t5f X^"^^.. -,- -/ '.^^-^>^\^ v,> -^. .^, a '■'•■ " W, » V V * n "^^ 8 I » N. x^^.. '^' '^^^ V V o 0^ ^ xO<^<. ^\ \^ .0 ,x^- ^^^ ^-^^^o^ -: 0^^ ^ "^ 1%. _.- ^''^- "^ ^^ * v^ ^ ^-o •'/ •"c « * O N 0- ^, <^ vO /'1 OUT OF INDIA THINGS I SA W, AND FAILED TO SEE, IN CERTAIN DAYS AND NIGHTS AT JEYPORE AND ELSEWHERE, BY RUDYARD KIPLING '&. NEW YORK: COPTUIGHT, 1895, BY G. W. Dilli7igham, Publisher, Successor to G. W. Carleton & Co. MDCCCXCV. \All Rights Reserved.^ (Xo^ CONTENTS. PART FIRST. Chapter Page I. An Escape from Rimmon — The Globe- Trotter goes to Jeypore — Certain Moral Reflections Thereon , . 7 II. Rajputana, the Cock-Pit of India — Something about the History of Jey- pore — The Globe-Trotter sees the Sights 14 III. Doing Amber — A City that will Never Wake — The Maharaja's Cotton- Press 22 IV. The Hindu Temple of Mahadeo— The World of the Innocents Abroad is a Touching and Unsophisticated Place — Reading Zola's Most Zolaistic Novels — The Mayo Hospital and the Museum 28 V. A Complete Description of the Wonder- ful Museum of Jeypore — Then go to the Palace of the Maharaja — The Bronze Horse and the Yanti Samrat, Prince of Dials — "Adsmir" . . 37 [ill] IV CONTENTS. Chapter Page VI. From a Criminal Point of View Ajimir is Not a Pleasant Place — Udaipur does not Approve of Englishmen . 46 VII, On the Various Uses of Lethal Weapons — Showing how the Englishman Came to the City of the Children of the Sun — The Padre-Sahib, the Good Man of the Wilderness . , -55 VIII. '' Sad Stories of the Death of Kings "— His Highness Prime Minister Rae Punna Lai is a Racial Anomaly . 67 IX. Showing how the Englishman Tried to Shoot Pigs and came upon " Bag- heera," the Panther . . . .77 X. The Englishman Comes Upon the Black Bulk of Chitor, and Learns of the Mal-pratices of a She-Elephant . . 85 XL Shows the Discovery of the Tower Visited by Childe Rolande, and the " Bogey " who Frightens Children 96 XII. An Escape Northward to Jharwasa — Some little Incidents Connected with the Bhumia — The Englishman Lands in Jodhpur, and Wishes to Give the British Govenment Advice on Certain Matters no XIII. Showing what sort of a Country a King will Make— The Hat-Marked Caste Receives Attention .... 124 XIV, Among the Houyhnhnms . . . 135 CONTENTS. V Chapter Page XV. The Real Reason of the Decadence of the Empire Found in a " Twenty-Five Per Cent. Reduction All Roun'," Thereby Limiting the Pleasures of Loaferdom — The Treachery of Gan- esh of Situr 146 XVI. A New Treaty is Needed With Maha Rao Raja Ram Singh, Bahadur, Raja of Boondi — Boys and other Things by the Way — Shields . . . 157 XVII. Poetry may be Found in a Bank, and There are Other Wonders Tlian Poetry in the Palace of Boondi . . lyr XVIII. From Uncivilized Sight to Things Civil- ized — Walter Besant's Mr. Maliphant is Found By the Way — How a Friend May Keep an Appointment Too Well 185 XIX. Certain Concluding Incidents and an Apology to the Reader . . . 194 PART SECOND. I. A Real Live City II. The Reflections of a Savage III. The Council of the Gods IV. On the Banks of the Hugli V. With the Calcutta Police VI. The City of Dreadful Night VII. Deeper and Deeper Still . VIII. Concerning Lucia . 205 , 212 . 220 . 230 • 239 . 246 . 257 . 264 VI CONTENTS. PART THIRD. Chapter Page I. A Railway Settlement .... 275 II. The Mighty Shops . . . , .284 III. At Vulcan's Forge 294 PART FOURTH. I. On the Surface 305 II. In the Depths ...... 314 III. The Perils of the Pits . . . .323 IV. In an Opium Factory .... 332? OUT OF INDIA. PART FIRST. CHAPTER I. AN ESCAPE FROM RIMMON — THE GLOBE TROTTER GOES TO JeYPORE — CERTAIN MORAL REFLEC- TIONS THEREON. Except for those who, under compulsion of a sick certificate, are flying Bombaywards, it is good for every man to see some little of the great Indian Empire and the strange folk who move about it. It is good to escape for a time from the House of Rim- mon— be it office or cutcherry— and to go abroad under no more exacting master than personal inclin- ation, and with no more definite plan of travel than has the horse, escaped from pasture, free upon the country side. The first result of such freedon is ex- treme bewilderment, and the second reduces the [7] 8 OUT OF INDIA. freed to a state of mind wliicli, for his sins, must be the normal portion of the Giobe-Trotter — the man who " does " kingdoms in days and writes books upon them in weeks. And this desperate facility is not as strange as it seems. By the time that an Eng- lishman has come by sea and rail via America, Japan, Singapore and Ceylon, to India, he can — these eyes have seen him do so — master in five min- utes the intricacies of the Indian Bradshaw^ and tell an old resident exactly how and where the trains run. Can we wonder that the intoxication of success in hasty assimilation should make him overbold, and that he should try to grasp — but a full account of the insolent Globe-Trotter must be reserved. He is worthy of a book. Given absolute freedom for a month, the mind, as I have said, fails to take in the situation and, after much debate, contents inself with follow- ing in old and well-beaten ways — paths that we in India have no time to tread, but must leave to the country cousin who wears \\\^ pagri \.2^\\ fashion down his back, and says *' cabman" to the driver of the ticca-ghari. Now, Jeypore from the Anglo-Indian point of view is a station on the Rajputana-Malwa line, on the way to Bombay, where half an hour is allowed for dinner, and where there ought to be more protection from the sun than at present exists. Some few, more learned than the rest, know that garnets come from Je3''pore, and here the limits of our wisdom are set. We do not, to quote the Calcutta shop-keeper, come out " for the good of our 'ealth," and what touring we ac- complish is for the most part off the line of rail. AN ESCAPE FROM RIMMON. For these reasons, and because he wished to study our winter birds of passage, one of the few thousand Englishmen in India, on a date and in a place which have no concern with the story, sacrificed all his self- respect and became — at enormous personal inconven- ience — a Globe-Trotter going to Jeypore, and leaving behind him for a little while all that old and well known life in which Commissioners and Deputy- Comissioners, Governors and Lieutenant-Governors, Aides-de-Camp, Colonels and their wives. Majors, Captains and Subalterns after their kind move and rule and govern and squabble and fight and sell each other's horses and tell wicked stories of their neighbors. But before he had fully settled into his part or accustomed himself to saying, " Please take out this luggage," to the coolies at the stations, he saw from the train the Taj wrapped in the mists of tlie morning. There is a story of a Frenchman " who feared not God, nor regarded man," sailing to Egypt for the expressed purpose of scoffing at the Pyramids and — though this is hard to believe — at the great Napo- leon who had warred under their shadow. It is on record that that blasphemous Gaul came to the Great Pyramid and wept through mingled reverence and contrition, for he sprang from an emotional race. To understand his feelings it is necessary to have read a great deal too much about the Taj, its design and proportions, to have seen execrable pictures of it at the Simla Fine Arts Exhibition, to have had its praises sung by superior and travelled friends till the brain loathed the repetition of the word, and then, 10 OUT OF INDIA. sulky with want of sleep, heavy-eyed, unwashen and chilled, to come upon it suddenly. Under these cir- cumstances everything, you will concede, is in favor of a cold, critical and not too impartial verdict. As the Englishman leaned out of the carriage he saw first an opal-tinted cloud on the horizon, and later certain towers. The mists lay on the ground, so that the splendor seemed to be floating free of the earth ; and the mists rose in the background, so that at no time could everything be seen clearly. Then as the train sped forward, and the mists shifted and tlie sun shone upon the mists, the Taj took a hundred new shapes, each perfect and each beyond description. It was the Ivory Gate through which all good dreams come ; it was the realization of the "glimmering halls of dawn" that Tennyson sings of ; it was veritably the " aspiration fixed," the " sign made stone " of a lesser poet ; and over and above concrete comparisons, it seemed the embodi- ment of all things pure, all things holy and all things unhappy. That was the mystery of the building. It may be that the mists wrought the witchery, and that the Taj seen in the dry sunlight is only as guide books say a noble structure. The Englishman could not tell, and has made a vow that he will never go nearer the spot for fear of breaking the charm of the unearthly pavilions. It may be, too, that each must view the Taj for himself with his own eyes ; working out his own in- terpretation of the sight. It is certain that no man can in cold blood and colder ink set down his im- pressions if he has been in the least moved, AN ESCAPE FROM BIMMON. 11 To the one who watched and wondered that November morning the thing seemed full of sorrow — the sorrow of the man who built it for the woman he loved, and the sorrow of the workmen who died in the building — used up like cattle. And in the face of this sorrow the Taj flnslied in the sunlight and was beautiful, after the beauty of a woman who has done no wrong. Here the train ran in under the walls of Agra Fort, and another train — of thought incoherent as that written above — came to an end. Let those who scoff at overmuch enthusiasm look at the Taj and thenceforward be dumb. It is well on the threshold of a journey to be taught reverence and awe. But there is no reverence in the Globe-Trotter : he is brazen. A Young Man from Manchester was travelling to Bombay in order — how the words hurt ! — to tee home by Christmas./ He had come through America, New Zealand and Australia, and finding that he had ten days to spare at Bombay, conceived the modest idea of " doing India." " I don't say that I've done it all ; but you may say that I've seen a good deal." Then he explained that he had been " much pleased " at Agra, ^' much pleased " at Delhi, and, last profanation, " very much pleased " at the Taj. Indeed he seemed to be going througii life just then " much pleased " at everything. With rare and sparkling originality he remarked that India was a " big place," and that there were many things to buy. Verily, this Young Man must have been a delight to the Delhi boxwallahs. He had purchased shawls and embroidery " to t4ie tune of" a certain 12 OUT OF INDIA. number of rupees duly set forth, and he had pur- chased jewellery to another tune. These were gifts for friends at home, and he considered them " very Eastern." If silver filagree work modelled on Palais Royal patterns, or aniline blue scarves be " Eastern," he had succeeded in his heart's desire. For some inscrutable end it had been decreed that man shall take a delight in making his fellow-man miserable. The Englishman began to point out gravely the probable extent to which the Young Man from Man- chester had been swindled, and the Young Man said : " By Jove. You don't say so. I hate being done. If there's anything I hate it's being done !" He had been so happy in the " thought of getting home by Christmas," and so charmingly communi- cative as to the members of his family for whom such and such gifts were intended, that the Englishman cut short the record of fraud and soothed him by saying that he had not been so very badly " done " after all. This consideration was misplaced, for, his peace of mind restored, the Young Man from Manchester looked out of the window and, waving his hand over the Empire generally, said: "I say. Look here. All those wells are wrong, you know !" The wells were on the wheel and inclined plane system ; but he objected to the incline, and said that it would be much better for the bullocks if they walked on level ground. Then light dawned upon him, and he said : *' I suppose it's to exercise all their muscles. Y'know a canal horse is no use after he has been on the tow- path for some time. He can't walk anywhere but on the flat, y'know, and I suppose its just the same AN ESCAPE EBOM RIMMON. 13 with bullocks." The spurs of the Aravalis, under which the train was running, had evidently sug- gested this brilliant idea which passed uncontra- dicted, for the Englishman was looking out of the window. If one were bold enough to generalize after the manner of Globe-Trotters, it would be easy to build up a theory on the well incident to account for the apparent insanity of some of our cold weather visit- ors. Even the Young Man from Manchester could evolve a complete idea for the training of well-bul- locks in the East at thirty-seconds' notice. How much the more could a cultivated observer from, let us say, an English constituency, blunder and pervert and mangle. We in this country have no time to work out the notion, which is worthy of the consid- eration of some leisurely Teuton intellect. Envy may have prompted a too bitter judgment of the Young Man from Manchester ; for, as the train bore him from Jeypore to Ahmedabad, happy in " his getting home by Christmas," pleased as a child with his Delhi atrocities, pink-cheeked, whiskered and superbly self-confident, the Englishman whose home for the time was a dark bungaloathesome hotel, watched his departure regretfully ; for he knew exactly to what sort of genial, cheery British house- hold, rich in untravelled kin, that Young Man was speeding. It is pleasant to play at Globe-Trotting ; but to enter fully into the spirit of the piece, one must also be going home for Christmas, 14: OtJl' OF INDIA. CHAPTER II. RAJPUTANA, THE COCK-PIT OF INDIA — SOMETHING ABOUT THE HISTORY OF JEYPORE — THE GLOBE TROTTER SEES THE SIGHTS. If any part of a land strewn with dead men's bones have a special claim to distinction, Rajputana, as the cock-pit of India, stands first. East of Suez men do not build towers on the tops of hills for the sake of the view, nor do they stripe the mountain sides with bastioned stone walls to keep in cattle. Since the beginning of time, if we are to credit the legends, there was fighting — heroic fighting — at the foot of the Aravalis, and beyond in the great deserts of sand penned by those kindly mountains from spreading over the heart of India. The " Thirty-six Royal Races " fought as royal races know how to do, Chohan with Rahtor, brother against brother, son against father. Later — but excerpts from the tan- gled tale of force, fraud, cunning, desperate love and more desperate revenge, crime worthy of demons and virtues fit for gods, may be found, by all who care to look, in the book of the man who loved the Rajputs and gave a life's labors in their behalf. From Delhi to Abu, and from the Indus to the Chambul, each yard of ground has witnessed slaughter, pillage and rapine. But, to-day, the capital of the State, that Dhola Rae, son of Soora Singh, hacked out more HAJPUTANA, THU cock-pit OF INDIA. 15 than nine hundred years ago with the sword from some weaker ruler's realm, is lighted with gas, and possesses many striking and English peculiarities which will be shown in their proper place. Dhola Rae was killed in due time, and for nine hundred years Jeypore, torn by the intrigues of un- ruly princes and princelings, fought Asiatically. When and how Jeypore became a feudatory of British power and in what manner we put a slur up- on Rajput honor — punctilious as the honor of the Pathan — are matters of which the Globe-Trotter knows more than we do. He '' reads up " — to quote his own words — a city before he comes to us, and, straightway going to another city, forgets, or, worse still, mixes what he has learnt — so that in the end he writes down the Rajput a Mahratta, says that Lahore is in the North-West Provinces and was once the capital of Sivaji, and piteously demands a *' guide-book on all India, a thing that you can carry in your trunk y' know — that gives you plain descrip- tions of things without mixing you up." Here is a chance for a writer of discrimination and void of conscience ! But to return to Jeypore — a pink city set on the border of a blue lake, and surrounded by the low, red spurs of the Aravalis — a city to see and to puzzle over. There was once a ruler of the State, called Jey Singh, who lived in the days of Aurungzeb, and did him service with foot and horse. He must have been the Solomon of Rajputana, for through the forty-four years of his reign his " wisdom remained with him." He led armies, and when fighting was 16 OUT OF INDIA. over, turned to literature ; he intrigued desperately and successfully, but found time to gain a deep in- sight into astronomy, and, by what remains above ground now, we can tell that " whatsoever his eyes desired, he kept not from him." Knowing his own worth, he deserted the city of Amber founded by Dhola Rae among the hills, and, six miles further, in the open plain, bade one Vedyadhar, his architect, build a new city, as seldom Indian city v/as built be- fore — with huge streets straight as an arrow, sixty yards broad, and cross-streets broad and straight. Many years afterwards the good people of America builded their towns after this pattern, but knowing nothing of Jey Singh, they took all the credit to themselves. He built himself everything that pleased him, palaces and gardens and temples, and then died, and was buried under a white marble tomb on a hill over- looking the city. He was a traitor, if history speak truth, to his own kin, and he was an accomplished murderer, but he did his best to check infanticide ; he reformed the Mahomedan calendar ; he piled up a superb library and he made Jeypore a marvel. Later on came a successor, educated and enlight- ened by all the lamps of British Progress, and con- verted the city of Jey Singh into a surprise — a big bewildering, practical joke. He laid down sumptu- ous trottoirs of hewn stone, and central carriage drives, also of hewn stone, in the main street ; he, that is to say, Colonel Jacob, the Superintending Engineer of the State, devised a water supply for the city and studded the ways with stand-pipes. He EAJPUTANA, THE COCK-PIT OF INDIA. 17 built gas works, set a-foot a School of Art, a Museum, all the things in fact which are necessary to Western municipal welfare and comfort, and saw that they were the best of tlieir kind. How much Colonel Jacob has done, not only for the good of Jeypore city but for the good of the State at large, will never be known, because the officer in question is one of the not small class who resolutely refuse to talk about their own work. The result of the good work is that the old and the new, the rampantly raw and the sul- lenly old, stand cheek-by-jowl in startling contrast. Thus, the branded bull trips over the rails of a steel tramway which brings out the city rubbish ; the lac- quered and painted ruth^ behind the two little stag- like trotting bullocks, catches its primitive wheels in the cast-iron ~gas-lamp post with the brass nozzle a-top, and all Rajputana, gaily-clad, small-turbaned swaggering Rajputana, circulates along the magnifi- cent pavements. The fortress-crowned hills look down upon the strange medley. One of them bears on its flank in huge white letters the cherry inscript "Welcome!" This was made when the Prince of Wales visited Jeypore to shoot his first tiger ; but the average traveller of to-day may appropriate the message to himself, for Jeypore takes great care of strangers and shows them all courtesy. This, by the way, demoral- izes the Globe-Trotter, whose first cry is : "Where can we get horses ? Where can we get elephants ? Who is the man to write to for all these things ?" Thanks to the courtesy of the Maharaja, it is pos- sible to see everything, but for the incurious who 18 OUT OF INDIA. object to being driven through their sights, a jour- ney down any one of the great main streets is a day's delightful occupation. The view is as unobstructed as that of the Ciiamps Elysees ; but in place of the white-stone fronts of Paris, rises a long line of open- work screen-wall, the prevailing tone of which is pink, caramel-pink, but house-owners have unlimited license to decorate their tenements as they please. Jeypore, broadly considered, is Hindu, and her architecture of the riotous, many-arched type which even the Globe-Trotter after a short time learns to call Hindu. It is neitlier temperate nor noble, but it satisfies the general desire for something that " really looks Indian." A perverse taste for low company drew the Englishman from the pavement — to walk upon a real stone pavement is in itself a privilege — up a side-street where he assisted at a quail fight and found the low-caste Rajput a cheery and affable soul. The owner of the losing quail was a sowar in the Maharaja's army. He explained that his pay was six rupees a month paid bi-monthly. He was cut the cost of his khaki blouse, brown- leather accoutrements and jack-boots ; lance, saddle, sword and horse were given free. He refused to say for how many months in the year he was drilled, and said vaguely that his duties were mainly escort ones, and he had no fault to find with them. The defeat of his quail had vexed him, and he desired the Sahib to understand that the sowars of his High- ness's army could ride. A clumsy attempt at a com- pliment so fired his martial blood that he climbed into his saddle, and then and there insisted on show- KAJPUTANA, THE COCK-PIT OF INDIA. 19 ing off his horsemanship. The road was narrow, the lance was long, and the liorse was a big one, but no one objected, and the Englishman sat him down on a doorstep and watched the fun. The horse seemed in some shadowy way familiar. His head was not the lean head of the Kathiawar, nor his crest the crest of the Marwarri, and his fore-legs did not seem to belong to the stony district. ** Where did he come from ?" The sowar pointed northward and said ''from Amritsar," but he pronounced it " Armt- zar." Many horses had been bought at the spring fairs in the Punjab ; they cost about Rs.200 each, perhaps more, the sowar could not say. Some came from Hissar and some from other places beyond Delhi. They were very good horses. " That horse there," he pointed to one a little distance down the street, " is the son of a big Sirkar horse — the kind that the Sirkar make for breeding horses — so high !'* The owner of " that horse " swaggered up, jaw- bandaged and cat-moustached and bade the English- man look at his mount ; bought, of course, when a butcha. Both men together said that the Sahib had better examine the Maharaja Sahib's stable where there were hundreds of horses, huge as elephants or tiny as sheep. To the stables the Englishman accordingly went, knowing beforehand what he would find, and won- dering whether the Sirkar's " big horses " were meant to get mounts for Rajput sowars. The Maha- raja's stables are royal in size and appointments. The enclosure round which they stand must be about half a mile long — it allows ample space for exercis' 20 OUT OF INDIA. ing, besides paddocks for the colts. The horses, about two hundred and fifty, are bedded in pure white sand — bad for the coat if they roll, but good for the feet — the pickets are of white marble, the heel-ropes in every case of good sound rope, and in every case the stables are exquisitely clean. Each stall contains above the manger, a curious little bunk for the syce who, if he uses the accommodation, must assuredly die once each hot weather. A journey round the stables is saddening, for the attendants are very anxious to strip their charges, and the stripping shows so much. A few men in India are credited with the faculty of never forget- ting a horse they have once seen, and of knowing the produce of every stallion they have met. The Eng- lisiiman would have given something for their com- pany at that hour. His knowledge of horseflesh was very limited ; but he felt certain that more than one or two of the sleek, perfectly groomed country-breds should have been justifying their existence in the ranks of the British cavalry, instead of eating their heads off on six seers of gram and one oigoor per diem. But they had all been honestly bought and honestly paid for ; and there was nothing in the wide world to prevent His Highness, if he wished to do so, from sweeping up the pick and pride of all the horses in the Punjab. The attendants appeared to take a wicked delight in saying " eshtud-bred " very loudly and with unnecessary emphasis as they threw back the loin-cloth. Sometimes they were wrong, but in too man}"- cases they were right. The Englishman left the stables and the great cen- BAJPTJTANA, THE COCK-PIT OF INDIA. 21 tral maidan, where a nervous Biluchi was being taught, by a perfect net-work of ropes, to '* monkey-jump," and went out into the streets reflecting on the work- ing of horse-breeding operations under the Govern- ment of India, and the advantages of having unlim- ted money wherewith to profit by other people's mistakes. Then, as happened to the great Tartarin of Tare- scon in Milianah, wild beasts began to roar, and a crowd of little boys laughed. The lions of Jeypore are tigers, caged in a public place for the sport of the people, who hiss at them and disturb their royal feel- ings. Two or three of the six great brutes are mag- nificent. All of them are short-tempered, and the bars of their captivity not too strong. A pariah-dog was furtively trying to scratch out a fragment of meat from between the bars of one of the cages, and the occupant tolerated him. Growing bolder, the starveling growled ; the tiger struck at him witli his paw and the dog fled howling with fear. When he returned, he brought two friends with him, and the trio mocked the captive from a distance. It was not a pleasant sight and suggested Globe- Trotters — gentlemen who imagine that " more cur- ricles " should come at their bidding, and on being undeceived become abusive. 2^ OUT OF INDIA. CHAPTER III. doing amber a city that will never wake the Maharaja's cotton-press. And what shall be said of Amber, Queen of the Pass — the city that Jey Singh bade his people slough as snakes cast their skins. The Globe-Trotter will assure you that it must be " done " before anything else, and the Globe-Trotter is, for once, perfectly correct. Amber lies between six and seven miles from Jeypore among the " tumbled fragments of the hills," and is reachable by so prosaic a con- veyance as a ticca-ghari, and so uncomfortable a one as an elephant. He is provided by the Maharaja, and the people who make India their prey, are apt to accept his services as a matter of course. Rise very early in the morning, before the stars have gone out, and drive through the sleeping city till the pavement gives place to cactus and sand, and educational and enlightened institutions to mile upon mile of semi-decayed Hindu temples — brown and weather-beaten — running down to the shores of the great Man Sagar Lake, wherein are more ruined temples, palaces and fragments of causeways. The water-birds have their home in the half-submerged arcades and the mugger nuzzles the shafts of the pillars. It is a fitting prelude to the desolation of Amber. Beyond the Man Sagar the road of to-day DOIJiia AMBER. 23 climbs up-hill, and by its side runs the huge stone- causeway of yesterday — blocks sunk in concrete. Down this path the swords of Amber went out to kill. A triple wall rings the city, and, at the third gate, the road drops into the valley of Amber. In the half light of dawn, a great city sunk between hills and built round three sides of a lake is dimly visible, and one waits to catch the hum that should arise from it as the day breaks. The air in the valley is bitterly chill. With the growing light, Amber stands revealed, and the traveller sees that it is a city that will never wake, A few meenas live in huts at the end of the valley, but the temples, the shrines, the palaces and the tiers-on-tiers of houses are desolate. Trees grow in and split upon the walls, the windows are filled with brush wood, and the cactus chokes the street. Tlie Englishman made his way up the side of tlie hill to the great palace that overlooks everything except the red fort of Jeighur, guardian of Amber. As the elephant swung up the steep roads paved with stone and built out on the sides of the hill, the Englishman looked into empty houses where the little grey squirrel sat and scratched its ears. The peacock walked upon the house-tops, and the blue pigeon roosted within. He passed under iron-studded gates whereof the hinges were eaten out with rust, and by walls plumed and crowned with grass, and under more gateways, till, at last, he reached the palace and came suddenly into a great quadrangle where two blinded, arrogant stallions, covered with red and gold trappings, screamed and neighed at each other from opposite 24 OUT OF INDIA. ends of the vast space. For a little time these were the only visible living beings, and they were in perfect accord with the spirit of the spot. Afterwards certain workmen appeared, for it seems that the Maharaja keeps the old palace of his forefathers in good repair, but they were modern and mercenary, and with great difficulty were detached from the skirts of the traveller. A somewhat extensive ex- perience of palace-seeing had taught him that it is best to see palaces alone, for the Oriental as a guide is undiscriminating and sets too great a store on corrugated iron-roofs and glazed drain-pipes. So the Englishman went into tliis palace built of stone, bedded on stone, springing out of scarped rock, and reached by stone ways — nothing but stone. Presently, he stumbled across a little temple of Kali, a gem of marble tracery and inlay, very dark and, at that hour of the morning, very cold. If, as Violet-le-Duc tells us to believe, a building reflects the character of its inhabitants, it must be impossible for one reared in an Eastern palace to think straightly or speak freely or — but iiere the annals of Rajputana contradict the theory — to act openly. The crampt and darkened rooms, the nar- row smooth-walled passages with recesses where a man might wait for his enemy unseen, the maze of ascending and descending stairs leading nowhither, the ever present screens of marble tracery that may hide or reveal so much, — all these things breathe of plot and counter-plot, league and intrigue. In a living palace where the sightseer knows and feels that there are human beings everwhere, and that he DOING AMBER. 25 Is followed by scores of unseen eyes, the impression is almost unendurable. In a dead palace — a ceme- tery of loves and hatreds done with hundreds of years ago, and of plottings that had for their end — though the grey beai'ds who plotted knew it not — the coming of the British tourist with guide-book and sun-hat — oppression gives place to simply im- pertinent curiosity. The Englishman wandered into cill parts of the palace, for there was no one to stop him — not even the ghosts of the dead Ranis — through ivory-studded doors, into the women's quarters, where a stream of water once flowed over a chiselled marble channel. A creeper had set its hands upon the lattice there, and there was dust of old nests in one of the niches in the wall. Did the lady of light virtue who managed to become possessed of so great a portion of Jey Singhs library ever set her dainty feet in the trim garden of the Hall of Pleasure be- yond the screen-work ? Was it in the forty-pillared Hall of Audience that the order went forth that the Chief of Birjooghar was to be slain, and from what wall did the King look out when the horsemen clat- tered up the steep stone path to the palace, bearing on their saddle-bows the heads of the bravest of Rajore ? There were questions innumerable to be asked in each court and keep and cell ; aye, but the only answer was the cooing of the pigeons on the walls. If a man desired beauty, there was enough and to spare in the palace ; and of strength more than enough. By inlay and carved marble, by glass and color, the Kings who took their pleasure in that now 26 OTTT OF INDIA. desolate pile, made all that their eyes rested upon royal and superb. But any description of the artistic side of the palace, if it were not impossible, would be wearisome. The wise man will visit it when time and occasion serve, and will then, in some small measure, understand what must have been the riot- ous, sumptuous, murderous life to which our Govern- ors, and Lieutenant-Governors, Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners, Colonels and Captains and the Subalterns after their kind, have put an end. From the top of the palace you may read if you please the Book of Ezekiel written in stone upon the hill-side. Coming up, the Englishman had seen the city from below or on a level. He now looked into its very heart — the heart that had ceased to beat. There was no sound of men or cattle, or grind-stones in those pitiful streets — nothing but the cooing of the pigeons. At first it seemed that the palace was not ruined at all — that presently the women would come up on the house-tops and the bells would ring in the temples. But as he attempted to follow with his eye the turns of the streets, the Englishman saw that they died out in wood tangle and blocks of fallen stone, and that some of the houses were rent with great cracks, and pierced from roof to road with holes that let in the morning sun. The drip-stones of the eaves were gap-toothed, and the tracery of the screens had fallen out so that zenana-rooms lay shamelessly open to the day. On the outskirts of the city, the strong walled houses dwindled and sank down to mere stone-heaps and faint indications of plinth and wall, hard to trace against the background DOING AMBER. 27 of Stony soil. The shadow of the palace lay over two- thirds of the city and the trees deepened the shadow. " He who has bent him o'er the dead " after the hour of whicii Byron -sings, knows that the features of the man become blunted as it were — the face begins to fade. The same hideous look lies on the face of the Queen of the Pass, and when once this is realized, the eye wonders that it could have ever believed in the life of her. She is the city " whose graves are set in the side of the pit, and her company is, round about her graves," sister of Pathros, Zoan and No. Moved by a thoroughly insular instinct, the Eng- lishman took up a piece of plaster and heaved it from the palace wall into the dark streets below. It bounded from a house-top to a window-ledge, and thence into a little square, and the sound of its fall was hollow and echoing, as the sound of a stone in a well. Then the silence closed up upon the sound, till in the far away courtyard below the roped stal- lions began screaming afresh. There may be deso- lation in the great Indian Desert to the westward, and there is desolation upon the open seas ; but the desolation of Amber is beyond the loneliness either of land or sea. Men by the hundred thousand must have toiled at the walls that bound it, the temples and bastions that stud the walls, the fort that over- looks all, the canals that once lifted water to the palace, and the garden in the lake of the valley. Renan could describe it as it stands to-day, and Vereschaguin could paint it. Arrived at this satisfactory conclusion, the Eng- lishman went down through the palace and the 28 OUT OF INDIA. scores of venomous and suggestive little rooms, to the elephant in the courtyard, and was taken back in due time to the Nineteenth Century in tlie shape of His Highness, the Maharajah's Cotton-Press, return- ing a profit of twenty-seven per cent., and fitted with two engines of fifty horse-power each, an hydraulic press, capable of exerting a pressure of three tons per square inch, and everything else to correspond. It stood under a neat corrugated iron roof close to the Jeypore Railway Station, and was in most per- fect order, but ^somehow it did not taste well after Amber. There was aggressiveness about the engines and the smell of the raw cotton. The modern side of Jeypore must not be mixed with the ancient. —• — — CHAPTER IV. THE HINDU TEMPLE OF MAHADEO THE WORLD OF THE INNOCENTS ABROAD IS A TOUCHING AND UNSOPHISTICATED PLACE READING ZOLa's MOST ZOLAISTIC NOVELS THE MAYO HOSPITAL AND THE MUSEUM. From the Cotton-Press the Englishman wandered through the wide streets till he came into a Hindu temple — rich in marble stone and inlay, and a deep and tranquil silence, close to the Public Library of the State. The brazen bull was hung with flowers, THE HINDU TEMPLE OF MAHADEO. 29 and men were burning the evening incense before Mahadeo, while those who had prayed their prayer beat upon the bells hanging from the roof and passed out, secure in the knowledge that the god had heard them. If there be much religion, there is little rever- ence, as Westerns understand the term, in the services of the gods of the East. A tiny little maiden, child of a monstrously ugly priest, with one chalk-white eye, staggered across the marble pavement to the shrine and threw, with a gust of childish laughter, the blossoms she w^as carrying into the lap of the great Mahadeo himself. Then she made as though she would leap up to the bells and ran away, still laughing, into the shadow of the cells behind the shrine, while her father explained that she was but a baby and that Mahadeo would take no notice. The temple, he said, was specially favored by the Maha- raja, and drew from lands an income of twenty thou- sand rupees a year. Thakoors and great men also gave gifts out of their benevolence ; and there was nothing in the wide world to prevent an Englishman from following their example. By this time, for Amber and the Cotton-Press had filled the hours, night was falling, and the priests un- hooked the swinging jets and began to light up the impassive face of Mahadeo with gas ! They used Taendstikker matches. Full night brought the hotel and its curiously- composed human menagerie. There is, if a work-a-day world will give credit, a society entirely outside, and unconnected with, that of the Station — a planet within a planet, where 30 OUT OF INDIA. nobody knows anything about the Collector's wife, the Colonel's dinner-party, or what was really the matter with the Engineer. It is a curious, an in- satiably curious, thing, and its literature is Newman's BradsJiaw. Wandering *' old arm-sellers " and others live upon it, and so do the garnetmen and the makers of ancient Rajput shields. The world of the innocents abroad is a touching and unsophisticated place, and its very atmosphere urges the Anglo- Indian unconsciously to extravagant mendacity. Can you wonder, then, that a guide of long-standing should in time grow to be an accomplished liar? Into this world sometimes breaks the Anglo- Indian returned from leave, or a fugitive to the sea, and his presence is like that of a well-known land- mark in the desert. The old arms-seller knows and avoids him, and he is detested by the jobber of gharis who calls every one " my lord " in English, and panders to the *' glaring race anomaly " by say- ing that every carriage not under his control is rotten, my lord, having been used by natives." One of the privileges of playing at tourist is the brevet- rank of *' Lord." Hazur is not to be compared with it. At first, upon heaing the obsequious " Lord " of the natives, there comes a feeling of having duped some one, but this soon wears away, and the tourist grows accustomed to the appellation, much as a poor man does to a huge fortune suddenly acquired. In fact, he is, in the course of a few days, prone to re- gard it as his due in this region, and would mentally THE HINDU TEMPLE OF MAHADEO. 31 remark the omission of the sobriquet. Such is human nature. There are many, and some very curious, methods of seeing India. One of these is buying English translations of the more Zolaistic of Zola's novels and reading them from breakfast to dinner-time in the verandah. Yet another, even simpler, is Ameri- can in its conception. Take a Newman's Bradshaw and a blue pencil, and race up and down the length of the Empire, ticking off the names of the stations "done." To do this thoroughly, keep strictly to the railway buildings and form your conclusions through the carriage-windows. These eyes have seen both ways of working in full blast, and, on the whole, the first is the most commendable. Let us consider now with due reverence the modern side of jeypore. It is difficult to write of a nickel-plated civilization set down under the imme- morial Aravalis in the first state of Rajputana. The red-grey hills seem to laugh at it, and the ever-shift- ing sand-dunes under the hills take no account of it, for they advance upon the bases of the mono- grammed, coronet-crowned lamp-posts, and fill up the points of the natty tramways near tlie Water- works, which are the out-posts of the civilization of Jeypore. Escape from the city by the Railway Station till you meet the cactus and the mud-bank and the Maharaja's Cotton-Press. Pass between a tramway and a trough for wayfaring camels till your foot sinks ankle-deep in soft sand, and you come upon what seems to be the fringe of illimitable desert, 32 OUT OF INDIA. mound upon mound of tussocks overgrown with plumed grass where the parrots sit and swing. Here, if you have kept to the road, you shall find a bund faced with stone, a great tank, and pumping machin- ery fine as the heart of a municipal engineer can de- sire — pure water, sound pipes and well-kept engines. If you belong to what is sarcastically styled an " able and intelligent municipality " under the British Raj, go down to the level of the tank, scoop up the water in your hands and drink, thinking meanwhile of the defects of the town whence you came. The exper- ience will be a profitable one. There are statistics in connection with the Water-works figures relating to "three-throw-plungers," delivery and supply, which should be known to the professional reader. They would not interest the unprofessional who would learn his lesson among the thronged stand- pipes of the city. While the Englishman was preparing in his mind a scathing rebuke for an erring municipality that he knew of, a camel swung across the sands, its driver's jaw and brow bound mummy fashion to guard against the dust. The man was evidently a stranger to the place, for he pulled up and asked the English- man where the drinking troughs were. He was a gentleman and bore very patiently with the English- man's absurd ignorance of his dialect. He had come from some village, with an unpronounceable name, thirty kos away, to see his brother's son who was sick in the big Hospital. While the camel was drinking the man talked, lying back on his mount. He knew nothing of Jeypore, except the names of certain THE HINDU TEMPLE OF MAHADEO. 33 Englishmen in it, tlie men who, he said, had made tlie Water-works and built the Hospital for his biother's son's comfort. And this is the curious feature of Jeypore ; thougli luippily the city is not unique in its peculiarity. When the late Maharaja ascended the throne, more than fifty years ago, it was his royal will and plea- sure that Jeypore should advance. Whether he was prompted by love for his subjects, desire for praise, or the magnificent vanity with which Jey Singh must have been so largely dowered, are questions that concern nobody. In the latter years of his reign, he was supplied with Englishmen who made the State their father-land, and identified themselves ■with its progress as only Englishmen can. Behind t!iem stood the Maharaja ready to spend money with a lavishness that no Supreme Goverment would dream of ; and it would not be too much to say that the two made the State what it is. When Ram Singh died, Madho Singh, his successor, a conservative Hindu, foreboreto interfere in any way with the work that was going forward. It is said in the city that he does not overburden himself with the cares of State, the driving power being mainly in the hands of a Bengali, who has everything but the name of Minister. Nor do the Englishmen, it is said in the city, mix themselves with the business of govern- ment ; their business being wholly executive. They can, according to the voice of the city, do what they please, and the voice of the city — not in the main roads but in the little side-alleys where the stall-less bull blocks the patli — attests how well their 34: OUT OF INDIA. pleasure has suited the pleasure of the people. In truth, to men of action few things could be more delightful than having a State of fifteen thousand square miles placed at their disposal, as it were, to leave their mark on. Unfortunately for the vagrant traveller, those who work hard for practical ends prefer not to talk about their doings, and he must, therefore, pick up what information he can at second- hand or in the city. The men at the stand-pipes ex- plain that the Maharaja Sahib's father gave the order for the Water-works and that Yakub Sahib made them — not only in the city but out away in the dis- trict. **Did people grow more crops thereby ?" Of course they did : were canals made to wash in only ?" *' How much more crops ?" " Who knows ? The Sahib had better go and ask some official." In- creased irrigation means increase of revenue for the State somewhere, but the man who brought about the increase does not say so. After a few days of amateur globe-trotting, a shamelessness great as that of the other loafer — the" red-nosed man who hangs about compounds and is always on the eve of starting for Calcutta — possesses tlie masquerader ; so that he feels equal to asking a Resident for a parcel-gilt howdah, or dropping into dinner with a Lieutenant-Governor. No man has a right to keep anything back from a Globe-Trotter, who is a mild, temperate, gentlemanly and unobtru- sive seeker after truth. Therefore he who, without a word of enlightenment, sends the visitor into a city which he himself has beautified and adorned and made clean and wholesome, deserves unsparing ex- THE HINDU TEMPLE OF MAHADEO. 35 posure. And the city may be trusted to betray him. The 77ialli in the Ram Newa's Gardens, Gardens — iiere the Englishman can speak from a fairly exten- sive experience — finer than any in India and fit to rank vvitli the best in Paris-^says tliat tlie Maharaja gave the order and Yakub Saliib made the Gardens. He also says that tlie Hospital just outside the Gar- dens was built by Yakub Sahib, and if the Sahib will go to the centre of the Gardens, he will find another big building, a Museum by the same hand. But the Englishman went first to the Hospital, and found the out-patients beginning to arrive, A Hos- pital cannot tell lies about its own progress as a municipality can. Sick folk either come or lie in their own villages. In the case of the Mayo Hos- pital, they came, and the operation-book showed that they had been in the habit of coming. Doctors at issue with provincial and local administrations, Civil Surgeons who cannot get their indents complied with, ground-down and mutinous practitioners all India over, would do well to visit the Mayo Hospital, Jeypore. They might, in the exceeding bitterness of their envy, be able to point out some defects in its supplies, or its beds, or its splints, or in the absolute isolation of the women's quarters trom the men's. Envy is a low and degrading passion, and should be striven against. From the Hospital the English- man went to the Museum in the centre of the Gardens, and was eaten up by it, for Museums appealed to him. The casing of the jewel was in the first place superb — a wonder of carven white stone of tlie Indo-Saracenic style, It stood on a stone plinth, and was rich in 0<^> OUT OF INDIA. stone-lracery, green marble columns from Ajmir, red marble, white marble colonnades, courts with foun- tains, richly-carved wooden doors, frescoes, inlay and color. Tiie ornamentation of the the tombs of Delhi, the palaces of Agra and the walls of Amber, have been laid under contribution to supply the designs in bracket, arch and soffit ; and stone-masons from tlie Jeypore School of Ait have woven into the work the best that their hands could produce. The build- ing in essence if not in the fact of to-day, is the work of Free Masons. The men were allowed a certain scope in their choice of detail and the result . . . but it should be seen to be understood, as it stands in those Imperial Gardens. And, observe, the man who had designed it, who had superintended its erection, had said no word to indicate that tliere were such a thing in the place, or that every foot of it, from the domes of the roof to the cool green chunam dadoes and tiie carving of the rims of the fountains in the court-yard, was worth studying ! Round the arches of the great centre court are written in Sanskrit and Hindi, texts from the great Hindu writers of old bearing on the beauty of wisdom and the sanctity of knowledge. In the central corridor are six great frescoes, each about nine feet by five, copies of illustrations in the Royal Folio of the Razninameh^ the Mahabharata, which Abkar caused to be done by the best artists of his day. The original is in the Museum, and he who can steyl it, will find a purchaser at any price up to fifty thousand pounds. A DESCRIPTION OF THE MUSEUM OF JEYPORE. 37 CHAPTER V. A COMPLETE DESCRIPTION OF THE WONDERFUL MUSEUM OF JEYPORE — THEN GO TO THE PALACE OF THE MAHARAJA THE BRONZE HORSE AND THE YANTI SAMRAT, PRINCE OF DIALS — *' ADSMIR." Internally, there is, in all honesty, no limit to the luxury of the Jeypore Museum. It revels in '* South Kensington " cases — of the approved pattern — that turn the beholder homesick, and South Kensington labels, whereon the description, measurements and price of each object, are fairly printed. These make savage one who knows how labelling is bungled in some of the Government Museums — those starved barns that are supposed to hold the economic ex- hibits, not of little States but of great Provinces. The floors are of dark red chunam, overlaid with a discreet and silent matting ; the doors, where they are not plate glass, are of carved wood, no two alike, hinged by sumptuous brass hinges on to marble jambs and opening without noise. On the carved marble pillars of each hall are fixed revolving cases of the S. K. M. pattern to show textile fabrics, gold lace and the like. In the recesses of the walls are more cases, and on the railing of the gallery that runs round each of the three great central rooms, are fixed 38 OUT OF INDIA. low cases to hold natural history specimens and models of fruits and vegetables. Hear this, Governments of India from the Punjab to Madras ! The doors come true to the jamb, the cases, which have been through a hot weather, are neither warped nor cracked, nor are there unseeml}^ tallow-drops and flaws in the glasses. The maroon cloth, on or against whicli the exhibits are placed is of close texture, untouched by the moth, neither stained nor meagre nor sunfaded ; the revolving cases revolve freely and without rattling ; there is not a speck of dust from one end of the building to the other, because the menial staff are numerous enough to keep everything clean, and the Curator's ofjfice is a veritable office — not a shed or a bath-room, or a loose-box partitioned from the main building. These things are so because money has been spent on the Museum, and it is now a rebuke to all other Museums in India, from Calcutta downwards. Whether it is not too good to be buried away in a native State is a question which envious men may raise and answer as they choose. Not long ago, the editor of a Bombay paper passed through it, but having the interests of the Egocentric Presidency before his eyes, dwelt more upon the idea of the building tlian its structural beauties ; saying that Bombay, who professed a weakness for technical ed- ucation should be ashamed of herself. And herein he was quite right. The system of the Museum is complete in intention as are its appointments in design. At present there are some fifteen thousand objects of art, *' surprising A DESCEIPTION OF THE MUSEUM OF JBYPOEE. 39 in themselves " as, Count Smaltork would say, a complete exposition of the arts, from enamels to pottery and from brass-ware to stone-carving, of the State of Jeypore. They are compared with similar arts of other lands. Thus a Damio's sword — a gem of lacquer-plated silk and stud-work — flanks the tulwars of Marvvarand \X\QJezails oi Tonk ; and repro- ductions of Persian and Russian brass-work stand side by side with the handicrafts of tiie pupils of the Jeypore School of Art. A photograph of His High- ness the present Maharaja is set among the arms, which are the most prominent features of the first or metal-room. As the villagers enter, they salaam rev- erently to the photo, and then move on slowly, with an evidently intelligent interest in what they see. Ruskin could describe the scene admirably — point- ing out how reverence must precede the study of art, and how it is good for Englishmen and Rajputs alike to bow on occasion before Geisler's cap. They thumb the revolving cases of cloths do those rustics, and artlessly try to feel the texture through the pro- tecting glass. The main object of the Museum is avowedly provincial — to show the craftsman of Jey- pore the best that his predecessors could do, and to show him what foreiofn artists have done. In time — but the Curator of the Museum has many schemes which will assuredly bear fruit in time, and it would be unfair to divulge them. Let those who doubt the thoroughness of a Museum under one man's control, built, filled and endowed with royal generosity — an institution perfectly independent of the Government of India — go and exhaustively visit Dr. Hendley's 40 OUT OF INDIA. charge at Jeypore. Like the man who made the building, lie refuses to talk, and so the greater part of the work that he has in hand must be guessed at. At one point, indeed, the Curator was taken off his guard. A huge map of the kingdom showed in green the portions that had been brought under irrigation, while blue circles marked the towns that owned dispensaries. " I want to bring every man in the State within twenty miles of a dispensary, and I've nearly done it," said he. Then he checked himself, and went off to food-grains in little bottles as being neutral and colorless things. Envy is forced to admit that the arrangement of the Museum — far too im- portant a matter to be explained off-hand — is Con- tinental in its character, and has a definite end and bearing — a trifle omitted by many institutions other than Museums. But — in fine, what can one say of a collection whose very labels are gilt-edged ! Shame- ful extravagance ? Nothing of the kind — only finish, perfectly in keeping with the rest of the fittings — a finish that we in kutcha India have failed to catch. That is all ! From the Museum go -out through the city to the Maharaja's Palace — skillfully avoiding the man who would show you the Maharaja's European billiard- room, and wander through a wilderness of sunlit, sleepy courts, gay with paint and frescoes, till you reach an inner square, where smiling grey-bearded men squat at ease and ^Xsij chaupur — just such a game as cost the Pandavs tlie fair Draupadi — with inlaid dice and gaily-lacquered pieces. These ancients are very polite and will press you to play, but give no A DESCRIPTION OF THE MUSEUM OF JEYPOKE. 41 heed to them, for chaiipur is an expensive game — expensive as quail-fighting, vvlien you have backed the wrong bird and the people are laughing at your inexperience. The Maharaja's Palace is arrogantly gay, overwhelmingly rich in candelabra, painted ceilings, gilt mirrors and other evidences of a too hastily assimilated civilization ; but, if the evidence of the ear can be trusted, the old, old game of intrigue goes on as merrily as of yore. A figure in saffron came out of a dark arch into the sunlight, almost falling into the arms of one in pink. " Where have you come from?" *' I have been to see "the name was unintelligible. " That is a lie : you have not r Then, across the court, some one laughed a low, croaking laugh. The pink and saffron figures separated as though they had been shot, and dis- appeared into separate bolt-holes. It was a curious little incident, and might have meant a great deal or just nothing at all. It distracted the attention of the ancients bowed above the chaupur cloth. In the Palace-gardens there is even a greater still- ness than that about the courts, and here nothing of the West, unless a hypercritical soul might take exception to the lamp-posts. At the extreme end lies a lake-like tank swarming with muggers. It is reached through an opening under a block of zenana build- ings. Remembering that all beasts by the palaces of Kings or the temples of priests in this country would answer to the name of '' Brother," the English- man cried with the voice of faith across the water, in a key as near as might be to the melodious howl of the " monkey faquir " on the top of Jakko. And 42 OUT OF INDIA. the mysterious freemasonry did not fail. At the far* end of the tank rose a ripple that grew and grew and grew like a thing in a nightmare, and became presently an aged mugger. As he neared the shore, there emerged, the green slime thick upon his eyelids, another beast, and the two together snapped at a cigar-butt — the only reward for their courtesy. Then, disgusted, they sank stern first with a gentle sigh. Now a mugger s sigh is the most suggestive sound in animal speech. It suggested first the zenana buildings overhead, the walled passes through the purple hills beyond, a horse that might clatter through the passes till he reached the Man Sagar Lake below the passes, and a boat that might row across the Man Sagar till it nosed the wall of the Palace-tank and then — then uprose the mugger with the filth upon his forehead and winked one horny eyelid — in truth he did ! — and so supplied a fitting end to a foolish fiction of old days and things that might have been. But it must be unpleasant to live in a house whose base is washed by such a tank. And so back as Pepys says, through the chunamed courts, and among the gentle sloping paths between the orange trees, up to an entrance of the palace, guarded by two rusty brown dogs from Kabul, each big as a man, and each requiring a man's charpoy to sleep upon. Very gay was the front of the palace, very brilliant were the glimpses of the damask- couched, gilded rooms within, and very, very civil- ized were the lamp-posts with Ram Singh's mono- gram, devised to look like V. R., at the bottom, and a coronet, as hath been shown, at the top. An un- A DESCRIPTION OF THE MUSEUM OF JEYPORE. 43 seen brass band among the orange bushes struck up the overture of the Bronze Horse. Those who know the music will see at once that that was the only- tune which exactly and perfectly fitted the scene and its surroundings. It was a coincidence and a reve- lation. In his time and when he was not fighting, Jey Singh, the second, who built the city, was a great as- tronomer — a royal Omar Khayyam, for he, like the tent-maker of Nishapur, reformed a calendar, and strove to wring their mysteries from the stars with instruments worthy of a king. But in the end he wrote that the goodness of the Almighty was above everything, and died ; leaving his observatory to de- cay without the palace-grounds. From the Bronze Horse to the grass-grown enclos- ure that holds the Yantr Samrat, or Prince of Dials, is rather an abrupt passage. Jey Singh built him a dial with a gnomon some ninety feet high, to throw a shadow against the sun, and the gnomon stands to- day, though there is grass in the kiosque at the top and the flight of steps up the hypotenuse is worn. He built also a zodiacal dial — twelve dials upon one platform — to find the moment of true noon at any time of the year, and hollowed out of the earth place for two hemispherical cups, cut by belts of stone, for comparative observations. He made cups for calculating eclipses, and a mural quadrant and many other strange things of stone and mortar, of which people hardly know the names and but very little of the uses. Once, said the keeper of two tiny elephants, Indur and Har, a Sahib, came 44 OUT OF INDIA. with the Burra Lat Sahib, and spent eight days in the enclosure of the great neglected observatory, seeing and writing things in a book. But he under- stood Sanskrit — the Sanskrit upon the faces of the dials, and the meaning of the gnoma and pointers. Now-a-days no one understands Sanskrit — not even the Pundits ; but without doubt Jey Singh was a great man. The hearer echoed the statement, though lie knew nothing of astronomy, and of all the wonders in the observatory was only struck by the fact that the shadow of the Prince of Dials moved over its vast plate so quickly that it seemed as though Time, wrath at the insolence of Jey Singh, had loosed the Horses of the Sun and were sweeping everything — dainty Palace-gardens and ruinous instruments — into the darkness of eternal night. So he went away chased by the shadow on the dial, and returned to the hotel, where he found men who said — this must be a catch-word of Globe-Trotters — that they were "much pleased at" Amber. They further thought that " house-rent would be cheap in those parts," and sniggered over the witticism. There is a class of tourists, and a strangely large one, who individu- ally never get farther than the "much pleased "state under any circumstances. It is assumed that they would be " much pleased " v/ith the Sphinx of Egypt, and the Pyramids, but if they were capable of stronger appreciation of anything, however vast or sublime, none should ever know it. Whether they have no higher emotions, or whether they only regard the external indication of some loftier sentiment as A DESCEIPTION OF THE MUSEUM OF JEYrORE. 4:0 an irreparable crime, is a mooted question in the mind of a stranger. This same class of tourists, it has also been observed, are usually free with hack- neyed puns, vapid phrases, and alleged or bygone jokes. Jey Singh^ in spite of a few discreditable laches, was a temperate and tolerant man ; but he would have hanged those Globe-Trotters in their trunk-straps as high as the Yantr Samrat. Next morning, in the grey dawn, the Englishman rose up and shook the sand of Jeypore from his feet, and went with Master Coryatt and Sir Thomas Roe to " Adsmir," wondering whether a year in Jeypore would be sufficient to exhaust its interest, and why he had not gone out to the tombs of the dead Kings and the passes of Gulta and the fort of Motee Dun- gri. But what he wondered at most — knowing how many men who have in any way been connected with the birth of an institution, do, to the end of their days, continue to drag forward and exhume their labors and the honors that did not come to them — was the work of the two men who, together for years past, have been pushing Jeypore along the stone- dressed paths of civilization, peace and comfort. " Servants of the Raj " they called themselves, and surely they liave served the Raj past all praise. The pen and tact of a Wilfred Blunt are needed to fitly last their reticence. But the people in the city and the camel-driver from the sand-hills told of them. They themselves held their peace as to wliat they had done, and, when pressed, referred — crowning baseness — to reports. Printed ones ! 4:6 OUT OF INDIA. CHAPTER VI. FROM A CRIMINAL POINT OF VIEW AJIMIR IS NOT A PLEASANT PLACE UDAIPUR DOES NOT APPROVE OF ENGLISHMEN. Arrived at Ajmir, the Englishman fell among tents pitched under the shadow of a huge banian tree, and in them was a Punjabi. Now there is no brother- hood like the brotherhood of the Pauper Province ; for it is even greater than the genial and unquestion- ing hospitality which in spite of the loafer and the Globe-Trotter, seems to exist throughout India. Ajmir being British territory, though the inhabitants are allowed to carry arms, is the headquarters of many of the banking firms who lend to the Native States. The complaint of the Setts to-day is that their trade is bad, because an unsympathetic Govern- ment induces Native States to make railways and become prosperous. "Look at Jodhpur !" said a gentleman whose possessions might be roughly estimated at anything between thirty and forty-five lakhs. " Time was when Jodhpur was always in debt — and not so long ago, either. Now, they've got a railroad and are carrying salt over it, and, as sure as I stand here, they have a surplus ! What can we do ?" Poor pauper ! However, he makes a little profit on the fluctuations in the coinage of the States round him, for every small king seems to have the FROM A CKIMIITAL POINT OF VIEW. 47 privilege of striking his own image and inflicting the Great Exchange Question on his subjects. It is a poor State that has not two seers and five dif- ferent rupees. From a criminal point of view, Ajmir is not a pleasant place. The Native States lie all round and about it, and portions of the district are ten miles off, Native State-locked on every side. Thus the criminal, who may be a burglarious Meena lusting for the money bags of the Setts, or a Peshawari down south on a cold weather tour, has his plan of campaign much simplified. The Englishman made only a short stay in the town, hearing that there was to be a ceremony — tamasha covers a multitude of things — at the capital of His Highness the Maharana of Udaipur — a town some hundred and eighty miles south of Ajmir, not known to many people beyond Viceroys and their Staffs and the officials of the Rajputana Agency. So he took a Neemuch train in the very early morning and, with the Punjabi, went due south to Chitor, the point of departure for Udaipur. In time the Ara- valis gave place to a dead, flat, stone-strewn plain, thick with dhak-jungle. Later the date-palm frater- nized with the dhak, and low hills stood on either side of the line. To this succeeded a tract rich in pure white stones, the line was ballasted with it. Then came more low hills, each with a comb of splintered rock a-top, overlooking dhak-jungle and villages fenced with thorns — places that at once declared tliemselves tigerish. Last, the huge bulk of Chitor showed itself on the horizon. The train crossed the 4:8 OUT OF INDIA. Gumber River and halted almost in the shadow of the hills on which the old pride of Udaipur was set. It is difficult to give an idea of the Chitor fortress ; but the long line of brown wall springing out of bush-covered hill suggested at once those pictures, such as the Graphic publishes, of the Inflexible or the Devastation — gigantic men-of-war with a very low free-board ploughing through green sea. The hill on which the fort stands is ship-shaped and some miles long, and, from a distance, every inch appears to be scarped and guarded. But there was no time to see Chitor. The business of the day was to get, if possible, to Udaipur from Chitor Station, which was composed of one platform, one telegraph-room, a bench and several vicious dogs. The State of Udaipur is as backward as Jeypore is advanced — if we judge it by the standard of civiliza- tion. It does not approve of the incursions of Eng- lishmen, and, to do it justice, it thoroughly succeeds in conveying its silent sulkiness. Still, where there is one English Resident, one Doctor, one Engineer, one Settlement Officer and one Missionary, there must be a mail at least once a day. There was a mail. The Englishman, men said, might go by it if he liked, or he might not. Then, with a great sinking of the heart, he began to realize that his caste was of no value in the stony pastures of Mewar, among the swaggering gentlemen, who were so lavishly adorned with arms. There was a mail, the ghost of a tonga, with tattered side-cloths and patched roof, inconceiv- ably filthy within and without, and it was Her Majesty's. There was another tonga — ixnaram tonga. TKOM A CRIMINAL POINT OF VIEW. 49 — but the Englishman was not to liave it. It was reserved for a Rajput Thakur who was going to Udripur with his "tail." The Thakur, in claret- colored velvet with a blue turban, a revolver — Army- pattern — a sword, and five or six friends, also with swords, came by and endorsed the statement. Now, the mail tonga had a wheel which was destined to become the Wheel of Fate, and to lead to many curi- ous things. Two diseased yellow ponies were ex- tracted from a dung-hill and yoked to the tonga ; and after due deliberation Her Majesty's mail started, the Thakur following. In twelve hours, or thereabouts, the seventy- miles between Chitor and Udaipur would be accom- plished. Behind the tonga cantered an armed sowar. He was the guard. The Thakur's tonga came up with a rush, ran deliberately- across the bows of the Englishman, chipped a pony, and passed on. One lives and learns. The Thakur seems to object to following the foreigner. At the halting-stages, once in every six miles, that is to say, the ponies were carefully undressed and all their accoutrements fitted more or less accurately on to the backs of any ponies that might happen to be near ; the released animals finding their way back to their stables alone and unguided. There were no syces^ and the harness hung on by special dispensa- tion of Providence. Still the ride over a good road, driven through a pitilessly stony country, had its charms for a while. At sunset the low hills turned to opal and wine-red and the brown dust flew up pure gold ; for the tonga was running straight into 50 OUT OF INDIA. the sinking sun. Now and again would pass a traveller on a camel, or a gang of Bunja?'ras with their pack-bullocks and their women ; and the sun touched the brasses of their swords and guns till the poor wretches seemed rich merchants come back from travelling with Sindbad. On a rock on the right hand side, thirty-four great vultures were gathered over the carcass of a steer. And this was an evil omen. They made unseemly noises as the tonga passed, and a raven came out of a bush on the right and answered them. To crown all, one of the hide and skin castes sat on the left hand side of the road, cutting up some of the flesh that he had stolen from the vultures. Could a man desire three more inauspicious signs for a night's travel ? Twilight came, and the hills were alive with strange noises, as the red moon, nearly at her full, rose over Chitor. To the low hills of the mad geo- logical formation, the tumbled strata that seem to obey no law, succeeded level ground, the pasture lands of Mewar, cut by the Beruch and Wyan, streams running over smooth water-worn rock, and, as the heavy embankments and ample waterways showed, very lively in the rainy season. In this region occurred the last and most inauspic- ious omen of all. Something had gone wrong with a crupper, a piece of blue and white punkah-cord. The Englishman pointed it out, and the driver, de- scending, danced on that lonely road an unholy dance, singing the while: "The du7nchi ! The dumchi I The dumchi f in a shrill voice. Then he returned and drove on, while the Englishman won- FKOM A CRIMINAL POINT OF VIEW. 51 dered into what land of lunatics he was heading. At an average speed of six miles an hour, it is possi- ble to see a great deal of the country ; and, under brilliant moonlight, Mewar was desolately beautiful. There was no night traffic on the road, no one ex- cept the patient sowar, his shadow an inky blot on white, cantering twenty yards behind. Once the tonga strayed into a company of date-trees that fringed the path, and once rattled through a little town, and once the ponies shyed at what the driver said was a rock ; but it jumped up in the moonlight and went away. Then came a great blasted heath whereon nothing was more than six inches high — a wilderness cov- ered with grass and low thorn ^and here, as nearly as might be midway between Chitor and Udaipur, the Wheel of Fate, which had been for some time beating against the side of the tonga, came off, and Her Majesty's mails, two bags including parcels, collapsed on the wayside : while the Englishman re- pented him that he had neglected the omens of the vultures and the raven, the low caste man and the mad driver. There was a consultation and an examination of the wheel, but the whole tonga was rotten, and the axle was smashed and the axle pins were bent and nearly red-hot. " It is nothing," said the driver, " the mail often does this. What is a wheel ?" He took a big stone and began hammering the wheel proudly on the tire, to show that that at least was sound, A hasty court-martial revealed that there 52 OUT OF INDIA. was absolutely not one single "breakdown tonga" on tlie whole road between Chitor and Udaipur. Now this wilderness was so utterly waste that not even the barking of a dog or the sound of a night- fowl could be heard. Luckily the Thakur had, some twenty miles back, stepped out to smoke by the road- side, and his tonga had been passed meanwhile. The sowar was sent back to find that tonga and bring it on. He cantered into the haze of the moonlight and disappeared. Then said the driver : *' Had there been no tonga behind us, I should have put the mails on a horse, because the Sirkar's dak cannot stop." The Englishman sat down upon the parcels-bag, for he felt that there was trouble coming. The driver looked East and West and said : " I too will go and see if the tonga can be found, for the Sirkar's dak cannot stop. Meantime, oh. Sahib, do you take care of the mails — one bag and one bag of parcels." So he ran swiftly into the haze of the moonlight and was lost, and the Englishman was left alone in charge of Her Majesty's mails, two un- happy ponies and a lop-sided tonga. He lit fires, for the night was bitterly cold, and only mourned that he could not destroy the whole of the territo- ries of His Highness the Maharana of Udaipur. But he managed to raise a very fine blaze, before he reflected that all this trouble was his own fault for wandering into Native States undesirous of English- men. The ponies coughed dolorously from time to time, but they could not lift the weight of a dead silence that seemed to be crushing the earth. After an FROM A CRIMINAL POINT OF VIEW, 53 interval measurable by centuries, sowar, driver and Thakur's tonga reappeared ; the latter full to the brim and bubbling over with humanity and bedding. *' We will now," said the driver, not deigning to notice the Englishman who had been on guard over the mails, " put the Sirkar's dak into this tonga and go forward." Amiable heathen ! He was going, he said so, to leave the Englishman to wait in the Sahara, for certainly thirty hours and perhaps forty- eight. Tongas are scarce on the Udaipur road. There are a few occasions in life when it is justifiable to delay Her Majesty's Mails. This was one of them. Seating himself upon the parcels-bag, the English- man cried in what was intended to be a very terrible voice, but the silence soaked it up and left only a thin trickle of sound, that any one who touched the bags would be hit with a stick, several times, over the head. The bags were the only link between him and the civilization he had so rashly foregone. And there was a pause. The Thakur put his head out of the tonga and spoke shrilly in Mewari. The Englishman replied in English-Urdu. The Thakur withdrew his head, and from certain grunts that followed seemed to be wak- ening his retainers. Then two men fell sleepily out of the tonga and walked into the night. '' Come in," said the Thakur, " you and your baggage. My banduq is in that corner ; be careful." The English- man, taking a mail-bag in one hand for safety's sake — the wilderness inspires an Anglo-Indian Cockney with unreasoning fear — climbed into the; tonga, which was then loaded far beyond PlimsoU mark, and the 54: OTJT OF INDIA. procession resumed its journey. Every one in the vehicle — it seemed as full as the railway carriage that held Alice. Through the Looking Glass — was Sahib SiVidillaztir. Except the Englishman. He was simple turn, and a revolver, Army pattern, was printing every diamond in the chequer-work of its handle, into his right hip. When men desired him to move, they prodded him with the handles of tulwars till they had coiled him into an uneasy lump. Then they slept upon him, or cannoned against him as the tonga bumped. It was an Aram tonga, or tonga for ease. That was the bitterest thought of all. In due season the harness began to break once every five minutes, and the driver vowed that the wheels would give way also. After eight hours in one position, it is excessively difificult to walk, still more difficult to climb up an unknown road into a dak-bungalow ; but he who has sought sleep on an arsenal and under the bodies of burly Rajputs, can do it. The grey dawn brought Udaipur and a French bedstead. As the tonga jingled away, the Englishman heard the familiar crack of broken harness. So he was not tlie Jonah he had been taught to consider himself all through that night of penance ! A jackal sat in the verandah and howled him to sleep, wherein he dreamed that he had caught a Viceroy under the walls of Chitor and beaten him with a ////'Z£/^r till he turned into a dak-pony whose near foreleg was perpetually coming off and who would say nothing but um when he was asked why he had not built a railway from Chitor to Udaipur. ON THE VAKIOTJS USES OF LETHAL WEAPONS. 65 What a distorted combination of a day's events and experiences is a first dream at Udaipur ? CHAPTER VII. ON THE VARIOUS USES OF LETHAL WEAPONS — SHOWING HOW THE ENGLISHMAN CAME TO THE CITY OF THE CHILDREN OF THE SUN THE PADRE- - SAHIB, THE GOOD MAN OF THE WILDERNESS. It was worth a night's discomfort and revolver-bed to sleep upon — this city of the Suryavansi, hidden among the hills that encompass the great Pichola lake. Truly, the King who governs to-day is wise in his determination to have no railroad to his capital. His predecessor was more or less enlightened, and had he lived a few years longer, would have brought the iron horse through the Dobarri — the green gate which is the entrance of the Girwa or girdle of hills around Udaipur ; and, with the train, would have come the tourist who would have scratched his name upon the Temple of Garuda and laughed horse- laughs upon the lake. Let us, therefore, be thankful that the capital of Mewar is hard to reach, and go abroad into a new and a strange land rejoicing. Each man who has any claims to respectability walks armed, carrying his tulwar sheathed in his hand, or hung by a short sling of cotton passing over 56 OUT OF INDIA. the shoulder, under his left armpit. His matchlock, or smooth-bore if he has one, is borne naked on the shoulder. Now it is possible to carry any number of lethal weapons without being actually dangerous. An un- handy revolver, for instance, may be worn for years, and, at the end, accomplish nothing more noteworthy than the murder of its owner. But the Rajput's weapons are not meant for display. The English- man caught a camel-driver who talked to him in Mewari, which is a heathenish dialect, something like Multani to listen to ; and the man, very grace- fully and courteously, handed him his sword and matchlock, the latter a heavy stump-stock arrange- ment without pretence of sights. The blade was as sharp as a razor, and the gun in perfect working order. The coiled fuse on the stock was charred at the end, and the curled ram's-horn powder-horn opened as readily as a whisky-fiask that is much handled. Un- fortunately, ignorance of Mewari prevented conversa- tion ; so the camel-driver resumed his accoutrements and jogged forward on his beast — a superb black one, with the short curled hubshee hair — while the English- man went to the city, which is built on hills on the borders of the lake. By the way, everything in Udaipur is built on a hill. There is no level ground in the place, except tlie Durbar Gardens, of which more hereafter. Because color holds the eye more than form, the first thing noticeable was neither temple nor fort, but an ever-recurring picture, painted in the rudest form of native art, of a man on horseback armed witli a lance, charging an elephant- ON THE TAKIOUS USES OF LETHAL WEAPONS. 57 of-war. As a rule, the elepliant was depicted on one side the house-door and the rider on the other. Tliere was no representation of an army behind. Tlie figuresstood alone upon the whitewash on house and wall and gate, again and again and again. A liiglily intelligent priest grunted that it was a tazwir j a private of the Maharana's regular army suggested that it was a. hat/ii ; wiiile a wheat-seller, his sword at his side, was equally certain that it was a Raja. Be- yond that point, his knowledge did not go. The ex- planation of the picture is this. In the days when Raja Maun of Amber put his sword at Akbar's ser- vice and won for him great kingdoms, Akbar sent an army against Mewar, whose then ruler was Per- tap Singh, most famous of all the princes of Mewar. Selim, Akbar's son, led the army of the Toork ; the Rajputs met them at the pass of Huldighat and fought till one-half of their band were slain. Once, in the press of battle, Pertap, on his great horse, " Chytak," came within striking distance of Selim's elephant, and slew the mahout, but Selim escaped, to become Jehangir afterwards, and the Rajputs were broken. That was three hundred years ago, and men have reduced the picture to a sort of dia- gram that the painter dashes in, in a few minutes, without, it would seem, knowing what he is com- memorating. Elsewhere, the story is drawn in lines even more roughly. Thinking of these things, the Englishman made shift to get to tlie city, and presently came to a tall gate, the gate of the Sun, on which the elephant- spikes, that he had seen rotted with rust at Amber, 58 OtJT OF INDIA. were new and pointed and effective. The City gates are said to be shut at night, and there is a story of a Viceroy's Guard-of-Honor which arrived before day- break, being compelled to crawl ignominiously man by man through a little wicket-gate, while the horses had to wait without till sunrise. But a civilized yearning for the utmost advantages of octroi, and not a fierce fear of robbery and wrong, is at the bot- tom of the continuance of this custom. The walls of the City are loopholed for musketry, but there seem to be no mounting for guns, and the moat without the walls is dry and gives cattle pasture. Coarse rubble in concrete faced with stone, makes the walls moderately strong. Internally, the City is surprisingly clean, though with the exception of the main street, paved after the fashion of Jullundur, of which, men say, the pave- ment was put down in the time of Alexander and worn by myriads of naked feet into deep barrels and grooves. In the case of Udaipur, the feet of the passengers have worn the rock veins that crop out everywhere, smooth and shiny ; and in the rains the narrow gullies must spout like fire-hoses. The people have been untouched by cholera for four years, proof that Providence looks after those who do not look after themselves, for Neemuch Cantonment, a hundred miles away, suffered grievously last summer. "And what do you make in Udaipur?" "Swords," said the man in the shop, throwing down an armful of tulwars^ kuttars and khandas on the stones. " Do you want any? Look here !" Hereat, he took up one of the commoner swords and flourished it in the ON THE VARIOUS USES OF LETHAL WEAPONS. 59 sunshine. Then he bent it double, and, as it sprang straight, began to make it " speak." Arm-vendors in Udaipur are a genuine race, for they sell to people who really use their wares. The man in the shop was rude — distinctly so. His first flush of profes- sional enthusiasm abated, he took stock of the Englishman and said calmly : *' What do you want with a sword ?" Then he picked up his goods and retreated, while certain small boys, who deserved a smacking, laughed riotously from the coping of a lit- tle temple hard by. Swords, seem to be the sole man- ufacture of the place. At least, none of the inhabit- ants the Englishman spoke to could think of any other. There is a certain amount of personal violence in and about the State, or else where would be the good of the weapons ? There are occasionally dacoities more or less important ; but these are not often heard of, and, indeed, there is no special reason why they should be dragged into the light of an unholy pub- licity, for the land governs itself in its own way, and is always in its own way, which is by no means ours, very happy. The Thakurs live, each in his own castle on some rock-faced hill, much as they lived in the days of Tod ; though their chances of distinguish- ing themselves, except in the school, sowar and dis- pensary line, are strictly limited. Nominally, they pay ckufoond, or a sixth of their revenues to the State, and are under feudal obligations to supply their Head with so many horsemen per thousand rupees ; but whether the c/iuUond justifies its name and what is the exact extent of the " tail " leviable, they, and 60 OUT OF INDIA. perhaps the Rajputana Agency, alone Know. They are quiet, give no trouble except to the wild boar, and personally are magnificent men to look at. The Rajput shows his breeding in his hands and feet wiiich are almost disproportionately small, and as well shaped as those of a woman. His stirrups and sword-handles are even more unusable by Westerns than those elsewhere in India, while the Bhil's knife- handle gives as large a grip as an English one. Now the little Bhil is an aborigine, which is humiliating to think of. His tongue, which may frequently be heard in the City, seems to possess some variant of the Zulu click ; whicli gives it a weird and uneartlily character. From the main gate of the City the Englishman climbed uphill towards the Palace and the Jugdesh Temple built by one Juggat Singh at the beginning of the last century. This building must be — but ignorance is a bad guide — Jain in character. From basement to the stone socket of the temple flag-staff, it is carved in high relief with elephants, men, gods and monsters in friezes of wearying profusion. The management of the temple have daubed a large portion of the building with whitewash, for which their revenues should be *' cut " for a year or two. The main shrine holds a large brazen image of Garuda, and, in the corners of the courtyard of the main pile, are shrines to Mahadeo, and the jovial, pot-bellied Ganesh. There is no repose in this archi- tecture, and the entire effect is one of repulsion ; for the clustered figures of man and brute seem always on the point of bursting into unclean, wriggling life. ON THE VAEIOUS USES OF LETHAL WEAPONS. 61 But it may be that the builders of this form of house desired to put the fear of all their many gods into the hearts of the worsliippers. From the temple whose steps are worn smooth by the feet of men, and whose courts are full of the faint smell of stale flow- ers and old incense, the Englishman went to the Palaces which crown the highest hill overlooking the City. Here, too, whitewash had been unsparingly applied, but the excuse was that the stately fronts and the pierced screens were built of a perishable stone which needed protection against the weather. One projecting window in the facade of the main palace had been treated with Minton tiles. Luckily it was too far up the wall for anything more than the color to be visible, and the pale blue against the pure white was effective. A picture of Ganesh looks out over the main court- yard which is entered by a triple gate, and hard by is the place where the King's elephant's fight over a low masonry wall. In the side of the hill on which the Palaces stand, is built stabling for horses and elephants — proof that the architects of old must have understood their business thoroughly. The Palace is not a "show place," and, consequently, the Eng- glishman did not see much of the interior. But he passed through open gardens with tanks and pavil- ions, very cool and restful, till he came suddenly upon the Pichola lake, and forgot altogether about the Palace. He found a sheet of steel-blue water, set in purple and grey hills, bound in, on one side, by marble bunds, the fair white walls of the Palace, and the grey, time-worn ones of the city ; and, on I 62 OUT OF INDIA. the other, fading away through the white of shallow water, and the soft green of weed, marsh, and rank- pastured river field, into the land. To enjoy open water thoroughly, live for a certain number of years barred from anything better than the yearly swell and shrinkage of one of the Five Rivers, and then come upon two and a half miles of solid, restful lake, with a cool wind blowing off it and little waves spitting against the piers of a verit- able, albeit hideously ugly, boat-house. On the faith of an exile from the Sea, you will not stay long among Palaces, be they never so lovely, or in little rooms panelled with Dutch tiles, be these never so rare and curious. And here follows digression. There is no life so good as the life of a loafer who travels by rail and road ; for all things and all people are kind to him. From the chill miseries of a dak- bungalow where they slew one hen with as much parade as the French guillotined Pranzini, to the well-ordered sumptuousness of the Residency, was a step bridged over by kindly and unqestioning hos- pitality. So it happened that the Englishman was not only able to go upon the lake in a soft-cushioned boat, with everything handsome about him, but might had he chosen, have killed wild-duck with which the lake swarms. The mutter of water under a boat's nose was a pleasant thing to hear once more. Starting at the head of the lake, he found himself shut out from sight of the main sheet of water in a loch bounded by a sunk, broken bund to steer across which was a matter of some nicety. Beyond that lay a second ON THE VARIOUS USES OF LETHAL WEAPONS. 6 o pool, spanned by a narrow-arched bridge built, men said, long before the City of the Rising Sun, which is little more than three hundred years old. The bridge connects the City with Brahmapura — a white- walled enclosure filled with many Brahmins and ring- ing with the noise of their conches. Beyond the bridge, the body of the lake, with the City running down to it, comes into full view ; and Providence has arranged for the benefit of such as delight in colors, that the Rajputni shall wear the most striking tints that she can buy in the bazaars, in order that she may beautify the ghats where she comes to bathe. The bathing-ledge at the foot of the City wall was lighted with women clad in raw vermillion, dull red, indigo and sky-blue, saffron and pink and turquoise; the water faithfully doubling everything. But the first impression was of the unreality of the sight, for the Englishman found himself thinking of the Simla Fine Arts Exhibition and the over-daring amateurs who had striven to reproduce scenes such as these. Then a woman rose up, and clasping her hands be- hind her head, looked at the passing boat, and the ripples spread out from her waist, in blinding white silver, far across the water. As a picture, a daringly insolent picture, it would have been superb. The boat turned aside to shores where huge turtles were lying, and a stork had built her a nest, big as a haycock, in a withered tree, and a bevy of coots were flapping and gabbling in the weeds or between great leaves of the Victoria Regia — an " escope " from the Purbar Gardens, Here were, as Mandeville hath it, 64 OUT OF INDIA. " all manner of strange fowle'" — divers and waders, after their kinds, king-fishers and snaky-necked birds of the cormorant family, but no duck. Tliey had seen the guns in the boat and were flying to and fro in companies across the lake, or settling, wise birds, in the glare of tlie sun on the water. The lake was swarming with them, but they seemed to know ex- actly how far a twelve-bore would carry. Perhaps their knowledge had been gained from the English- man at the Residency. Later, as the sun left the lake and the hills began to glow like opals, the boat made her way to the shallow side of the lake, through fields of watergrass and dead lotus-raffle that rose as high as the bows, and clung lovingly about the rud- der, and parted with the noise of silk when it is torn. There she waited for the fall of twilight when the duck would come home to bed, and the Englishman sprawled upon the cusliions in deep content and lazi- ness, as he looked across to where two marble Palaces floated upon the waters, and saw all the glory and beauty of the City, and wondered whether Tod, in cocked hat and stiff stock, had ever come shooting among the reeds, and, if so, how in the world he had ever manas:ed to bowl over. " Duck and drake, by Jove ! Confiding beasts, weren't they. Hi ! Lalla, jump out and get them !" It was a brutal thing, this double-barrelled murder perpetrated in the silence of the marsh when the lingly wild-duck came back from his wanderings with his mate at his side, but — but — the birds were Very good to eat. After this, and many other slaughters had been accomplished, the boat went ON THE VARIOUS USES OF LETHAL WEAPONS. 65 back in the full dusk, down narrow water-lanes and across belts of weed, disturbing innumerable fowl on the road, till she reached open water and " the moon like a rick afire was rising over the dale," and it was not the "whit, whit, whit" of the niglitingale, but the stately '■'' honk^ honk'' of some wild geese, thank- ing their stars that these pestilent i'/^/y^^r/i" were going away. If the Venetian owned the Pichola Sagar he might say with justice : — '' See it and die." But it is better to live and go to dinner, and strike into a new life — that of the men who bear the hat-mark on their brow as plainly as the well-born native carries the trisul of Shiva. They are of the same caste as the toilers on the Frontier — tough, bronzed men, with wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, gotten by looking across much sun-glare. When they would speak of horses they mention Arab ponies, and their talk, for the most part, drifts Bombaywards, or to Abu, which is their Simla. By these things the traveller may see that he is far away from the Presidency ; and will presently learn that he is in aland where the railway is an incident and not an indispensable luxury. Folk tell strange stories of drives in bullock-carts in the rains, of break-downs in nullahs fifty miles from everywhere, and of elephants that used to sink " for rest and refreshment" half-way across swollen streams. Every place here seems fifty miles from everywhere, and the " legs of a horse " are regarded as the only natural means of locomotion. Also, and this to the Indian Cockney, who is accustomed to 6Q OUT OF INDIA. the bleached or office man is curious, fhere are to be found many veritable " tiger-men " — not story- spinners but such as have, in their wanderings from Bikaneer to Indore dropped their tiger in the way of business. They are enthusiastic over princelings of little known fiefs, lords of austere estates perched on the tops of unthrifty hills, hard riders and good sportsmen. And five, six, yes fully nine hundred miles to the northward, lives the sister branch of the same caste — the men who swear by Pathan, Biluch and Brahui, with whom they have shot or broken bread. There is a saying in Upper India that the more desolate the country the greater the certainty of finding a Padre-Sahib. The proverb seems to hold good in Udaipur, where the Scotch Presbyterian Mission have a post, and others at Todgarh to the north and elsewhere. To arrive, under Providence at the cure of souls through the curing of bodies certainly seems the rational method of conversion ; and this is exactly what the Missions are doing. Their Padre in Udaipur is also an M. D., and of him a rather striking tale is told. Conceiving that the City could bear another hospital in addition to the State one, he took furlough, went home, and there, by crusade and preaching, raised sufficient money for the scheme, so that none might say that he was beholden to ihe State. Returning, he built his hos- pital, a very model of neatness and comfort, and, opening the operation-book, announced his readiness to see any one and every one who was sick. How the call was and is now responded to, the dry records "sad stories of the death of kings." 67 of that book will show ; and the name of the Padre- Sahib is honored, as these ears have heard, through- out Udaipur and far around. The faith that sends a man into the wilderness, and the secular energy which enables him to cope with an ever-growing demand for medical aid, must, in time, find their reward. If patience and unwearying self-sacrifice carry any merit, they should do so soon. To-day the people are willing enough to be healed, and the general influence of the Padre-Sahib is very great. But beyond that . . . Still it was impossible to judge aright. CHAPTER VIII. '^SAD STORIES OF THE DEATH OF KINGS " — HIS HIGH- NESS PRIME MINISTER RAE PUNNA LAL IS A RACIAL ANOMALY. In this land men tell " sad stories of the death of Kings" not easily found elsewhere ; and also speak of sati^ which is generally supposed to be an *' effete curiosity " as the Bengali said in a manner which makes it seem very near and vivid. Be pleased to listen to some of the tales, but with all the names-cut out, because a King has just as mucli right to have his family affairs respected as has a British house- holder paying income tax. 68 OUT OF INDIA. Once upon a time, that is to say when the British power was well established in the land and there were railways, there was a King who lay dying for many days, and all, including the Englishmen about him, knew that his end was certain. But he had chosen to lie in an outer court or pleasure-house of his Palace ; and with him were some twenty of his favorite wives. The place in which he lay was very near to the City ; and there was a fear that his womenkind should, on his death, going mad with grief, cast off their veils and run out into the streets, uncovered before all men. In which case nothing, not even the power of the Press, and the locomotive, and the telegraph, and cheap education and enlight- ened municipal councils, could have saved them from sati^ for they were the wives of a King. So the Politi- cal did his best to induce the dying man to go to the Fort of the City, a safe place close to the regular zenana, where all the women could be kept within walls. He said that the air was better in the Fort, but the King refused ; and that he would recover in the Fort ; but the King refused. After some days, the latter turned and said ; Why are you so keen, Sahib, upon getting my old bones up to the Fort." Driven to his last defences, the Political said simply : *' Well, Maharana Sahib, the place is close to the road you see, and . . ." The King saw and said : "Oh, thafs it. Fve been puzzling my brain for four days to find out what on earth you were driving at. FU go to-night." *' But there may be some difficulty," began the Political. "You think so," said the King. "If I only hold up my little finger, the women will '^ SAD STORIES OI' THE DEA'TH OF KINGS.'* 69 obey me. Go now, and come back in five minutes, and all will be ready for departure." As a matter of fact, the Political withdrew for the space of fifteen minutes, and gave orders that the conveyances which he had kept in readiness day and night should be got ready. In fifteen minutes those twenty women, with their hand-maidens, were packed and ready for de- parture ; and the King died later at the Fort, and nothing happened. Here the Englishman asked wdiy a frantic woman must of necessity become sati, and felt properly abashed when he was told that she must. There was nothing else for her if she went out un- veiled deliberately. The rush-out forces the matter. And, indeed, if you consider the matter from a Rajput point of view it does. Then followed a very grim tale of the death of another King ; of the long vigil by his bedside, be- fore he was taken off the bed to die upon the ground ; of the shutting of a certain mysterious door behind tlie bed-head, which shutting was followed by a rustle of women's dress ; of a walk on the top of the Palace, to escape the heated air of the sick room ; and then, in the grey dawn, the wail upon wail break- ing from the zenana as the news of the King's death went in. '' I never wish to hear anything more hor- rible and awful in my life. You could see nothing. You could only hear the poor wretches," said the Political with a shiver. The last resting-place of the Maharanas of Udai- pur is at Ahar, a little village two miles east of the City. Here they go down in their robes of State, 70 OUT OF INDIA. their horse following behind, and here the Political saw, after the death of a Maharana, the dancing girls dancing before the poor white ashes, the musi- cians playing anaong the cenotaphs, and the golden hookah, sword and water-vessel laid out for the naked soul doomed to hover twelve days round the funeral pyre, before it could depart on its journey to- wards a fresh birth in the endless circle of the Wheel of Fate. Once, in a neighboring State it is said, one of the dancing-girls stole a march in the next world's precedence and her lord's affections, upon the legitimate queens. The affair happened, by the way, after the Mutiny, and was accomplished with great pomp in the light of day. Subsequently those who might have stopped it but did not, were severe- ly punished. The girl said that she had no one to look to but the dead man, and followed him, to use Tod's formula, '' through the flames." It would be curious to know what is done now and again among these lonely hills in the walled holds of the Thakurs. But to return from the burning-ground to modern Udaipur, as at present worked under the Maharana and his Prime Minister Rae Punna Lai, C, I. E. To begin with, His Highness is a racial anomaly intliat, judged by the strictest European standard, he is a man of temperate life, the husband of one wife whom he married before he was chosen to the throne after the death of tlie Maharana Sujjun Singh in 1884. Sujjun Singh died cliildless and gave no hint of his desires as to succession and — omitting all the genealogical and political reasons which would drive a man mad — Futteh Singh was chosen, by the " SAD STORIES OF THE DEATH OF KINGS." 71 Thakurs, from the Seorati Branch of the family which Sangram Singh II. founded. He is thus a younger son of a younger branch of a younger family, which lucid statement sliould suffice to ex- plain everything. The man who could deliberately unravel the succession of any one of the Rajput States would be perfectly capable of clearing the politics of all the Frontier tribes from Jumrood to Quetta. Roughly speaking, the Maharana and the Prime Minister — in whose family the office has been heredi- tary for many generations — divide the power of the State. They control, more or less, the Mahand Raj Sabha or Council of Direction and Revision. This is composed of many of the Rawats an-d Thakurs of the Stiite, and IhQ Poet Laureate who, under a less genial administration, would be presumably the Registrar. There are also District Officers, Officers of Customs, Superintendents of the Mint, Master of the Horses, and Supervisor of Doles, which last is pretty and touching. The State officers itself, and the Englishman's investigations failed to unearth any Bengalis. The Commandant of the State Army, about five thousand men of all arms, is a retired non- commissioned officer, a Mr. Lonergan ; who, as the medals on his breast attest, has " done the State some service," and now in his old age rejoices in the rank of Major-General, and teaches the Maharaja's guns to make uncommonly good practice. The Infantry are smart and well set up, while the Cavalry — rare thing in Native States — have a distinct notion of keeping their accoutrements clean. Tiiey are, ^2 OtJT Ol^ INDIA. further, well mounted on light wiry Mewar and Kathiawar horses. Incidentally, it may be men- tioned that the Pathan comes down with his pickings from the Punjab to Udaipur, and finds a market there for animals that were much better employed in — but the complaint is a stale one. Let us see, later on, what the Jodhpur stables hold ; and then formulate an indictment against the Government. So much for the indigenous administration^ of Udaipur. The one drawback in the present Maha- raja, from the official point of view, is his want of education. He is a thoroughly good man, but was not brought up with a seat on the guddee before his eyes, consequently he is not an English-speaking man. There is a story told of him, which is worth the repeating. An Englishman who flattered himself that he could speak the vernacular fairly well, paid him a visit and discoursed with a round mouth. The Maharana heard him politely, and turning to a satellite, demanded a translation ; which was given. Then said the Maharana : — " Speak to him in Angrezt,'* The Angrezt spoken by the interpreter was the vernacular as the Sahibs speak it, and the Englishman, having ended his conference, departed abashed. But this backwardness is eminently suited to a place like Udaipur, and a " varnished " prince is not always a desirable thing. The curious and even startling simplicity of his life is worth preserving. Here is a specimen of one of his days. Rising at four — and the dawn can be bitterly chill — he bathes and prays after the custom of his race, and at six is " SAD STORIES OF THE DEATH OF KINGS." 73 ready to take in hand the first installment of the day's work which comes before him through his Prime Minister, and occupies him for three or four hours till the first meal of the day is ready. At two o'clock he attends the Mahand Raj Sabha, and works till five, retiring at a healthily primitive hour. He is said to have his hand fairly, firmly upon the reins of rule, and to know as much as most monarchs know of the way in which the revenues — about thirty lakhs — are disposed of. The Prime Minister's career has been a chequered and interesting one, including, interalia a dismissal from power (this was worked from behind the screen), and arrest and an attack with words which all but ended in his murder. He has not so much power as his predecessors had, for the reason that the present Maharaja allows little but tiger-shooting to distract him from the super- vision of the State. His Highness, by the way, is a first-class shot and has bagged eighteen tigers already. He preserves his game carefully, and permission to kill tigers is not readily obtainable. A curious instance of the old order giving place to the new is in process of evolution and deserves notice. The Prime Minister's son, Futteh Lai, a boy of twenty years old, has been educated at the Mayo Col- lege, Ajmir, and speaks and writes English. There are few native officials in the State who do this ; and the consequence is that the lad has won a very fair insight into State affairs, and knows generally what is going forward both in the Eastern and Western spheres of the little Court. In time he may qualify for direct administrative powers, and Udaipur will 74 OUT OF INDIA. be added to the list of the States that are governed ** English fash," as the irreverent Americans put it. What the end will be, after three generations of Princes and Dewans have been put through the mill of Rajkumar Colleges, those who live will learn. More interesting is the question. For how long can the vitality of a people whose life was arms be suspended ? Men in the North say that, by the favor of the Government, the Sikh Sirdars are rot- ting on their lands ; and the Rajput Thakurs say of themselves that they are growing " rusty." The old, old problem forces itself on the most unreflective mind at every turn in the gay streets of Udaipur. A Frenchman might write : " Behold there the horse of the Rajput — foaming, panting, caracoling, but always fettered with his head so majestic upon his bosom so amply filled with a generous heart. He rages, but he does not advance. See there the destiny of the Rajput who bestrides him, and upon whose left flank bounds the sabre useless — the haberdashery of the ironmonger only. Pity the horse in reason, for that life there is his raison d'etre. Pity ten thousand times more the Rajput, for he has no raison d'etre. He is an anachronism in a blue turban." The Gaul might be wrong, but Tod wrote things which seem to support this view, in the days when he wished to make " buffer-states " of the land he loved so well. Let us visit the Durbar Gardens, where little naked Cupids are trampling upon fountains of fatted fish, all in bronze, where there are cypresses and red paths, and a deer-park full of all varieties of deer, " SAD STORIES OF THE DEATH OF KINGS." 75 besides two growling, fluffy little panther cubs, a black panther who is the Prince of Darkness and a gentleman, and a terrace-full of tigers, bears and Guzerat lions brought from the King of Oudh's sale. On the best site in the Gardens is rising the Vic- toria Hall, the foundation-stone of which was laid by the Maharana on the 21st of June last. It is built after the designs of Mr. C. Thompson, Executive Engineer of the State, and will be in the Hindu-Sar- acenic style ; having two fronts, west and north. In the former will be the principal entrance, approached by a flight of steps leading to a handsome porch of carved pillars supporting stone beams — the flat Hindu arch. To the left of the entrance hall will be a domed octagonal tower eighty feet high, holding the principal staircase leading to the upper rooms. A corridor on the right of the entrance will lead to the museum, and immediately behind the entrance hall is the reading-room, 42 by 24 feet, and beyond it the library and office. To the right of the reading- room will be an open courtyard with a fountain in the centre, and, beyond the courtyard, the museum — a great hall, one hundred feet long. Over the li- brary and the entrance hall will be private apartments for the Maharana, approached by a private staircase. The communication between the two upper rooms will be by a corridor running along the north front having a parapet of delicately cut pillars and cusped arches — the latter filled in with open tracery. Pity it is that the whole of this will have to be white- washed to protect the stone from the weather. Over 76 OtTT OF INDIA. the entrance-porch, and projecting from the upper room, will be a very elaborately cut balcony sup- ported on handsome brackets. Facing the main en- trance will be a marble statue, nine feet high, of the Queen, on a white marble pedestal ten feet high. The statue is now being made at home by Mr. Birch, i?. A. The cost of the whole will be about Rs. 80,000. Now, it is a curious thing that the statue of Her Majesty will be put some eighty feet below the level of the great bund that holds in the Pichola lake. But the bund is a firm one and has stood for many years. Another public building deserves notice, and that is the Walter Hospital for native women, the foun- dation-stone of which was laid by the Countess of Dufferin on that memorable occasion when the Vice- roy, behind Artillery Horses, covered the seventy miles from Chitor to Udaipur in under six hours. The building by the same brain that designed the hall, will be ready for occupation in a month. It is in strict keeping with the canons of Hindu archi- tecture externally, and has a high, well-ventilated waiting-room, out of which, to the right, are two wards for in-patients, and to the left a dispensary and consulting-room. Beyond these, again, is a third ward for in-patients. In a courtyard behind are a ward for low caste patients and the offices. When all these buildings are completed, Udaipur will be dowered with three good hospitals, including the State's and the Padre's, and a first instalment of civilization. The British civilization, by scientific legislation, SHOWING HOW TO SHOOT PIGS. Y7 by peace and order, by the recognition of property in land, by education in the widest sense, by works of material improvement, such as these hospitals, and by the introduction of western ideas, is fast affecting tlie mind of nearly all the nationalities now existing in the empire. CHAPTER IX. SHOWING HOW THE ENGLISHMAN TRIED TO SHOOT PIGS AND CAME UPON " BAGHEERA," THE PANTHER. Above the Durbar Gardens lie low hills, in which the Maharana keeps, very strictly guarded, his pig and his deer, and anything else that may find shelter in the low scrub or under the scattered boulders. These preserves are scientifically parcelled out with high, red-stone walls ; and, here and there, are dotted tiny shooting-boxes, in the first sense of the term — masonry sentry boxes, in which five or six men may sit at ease and shoot. It had been arranged to en- tertain the Englishmen who were gathered at the Residency to witness the investiture of the King with the G. C. S. I. — that there should be a little pig-drive in front of the Kala Odey or black shooting-box. The Rajput is a man and a brother, in respect that he will ride, shoot, eat pig, and drink strong waters like an Englishman. Of the pig-hunting he makes almost a religious duty, and of the wine-drinking no less. Read how desperately they used to ride in 78 OUT OF INDIA. Udaipur at the beginning of the century when Tod, always in his cocked hat to be sure, counted up the tale of accidents at tlie end of tlie day's sport. There is something unfair in shooting pig ; but each man who went out consoled himself with the thought that it was uttei'ly impossible to ride the brutes up the almost perpendicular hillsides, or down rocky ravines, and that he individually would only go *' just for the fun of the thing." Those who stayed behind made rude remarks on the subject of " pork butchers," and the dangers that attended shooting from a balcony. These were treated with a contempt they merited. There are ways and ways of slaying pig — from the orthodox method which begins with " The Boar — the Boar — the mighty Boar T^ overnight, and ends with a shaky bridle-hand next morn, to the sober and solitary pot-shot at dawn, from a railway embankment running through river marsh ; but the perfect way is this. Get a large, four-horse break, and drive till you meet an unlimited quantity of pad-elephants waiting at the foot of rich hill-preserves. Mount slowly and with dignity, and go in swinging procession, by the marble-faced bor- der of one of the most lovely lakes on earth. Strike off on a semi-road, semi-hill-torrent path through un- thrifty, thorny jungle, and so climb up and up and up, till you see, spread like a map below the lake and tlie Palace and the City, hemmed in by the sea of hills that lies between Udaipur and Mount Abu a hundred miles away. Then take your seat in a comfortable cliair, in a pukka, two-storied Grand Stand, with an awning spread atop to keep off the sun, while the SHOWING HOW TO SHOOT PIGS. 79 Rawat of Amet and the Prime Minister's heir — no less — invite you to take your choice of the many rifles spread on a ledge at the front of the building. This, gentlemen who screw your pet ponies at early dawn after the sounder that vanishes into cover soon as siglited, or painfully follow the tiger through the burning heats of Mewar in May, this is shooting after the fashion of Ouida — in musk and ambergris and patchouli. It is demoralizing. One of the best and hardest riders of the Lahore Tent Club in the old days, as the boars of Bouli Lena Singh knew well, said openly : '' This is a first-class bundobust^'' and fell to testing his triggers as though he had been a pot- hunter from his birth. Derision and threats of exposure moved him not. " Give me an arm-chair !" said he. " This is the proper way to deal with pig !" And he put up his feet on the ledge and stretched himself. There were many weapons to have choice among — > from the double-barrelled '500 Express, whose bullet is a tearing, rending sliell, to the Rawat of Amet's regulation military Martini-Henri. A profane public at the Residency had suggested clubs and saws as amply sufficient for the work in hand. Herein they were moved by envy, which passion was ten-fold increased when — but this comes later on. The beat was along a deep gorge in the liills, flanked on either crest by stone walls, manned with beaters. Imme- diately opposite the shooting-box, the wall on the upper or higlier hill made a sharp turn downhill, contracting the space through which the pig would 80 OUT OF INDIA. have to pass to a gut which was variously said to be from one hundred and fifty to four hundred yards across. Most of the shooting was up or downhill. A philanthropic desire to murder more Bhils than were absolutely necessary to maintain a healthy cur- rent of human life in the Hilly Tracts, coupled with a well-founded dread of the hinder, or horse, end of a double-barrelled '500 Express which would be sure to go off both barrels together, led the Englishman to take a gunless seat in the background ; while a silence fell upon the party, and very far away up the gorge the heated afternoon air was cut by the shrill tremolo squeal of the Bhil beaters. Now a man may be in no sort or fashion a shikari — may hold Budd- histic objections to the slaughter of living things — but there is something in the extraordinary noise of an agitated Bhil, which makes even the most peace- ful mortals get up and yearn, like Tartarin of Tares- con for '' lions," always at a safe distance be it under- stood. As the beat drew nearer, under the squealing ■ — the '' ul-al-lu-lu-lu " — was heard a long-drawn bit- tern-like boom of '' So-oor /" " So-oor r and the crash- ing of boulders. The guns rose in their places, forget- ting that each and all had merely come " to see the fun," and began to fumble among the little mounds of cartridges under the chairs. Presently, tripping delicately among the rocks, a pig stepped out of a cactus-bush, and the fusillade began. The dust flew and the branches cliipped, but the pig went on — a blue-grey shadow almost undistinguishable against the rocks, and took no harm. " Sighting shots," said the guns sulkily ; and tlie company mourned that the SHOWING HOW TO SHOOT PIGS. 81 brute had got away. The beat came nearer, and then the listener discovered what the bubbling scream was like ; for he forgot straightway about the beat and went back to the dusk of an Easter Monday in the Gardens of the Crystal Palace before the bom- bardment of Kars, "set piece ten thousand feet square," had been illuminated, and about five hun- dred 'Arries were tickling a thousand 'Arriets. Their giggling and nothing else was the noise of the Bhil. So curiously does Sydenham and Western Rajputana meet. Then came another pig, who was smitten to the death and rolled down among the bushes, draw- ing his last breath in a human and horrible manner. But full on the crest of the hill, blown along — there is no other word to describe it — like a ball of thistle-down, passed a brown shadow, and men cried : " Bagheera^' or " Panther !" according to their nationalities, and blazed. The shadow leaped the wall that had turned the pig downhill, and van- ished among the cactus. " Never mind," said the Prime Minister's son consolingly, *' we'll beat the other side of the hill afterwards and get him yet." *'Oh, he's a mile off by this time," said the guns ; but the Rawat of Amet, a magnificent young man, smiled a sweet smile and said nothing. More pig passed and were slain, and many more broke back through the beaters who presently came through the cover in scores. They were in russet green and red uniform, each man bearing a long spear, and the hill-side was turned on the instant to a camp of Robin Hood's foresters. Then they brought up the dead from behind bushes and under rocks — among 82 OUT OF INDIA. others a twenty-seven-inch brute who bore on his flank (all pigs shot in a beat are ex-officio boars) a hideous, half-healed scar, big as a man's hand, of a bullet wound. Express bullets are ghastly things in their effects, for, as the shikari is never tired of demonstrating, they kock the inside of animals into pulp. The second beat, of the reverse side of the hill, had barely begun when the panther returned — uneasily, as if something were keeping her back — much lower down the hill. Then the face of the Rawat of Amet changed, as he brought his gun up to his shoulder. Looking at him as he fired, one forgot all about the Mayo College at which he had been educated, and remembered only some trivial and out-of-date affairs, in which his forefathers had been concerned, when a bridegroom, with his bride at his side, charged down the slope of the Chitorroad and died among Akbar's men. There are stories connected with the house of Amet, which are told in Mewar to-day. The young man's face, for as 'short a time as it takes to pull trigger and see where the bullet falls, was a light upon all these tales. Then the mask shut down, as he clicked out the cartridge and, very sweetly, gave it as his opinion that some other gun, and not his own, had bagged the panther who lay shot through the spine, feebly trying to drag herself down-hill into cover. It is an awful thing to see a big beast die, when the soul is wrenched out of the struggling body in ten seconds. Wild horses shall not make the Englishman disclose the exact number of shots that were fired. It is SHOWING HOW TO SHOOT PIGS. 82 enough to say that four Engli&hmfcn, now scattered to the four winds of heaven, are each morally cer- tain that he and he alone shot that panther. In time when distance and Ihe mirage of the sands of Uodli- pur shall have '^.oftened the harsh outlines of truths the Englishrnan who did not fire a shot will come to believe that he was the real slayer, and will carefully elaborate that lie. A few minutes after the murder, a two-year olc? oub came trotting along the hill-side, and was bowled over by a very pretty shot behind the left ear and through the palate. Then the beaters' lances showed through the bushes, and the guns be- gan to realize that they had allowed to escape, or had driven back by their fire, a multitude of pigs. This ended the beat, and the procession returned to the Residency to heap dead panthers upon those who had called them "pork butchers," and to stir up the lake of envy with the torpedo of brilliant de- scription. The Englishman's attempt to compare the fusillade which greeted the panther to the con- tinuous drum.ming of a ten-barrelled Nordenfeldt was, however, coldly received. So harshly is truth treated all the world over. And then, after a little time, came the end, and a return to the road in search of new countries. But shortly before the departure, the Padre-Sahib, who knows every one in Udaipur, read a sermon in a sen- tence. The Maharana's investiture, which has al- ready been described in the Indian papers, had taken place, and the carriages, duly escorted by the Erin- pura Horse, were returning to the Residency. In a 84: OUT OF INDIA. niche of waste land, under the shadow of the main gate, a place strewn with rubbish and shards of pot- tery, a dilapidated old man was trying to control his horse and a hookah on the saddle-bow. The blun- dering garron had been made restive by the rush past, and the hookah all but fell from the hampered hands. " See that man," said the Padre tersely. ** That's Singh. He intrigued for the throne not so very long ago." It was a pitiful little picture, and needed no further comment. For the benefit of the loafer it should be noted that Udaipur will never be pleasant or' accessible until the present Mail Contractors have been hanged. They are extortionate and untruthful, and their one set of harness and one tonga are as rotten as pears. However, the weariness of the flesh must be great indeed, to make the wanderer blind to the beauties of a journey by clear starlight and in biting cold to Chitor. About six miles from Udaipur, the granite hills close in upon the road, and the air grows warmer until, with a rush and a rattle, the tonga swings through the great Dobarra, the gate in the double circle of hills round Udaipur on to the pas- tures of Mewar. More than once the Girwa has been a death-trap to those who rashly entered it ; and an army has been cut up on the borders of the Pichola lake. Even now the genius of the place is strong upon the hills, and as he felt the cold air from the open ground without the barrier, the Englishman found himself repeating the words of one of the Hat- marked tribe whose destiny kept him within the Do- barra. " You must have a shouk of some kind in THE ENGLISHMAN COMES tJPON CHITOE. 85 these parts or you'll die." Very lovely is Udaipur, and thrice pleasant are a few days spent within her gates, but . . . read what Tod said who stayed two years behind the Dobarra, and accepted the deserts of Marwar as a delightful change. It is good to be free, a wanderer upon the high- ways, knowing not what to-morrow will bring forth — whether the walled-in niceties of an English house- hold, rich in all that makes life fair and desirable, or a sleepless night in the society of a goods-curn- booking-office-^2/;;2-parcels-clerk, on fifteen rupees a month, who tells in stilted English the story of his official life, while the telegraph gibbers like a ma- niac once in an hour and then is dumb, and the pariah dogs fight and howl over the cotton-bales on the platform. Verily, there is no life like life on the road — when the skies are cool and all men are kind. CHAPTER X. THE ENGLISHMAN COMES UPON THE BLACK BULK OF CHITOR, AND LEARNS OF THE MAL-PRAC- TICES OF A SHE-ELEPHANT. There is a certain want of taste, an almost actual indecency, in seeing the sun rise on the earth. Until the heat-haze begins and the distances thicken, Nature is so very naked that the Actseon who has 86 OUT OF INDIA. surprised her dressing, blushes. Sunrise on the plains of Mewar is an especially brutal affair. The moon was burnt out and the air was bitterly cold, when the Englishman headed due east in his tonga, and the patient sowar behind nodded and yawned in the saddle. There was no warning of the day's advent. The horses were unharnessed, at one halting-stage, in the thick, soft shadows of night, and ere their successors had limped under the bar, a raw and cruel light was upon all things, so that the Englishman could see every rent seam in the rocks around — see " even to the uttermost farthing." A little further, and he came upon the black bulk of Chitor between him and the morning sun. It has already been said that the Fort resembles a man-of- war. Every distant view heightens this impression, for the swell of the sides follows the form of a ship, and the bastions on the south wall make the spon- sions in which the machine-guns are mounted. From bow to stern, the thing more than three miles long, is between three and five hundred feet high, and from one-half to one-quarter of a mile broad. Have patience, now, to listen to a rough history of Chitor. In the beginning, no one knows clearly who scarped the hill-sides of the hill rising out of the bare plain, and made of it a place of strength. It is written that, eleven and a half centuries ago, Bappa Rawul, the demi-god whose stature was twenty cubits, whose loin-cloth was five hundred feet long, and whose spear was beyond the power of mortal man to lift, took Chitor from " Man Singh, the Mori Prince," and THE ENGLISHMAN COMES UPON CHlTOR. 87 wrote the first chapter of the history of Mewar, which he received ready-made from Man Singh who, if the chronicles speak sooth, was his uncle. Many and very marvellous legends cluster round the name of Bappa Rawul ; and he is said to have ended his days far away from India, in Khorasan, where he married an unlimited number of the Daughters of Heth, and was the father of all the Nowshera Pathans. Some who have wandered, by the sign-posts of inscription, into the fogs of old time, aver that, two centuries be- fore Bappa Rawul took Chitor the Mori division of the Pramar Rajputs, who are tlie ruling family of Mewar, had found a hold in Bhilwar, and for four centuries before that time had ruled in Kathiawar ; and had royally sacked and slain, and been sacked and slain in turn. But these things are for the curi- ous and the scholar, and not for the reader who reads lightly. Nine princes succeeded Bappa, between 728 and 1068 A. D., and among these was one AUuji, who built a Jain tower upon the brow of the hill, for in those days, though the sun was worshipped, men were Jains. And here they lived and sallied into the plains, and fought and increased the borders of their kingdom, or were suddenly and stealthily murdered, or stood shoulder to shoulder against the incursions of the " Devil men " from the north. In 1150 A. D. was born Samar Singh, and he married into the family of Prithi Raj, the last Hindu Emperor of Delhi, who was at feud, in regard to a succession question, with the Prince of Kanauj. In the war that followed, Kanauj, being hard pressed by Prithi Raj, and Samar 88 OUT OF INDIA. Singh, called Shahabuddln Ghori to his aid. At first, Samar Singh and Prithi Raj broke the army of the Northern somewhere in the lower Punjab, but two years later Shahabuddin came again, and, after three days' fighting on the banks of the Kaggar, slew Samar Singh, captured and murdered Prithi Raj, and sacked Delhi and Amber, while Samar Singh's fav- orite queen became sati at Chitor. But another wife, a princess of Patun, kept her life, and when Shaha- buddin sent down Kutbuddin to waste her lands, led the Rajput army, in person, from Chitor, and de- feated Kutbuddin. Then followed confusion, through eleven turbulent reigns that the annalist has failed to unravel. Once in the years between 1193 and the opening of the fourteenth century, Chitor must have been taken by the Mussalman, for it is written that one prince " re- covered Chitor and made the name of Rana to be rec- ognized by all." Six princes were slain in battles against the Mussulman, in vain attempts to clear far away Gya from the presence of the infidel. Then Ala-ud-din Khilji, the Pathan Emperor, swept the country to the Dekkan. In those days, and these things are confusedly set down as having happened at the end of the thirteenth century, a relative of Rana Lakhsman Singh, the then Rana of Chitor, had married a Rajput princess of Ceylon — Pudmini, " And she was fairest of all flesh on earth." Her fame was sung through the land by the poets, and she became, in some sort, the Helen of Chitor. Ala-ud-din heard of her beauty and promptly besieged the Fort. When he found his enterprise too difficult, he prayed THU ENGLISHMAN COMES tJPON CHITOR. 89 that he might be permitted to see Pudmini's face in a mirror, and this wish, so says the tale, was granted. Knowing that the Rajput was a gentleman he entered Ciiitor almost unarmed, saw the face in the mirror, and was well treated ; the husband of the fair Pud- mini accompanying him, in return, to the camp at the foot of the hill. Like Raja Runjeet in the ballad the Rajput — "... trusted a Mussalman's word Wah ! Wah ! Trust a liar to lie. Out of his eyrie they tempted my bird, Fettered his wings that he could not fly." Pudmini's husband was caught, and Ala-ud-din de- manded Pudmini as the price of his return. The Rajputs here showed that they too could scheme, and sent, in great state, Pudmini's litter to the besiegers' entrenchments. But there was no Pudmini in the litter, and the following of handmaidens was a band of seven hundred armed men. Thus, in the confu- sion of a camp-fight, Pudmini's husband was rescued, and Ala-ud-din's soldiery followed hard on his heels to the gates of Chitor, where the best and bravest on the rock were killed before Ala-ud-din withdrew, only to return soon after and, with a doubled army, be- siege in earnest. His first attack men called the half-sack of Chitor, for, though he failed to win within the walls, he killed the flower of the Rajputs. The second attack ended in the first sack and the awful sati of the women on the rock. When everything was hopeless and the very terri- ble Goddes, who lives in the bowels of Chitor, had 90 OUT OF INDIA. spoken and claimed for death eleven out of the twelve of the Rana's sons, all who were young or fair women betook themselves to a great underground chamber, and the fires were lit and the entrance was walled up and they died. The Rajputs opened the gates and fought till they could fight no more, and Ala-ud-din the victorious entered a wasted and deso- lated city. He wrecked everything except only the palace of Pudmini and the old Jain tower before mentioned. That was all he could do, for there were few men alive of the defenders of Cliitor when the day was won, and the women were ashes in the under- ground palace. Ajai Singh, the one surviving son of Lakshman Singh, had at his father's insistence, escaped from Chitor to "carry on the line " when better days should come. He brought up Hamir, son of one of his elder brothers, to be a thorn in the side of the invader, and Hamir overthrew Maldeo, chief of Jhalore and vas- sal of Ala-ud-din, into whose hands Ala-ud-din had, not too generously, given what was left of Chitor. So the Sesodias came to their own again, and the successors of Hamir extended their kingdoms and rebuilt Chitor, as kings know how to rebuild cities in a land where human labor and life are cheaper than bread and water. For two centuries, saith Tod, Mewar flourished exceedingly and was the para- mount kingdom of all Rajasthan. Greatest of all the successors of Hamir, was Kumbha Rana who, when the Ghilzai dynasty was rotting away and Viceroys declared themselves kings, met, defeated, took captive and released without ransom, Mahmoud THE ENGLISHMAN COMES tJPON CHITOR. 91 of Malwa. Kumbha Rana built a Tower of Victory, nine stories high, to commemorate this and tlie other successes of his reign, and the tower stands to-day a mark for miles across the plains. Of this, more here- after. But the well-established kingdom weakened, and the rulers took favorites and disgusted their best supporters — after the immemorial custom of too prosperous rulers. Also they murdered one another. In 1535 A. D. Bahadur Shah, King of Gujarat, seeing the decay, and remembering how one of his pre- decessors, together with Mahmoud of Malwa, had been humbled by Mewar in years gone by, set out to take his revenge of Time and Mewar then ruled by Rana Bikrmajit, who had made a new capital at Deola. Bikrmajit did not stay to give battle in that place. His chiefs were out of hand, and Chitor was the heart and brain of Mewar ; so he marched thither, and the gods were against him. Bahadur Shah mined one of the Chitor bastions and wiped out in the explosion the Hara Prince of Boondee with five hundred followers. Jowahir Bae, Bikrmajit's mother, headed a sally from the walls and was slain. There were Frank gunners among Bahadur Shah's forces, and they hastened the end. The Rajputs made a second /ar sh^d, ingeniously ornamented with insecure kerosene lamps, and crammed with gharriwans, khit??iatgars, small store-keepers and the like. Never a sign of a European. Why ? *' Because if an Englishman messed about here, he'd get into trouble. Men don't come here unless they're drunk or have lost their way." The gharriwafis — they have the privilege of voting, have they not ? — look peaceful enough as they squat on tables or crowd by the doors to watch the nautch that is going forward. Five pitiful draggle- tails are huddled together on a bench under one of the lamps, while the sixth is squirming and shriek- ing before the impassive crowd. She sings of love as understood by the Oriental — the love that dries the heart and consumes the liver. In this place, the words that would look so well on paper^ have an evil and ghastly significance. The gharrnvans stare or sup tumblers and cups of a filthy decoction, and the kujichenee howls with renewed vigor in the pres- ence of the Police. Where the Dainty Iniquity was hung with gold and gems, she is trapped with pewter and glass ; and where there was heavy embroidery on the Fat Vice's dress, defaced, stamped tinsel faithfull}'- reduplicates the pattern on the tawdry robes of the kunchenee. So you see, if one cares to moralize, they are sisters of the same class. Two or three men, blessed with uneas}' consciences, have quietly slipped out of the coffee-shop into the THE GITY OF DREADFUL KIGHT. 253 mazes of the huts be3^ond. The Police laugh, and those nearest in the crowd laugh applausively, as in duty bound. Perhaps the rabbits grin uneasily when the ferret lands at the bottom of the burrow and begins to clear the warren, " The c/mndoo-shops shut up at six, so you'll have to see opium-smoking before dark some day. No, you won't, though." The detective nose sniffs, and the detective body makes for a half-opened door of a hut whence floats the fragrance of the black smoke. Those of the inhabitants who are able to stand promptly clear out — they have no love for the Police — and there remain only four men lying down and one standing up. This latter has a pet mongoose coiled round his neck. He speaks English fluentl3^ Yes, he has no fear. It was a private smoking party and — " No business to-night — show how you smoke opium." "Aha! You want to see. Very good, I show. Hiya ! you " — he kicks a man on the floor — "show how opium-smoking." The kickee grunts lazily and turns on his elbow. The mongoose, always keeping to the man's neck, erects every hair of its body like an angry cat, and chatters in its owner's ear. The lamp for the opium-pipe is the only one in the room, and lights a scene as wild as anything in the witches' revel ; the mongoose acting as the famil- iar spirit. A voice from the ground says, in tones of infinite weariness: "You take ajim, so" — a long, long pause, and another kick from the man possessed of the devil — the mongoose. " You take a^m .?" He takes a pellet of the black, treacly stuff on the end of a knitting-needle. "And light afini,'" He plunges 254 OUT OF INDIA. the pellet into the night-light, where it swells and fumes greasily. " And then you put it in your pipe." The smoking pellet is jammed into the tiny bowl of the thick, bamboo-stemmed pipe, and all speech ceases, except tiie unearthly noise of the mongoose. The man on the ground is sucking at his pipe, and when the smoking pellet hasceased to smoke will be half way to Nibhan. " Now you go," says the man with the mongoose. " I am going smoke." The hut door closes upon a red-lit view of huddled legs and bodies, and the man with the mongoose sinking, sink- ing on to his knees, his head bowed forward, and the little hairy devil chattering on the nape of his neck. After this the fetid night air seems almost cool, for the hut is as hot as a furnace. " See \h^ pukka chandu shops in full blast to-morrow. Now for Colootollah. Come through the huts. There is no decoration about this vice." The huts now gave place to houses very tall and spacious and very dark. But for the narrowness of the streets we might have stumbled upon Chouringhi in the dark. An hour and a half has passed, and up to this time we have not crossed our trail once. " You might knock about the city for a night and never cross the same line. Recollect Calcutta isn't one of your poky up-country cities of a lakh and a half of people." " How long does it take to know it then ?" " About a lifetime, and even then some of the streets puzzle you." " How much has the head of a ward to know ?" " Every house in his ward if he can, who owns it, what sort of character the inhabitants are, who are their friends, who go out THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT. 255 and in, who loaf about the place at night, and so on and so on." "And he knows all this by night as well as by day ?" " Of course. Why shouldn't he ?" " No reason in the world. Only it's pitchy black just now, and I'd like to see wliere this alley is going to end." " Round the corner beyond that dead wall. There's a lamp there. Then you'll be able to see," A shadow flits out of a gully and disappears. "Who's that?" "Sergeant of Police just to see where we're going in case of accidents." Another shadow staggers into the darkness. " Who's that .?" " Man from the fort or a sailor from the ships. I couldn't quite see." The Police open a shut door in a high wall, and stumble unceremoniously among a gang of women cooking their food. The floor is of beaten earth, the steps that lead into the upper stories are unspeakably grimy, and the heat is the heat of April. The women rise hastily, and the light of the bull's eye — for the Police have now lighted a lantern in regular " rounds of London " fashion — shows six bleared faces — one a half native half Chinese one, and the others Bengali. " There are no men here !" they cry. " The house is empty." Then they grin and jabber and cXiq-w pan and spit, and hurry up the steps into the darkness. A range of three big rooms has been knocked into one here, and there is some sort of arrangement of mats. But an average country-bred is more sumptuously accommodated in an Englishman's stable. A home horse would snort at the accommodation. " Nice sort of place, isn't it V say the Police, genially. " This is where the sailors get robbed and 256 OUT OF INDIA. drunk." *' They must be blind drunk before they come." " Na — Na ! Na sailor men ee — yah !" chorus the women, catching at the one word they understand. "Arlgone!" The Police take no notice, but tramp down the big room with the n>at loose- boxes. A woman is shivering in one of these. " Wiiat's the matter ?" " Fever. Seek. Vary, vary seek." She huddles herself into a heap on Xka. charpoy and groans. A tiny, pitch-black closet opens out of the long room, and into this the Police plunge. " Hullo ! What's here?" Down flashes the lantern, and a white hand with black nails comes out of the gloom. Somebody is asleep or drunk in the cot. The ring of lantern light travels slowly up and down the body' " A sailor from the ships. He's got his dungarees on. He'll be robbed before the morning most likely." The man is sleeping like a little child, both arms thrown over his head, and he is not unhandsome. He is shoeless, and there are huge holes in his stock- ings. He is a pure-blooded white, and carries the flush of innocent sleep on his cheeks. The light is turned off, and the Police depart; while the woman in the loose-box shivers, and moans tha^. she is '' seek ; vary, vary seek." It is not sur- prising. DEEPER AND DEEPER STILL. 267 CHAPTER VII. DEEPER AND DEEPER STILL. I built myself a lordly pleasure-house, Wherein at ease for aye to dwell ; I said : — " O Soul, make merry and carouse. Dear Soul — for all is well." — The Palace of ArL "And where next? I don't like Colootollah."" The Police and their charge are standing in the in- terminable waste of houses under the starlight. " To the lowest sink of all," say the Police after the manner of Virgil when he took the Italian with the indigestion to look at the frozen sinners. " And Where's that?" "Somewhere about here; but you wouldn't know if you were told." They lead and they lead and they lead, and they cease not from leading till they come to the last circle of the In- ferno — a long, long, winding, quiet road. " There you are ; you can see for yourself." But there is nothing to be seen. On one side are houses — gaunt and dark, naked and devoid of furni- ture ; on the other, low, mean stalls, lighted, and with shamelessly open doors, wherein women stand and lounge, and mutter and whisper one to another. There is a hush here, or at least the busy silence of an officer of counting-house in working hours. One look down the street is sufficient. Lead on, gentle- 258 OUT OF INDIA. men of the Calcutta Police. Let us escape from the lines of open doors, the flaring lamps within, the glimpses of the tawdry toilet-tables adorned with little plaster dogs, glass balls from Christmas-trees, and — for religion must not be despised though women be fallen — pictures of the saints and statu- ettes of the Virgin. The street is a long one, and other streets, full of the same pitiful wares, branch off from it. '^ Why are they so quiet ? Why don't they make a row and sing and shout, and so on ?" " Why should they, poor devils .?" say the Police, and fall to telling tales of horror, of women decoyed into palkis and shot into this trap. Then other tales that shat- ter one's belief in all things and folk of good repute. " How can you Police have faith in humanity ?" "That's because you're seeing it all in a lump for the first time, and it's not nice that way. Makes a man jump rather, doesn't it ? But, recollect, you've asked for the worst places, and you can't complain." "Who's complaining? Bring on your atrocities. Isn't that a European woman at that door ?" " Yes. Mrs. D , widow of a soldier, mother of seven children." " Nine, If you please, and good evening to you," shrills Mrs. D , leaning against the door- post, her arms folded on her bosom. She is a rather pretty, slightly-made Eurasian, and whatever shame she may have owned she has long since cast behind her. A shapeless Burmo-native trot, with high cheek- bones and moutli like a shark, calls Mrs. D "Mem-Sahib." The word jars unspeakably. Pier life is a matter between herself and her Maker, but DEEPER AND DEEPER STILL. 259 in that she — the widow of a soldier of the Queen — has stooped to this common foulness in the face of the city, she has offended against the white race. The Police fail to fall in with this righteous indig- nation. More. They laugh at it out of the wealth of their unholy knowledge. " You're from up-country, and of course you don't understand. There are any amount of that lot in the city." Then the secret of the insolence of Calcutta is made plain. Small won- der the natives fail to respect the Sahib, seeing what they see and knowing what they know. In tlie good old days, the honorable the directors deported him or her who misbehaved grossly, and the white man pre- served his izzat. He may have been a ruffian, but he was a ruffian on a large scale. He did not sink in the presence of the people. The natives are quite right to take the wall of the Sahib who has been at great pains to prove that he is of the same flesh and blood. All this time Mrs. D stands on the threshold of her room and looks upon the men with unabashed eyes. If the spirit of that English solidier, who married her long ago by the forms of the English Church, be now flitting bat-wise above the roofs, how singularly pleased and proud it must be ! Mrs. D is a lady with a story. She is not averse to telling it. '* What was — ahem — the case in which you were — er — hmn — concerned, Mrs. D ?" *' They said I'd poisoned my husband by putting something into his drinking water." This is interesting. How much modesty >^^j" this creature ? Let us see. "And — ah — did you .'" " 'Twasn't proved," says Mrs, 260 OUT OF INDIA. D with a laugh, a pleasant, lady-like laugh that does infinite credit to her education and upbring- ing. Worthy Mrs. D ! It would pay a novelist — a French one let us say — to pick you out of the stews and make you talk. The Police move forward, into a region of Mrs. D 's. This is horrible ; but they are used to it, and evidently consider indignation affectation. Everywhere are the empty houses, and the babbling women in print gowns. The clocks in the city are close upon midnight, but the Police show no signs of stopping. They plunge hither and thither, like wreckers into the surf ; and each plunge brings up a sample of misery, filth and woe. "Sheikh Babu was murdered just here," they say, pulling up in one of the most troublesome houses in the ward. It would never do to appear ignorant of the murder of Sheikh Babu. " I only wonder that more aren't killed." The houses with their break- neck staircases, their hundred corners, low roofs, hidden courtyards and winding passages, seem specially built for crime of every kind. A woman — Eurasian — rises to a sitting position on a board- charpoy and blinks sleepily at the Police. Then she throws herself down with a grunt. " What's the matter with you ?" " I live in Markiss Lane and "— this with intense gravity — ^' I'm so drunk." She has a rather striking gipsy-like face, but her language might be improved. " Come along," say the Police, *' we'll head back to Bentinck Street, and put you on the road to the Great pastern." They walk long and steadily, and DEEPER AND DEEPER STILL. 261 the talk falls on gambling hell. " You ought to see our men rush one of 'em. They like the work- natives of course. When we've marked a hell down, we post men at the entrances and carry it. Some- times the Chinese bite, but as a rule they fight fair. It's a pity we hadn't a hell to show you. Let's go in here — there may be something forward." " Here " appears to be in the heart of a Chinese quarter, for the pigtails — do they ever go to bed ? — are scuttling about the streets. '' Never go into a Chinese place alone,*' say the Police, and swing open a postern gate in a strong, green door. Two Chinamen appear. '' What are we going to see ?" '' Japanese gir — • No, we aren't, by Jove ! Catch that Chinaman, quicky The pigtail is trying to double back across a courtyard into an inner chamber ; but a large hand on his shoulder spins him round and puts him in rear of the line of advancing Englishmen, who are, be it observed, making a fair amount of noise with their boots. A second door is thrown open, and the vis- itors advance into a large, square room blazing with gas. Here thirteen pigtails, deaf and blind to the outer world, are bending over a table. The captured Chinaman dodges uneasily in the rear of the proces- sion. Five — ten — fifteen seconds pass, the English- men standing in the full light less than three paces from the absorbed gang who see nothing. Then burly Superintendent Lamb brings down his hand on his thigh with a crack like a pistol-shot and shouts : ** How do, John ?" Follows a frantic rush of scared Celestials, alm.ost tumbling over each other in their anxiety to get clear. Gudgeon before the rush of the 262 OUT OF INDIA.. pike are nothing to John Chinaman detected in the act of gambling. One pigtail scoops up a pile of copper money, another a chinaware soup-bowl, and only a little mound of accusing cowries remains on the white matting that covers the table. In less than half a minute two facts are forcibly brought home to the visitor. First, that a pigtail is largely composed of silk, and rasps the palm of the hand as it slides through ; and secondly, that the forearm of a China- man is surprisingly muscular and well-developed. " What's going to be done ?" " Nothing. They're only three of us, and all the ringleaders would get away. Look at the doors. We've got 'em safe any time we want to catch 'em, if this little visit doesn't make 'em shift their quarters. Hi ! John. No pid- gin to-night. Show how you makee play. That fat youngster there is our informer." Half the pigtails have fled into the darkness, but the remainder, assured and trebly assured that the Police really mean " no pidgin," return to the table and stand round while the croupier proceeds to man- ipulate the cowries, the little curved slip of bamboo and the soup-bowl. They never gamble, these inno- cents. They only come to look on, and smoke opium in the next room. Yet as the game progresses their eyes light up, and one by one they lose in to deposit their pice on odd oreven — the number of the cowries that are covered and left uncovered by the little soup- bowl. Mythan is the name of the amusement, and, whatever may be its demerits, it is clean. The Police look on while their charge plays and oots a parch- ment-skinned horror — one of Swift's Struldburgs, DEEPER AND DEEPER STILL. 263 Strayed from Laputa — of the enormous sum of two annas. The return of this wealth, doubled, sets the loser beating his forehead against the table from sheer gratitude. ^^ Most immoral game this. A man might drop five whole rupees, if he began playing at sun-down and kept it up all night. Don't j'^w ever play whist occasionally ?" " Now, we didn't bring you round to make fun of this department. A man can lose as much as ever he likes and he can fight as well, and if he loses all his money he steals to get more. A Chinaman is in- sane about gambling, and half his crime comes from it. It ^;2«j-/ be kept down." " And the other business. Any sort of supervision there ?" " No ; so long as they keep outside the penal code. Ask Dr. about that. It's outside our department. Here we are in Bentinck Street and you can be driven to the Great Eastern in a few minutes. Joss houses ? Oh, yes. If you want more horrors, Superintendent Lamb will take you round with him to-morrow after- noon at five. Report yourself at the Bow Bazar Thanna at five minutes to. Good-night." The Police depart, and in a few minutes the si- lent, well-ordered respectability of Old Council House Street, with the grim Free Kirk at the end of it, is reached. All good Calcutta has gone to bed, the last tram has passed, and the peace of the night is upon the world. Would it be wise and rational to climb the spire of that kirk, and shout after the fash- ion of the great Lion-slayer of Tarescon : " O true believers ! Decency is a fraud and a sham. There 264: OUT OF INDIA. is nothing clean or pure or wholesome under the stars, and we are all going to perdition together. Amen !" On second thoughts it would not ; for the spire is slippery, the night is hot, and the Police have been specially careful to warn their charge that he must not be carried away by the sight of horrors that cannot be written or hinted at. "Good-morning," says the Policeman tramping the pavement in front of the Great Eastern, and he nods his head pleasantly to show that he is the rep- resentative of Law and Peace and that the city of Calcutta is safe from itself for the present. CHAPTER VIIL CONCERNING LUCIA. " Was a woman such a woman — cheeks so round and lips so red ? On the neck the small head buoyant like the bell flower in its bed." Time must be filled in somehow till five this after- noon, when Superintendent Lamb will reveal more horrors. Why not, the trams aiding, go to the Old Park Street Cemetery ? It is presumption, of course, because none other than the great Sir W. W. Hunter once went there, and wove from his visit certain fascinating articles for the Englishmanj the memory CONCERNING LUCIA. 265 of which lingers even to this day, though they were written fully two years since. But the great Sir W. W. went in his Legislative Consular brougham and never in an unbridled tram- car which pulled up somewhere in the middle of Dhurrumtollah. '' You want go Park Street ? No trams going Park Street. You get out here." Cal- cutta tram conductors are not polite. Some day one of them will be hurt. The car shuffles unsympatheti- cally down the street, and the evicted is stranded in Dhurrumtollah, which may be the Hammersmith Highway of Calcutta. Providence arranged this mistake, and paved the way to a Great Discovery now published for the first time. Dhurrumtollah is full of the People of India, walking in family parties and groups and confidential couples. And the people of India are neither Hindu nor Mussulman — Jew, Ethiop, Gueber or expatriated British. They are the Eurasians, and there are hundreds and hun- dreds of them in Dhurrumtollah now. There is Papa with a shining black hat fit for a counsellor of the Queen, and Mamma, whose silken attire is tight upon her portly figure, and The Brood made up of straw-hatted, olive-cheeked, sharp-eyed little boys, and leggy maidens wearing white, open-work stock- ings calculated to show dust. There are the young men who smoke bad cigars and carry themselves lordily — such as have incomes. There are also the young women with the beautiful eyes and the won- derful dresses which always fit so badly across the shoulders. And they carry prayer-books or baskets, because they are either going to mass or the market. 266 OUT OF INDIA. Without doubt, these are the people of India. They were born in it, bred in it, and will die in it. The Englishman only comes to the country, and the natives of course were there from the first, but these people have been made here, and no one has done anything for them except talk and write about them. Yet they belong, some of them, to old and honorable families, hold '' houses, messuages, and tenements " in Sealdah, and are rich, a few of them. They all look prosperous and contented, and they chatter eternally in that curious dialect that no one has yet reduced to print. Beyond what little they please to reveal now and again in the newspapers, we know nothing about their life which touches so intimately the white on the one hand and the black on the other. It must be interesting — more interesting than the colorless Anglo-Indian article ; but who has treated of it ? There was one novel once in which the second heroine wa^ an Eurasienne. She was a strictly sub- ordinate character, and came to a sad end. The poet of the race, Henry Derozio — he of whom Mr. Thomas Edwards wrote a history — was bitten with Keats and Scott and Shelley, and overlooked in his search for material things that lay nearest to him. All this mass of humanity in DhurrumtoUah is unexploited and almost unknown. Wanted, there- fore, a writer from among the Eurasians, who shall write so that men shall be pleased to read a story of Eurasian life ; then outsiders will be interested in the People of India, and will admit that the race has possibilities. A futile attempt to get to Park Street from Dhur- CONCERNING LtJClA. ^6? rumtollah ends in the market — the Hogg Market men call it. Perhaps a knight of that name built it. It is not one-half as pretty as the Crawford Market, in Bombay but ... it appears to be the trysting place of Young Calcutta. The natural inclination of youth is to lie abed late, and to let the seniors do all the hard work. Why, therefore, should Pyramus who has to be ruling account forms at ten, and Thisbe, who cannot be interested in the price of second quality beef, wander, in studiously correct raiment, round and about the stalls before the sun is well clear of the earth ? Pyramus carries a walking stick with imitation silver straps upon it, and there are cloth tops to his boots ; but his collar has been two days worn. Thisbe crowns her dark head with a blue velvet Tam-o'-Shanter ; but one of her boots lacks a button, and there is a tear in the left-hand glove. Mamma, who despises gloves, is rapidly fill- ing a shallow basket, that the coolie-boy carries, with vegetables, potatoes, purple brinjals, and — Oh, Pryamus ! Do you ever kiss Thisbe when Mamma is not near ? — garlic — yea, lusson of the bazar. Mammals generous in her views on garlic. Pyramus comes round the corner of the stall looking for nobody in particular — not he — and is elaborately polite to Mamma. Somehow, h .- and Thisbe drift off together, and Mamma, very portly and very voluble, is left to chaffer and sort and select alone. In the name of the Sacred Unities do not, young people, retire to the meat-stalls to exchange confidences ! Come up to this end, where the roses are arriving in great flat baskets, where the air is heavy with the 268 OUT OF INDIA. fragrance of flowers, and the young buds and green- ery are littering all the floor. They won't — they prefer talking by the dead, unromantic muttons, where there are not so many buyers. How they babble ! There must have been a quarrel to make up. Thisbe shakes the blue velvet Tam-o'-Shanter and says : " O yess !" scornfully. Pyramus answers : " No-a, no-a. Do-ant say thatt." Mamma's bas- ket is full and she picks up Thisbe hastily. Pyramus departs. ^He never came here to do any marketing. He came to meet Thisbe, who in ten years will own a figure very much like Mamma's. Ma)^ their ways be smooth before them, and after honest ser- vice of the Government, may Pyramus retire on Rs. 250 per mensen, into a nice little house some- where in Monghyr or Chunar. From love by natural sequence to death. Where is the Park Street Cemetery ? A \\M's\^r&di gharriwans leap from their boxes and invade the market, and after a short struggle one of them uncarts his cap- ture in a burial-ground — a ghastly new place, close to a tramway. This is not what is wanted. The living dead are here — the people whose names are not yet altogether perished and whose tombstones are tended. ** Where are the ensin? I am his wife," a woman clamors, stamping her pevvter-ankleted feet. " He was killed in your service. Where is his pensin 2 I am his wife." " You lie ! You're his rukni. Keep quiet ! Go ! T\\q pensin comes to zis." The sister's brother-in-law is not a refined man, but the rukni is his match. They are silenced. The Sahib takes the report, and the body is borne away. Before to-morrow's sun rises the Sirdar may find himself a simple " surface-coolie," earning nine pice a day ; and, in a week some Sonthal woman behind the hills may discover that she is entitled to draw monthly great wealth from the coffers of the Sirkar, But this will not happen if the sister's brother-in-law can prevent it. He goes off swearing at the rukni. But, in the meantime, what have the rest of the dead man's gang been doing ? They have, if you please, abating not one stroke, dug out all the clay, and would have it verified. They have seen their comrade die. He is dead. Bus ! Will the Sirdar 330 OtJT OF INDIA. take the tale of clay ? And yet, were twenty men to be crushed by their own carelessness in the pit, these impassive workers would scatter like panic-stricken horses. But, turning from this sketch, let us set in order some of the stories of the pits. These are quaint tales. The miner-folk laugh when they tell them. In some of the mines the coal is blasted out by the dynamite which is fired by electricity from a battery on the surface. Two men place the charges, and then signal to be drawn up in the cage which hangs in the pit-eye. On one occasion two natives were entrusted with the job. They performed their parts beautifully till the end, when the vaster idiot of the two scrambled into the cage, gave signal, and was hauled up before his friend could enter. Thirty or forty yards up the shaft all possible dan- ger for those in the cage was over, and the charge was accordingly exploded. Then it occurred to the man in the cage that his friend stood a very good chance of being by this time riven to pieces and choked. But the friend was wise in his generation. He had missed the cage, but found a coal-tub — one of the little iron trucks — and turning this upside down, had crawled into it. His account of the explosion has never been published. When the charge went off, his shelter was battered in so much, that men had to hack him out, for the tub had made, as it were, a tinned sardine of its occupant. He was absolutely uninjured, but his feeling were lacerated. On reach- ing the pit-bank his first words were : " I do not THE fEEILS OE THE PITS. 33 1 desire to go down the pit with that man any more." His wish had been already gratified for " that man " had fled. Later on, the story goes, when *' that man " found that the guilt of murder was not at his door, he returned, and was made a surface-coolie, and his bhai-band jeered at him as they passed to their bet- ter-paid occupation. Occasionally there are mild cyclones in the pits. An old working, perhaps a mile away, will collapse : a whole gallery sinking in bodily. Then the displaced air rushes through the inhabited mine, and, to quote their own expression, blows the pitmen about " like dry leaves." Few things are more amusing than the spectacle of a burly Tyneside foreman who, failing to dodge round a corner in time, is **put down " by the wind, sitting fashion, on a knobby lump of coal. But most impressive of all is a tale they tell of a fire in a pit many years ago. The coal caught — light. They had to send earth and bricks down the shaft and build great dams across the galleries to choke the fire. Imagine the scene, a few hundred feet underground, with tlie air growing hotter and hotter each moment, and the carbonic acid gas trick- ling through the dams. After a time the rough dams gaped, and the gas poured in afresh, and the English- men went down and leeped the cracks between roof and dam-sill with anything they could get. Coolies fainted, and had to be taken away, but no one died, and behind the kutcha dams they built great masonry ones, and bested that fire ; though for a long time afterwards, whenever they pumped water into it, the 332 OrT OF INDIA. steam would puff out from crevices in the ground above. It is a queer life that they lead, these men of the coal-fields, and a "big" life to boot. To describe one-half of their labors would need a week at the least, and would be incomplete then. " If you wnnt to see anything," they say, " you should go over to the Baragunda copper-mines ; you should look at the Barakar ironworks ; you should see our boring oper- ations five miles away ; you should see how we sink pits; you should, above all, see Giridih Bazar on a Sunday. Why, you haven't seen anything. There's no end of a Sonthal Mission hereabouts. All the lit- tle dev — dears have gone on a picnic. Wait till they come back, and see 'em learning to learn." Alas ! one cannot wait. At the most one can but thrust an impertinent pen skin-deep into matters only properly understood by specialists. CHAPTER IV. IN AN OPIUM FACTORY. On the banks of the Ganges, forty miles below Benares as the crow flies, stands the Ghazipur Fac- tory, an opium mint as it were, whence issue the precious cakes that are to replenish the coffers of the Indian Government. The busy season is setting in, for with April the opium comes in from districts lif AN OPIUM FACTORY. 333 after having run the gauntlet of the district officers of the Opium Department, who will pass it as fit for use. Then the really serious work begins under a roasting sun. The opium arrives by c/ia/lans, regi- ments of one hundred jars, each holding one maund and each packed in a basket and sealed atop. The district officer submits forms — never was such a place for forms as the Ghazipur Factory — showing the quality and weight of eacli pot, and with the jars come a ziladar responsible for the safe carriage of the challans^ their delivery and their virginity. If any pots are broken or tampered with an unfortu- nate individual called the import officer, and appoint- ed to work like a horse from dawn till dewy eve, must examine the ziladar in charge of X.\\q challan and reduce his statement to writing. Fancy getting any native to explain how a inatka has been smashed. But the perfect flower is about as valuable as silver. Then all the pots have to be weighed, and the weights— Calcutta Mint, if you please — and the beams must be daily tested. The weight of each pot is recorded on the pot, in a book, and goodness knows where else, and everyone has to sign certifi- cates that the weighing is correct. Nota befie. The pots have been weighed once in the district and once in the factory. Therefore a certain number of them are taken at random and weighed afresh before they are opened. This is only the beginning of the long series of checks. All sorts of inquiries are made aboutlight pots, and then the testing begins. Every single, serially-numbered pot has to be tested for quality. A native called the purkhea drives his fist 334: OUT OF INDIA. into the opium, rubs and smells it, and calls out the class for the benefit of the opium examiner. A sample picked between finger and thumb is thrown into a jar, and if the opium examiner thinks the purkhea has said sooth, the class of the jar is marked in chalk, and everything is entered in a book. Every ten samples are put in a locked box with duplicated keys, and sent over to the laboratory for assay. With the tenth boxful — and this marks the end of the challan of a hundred jars — the Englishman in charge of the testing signs the test paper, and enters the name of the native tester and sends it over to the laboratory. For convenience sake, it may be as well to say that, unless distinctly stated to the contrary, every single thing in Ghazipur is locked, and every operation is conducted under more than police supervision. In the laboratory each set of ten samples is thor- oughly mixed by hand, a quarter ounce lump is then tested for starch adulteration by iodine which turns the decoction blue,, and, if necessary, for gum adul- teration by alcohol which makes the decoction filmy. If adulteration be shown, all the ten pots of that set are tested separately. When the sinful pot is dis- coverd, all the opium is tested in four-pound lumps. Over and above this test, three samples of one hun- dred grains each are taken from ih^ Jumfnakaroed SQt of ten samples, dried on a steam table and then weighed for consistence. The result is written down in a ten-columned form in the assay register, and by the mean result are those ten pots paid for. This, after everything has been done in duplicate and IN AN OPIUM FACTORY. 335 counter-signed, completes the test and assay. If a district officer has classed tlie opium in a glaringly- wrong way, he is thus caught and reminded of his error. No one trusts anyone in Ghazipur. They are always weighing, testing and assaying. Before the opium can be used it must be " alli- gated " in big vats. The pots are emptied into these, and special care is taken that none of the drug sticks to the hands of the coolies. Opium has a special knack of doing this, and therefore coolies are searched at most inopportune moments. There are a good many Mahomedans in Ghazipur, and they would all like a little opium. The pots after emptying are smashed up and scraped, and heaved down the steep river bank of the factory, where they help to keep the Ganges in its place, so many are they, and the little earthen bowls in which the opium cakes are made. People are forbidden to wander about the riverfront of the factory in search of remnants of opium on the strands. There are no remnants, but people will not credit this. After vatting, as has been said, the big vats, holding from one to three thousand maunds, are probed with test rods, and the samples are treated just like the samples of the challans^ everybody writ- ing everything in duplicate and signing it. Having secured the mean consistence of each vat, the requis- ite quantity of each blend — Calcutta Mint scales again, and an unlimited quantity of supervision — is weighed out, thrown into an alligation vat, of 250 maunds, and worked up by the feet of coolies, who hang on to ropes and drag their legs painfully 336 OUT OF INDIA. through the probe. Try to wade in mud of 70^ con- sistency, and see what it is like. This completes the working of the opium. It is now ready to be made into cakes after a final assay. Man has done notliing to improve it since it streaked the capsule of the poppy — this mysterious drug. Perhaps half a hundred sinners have tried to adulter- ate it and been paid out accordingly, but that has been the utmost. April, May and June are the months for receiving and manufacturing opium, and in the winter months comes the packing and the despatch. At the beginning of the cold weather Ghazipur holds locked up a trifle, say, of three and a half mil- lions sterling in opium. Now, there may be only a paltry three-quarters of a million on hand, and that is going out at the rate of one Viceroy's salary for two and a half years per diem. For such a flea-bite it seems absurd to prohibit smoking in the factory or to stud the place with tanks and steam fire- engines. Really, Ghazipur is unnecessarily timid. A long time ago some one threatened to cast down a tree sacred to Mahadeo. In a very few days, just as soon as Mahadeo got news of the insult, a fire broke out and damaged thousands of pounds' worth of opium. But all this time we have not gone through the factory. There are ranges and ranges of gigantic godowns, huge barns that can hold over half-a-mil- lion pounds* worth of opium. There are acres of bricked floor, regiments on regiments of chests ; and yet more godowns and more godowns, The heart of IN AN OPIUM FACTORY. 337 the whole is the laboratory which is full of the sick faint smell of a chandu-kh na. This makes Ghazipur indignant. "That's the smell of opium. We don't need chandu here. You don't know what real opium smells like. Chandu-khana indeed [ That's refined opium under treatment for morphia, and cocaine and perhaps narcoine.'^ " Very well, let's see some of the real opium made for the China market." "We shan't be making any for another six weeks at ear- liest ; but we can show you one cake made, and you must imagine two hundred and fifty men making 'em as hard as they can up to one every four minutes." A Sirdar of cake-makers is called, and appears with a miniature dhobts washing board on which he sits, a little square box of dark wood, a tin cup, an earthen bowl, and a mass of poppy petal chupattis. A larger earthen bowl holds a mass of what looks like bad Cape tobacco. " What's that ?" " Trash — dried pop- py leaves, not petals, broken up and used for packing cakes in. You'll see presently." The cake-maker sits down and receives a lump of opium, weighed out, of one seer seven chittacks and a half, neither more nor less. " That's pure opium of seventy con- sistence." Every allowance is weighed. " What are they weighing that brown water for ?" '' That's lewO' — thin opium at fifty consistence. It's the paste. He gets four chittacks and a half." " And do they weigh the chupattis .?" " Of course. Five chittacks of chupattis — about sixteen chupattis of all three kinds." This is overwhelming. This sirdar takes a brass hemispherical cup and wets it with a rag. Then he tears a chupatti across so that it fits into the 338 OUT OF INDIA. cup without a wrinkle, and pastes it with the thin opium, the lewa. After this his actions become in- comprehensible, but there is evidently a deep method in them. Chupatti after chupatti is torn across, dressed with leiva and pressed down into the cup, the fringes hanging over the edge of the bowl. He takes half chupattis and fixes them skilfully, picking now first- class and now second-class ones. Everything is gummed into everything else with the lewa^ and he presses all down by twisting his wrists inside the bowl. " He is making \X\Qgattia now." Gattia means a tight coat at any rate, so there is some ray of en- lightenment. Torn chupatti follows torn chupatti^ till the bowl is lined half-an-inch deep with them, and they all glisten with the greasy lewa. He now takes up an ungummed chupatti and fits in carefully all round. The opium is dropped tenderly upon this, and a curious washing motion of the hand follows. The opium is drawn up into a cone as one by one the j/>^(a!r picks up the overlapping portions of \.\\& chu- fattis that hung outside the bowl and plasters them against the drug. He makes a clever waist-belt while he keeps all the flags in place, and so strength- ens the midriff of the lump. He tucks in the top of the cone with his thumbs, brings the fringe oi chupattis over to close the opening, and pastes fresh leaves upon all. The cone has now taken a spherical shape, and he gives it the finishing touch by gumming a large chupatti, one of the " moon " kind, set aside from the first, on the top, so deftly that no wrinkle is visible. The cake is now complete, and all the Celestials of the middle kingdom shall not be able to IN AN OPIUM FACTORY. 339 disprove that it weighs two seers one and three-quar- ter chittacks, with a play of half a chittack for the personal equation. The Sirdar takes it up and rubs it in the bran-like poppy trash in the big bowl, so that two-thirds of it are powdered with the trash and one-third is fair and shiny chupatti. " That is the difference between a Ghazipur and a Patna cake. Our cakes have always an unpowdered head. The Patna ones are rolled in trash all over. You can tell them anywhere by that mark. Now we'll cut this one open and you can see how a section looks." One half of an inch as nearly as may be is the thickness of the chupatti shell all round the cake, and even in this short time so firmly has the lewa set that any attempt at sundering the skins of chupatti is followed by the rending of the poppy petals that compose the chupatti. ** You've seen in detail what a cake is made of — that is to say, pure opium 70 consistence, poppy-petal pancakes, kway of S2'5o consistence, and a powdering of poppy- trash." " But why are you so particular about the shell ?" " Because of the China market. The China- man likes every inch of the stuff we send him, and uses it. He boils the shell and gets out every grain of the /^«/^used to gum it together. He smokes that after he has dried it. Roughly speaking, the value of the cake we've just cut open is two pound ten. All the time it is in our hands we have to look after it and check it, and treat it as though it were gold. It mustn't have too much moisture in it, or it will swell and crack, and if it is too dry John China- man won't have it. He values his opium for quali- 340 OUT OF INDIA. ties just the opposite of those in Smyrna opium. Smyrna opium gives as much as ten per cent, of morphia, and is nearly solid — 90 consistence. Our opium does not give more than three or three and a half per cent, of morphia on the average, and, as you know it is only 70 or in Patna 75 consistence. That is the drug the Chinaman likes. He can get the maximum of extract out of it by soaking it in hot water, and he likes the flavor. He knows it is absolutely pure too, and it comes to him in good con- dition." " But has nobody found out any patent way of making these cakes and putting skins on them by machinery ?" Not yet. Poppy to poppy. There's nothing better. Here are a couple of cakes made in 1849, when they tried experiments in wrap- ping them in paper and cloth. You can see that they are beautifully wrapped and sewn like cricket balls, but it would take about half-an-hour to make such cakes, and we could not be sure of keeping the aroma in them. Nothing like poppy plant for poppy drug." And this is the way the drug, which yields such a splendid income to the Indian Government, is pre- pared. To tell how it is thereafter kept in store, packed for export, put upon the market at certain fixed periods, and shipped away, for John Chinaman's consumption chiefly, would be a tame story. The interest lies in the actual manufacture and manipu- lation of the cakes, and we have seen how this is done in the busy factory at Ghazipur. C^' THE END, ^. -'tfj .>^ .S^ <^. aV ^ K^ ^ i/^^ ^ ^ .0 ^ ^.^-^ .\ a^ S^. -x ^^^' ,i^ ^ '^.< o 0^ ^. '■ ** ,0C .V ,r> '^OO ^^. * M ^ .^^ U; ^X o ^; -^