and cholis glittering with gems and gold lace ; while from the same receptacle " the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind " was suddenly and splendidly illustrated by the production of a whole heap of necklaces, armlets, bangles, and chains of the most costly jewels. Benares is always rich, because good Hindus — when they have amassed a fortune — come hither to end their days, bringing their gold mohurs and rupees with them. But it has only been under the strong British Eaj that a Hindu merchant can thus safely store up and display his opulence ! Once more in the street, we wandered through a maze of shops and shrines, the latter so numerous that there really appeared to be more temples than houses in Benares. We entered many a famous fane — where Mahadeo, or Parvati, or Gunpati sate in more or less ugly sanctity, amid a swarm of fervent worshippers and sacred but intrusive bulls. Perhaps the most curious was a little out-of-the-way "temenos" into which the Benares ladies were constantly passing with offerings, while nobody went by its gate without stop- ping to pay a lowly obeisance. Within the dark adytum. THE LAND OP THE « LIGHT OP ASIA." 221 to which we were readily admitted, was a stone figure of the seated Buddha, bearing the established inscrip- tion, Yad dharma hetu, &c., beneath it, and this was being devoutly adored by the married women as an orthodox Hindu deity who could insure them hand- some offspring ! In many places, indeed, about the city there may be observed, built into walls or adopted as ornaments of temples, relics of the Buddhism which for eight hundred years had a chief seat here; but this was the only instance where Sakya-Muni was actually worshipped. The incident led to interesting conversations with some of the priests, who seem for the most part free enough from bigotry, and true Vedantists, i.e., Theists or Pantheists, at bottom. My Jain friend and I passed unhindered into the presence of many of the most sacred divinities, occasionally presenting a small offering to the guardian Brahmans, who are grown so reasonable that the Municipal Com- missioners have even been able to deport most of the troublesome red monkeys from the Durg^ Kund Temple into the jungles on the other side of the river. They gave me flower wreaths from the necks of their idols, and smiled assent when I said that no " Twice-Born " who had read his JBhagavad- Gtta coiAd believe in stone Mahadeos and wooden Gunpatis, except as symbols. Arrived at last through all this labyrinth of Asiatic theology upon a spot near the Burning GrhS,t, where another little group of dead lay silently, with their rigid feet laved by the running water, I asked, rather abruptly, " Did these live before their recent existence. 222 INDIA REVISITED. Eaja, and will Heaven grant them to live again?" The good Jain settled himself against a carved pillar of Aurungzebe's mosque, and quoted in Sanskrit those lines of the great Bhagavad-QUa, which say : " He is unknowa to whoso think they know ; And known to whoso know they know Him not." " There is the metaphysical and there is the practi- cal answer," he went on, " which wiU. you have ? The true truth in all languages transcends expression ! No words can compass what the informed soul knows and feels ; but for work-a-day purposes it is enough to believe — as we Jains do — ^that the life of these dead men was the outcome of former births, and that as they have passed this existence well or ill so must their next life be surely moulded." The Eaja was, in fact, full of delightful stories and deep philosophies. As we made way for a poor cripple at a temple gate, whom the throng would have shut out, he told me of a rebuke administered to Sher Shah by the Muslim poet M&lik Muhammad. The Emperor, hearing of this verse-writer's renown, sent for him to Court. The poet came — a man of genius, but a weaver by trade — poor, mean in aspect, with a grotesque face, and eyes that squinted. Sher Shah broke into a loud laugh of ridicule at the unprepossessing appearance of the minstrel, upon which MMik Muhammad said gravely and sweetly, " Do you laugh, oh, my lord ! at the Creator or at what He has created ? " Yet it is not Hinduism which — to my mind, at least — chiefly consecrates Benares. The divine memory THE LAND OF THE "LIGHT OF ASIA." 223 of the founder of Buddhism broods over all the country hereabouts; and just as the walls and buildings of " Kasi " are full of old Buddhist stones carved with symbols and legends of his gentle faith, so is the land north and south famous with the passage of his feet, and so are the religious and social thoughts and ways of all this Hindu people stamped with the impress of his doctrines. Modern Brahmanism is really Buddhism in a Shastri's robe and sacred thread. Shunkuracharya and his priests expelled the brethren of the yellow robe from India, but the spirit of Sakya-Muni's teaching remained unbanished, just as " Greece, overcome, conquered her conqueror." For this reason the country of " The Light of Asia " and the monuments which remain in India of ancient Buddhism ought surely to be esteemed more interest- ing than the most ornate Brahmanic temples, or the proudest and most beautiful mosques and palaces of the Mogul. And all the country of the Buddhist chronicles may be visited within a week by one who would see where Prince Siddartha was born and dwelled in his Pleasure-House; where he meditated his doctrines during six years, and where he publicly taught them ; and where his body was burned. It all lies, roughly speaking, inside the three or four hundred miles between Busti in Oudh and Buddha-Gya in the Lower Provinces, which tract, varying somewhat in scenery and races, includes four sites, more important and absorbing in regard of what may be called " Eeli- 224 INDIA KEVISITED. gious Geography " than Mount Hira, where the Prophet received commission to write his Koran, or Paniput, where the Bhagavad-Gtta was recited ; nay, approach- ing — if one may say so — in deep human import the sacred sites of Palestine itself, since Buddhism, justly understood, is in certain aspects an Asiatic Christianity, having thrice as many votaries as any other creed. The four sites alluded to are Bhuila, which is the ancient Kapila-vastu, the place of his birth; Kasia, that of his death ; SarnS,th, near Benares, which is the ancient Isipatana, where he preached; and Buddha- Gya, where — upon a spot known to a rood, to a yard, of ground — this lofty and tender teacher elaborated in solitude that statement of belief which, rightly com- prehended, is so full of love, of hope, of peace, and of philosophic truth. Bhuila, now almost certainly identified with Kapila-vastu by the admirable labours of Mr. Carllyle, General Cunningham, and others, is to-day a tangle of brick and stone ruins, where gaps in the mound which was once a city wall mark the gates whereby Siddartha rode forth to contend with the Sakya princes for the love of Yasddhara, and to witness those sights of age, sickness, and death which filled his heart with " the still, sad music of humanity." There are to this day, in that district, the lakes from which he drank; the fields where he watched the labours of the Indian spring-time; the jungle where the Jambu tree shaded his princely head ; the villages of Asita, of Supprabuddha, of Devadatta, and, most significant of all, that distant view of the ranges of THE LAND OP THE "LIGHT OF ASIA." 225 Himalaya, which, it may be believed, lifted his soul to lofty thoughts, by the majesty and mystery of the shining peaks, which seem at once to shut in the world, and to supply a pathway to heaven. From his earthly paradise in that spot beyond the Gogra the young prince fled ; and one may identify and ride over the Anoma river, which he crossed on his way southward ; and traverse the vast flats of jungle, desolate with sandy patches, or rank with wild indigo, tiger grass, and thorn-bushes, which his patient feet trod. The charm of the Indian jungle has never been adequately described. There are districts where it is almost terrible in its wildness of savage luxuriance, where masses of dank and poisonous trees are knitted into an impenetrable shade by snaky creepers, and the fever in the hot moist air seems present like a visible evil genius, like an Asura, lurking to slay its victims, as the leopard does on the branch of the black sal tree, and the cobra under the beautiful deadly blossoms of the datura. And, again, there are tracts of delightful wilderness in India, where no plough has touched the sterile, yet lovely, landscape since its levels were laid. To wander here on the smooth sand and rock, between clumps of self-planted korunda and jujube ; to taste the pure warm air sighing across its maidans, to follow the shadowed hollows and painted banks of the nullah and come suddenly upon the lonely reed-fringed jheel, full of crimson and blue lotuses and crowded by water- birds, is the pleasantest of lonely wandering. In these natural and delicious solitudes of Asia, which p 226 INDIA EEVISITED. have never known the hand — scarcely even the foot — of man, the spirit of the dreamy, placid, metaphysical East seems to brood over the silence, that spirit which Shelley embodies in the " Prometheus Unbound : " " Asia ! thou Light of Life ! Shadow of beauty unbeheld ! " And amid these wild gardens of the great Peninsula you may study as you roam all the classical objects of Aryan Natural History, as the Mahdbhdrata and Kalidasa describe them. The Koil will utter its flute- like notes from the thicket ; the peacocks break from the kusa grass, a storm of green, and purple, and gold; the sand-grouse, whose cry is heard before the bird is visible in the sky, skims to the pool, where the white egrets and the cranes are stalking, and over which the " fish-tiger " hovers ; the bee-bird hawks for butter- flies ; the " nine sisters " chatter in the thorn-bushes ; the antelopes file in graceful beauty across the plain ; and, as evening falls, you hear the chakur and chakri, " which live on moonbeams, and which only death can separate," cheeping to the rising crescent ; while the jackals steal out to find food, and the flying foxes unhook their leathern pinions from the neem tree, and scream as they launch themselves on the dusky air to plunder the distant village fruit-groves. Through such a country it was my happiness to track the passage of Sakya-Muni step by step, as he wandered from his palace near the lakes at Busti towards the Ganges Valley and the hills surrounding Gya. After his attainment of the Buddhahood, THE LAND OF THE "LIGHT OP ASIA." 227 almost the first spot in which he declared " the Law " was the "Deer Park," near Benares, called in the ancient writings " Isipatan." This may be very easily visited from Benares. The road leads for three or four miles out of the cantonments, past the old residence of Warren Hastings, and over the river Barna, under avenues of fig trees and bamboos, until a sudden turn brings you — after a further ride of a mile and a half — to a well-cultivated plain, where two prominent objects rise above the face of the country. One is an abrupt little hill, topped by a square building, the hill being a mass of ruined brickwork, and the turret a comparatively modern erection. But within sight of it, elevated above the trees and bamboo-clumps through which the road approaches, come abruptly into view the massive outlines of a Buddhist Stupa, resembling no other kind of monument in the world. It soars aloft, 80 or 90 feet high, shaped, in its present broken outlines, like a martello tower of masonry, having on its summit another and smaller turret of red bricks. The lower structure is circular, and formed of large blocks of square-cut sandstone of a russet tinge, the sweep of its surface being diversified by seven slightly projecting entablatures, reaching from the swell at its base nearly to the crown of the larger tower, and each containing a niche which, doubtless, once held a gilded Buddha. Eound the central zone runs a belt of carving — lotus flowers and scrolls — boldly but excellently wrought wherever .finished, although certain parts remain incomplete, 228 INDIA REVISITED. and you can see where the last strokes of the mason's graver were suspended. The upper structure is of flat ruddy bricks, much broken by time, and topped ■with a waving growth of grass and flowers ; but probably this was once coated with plaster, and sur- OAKVING ON TOWEK AT SAENAIH. rounded by a coronet of pilasters. The Stupa, in its entirety, with the band of graceful sculpture girdling it, its ring of seated golden Buddhas, and its solid- columned top, must have looked grandly in the days when Asoka, or some Buddhist king, reared it — about THE LAND OF THE "LIGHT OF ASIA." 229 the date of the first Punic war. Even now it is an im- posing pile, dominating the land near and far with its rugged mass, and scattering over the plain for a furlong around its d^ris of brick and carved stones. Never- theless, that which it commemorates, and the land- scape of which it is the centre, are what most absorb the attention. Here the wise Indian prince taught the Law with his unalterable sweetness and pity. Upon these fields, and fair groves, and grassy hollows, his mild eyes gazed, while the people and their lords gathered eagerly around him to learn deliverance from ignorance and Vedic tyrannies. This was the " Deer Park," this was "Isipatana," to which he repaired from the banks of the Phalgu to declare the new wisdom : for there are stones here, to this hour, marked in Asoka characters by the ancient masons with "Isi " and "Isipa — ," denoting their desti- nation, and all the world of Buddhism knows Sarn^th to be the place where " The Light of Asia " shed its earliest beams. As I sate on the ramp of the great Stupa, surrounded by a friendly crowd of naked Hindu children pleasantly chatting, with birds and beasts fearlessly approaching us, and the bright peace of an Indian afternoon irradiating the groves and fields, it seemed as if more consecrated ground could hardly anywhere be found ! After some days spent in Benares we followed further the steps of " the Master," as he first wandered down from Kapila-vastu to the Ganges Valley, near Patna, and thence to Eajagriha and Buddha Gya. 230 IN'DIA REVISITED. Leaving Patna, or Bankipore, the road leads for about sixty miles through a level country covered with rice- fields to Gya, the ancient Eajagriha, or "King's House," where Bimbasara reigned. We reached this town at night, and I rose at daybreak next morning with much pleasant anxiety to view and identify those landmarks of the neighbourhood in which the Great Teacher dwelled during six years, and where he put a stop to the cruel sacrifices, and passed daily with his begging-bowl. "Eound Eajagriha five fair hills arise." There, in the distance, they were ! Bipula, with its stream and crags ; Eatna-giri ; Gridha- kuta, still swarming with vultures, as its name implies ; Sona-giri, " the Golden Hill ; " and most memorable of all, Baibhara, with its hot springs, which has on its northern extremity at Jarasandh-ki-baithak, the veri- table cavern wherein Sakya-Muni lived, and near at hand, that of S6n-Bhandar, wherein the great Buddhist Convention assembled three months after his death. The ancient town of Eajagriha, with its five hills, lay some miles away from the position of modern Gya, but close to this latter is Mora, the Praghodhi moun- tain, containing the cave of which Fa Hian writes : " Going north-east half a yojana from this we arrived at a stone cell, into which Bodhisatwa, entering, sat down with his legs crossed, and his face toward the west. Whilst thus seated he reflected — ' If I am to arrive at the condition of perfect wisdom, then let there be some spiritual manifestation.' Immediately on the stone wall there appeared a shadow of Buddha, THE LAND OF THE "LIGHT OP ASIA." 231 in length somewhat about three feet. This shadow is still distinctly visible. Then the heavens and the earth were greatly shaken, so much so that all the Devas resident in space cried out and said — ' This is not the place appointed for the Buddhas, past or those to come, to arrive at perfect wisdom.' " All that was after he had lived for some time in the cavern upon Baibhara, which General Cunningham — whom I have since had the privilege to meet — dis- covered in the remarkable way thus narrated in the official records: "Two points in the description led me to the discovery of the cave I was in search of, which was quite unknown to the people. Close to the hot-springs, on the north-east slope of the Baibhira hill, there is a massive foundation of a stone house, eighty-five feet square, called Jarasandh-ki-haithaJc; or ' Jar^sandhas' throne.' Now, as Jar^sandha was an Asura, it struck me that the cave should be looked for in the immediate vicinity of the stone foundation. I proceeded from the bed of the stream straight to the haitkaJc, a distance of 289 paces, which agrees with the 300 paces noted by Pa Hian. Seated on the baithak itself, I looked around, but could see no trace of any cave ; and neither the officiating Brahmans at the hot-springs, nor the people of the village, had ever heard of one. After a short time my eye caught a large mass of green immediately behind the stone basement. On pushing aside some of the branches with a stick I found that they belonged to trees growing in a hole, and not to mere surface brushwood. 232 INDIA KEVISITED, I then set men to cut down the trees and clear out the hollow. A flight of steps was first uncovered, then a portion of the roof, which was still unbroken ; and before the evening we had partially cleared out a large cave, forty feet in length by thirty feet in width. This, then, was the Pippal, or Vaibhara cave, of the Chinese pilgrims, in which Buddha had actually dwelt and taken his meals. The identification is fully con- firmed by the relative position of the other cave, called Son-Bhandar, which corresponds exactly with the account given by Fa Hian. In a direct line the distance between the two caves is only 3000 feet, but to go from one to the other it is necessary to descend the hill again to the bed of the stream, and then to ascend the stream to the S6n-Bhand§.r cave, which increases the distance to about 4500 feet, or rather more than 5 li. The S6n-BhandS,r cave was there- fore beyond all doubt the famous Sattapani cave of the Buddhists, in which the first synod was held in 478 B.C., three months after the death of Buddha." Yet, the most hallowed spot of all this sacred ground is certainly Buddha-Gya, where, under the B6dhi tree, the sun of Truth rose for Prince Sidd^rtha. You pass along the banks of Phalgu to the point where the two streams of Lil&jan and Moh&na unite to form that river, traversing a sandy but fertile valley full of sM trees, jujubes, figs, and bamboos. The sunny hills look down on the broad shining channel ; the peaceful people sit at their hut-doors winding their Tusseh silk cocoons, or draw the palm wine from the toddy trees, THE LAND OF THE "LIGHT OF ASIA." 233 or herd upon the plains great droves of milch cattle and black sheep. Underneath the shady topes move the forest-creatures of the Buddha story, in that amity which he created between them and man — the striped squirrel, the doves (pearl-colour and blue), the Jioil, the parroquet, the kingfisher, the quail, and the rayna. Especially does the sacred Fig Tree flourish in the neighbourhood — not the aswattha, which sends down aerial roots and makes fresh trunks, but the Peepul, the sacred Fig, under the shade of which Siddartha triumphed over doubt. After five miles of this pleasant passage the village of Buddha-Gya is reached, and a short walk from the road brings one suddenly in view of a lofty temple built in tiers or stages, and adorned with seated figures of Buddha. This is the great central shrine of the Gentle Faith ; the Mecca of Buddhism. The tower, built of bricks, faced with white chunam, rises out of an extensive square excavation to the height of 160 or 170 feet, with eight rows of niches belting its diminishing pinnacle, which is crowned with a golden finial, in the shape' of an ammalaka fruit. All around it, in this sunken square, are stwpas and viharas, large and small — shrines and memorials — with rows of broken sculptures and inscribed stones dug up from the vicinity of the temple. Inside the adytum of the temple is a seated Buddha, gilt and inscribed, before which were fluttering numberless gilded ribbons ; while the granite floor was carved with votive inscriptions, and desecrated in the middle, by the Brahmans who 234 INDIA REVISITED. have usurped the place, with a stone Lingam. South- west of the temple — which doubtless remains much as Hwen Thsang saw it in A.D. 637 — is a raised scLuare platform, and on one corner of this, its trunk and branches adorned with leaf-gold and coloured here and there with red ochre, stands the present representative of the famous B6dhi tree, replacing the many successors of that under which, according to the Mahawanso, " the Divine Sage achieved the Supreme, All-perfect Buddha- hood." The present tree is a flourishing little peepul, thick with darli, glossy, pointed leaves, from which the Brahman priest, who was reciting the names of Siva to a party of pilgrims, readily — too readily, indeed ! — gave me a bunch. I should have been better pleased if he had resented my request ; but Buddha is unknown and unhonoured upon his own ground by the Sivaites, although it is His name which has made the place famous, and which brings there countless pilgrims. It was strange to see these votaries of Mahadeo rolling sacrificial cakes — -pindas — and repeat- ing mantras on the spot where Sakya-Muni attained so much higher religious insight ! Around the hollow are clustered gardens and huts, and immediately en- circling the temple itself is a railing of sandstone, the most ancient relic of the site — almost, indeed, the most antique memorial of all India; for, besides its old-world carvings of fabulous animals, and lotus blossoms, the massive fence of masonry bears Asoka inscriptions, and must be at least twenty centuries old. A Burmese tablet is set up in the Mahant's college, THE LAND OF THE "LIGHT OF ASIA." 235 close by, which says : " This is the chief of the 84,000 shrines erected by Dharma Asoka, ruler of the earth, at the close of the 2 1 8th year of Buddha's Nirvana, upon the holy spot where our Lord tasted the milk and honey." Since then the original fane has been patched, re- paired, and renovated, but not apparently very greatly altered in outline or character from Asoka's own work. Ages of neglect had covered its base with ddbris, from which it is now cleared again, and will be pro- tected for the future with more or less satisfactory reverence. Yet painful it certainly is, to one who realises the immense significance of this spot in the history of Asia and of humanity, to wander round the precincts of the holy tree, and to see scores and hundreds of broken sculptures lying about in the jungle or on the brick-heaps, some delicately carved with incidents of the Buddha legend, some bearing clear and precious inscriptions in early or later charac- ters. In the garden of a little house near the platform and the fane I saw numberless beautiful broken stones tossed aside, cut into Buddhas and Bodhisats with a skiU often quite admirable ; while in a shed adjoining was a whole pile of selected fragments — five or six cartloads — lying in dust and darkness, the very first of which, when examined, bore the Buddhist formula of faith, and the second was an exquisite bas-relief of Buddha illustrating the incident of the mad elephant who worshipped him. I have since appealed to the Government of India and to all enlightened Hindu 236 INDIA REVISITED. gentlemen, by a public letter, against such sad neglect of the noblest locality in all their Indian philosophic annals ; and I cherish the hope of seeing the temple and its precincts — which are all Government property — placed under the guardianship of Buddhists. But whether the temple and its relics be preserved with proper reverence or not, neither bigotry, Brahmanism, nor time can ever destroy the inherent sanctity of the scene, or diminish the spell which broods over that memorable landscape. Here, in the sunken plain which looks southwards to Shergoti and northwards to Gya— here, where the dark-green peepul is still the chief of the forest trees, and Phalgu trickles in her wide bed under the rocky hills, the greatest Thinker of ancient times rose from his long medita- tions of love and pity to proclaim ideas which have moulded the life and religions of Asia, and modified a hundred Asiatic histories ! What site — even in India, so rich with monuments and shrines — can be compared for imperishable associations with this of the little Fig Tree at Buddha-Gya, under whose shade I passed the afternoon of a perfect day, while pilgrims trooped into Asoka's temple, close at hand, and the dreamy brilliancy of the sunshine and the placid in- dustries of the happy villagers brought to mind that Nirvana which is not annihilation, but the unspeakable perfected state beyond all such existence as our senses can know — that peace of heaven which " passeth all understanding : " that eternal refuge from the evils of being, " where the silence lives ! " ( 237 ) XV. THE "CITY OF PALACES" AND MADRAS. It is a mistake to think that the snakes are always harmless which are brought round to house doors and hotels in India by the jugglers and samp-wallahs. An almost universal opinion exists that these men extract the poison-fangs from the serpents kept in their baskets, and that anybody, therefore, may approach and play with them as freely as their exhibitors. This is' by no means the case. Many of the reptiles which hiss and coil about in the Indian verandahs are as deadly as any to be found in the jungle. The conjuring people tame and familiarise their snakes, especially the cobras, which are then disinclined to strike, and become quite playful and friendly ; so that, unless suddenly frightened or irritated, they dart at the hand of the snake-charmer without erecting the poison-fangs or even opening their mouths. It would, however, be different and very dangerous if a stranger trifled with some of those basketed serpents, and the samp- wallahs themselves occasionally fall victims to the recklessness or confidence with which they handle their captures. The Maharajah of Benares was kind enough to send the entire company of his palace- 238 INDIA REVISITED. jugglers for our entertainment. They performed with much adroitness the usual series of Hindu tricks. They made the mango-tree grow and bear ripe fruit from a seed ; swallowed fire and swords ; disentangled inextricable knots ; and, having mixed together in water and drunk up three powders, red, green, and yellow, one of them brought what seemed the same powders forth from his mouth in a dry state again. Then they produced a large selection of snakes, of which three were cobras, and one of these was made to dance to the gourd and bansula, striking again and again meanwhile at the hand of the performer. A doubt being expressed by somebody as to the lethal power of this creature, the chief juggler declared it was truly a dant-wallah, and had his poison teeth. " If the saheb-lok would supply a sheep or goat, they might quickly see whether he spoke a true word." Eventually a white chicken was produced, and seizing his cobra by the neck, the juggler pinched its tail, and made it bite the poor fowl, which uttered a little cry when the sharp tooth punctured its thigh. But, being replaced on the ground, the chicken began to pick up rice with unconcern, apparently uninjured. In about four minutes, however, it ceased moving hither and thither, and began to look sick. In two minutes more it had dropped its beak upon the ground, and was evidently paralysed, and unable to breathe freely. In another minute it fell over upon its side, and was dead with convulsions within ten minutes after the infliction of the wound. At Pahlanpur, a THE "CITY OF PALACES" AND MADRAS. 239 snake-charmer for whom we sent to catch a serpent, said to be infesting the compound, had just died by a bite from one of his own captive snakes. The fact is snakes are not understood, and especially cobras. They are extremely intelligent, slow to anger, conscious of their terrible venom, and loath to employ it. The striking teeth in the cobra are always half- erect, and not more than a quarter of an inch long ; they are grooved, and it is the gum which presses the poison into them, not the special gland ; which, how- ever, exists, of course, but which these serpents are very backward in discharging. They are easily tamed, are anxious to escape notice, but extraordinarily sen- sible to kindness, and when not frightened are among the most gentle and attached of creatures. I shall print in this place an unpublished poem written by me some time ago, which illustrates the topic ; THE SNAKE AND THE BABY. " In sin conceived," you tell us, " condemned for the guilt of birth," From the moment when, lads and lasses, they come to this sorrow- ful earth ; And the rose-leaf hands, and the limpid eyes, and the blossom- mouths learning to kiss Mean nothing, my good Lord Bishop ! which, anyway, shakes you in this 1 Well, I — I believe in babies ! from the dawn of a day in Spring When, under the neems, in my garden, I saw a notable thing. Long ago, in my Indian garden. 'Twas a morning of gold and grey, And the Sun — as you never see him — had melted the last stars away. 240 INDIA REVISITED. My Arab, before the house-door, stood stamping the gravel to go, All wild for his early gallop ; and you heard the caw of the crow, And the " nine little sisters " a-twitter in the thorn-bush ; and, farther away, The coppersmiths' stroke in the fig-tree, awaking the squirrels to play. My foot was raised to the stirrup, and the bridle gathered. What made Syce Gopal stare straight before him, with visage fixed and dis- mayed ? What made him whisper in terror — " O Shiva ! the snake ! the snake ! " I looked where Gopal was looking, and felt my own heart quake ! For there — in a patch of sunlight — where the path to the well went down, The year-old baby of Gopal sate naked, and soft, and brown, His small right arm encircling a lota of brass, his left Close-cuddling a great black cobra, just creeping forth from a cleft ! We held our breaths ! The serpent drew clear its lingering tail As we gazed ; you could see its dark folds and silvery belly trail Tinkling the baby's bangles, and climbing his thigh and his breast, As it glided beneath the fingers on those cold scales fearlessly pressed. He was crowing — that dauntless baby! — while the lank black Terror squeezed Its muzzle, and throat, and shoulders, 'twixt his stomach and arm ! Well pleased He was hard at play with .his serpent, pretending to guard the milk, And stroking that grewsome playmate with palms of nut-brown silk! Alone, untended, and helpless, he was cooing low to the snake ; Which coiled and clung about him, even more (as it seemed) foi the sake THE "CITY OF PALACES" AND MADKAS. 241 Of the touch of his velvety body, and the love of his laughing And the floweiy clasp of his fingers, than to make the TnilV a prize. For, up to the boy's face mounting, we saw the cobra dip His wicked head in the lota, and drink with him, sip for sip ; Whereat, with a chuckle, that baby pushed off the serpent's head. And — look ! — the red jaws opened, and the terrible hood was spread ! And Gopal muttered beside me " Ah, Saheb ! wah, Saheb ! " to see The forked tongue glance at the infant's neck, and the spectacled devilry Of the broad crest dancing and darting all round that innocent brow; Yet it struck not ; but, quietly closing its jaws and its hood, laid now The horrible mottled murder of its mouth in the tender chink Of the baby's plump crossed limblets ; while peacefully he diJ drink What breakfast-milk he wanted, then held the lota down For the snake to finish at leisure, plunged deep in it, fang and crown. Three times, before they parted, my Syce would have sprung to the place. In fury to smite the serpent ; but I held him fast ; for one pace Had been death to the boy! I knew it ! and I whispered, " 0