From Sea to Sea; Letters of Travel
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Title: From Sea to Sea; Letters of Travel
Author: Rudyard Kipling
Release date: June 25, 2010 [eBook #32977]
Most recently updated: January 6, 2021
Language: English
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Transcriber's Notes
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FROM SEA TO SEA
From Sea to Sea
Letters of Travel
By Rudyard Kipling
COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1913
Copyright, 1899, 1907,
By RUDYARD KIPLING.
PREFACE
In these two volumes I have got together the bulk of the special
correspondence and occasional articles written by me for the _Civil and
Military Gazette_ and the _Pioneer_ between 1887-1889. I have been
forced to this action by the enterprise of various publishers who, not
content with disinterring old newspaper work from the decent seclusion
of the office files, have in several instances seen fit to embellish it
with additions and interpolations.
RUDYARD KIPLING.
CONTENTS OF PART I
LETTERS OF MARQUE
I PAGE
Of the Beginning of Things. Of the Taj and the
Globe-trotter. The Young Man from Manchester and Certain
Moral Reflections 3
II
Shows the Charm of Rajputana and of Jeypore, the City of
the Globe-trotter. Of its Founder and its Embellishment.
Explains the Use and Destiny of the Stud-bred, and fails
to explain Many More Important Matters 10
III
Does not in Any Sort describe the Dead City of Amber, but
gives Detailed Information about a Cotton-Press 18
IV
The Temple of Mahadeo and the Manners of Such as see
India. The Man by the Water-troughs and his Knowledge. The
Voice of the City and what it said. Personalities and the
Hospital. The House Beautiful of Jeypore and its Builders 25
V
Of the Sordidness of the Supreme Government on the Revenue
Side; and of the Palace of Jeypore. A Great King's
Pleasure-house, and the Work of the Servants of State 33
VI
Showing how her Majesty's Mails went to Udaipur and fell
out by the Way 41
VII
Touching the Children of the Sun and their City, and the
Hat-marked Caste and their Merits, and a Good Man's Works
In the Wilderness 50
VIII
Divers Passages of Speech and Action whence the Nature,
Arts, and Disposition of the King and his Subjects may be
observed 62
IX
Of the Pig-drive which was a Panther-killing, and of the
Departure to Chitor 70
X
A Little of the History of Chitor, and the Malpractices of
a She-elephant 78
XI
Proves conclusively the Existence of the Dark Tower
visited by Childe Rolande, and of "Bogey" who frightens
Children 88
XII
Contains the History of the Bhumia of Jhaswara, and the
Record of a Visit to the House of Strange Stories.
Demonstrates the Felicity of Loaferdom, which is the
Veritable Companionship of the Indian Empire, and proposes
a Scheme for the Better Officering of Two Departments 100
XIII
A King's House and Country. Further Consideration of the
Hat-marked Caste 113
XIV
Among the Houyhnhnms 124
XV
Treats of the Startling Effect of a Reduction in Wages and
the Pleasures of Loaferdom. Paints the State of the Boondi
Road and the Treachery of Ganesh of Situr 134
XVI
The Comedy of Errors and the Exploitation of Boondi. The
Castaway of the Dispensary and the Children of the
Schools. A Consideration of the Shields of Rajasthan and
Other Trifles 144
XVII
Shows that there may be Poetry in a Bank, and attempts to
show the Wonders of the Palace of Boondi 158
XVIII
Of the Uncivilised Night and the Departure to Things
Civilised. Showing how a Friend may keep an Appointment
too well 171
XIX
Comes back to the Railway, after Reflections on the
Management of the Empire; and so Home again, with Apology
to All who have read thus far 180
FROM SEA TO SEA
I
Of Freedom and the Necessity of using her. The Motive and
the Scheme that will come to Nothing. A Disquisition upon
the Otherness of Things and the Torments of the Damned 193
II
The River of the Lost Footsteps and the Golden Mystery
upon its Banks. The Iniquity of Jordan. Shows how a Man
may go to the Shway Dagon Pagoda and see it not and to
the Pegu Club and hear too much. A Dissertation on Mixed
Drinks 202
III
The City of Elephants which is governed by the Great God
of Idleness, who lives on the Top of a Hill. The History
of Three Great Discoveries and the Naughty Children of
Iquique 214
IV
Showing how I came to Palmiste Island and the Place of
Paul and Virginia, and fell Asleep in a Garden. A
Disquisition on the Folly of Sight-seeing 223
V
Of the Threshold of the Far East and the Dwellers thereon.
A Dissertation upon the Use of the British Lion 233
VI
Of the Well-dressed Islanders of Singapur and their
Diversions; proving that All Stations are exactly Alike.
Shows how One Chicago Jew and an American Child can poison
the Purest Mind 240
VII
Shows how I arrived in China and saw entirely through the
Great Wall and out upon the Other Side 247
VIII
Of Jenny and her Friends. Showing how a Man may go to see
Life and meet Death there. Of the Felicity of Life and the
Happiness of Corinthian Kate. The Woman and the Cholera 259
IX
Some Talk with a Taipan and a General: proves in what
Manner a Sea Picnic may be a Success 268
X
Shows how I came to Goblin Market and took a Scunner at it
and cursed the Chinese People. Shows further how I
initiated all Hong-Kong into our Fraternity 281
XI
Of Japan at Ten Hours' Sight, containing a Complete
Account of the Manners and Customs of its People, a
History of its Constitution, Products, Art, and
Civilisation, and omitting a Tiffin in a Tea-house with
O-Toyo 291
XII
A Further Consideration of Japan. The Inland Sea and Good
Cookery. The Mystery of Passports and Consulates and
Certain Other Matters 305
XIII
The Japanese Theatre and the Story of the Thunder Cat.
Treating also of the Quiet Places and the Dead Man in the
Street 313
XIV
Explains in what Manner I was taken to Venice in the Rain
and climbed into a Devil Fort; a Tin-pot Exhibition and a
Bath. Of the Maiden and the Boltless Door, the Cultivator
and his Fields, and the Manufacture of Ethnological
Theories at Railroad Speed. Ends with Kioto 323
XV
Kioto, and how I fell in Love with the Chief Belle there
after I had conferred with Certain China Merchants who
trafficked in Tea. Shows further how, in a Great Temple, I
broke the Tenth Commandment in Fifty-three Places and
bowed down before Kano and a Carpenter. Takes me to
Arashima 337
XVI
The Party in the Parlour who played Games. A Complete
History of All Modern Japanese Art; a Survey of the Past
and a Prophecy of the Future, arranged and composed in the
Kioto Factories 352
XVII
Of the Nature of the Tokaido and Japanese Railway
Construction. One Traveller explains the Life of the
Sahib-Log, and Another the Origin of Dice. Of the Babies
in the Bath Tub and the Man in D. T. 363
XVIII
Concerning a Hot-water Tap, and Some General Conversation 375
XIX
The Legend of Nikko Ford and the Story of the Avoidance of
Misfortune 386
XX
Shows how I grossly libelled the Japanese Army, and edited
a Civil and Military Gazette which is not in the least
Trustworthy 396
XXI
Shows the Similarity between the Babu and the Japanese.
Contains the Earnest Outcry of an Unbeliever. The
Explanation of Mr. Smith of California and Elsewhere.
Takes me on Board Ship after Due Warning to those who
follow 411
XXII
Shows how I came to America before My Time and was much
shaken in Body and Soul 423
XXIII
How I got to San Francisco and took Tea with the Natives
there 436
XXIV
Shows how through Folly I assisted at a Murder and was
Afraid. The Rule of the Democracy and the Despotism of the
Alien 451
CONTENTS OF PART II
FROM SEA TO SEA
XXV PAGE
Tells how I dropped into Politics and the Tenderer
Sentiments. Contains a Moral Treatise on American Maidens
and an Ethnological One on the Negro. Ends with a Banquet
and a Type-writer 3
XXVI
Takes me through Bret Harte's Country and to Portland with
"Old Man California." Explains how Two Vagabonds became
Homesick through looking at Other People's Houses 18
XXVII
Shows how I caught Salmon in the Clackamas 33
XXVIII
Takes me from Vancouver to the Yellowstone National Park 50
XXIX
Shows how Yankee Jim introduced me to Diana of the
Crossways on the Banks of the Yellowstone and how a German
Jew said I was no True Citizen. Ends with the Celebration
of the 4th of July and a Few Lessons therefrom 62
XXX
Shows how I entered Mazanderan of the Persians and saw
Devils of Every Colour, and Some Troopers. Hell and the
Old Lady from Chicago. The Captain and the Lieutenant 73
XXXI
Ends with the Cañon of the Yellowstone. The Maiden from
New Hampshire--Larry--"Wrap-up-his-Tail"--Tom--The Old
Lady from Chicago--and a Few Natural Phenomena--including
One Briton 88
XXXII
Of the American Army and the City of the Saints. The
Temple, the Book of Mormon, and the Girl from Dorset. An
Oriental Consideration of Polygamy 106
XXXIII
How I met Certain People of Importance between Salt Lake
and Omaha 120
XXXIV
Across the Great Divide; and how the Man Gring showed me
the Garments of the Ellewomen 130
XXXV
How I struck Chicago, and how Chicago struck me. Of
Religion, Politics, and Pig-sticking, and the Incarnation
of the City among Shambles 139
XXXVI
How I found Peace at Musquash on the Monongahela 154
XXXVII
An Interview with Mark Twain 167
THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT
I
A Real Live City 185
II
The Reflections of a Savage 191
III
The Council of the Gods 199
IV
On the Banks of the Hugli 208
V
With the Calcutta Police 217
VI
The City of Dreadful Night 223
VII
Deeper and Deeper Still 233
VIII
Concerning Lucia 240
AMONG THE RAILWAY FOLK
I
A Railway Settlement 249
II
The Shops 257
III
Vulcan's Forge 266
THE GIRIDIH COAL-FIELDS
I
On the Surface 275
II
In the Depths 284
III
The Perils of the Pits 291
PART I
LETTERS OF MARQUE
LETTERS OF MARQUE
I
OF THE BEGINNING OF THINGS. OF THE TAJ AND THE GLOBE-TROTTER. THE YOUNG
MAN FROM MANCHESTER AND CERTAIN MORAL REFLECTIONS.
NOV.-DEC., 1887
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 Rimmon--be it office or
cutchery--and to go abroad under no more exacting master than personal
inclination, and with no more definite plan of travel than has the
horse, escaped from pasture, free upon the countryside. The first result
of such freedom is extreme bewilderment, and the second reduces the
freed to a state of mind which, for his sins, must be the normal portion
of the Globe-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 Englishman has come by sea and rail
_via_ America, Japan, Singapur, and Ceylon, to India, he can--these eyes
have seen him do so--master in five minutes 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 itself with following 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 his _pagri_ tail-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 Jeypore, and here the limits of our wisdom are
set. We do not, to quote the Calcutta shopkeeper, come out "for the good
of our 'ealth," and what touring we accomplish is for the most part off
the line of rail.
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 inconvenience--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-Commissioners, 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 neighbours. 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 the morning.
There is a story of a Frenchman who feared not God, nor regarded man,
sailing to Egypt for the express purpose of scoffing at the Pyramids
and--though this is hard to believe--at the great Napoleon 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, sulky with want of sleep, heavy-eyed, unwashed, and
chilled, to come upon it suddenly. Under these circumstances everything,
you will concede, is in favour 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 Splendour 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 the 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 gleaming halls of dawn" that Tennyson sings of; it
was veritably the "aspiration fixed," the "sigh made stone" of a lesser
poet; and, over and above concrete comparisons, it seemed the embodiment
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 interpretation of the sight. It is certain
that no man can in cold blood and colder ink set down his impressions if
he has been in the least moved.
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 flushed 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 be 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 through 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 the tune of" a certain number of rupees duly
set forth, and he had purchased jewellery to another tune. These were
gifts for friends at home, and he considered them "very Eastern." If
silver filigree 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 Manchester 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 communicative 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 it's just the same with bullocks." The
spurs of the Aravalis, under which the train was running, had evidently
suggested this brilliant idea which passed uncontradicted, for the
Englishman was looking out of the window.
If one were bold enough to generalise 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 visitors. Even the Young Man from Manchester could evolve a
complete idea for the training of well-bullocks 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
consideration 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 bungaloathsome hotel,
watched his departure regretfully; for he knew exactly to what sort of
genial, cheery British household, 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."
II
SHOWS THE CHARM OF RAJPUTANA AND OF JEYPORE, THE CITY OF THE
GLOBE-TROTTER. OF ITS FOUNDER AND ITS EMBELLISHMENT. EXPLAINS THE USE
AND DESTINY OF THE STUD-BRED, AND FAILS TO EXPLAIN MANY MORE IMPORTANT
MATTERS.
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
tangled 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 labours 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 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.
Dhola Rae was killed in due time, and for nine hundred years Jeypore,
torn by the intrigues of unruly princes and princelings, fought
Asiatically.
When and how Jeypore became a feudatory of British power and in what
manner we put a slur upon Rajput honour--punctilious as the honour 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 Northwest 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
descriptions 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 over, turned to literature; he intrigued
desperately and successfully, but found time to gain a deep insight
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 was built
before--with huge streets straight as an arrow, sixty yards broad, and
cross-streets broad and straight. Many years afterward 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 overlooking 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 Mahometan calendar; he piled up a
superb library and he made Jeypore a marvel.
Later on came a successor, educated and enlightened by all the lamps of
British Progress, and converted the city of Jey Singh into a surprise--a
big, bewildering, practical joke. He laid down sumptuous _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 standpipes. He built gas works, set afoot 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 their 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 sullenly old, stand
cheek-by-jowl in startling contrast. Thus, the Sacred Bull of Shira
trips over the rails of a steel tramway which brings out the city
rubbish; the lacquered and painted cart behind the two little stag-like
trotting bullocks catches its primitive wheels in the cast-iron gas-lamp
post with the brass nozzle atop, and all Rajputana, gayly clad,
small-turbaned swaggering Rajputana, circulates along the magnificent
pavements.
The fortress-crowned hills look down upon the strange medley. One of
them bears on its flank in huge white letters the cheery inscription,
"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, demoralises 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 possible to see
everything, but for the incurious who object to being driven through
their sights, a journey down any one of the great main streets is a
day's delightful occupation. The view is as unobstructed as that of the
Champs Élysées; 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 neither
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 trooper in the Maharaja's army. He explained that his
pay was six rupees a month paid bimonthly. He had to pay the cost of his
khaki blouse, brown-leather accoutrements, and jack-boots; lance,
saddle, sword, and horse were given free. He refused to tell 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 Highness's army could ride. A clumsy
attempt at a compliment so fired his martial blood that he climbed into
his saddle, and then and there insisted on showing off his horsemanship.
The road was narrow, the lance was long, and the horse 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 forelegs did not belong to these stony districts.
"Where did he come from?" The sowar pointed northward and said, "from
Amritsar," but he pronounced it "Armtzar." Many horses had been bought
at the spring fairs in the Punjab; they cost about two hundred rupees
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 Government 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 Englishman look at his mount;
bought, of course, when a colt. 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 wondering whether the Sirkar's "big horses" were
meant to get mounts for Rajput sowars. The Maharaja'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 exercising, 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 forgetting a horse
they have once seen, and of knowing the produce of every stallion they
have met. The Englishman would have given something for their company at
that hour. His knowledge of horse-flesh 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[1] of gram and one of sugar 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 stud-bred horses in the Punjab. The
attendants appeared to take a wicked delight in saying "eshtud-bred"[2]
very loudly and with unnecessary emphasis as they threw back the
loin-cloth. Sometimes they were wrong, but in too many cases they were
right.
[1] A seer is about two pounds.
[2] Stud-bred, _i.e._ bred at the Indian Government studs.
The Englishman left the stables and the great central maidan, where a
nervous Biluchi was being taught, by a perfect network of ropes, to
"monkey-jump," and went out into the streets reflecting on the working
of horse-breeding operations under the Government of India, and the
advantages of having unlimited money wherewith to profit by other
people's mistakes.
Then, as happened to the great Tartarin of Tarescon, 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 feelings. Two or three of the six great
brutes are magnificent. 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 with his paw, and the dog fled howling
with fear. When he returned, he brought two friends with him, and the
three mocked the captive from a distance.
It was not a pleasant sight and suggested Globe-trotters--gentlemen who
imagine that "more curricles" should come at their bidding, and on being
undeceived become abusive.
III
DOES NOT IN ANY SORT DESCRIBE THE DEAD CITY OF AMBER, BUT GIVES DETAILED
INFORMATION ABOUT A COTTON-PRESS.
And what shall be said of Amber, Queen of the Pass--the city that Jey
Singh bade his people slough as snakes cast their skins? The
Globe-trotter will assure you that it must be "done" before anything
else, and the Globe-trotter is, for once, perfectly correct. Amber lies
between six and seven miles from Jeypore among the "tumbled fragments of
the hills," and is reachable by so prosaic a conveyance as a
_ticca-ghari_, and so uncomfortable a one as an elephant. _He_ is
provided by the Maharaja, and the people who make India their prey, are
apt to accept his services as a matter of course.
Rise very early in the morning, before the stars have gone out, and
drive through the sleeping city till the pavement gives place to cactus
and sand, and educational and enlightened institutions to mile upon mile
of semi-decayed Hindu temples--brown and weather-beaten--running down to
the shores of the great Man Sagar Lake, wherein are more ruined temples,
palaces, and fragments of causeways. The water-birds have their home in
the half-submerged arcades and the crocodile nuzzles the shafts of the
pillars. It is a fitting prelude to the desolation of Amber. Beyond the
Man Sagar the road of to-day climbs up-hill, and by its side runs the
huge stone causeway of yesterday--blocks sunk in concrete. Down this
path the swords of Amber went out to kill. A triple wall rings the city,
and, at the third gate, the road drops into the valley of Amber. In the
half light of dawn, a great city sunk between hills and built round
three sides of a lake is dimly visible, and one waits to catch the hum
that should 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 beggars
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 upon
and split the walls, the windows are filled with brushwood, and the
cactus chokes the street. The Englishman made his way up the side of the
hill to the great palace that overlooks everything except the red fort
of Jeighur, guardian of Amber. As the elephant swung up the steep roads
paved with stone and built out on the sides of the hill, he looked into
empty houses where the little grey squirrel sat and scratched its ears.
The peacock walked on the house-tops, and the blue pigeon roosted
within. He passed under iron-studded gates whose hinges were eaten out
with rust, and by walls plumed and crowned with grass, and under more
gate-ways, till, at last, he reached the palace and came suddenly into a
great quadrangle where two blinded, arrogant stallions, covered with red
and gold trappings, screamed and neighed at each other from opposite
ends of the vast space. For a little time these were the only visible
living beings, and they were in perfect accord with the spirit of the
spot. Afterwards certain workmen appeared; for it seems that the
Maharaja keeps the old palace of his forefathers in good repair, but
they were modern and mercenary, and with great difficulty were detached
from the skirts of the traveller. A somewhat extensive experience of
palace-seeing had taught him that it is best to see palaces alone, for
the Oriental as a guide is undiscriminating and sets too great a store
on corrugated iron roofs and glazed drain-pipes.
So the Englishman went into this palace built of stone, bedded on stone,
springing out of scarped rock, and reached by stone ways--nothing but
stone. Presently, he stumbled across a little temple of Kali, a gem of
marble tracery and inlay, very dark and, at that hour of the morning,
very cold.
If, as Viollet-le-Duc tells us to believe, a building reflects the
character of its inhabitants, it must be impossible for one reared in an
Eastern palace to think straightly or speak freely or--but here the
annals of Rajputana contradict the theory--to act openly. The cramped
and darkened rooms, the narrow smooth-walled passages with recesses
where a man might wait for his enemy unseen, the maze of ascending and
descending stairs leading 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 everywhere, and
that he is followed by scores of unseen eyes, the impression is almost
unendurable. In a dead palace--a cemetery of loves and hatreds done with
hundreds of years ago, and of plottings that had for their end, though
the greybeards who plotted knew it not, the coming of the British
tourist with guide-book and sun-hat--oppression gives place to simply
impertinent curiosity. The Englishman wandered into all parts of the
palace, for there was no one to stop him--not even the ghosts of the
dead Queens--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 Singh's
library ever set her dainty feet in the trim garden of the Hall of
Pleasure beyond the screen-work? Was it in the forty-pillared Hall of
Audience that the order went forth that the Chief of Birjooghar was to
be slain, and from what wall did the King look out when the horsemen
clattered up the steep stone path to the palace, bearing on their
saddle-bows the heads of the bravest of Rajore? There were questions
innumerable to be asked in each court and keep and cell; but the only
answer was the cooing of the pigeons.
If a man desired beauty, there was enough and to spare in the palace;
and of strength more than enough. With inlay and carved marble, with
glass and colour, the Kings who took their pleasure in that now desolate
pile, made all that their eyes rested upon royal and superb. But any
description of the artistic side of the palace, if it were not
impossible, would be wearisome. The wise man will visit it when time and
occasion serve, and will then, in some small measure, understand what
must have been the riotous, sumptuous, murderous life to which our
Governors and Lieutenant-Governors, Commissioners and Deputy
Commissioners, Colonels and Captains and the Subalterns, have put an
end.
From the top of the palace you may read if you please the Book of
Ezekiel written in stone upon the hillside. Coming up, the Englishman
had seen the city from below or on a level. He now looked into its very
heart--the heart that had ceased to beat. There was no sound of men or
cattle, or grind-stones in those pitiful streets--nothing but the cooing
of the pigeons. At first it seemed that the palace was not ruined at
all--that soon 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, that some of the houses were rent
with great cracks, and pierced from roof to road with holes that let in
the morning sun. The drip-stones of the eaves were gap-toothed, and the
tracery of the screens had fallen out so that zenana-rooms lay
shamelessly open to the day. On the outskirts of the city, the
strong-walled houses dwindled and sank down to mere stone-heaps and
faint indications of plinth and wall, hard to trace against the
background of stony soil. The shadow of the palace lay over two-thirds
of the city and the trees deepened the shadow. "He who has bent him o'er
the dead" _after_ the hour of which Byron sings, knows that the features
of the man become blunted as it were--the face begins to fade. The same
hideous look lies on the face of the Queen of the Pass, and when once
this is realised, the eye wonders that it could have ever believed in
the life of her. She is the city "whose graves are set in the side of
the pit, and her company is round about her graves," sister of Pathros,
Zoan, and No.
Moved by a thoroughly insular instinct, the Englishman took up a piece
of plaster and heaved it from the palace wall into the dark streets. It
bounded from a house-top to a window-ledge, and thence into a little
square, and the sound of its fall was hollow and echoing, as the sound
of a stone in a well. Then the silence closed up upon the sound, till in
the far-away courtyard below the roped stallions began screaming afresh.
There may be desolation in the great Indian Desert to the westward, and
there is desolation on the open seas; but the desolation of Amber is
beyond the loneliness either of land or sea. Men by the hundred thousand
must have toiled at the walls that bound it, the temples and bastions
that stud the walls, the fort that overlooks all, the canals that once
lifted water to the palace, and the garden in the lake of the valley.
Renan could describe it as it stands to-day, and Verestchaguin could
paint it.
Arrived at this satisfactory conclusion, the Englishman went down
through the palace and the scores of venomous and suggestive little
rooms, to the elephant in the courtyard, and was taken back in due time
to the Nineteenth Century in the shape of His Highness, the Maharaja's
Cotton-Press, returning a profit of 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 perfect order, but somehow
it did not taste well after Amber. There was aggressiveness about the
engines and the smell of the raw cotton.
The modern side of Jeypore must not be mixed with the ancient.
IV
THE TEMPLE OF MAHADEO AND THE MANNERS OF SUCH AS SEE INDIA. THE MAN BY
THE WATER-TROUGHS AND HIS KNOWLEDGE. THE VOICE OF THE CITY AND WHAT IT
SAID. PERSONALITIES AND THE HOSPITAL. THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL OF JEYPORE AND
ITS BUILDERS.
From the Cotton-Press the Englishman wandered through the wide streets
till he came into an 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, 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 reverence, as Westerns understand the term, at the services of
the Gods of the East. A tiny little maiden, child of a monstrously ugly,
wall-eyed priest, staggered across the marble pavement to the shrine and
threw, with a gust of childish laughter, the blossoms she was carrying
into the lap of the Great Mahadeo himself. Then she made as though she
would leap up to the bell 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 favoured by the Maharaja, and drew from lands an income of
twenty thousand 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 unhooked the swinging jets and began to
light up the impassive face of Mahadeo with gas. They used Swedish
matches!
Full night brought the hotel and its curiously composed human menagerie.
There is, if a work-a-day world will believe, a society entirely
outside, and unconnected with, that of the Station--a planet within a
planet, where 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 insatiably curious, thing, and its literature is
Newman's _Bradshaw_. Wandering "old arms-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
an 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 saying 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."
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 American 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 civilisation set down under the
immemorial Aravalis in the first state of Rajputana. The red-grey hills
seem to laugh at it, and the ever-shifting sand-dunes under the hills
take no account of it, for they advance upon the bases of the
monogrammed, coronet-crowned lamp-posts, and fill up the points of the
natty tramways near the Waterworks, which are the outposts of the
civilisation 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--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 dam faced with stone, a great tank, and pumping machinery fine as
the heart of a municipal engineer can desire--pure water, sound pipes,
and well-kept engines. If you belong to what is sarcastically styled an
"able and intelligent municipality" under the British Rule, 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
experience will be a profitable one. There are statistics in connection
with the Waterworks 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 standpipes 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 Englishman where the drinking-troughs were. He was a gentleman and
bore very patiently with the Englishman'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 along
his mount. He knew nothing of Jeypore, except the names of certain
Englishmen in it, the men who, he said, had made the Waterworks and
built the Hospital for his brother's son's comfort.
And this is the curious feature of Jeypore; though happily 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 pleasure
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 fatherland, and identified
themselves with its progress as only Englishmen can. Behind them stood
the Maharaja ready to spend money with a lavishness that no Supreme
Government would dream of; and it would not be too much to say that they
together made the State what it is. When Ram Singh died, Madho Singh,
his successor, a conservative Hindu, forbore to 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 government; 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 path--attests how well
their 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 standpipes explain that the Maharaja Sahib's
father gave the order for the Waterworks and that Yakub (Jacob) Sahib
made them--not only in the city, but out away in the district. "Did the
people grow more crops thereby?" "Of course they did. Were canals made
only to wash in?" "How much more crops?" "Who knows? The Sahib had
better go and ask some official." Increased 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 one garden
and is always on the eve of starting for Calcutta--possesses the
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 unobtrusive 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 exposure. And the city may be trusted
to betray him. The _malli_ in the Ram Newas Gardens--Gardens which are
finer than any in India and fit to rank with the best in Paris--says
that the Maharaja gave the order and Yakub Sahib made the Gardens. He
also says that the Hospital just outside the Gardens 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 Hospital 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 Hospital, 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 from the men's.
From the Hospital the Englishman 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 the Indo-Saracenic style. It stood on a stone plinth, and was
rich in stone-tracery, green marble columns from Ajmir, red marble,
white marble colonnades, courts with fountains, richly carved wooden
doors, frescoes, inlay, and colour. The ornamentation of 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 the Jeypore School of Art have woven into the work the
best that their hands could produce. The building in essence if not in
the fact of to-day, is the work of Freemasons. 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 there 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 the carving of the rims of the fountains in
the courtyard, 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 true
knowledge.
In the central corridor are six great frescoes, each about nine feet by
five, copies of illustrations in the Royal Folio of the _Razmnameh_, 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 steal it will find a
purchaser at any price up to fifty thousand pounds.
V
OF THE SORDIDNESS OF THE SUPREME GOVERNMENT ON THE REVENUE SIDE; AND OF
THE PALACE OF JEYPORE. A GREAT KING'S PLEASURE-HOUSE, AND THE WORK OF
THE SERVANTS OF STATE.
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--our starved barns that are supposed
to hold the economic exhibits, 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 South Kensington 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 low cases to hold natural history
specimens and wax 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 unseemly tallow-drops and
flaws in the glasses. The maroon cloth, on or against which the exhibits
are placed, is of close texture, untouched by the moth, neither stained
nor meagre nor sunfaded; the revolving cases revolve freely 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 office 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 than its structural beauties; saying that
Bombay, who professed a weakness for technical education, should be
ashamed of herself. And 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, covering 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 Marwar and the _jezails_ of Tonk; and reproductions of
Persian and Russian brass-work stand side by side with the handicrafts
of the pupils of the Jeypore School of Art. A photograph of His Highness
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
reverently to the photo, and then move on slowly, with an evidently
intelligent interest in what they see. Ruskin could describe the scene
admirably--pointing 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 protecting
glass. The main object of the Museum is avowedly provincial--to show the
craftsman of Jeypore the best that his predecessors could do, and what
foreign 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 charge at Jeypore. Like
the man who made the building, he 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 colourless things. Envy is forced to admit that the
arrangement of the Museum--far too important a matter to be explained
off-hand--is Continental 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! Shameful extravagance? Nothing of the kind--only finish,
perfectly in keeping with the rest of the fittings--a finish that we in
_kutcha_[3] India have failed to catch.
[3] casual: half-finished.
From the Museum go out through the city to the Maharaja's
Palace--skilfully 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 play
_chaupur_[4]--just such a game as cost the Pandavs the fair
Draupadi--with inlaid dice and gayly lacquered pieces. These ancients
are very polite and will press you to play, but give no heed to them,
for _chaupur_ is an expensive game--expensive as quail-fighting, when
you have backed the wrong bird and the people are laughing at your
inexperience. The Maharaja's Palace is gay, overwhelmingly rich in
candelabra, painted ceilings, gilt mirrors, and other evidences of a too
hastily assimilated civilisation; 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_!" Then, across the court, some one laughed a low, croaking
laugh. The pink and saffron figures separated as though they had been
shot, and disappeared 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.
[4] something like _parchesi_.
In the Palace-gardens there is even a greater stillness than that about
the courts, and here nothing of the West, unless a critical soul might
take exception to the lamp-posts. At the extreme end lies a lake-like
tank swarming with _muggers_.[5] It is reached through an opening under
a block of zenana buildings. 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 Englishman cried with the voice of faith across
the water. And 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.
[5] crocodiles.
And so back 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 civilised were the lamp-posts with Ram
Singh's monogram, devised to look like V. R., at the bottom, and a
coronet at the top. An unseen 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 revelation.
In his time and when he was not fighting, Jey Singh, the second, who
built the city, was a great astronomer--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 decay without the
palace-grounds.
From the _Bronze Horse_ to the grass-grown enclosure 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 a man in charge of
two tiny elephants, _Indur_ and _Har_, a Sahib came with the Viceroy,
and spent eight days in the enclosure of the great neglected
observatory, seeing and writing things in a book. But _he_ understood
_Sanskrit_--the Sanskrit upon the faces of the dials, and the meaning of
the gnoma and pointers. Nowadays no one understands Sanskrit--not even
the Pundits; but without doubt Jey Singh was a great man.
The hearer echoed the statement, though he 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, wroth 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 individually never get farther than the
"much pleased" state under any circumstances. This same class of
tourists, it has also been observed, are usually free with hackneyed
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
Dungri. 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 labours and the
honours 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 civilisation, peace, and comfort. "Servants of
the Raj" they called themselves, and surely they have served the Raj
past all praise. The people in the city and the camel-driver from the
sand-hills told of their work. They themselves held their peace as to
what they had done, and, when pressed, referred--crowning baseness--to
reports. Printed ones!
VI
SHOWING HOW HER MAJESTY'S MAILS WENT TO UDAIPUR AND FELL OUT BY THE WAY.
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
brotherhood like the brotherhood of the Pauper Province; for it is even
greater than the genial and unquestioning 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[6] to-day is that their trade
is bad, because an unsympathetic Government 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 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 different rupees.
[6] native bankers.
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
Aravalis gave place to a dead, flat, stone-strewn plain, thick with
dhak-jungle. Later the date-palm fraternised with the dhak, and low
hills stood on either side of the line. To this succeeded a tract rich
in pure white stone--the line was ballasted with it. Then came more low
hills, each with a cock's comb of splintered rock, overlooking
dhak-jungle and villages fenced with thorns--places that at once
declared themselves tigerish. Last, the huge bulk of Chitor showed
itself on the horizon. The train crossed the 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 civilisation. It does not approve of the
incursions of Englishmen, 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 realise 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, inconceivably filthy within and without, and it was Her Majesty's.
There was another tonga,--an _aram_ tonga, a carriage of ease--but the
Englishman was not to have it. It was reserved for a Rajput Thakur who
was going to Udaipur with his "tail." The Thakur, in claret-coloured
velvet with a blue turban, a revolver--Army pattern--a sword, and five
or six friends, also with swords, came by and indorsed the statement.
Now, the mail tonga had a wheel which was destined to become the Wheel
of Fate, and to lead to many curious things. Two diseased yellow ponies
were extracted 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 accomplished. 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 grooms, and the harness hung on by special
dispensation 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 the sinking sun.
Now and again would pass a traveller on a camel, or a gang of
_Bunjarras_[7] 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.
[7] Gipsy traders.
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 geological
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 inauspicious 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, descending,
danced on that lonely road an unholy dance, singing the while: "The
_dumchi_![8] The _dumchi_! The _dumchi_!" in a shrill voice. Then he
returned and drove on, while the Englishman wondered into what land of
lunatics he was heading. At an average speed of six miles an hour, it is
possible 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 except 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 shied at what the driver said was a
rock. But It jumped up in the moonlight and went away.
[8] The crupper.
Then came a great blasted heath whereon nothing was more than six inches
high--a wilderness covered 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 repented 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
proudly on the tire, to show that that at least was sound. A hasty
court-martial revealed that there was absolutely not one single relief
vehicle on the 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 roadside, 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 mail 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 unhappy ponies, and a lop-sided tonga. He lit a
fire, for the night was bitterly cold, and only mourned that he could
not destroy the whole of the territories 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 Englishmen.
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 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 mail
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 Mail. This was one of them. Seating himself upon the
parcels-bag, the Englishman 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 civilisation 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 wakening 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 pistol
is in that corner; be careful." The Englishman, 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 Plimsoll mark, and the 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_ and _Hazur_. Except
the Englishman. He was simple _tum_ (thou), and a revolver, Army
pattern, was printing every diamond in the chequer-work of its handle,
on 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, a 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 difficult 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 the 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, and he dreamed
that he caught a Viceroy under the walls of Chitor and beat him with a
_tulwar_ till he turned into a dak-pony whose near foreleg was
perpetually coming off and who would say nothing but _tum_ when he was
asked why he had not built a railway from Chitor to Udaipur.
VII
TOUCHING THE CHILDREN OF THE SUN AND THEIR CITY, AND THE HAT-MARKED
CASTE AND THEIR MERITS, AND A GOOD MAN'S WORKS IN THE WILDERNESS.
It was worth a night's discomfort and revolver-beds 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.
Each man in this land 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 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 unhandy 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 Englishman 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 gracefully and courteously, handed him his sword and
matchlock, the latter a heavy stump-stock arrangement 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 much-handled
whisky-flask. Unfortunately, ignorance of Mewari prevented conversation;
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 Englishman 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 the Durbar Gardens, of which
more hereafter. Because colour 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 with a lance, charging an elephant-of-war. As a rule, the elephant
was depicted on one side the house-door and the rider on the other.
There was no representation of an army behind. The figures stood alone
upon the whitewash on house and wall and gate, again and again and
again. A highly intelligent priest grunted that it was a picture; a
private of the Maharana's regular army suggested that it was an
elephant; while a wheat-seller, his sword at his side, was equally
certain that it was a Raja. Beyond that point, his knowledge did not go.
The explanation of the picture is this. In the days when Raja Maun of
Amber put his sword at Akbar's service and won for him great kingdoms,
Akbar sent an army against Mewar, whose then ruler was Pertap 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 was 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 diagram that
the painter dashes in, in a few minutes, without, it would seem, knowing
what he is commemorating.
Thinking of these things, the Englishman made shift to get to the 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, 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-Honour which arrived before
daybreak, being compelled to crawl ignominiously man by man through a
little wicket-gate, while the horses had to wait without till sunrise.
But a civilised yearning for the utmost advantages of octroi, and not a
fierce fear of robbery and wrong, is at the bottom 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 pavement 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
sunshine. Then he bent it double, and, as it sprang straight, began to
make it "speak." Arm-venders in Udaipur are a sincere race, for they
sell to people who really use their wares. The man in the shop was
rude--distinctly so. His first flush of professional 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 little temple hard by. Swords seem to be the sole manufacture of
the place. At least, none of the inhabitants 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 publicity, 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
distinguishing themselves, except in the school, and dispensary line,
are strictly limited. Nominally, they pay _chutoond_, 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
_chutoond_ justifies its name and what is the exact extent of the "tail"
leviable, they, and 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, which 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, whereas 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, which gives it a weird and unearthly 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 flagstaff, 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 architecture,
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. 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
worshippers.
From the temple whose steps are worn smooth by the feet of men, and
whose courts are full of the faint smell of stale flowers 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 façade of the main palace had been treated
with Minton tiles. Luckily it was too far up the wall for anything more
than the colour to be visible, and the pale blue against the pure white
was effective.
A picture of Ganesh looks out over the main courtyard, which is entered
by a triple gate, and hard by is the place where the King's elephants
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 Englishman did not
see much of the interior. But he passed through open gardens with tanks
and pavilions, 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 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 veritable, 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.
And here follows a 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 unquestioning hospitality. 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 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
whiter walled enclosure filled with many Brahmins and ringing 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 colours, that the
Rajputni shall wear the most striking tints that she can buy in the
bazaars, in order that she may beautify the ghâts where she comes to
bathe.
The bathing-ledge at the foot of the City wall was lighted with women
clad in raw vermilion, 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 overdaring
amateurs who had striven to reproduce scenes such as these. Then a
woman rose up, and clasping her hands behind 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 was 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 "escape" from the State Gardens. Here
were divers and waders, kingfishers and snaky-necked birds of the
cormorant family, but no duck. They had seen the guns in the boat and
were flying to and fro in companies across the lake, or settling--wise
things!--in the glare of the sun on the water. The lake was swarming
with them, but they seemed to know exactly how far a twelve-bore would
carry. Perhaps their knowledge had been gained from the Englishman 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 rudder, 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
cushions in deep content and laziness, 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 managed 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 kingly wild-duck
came back from his wanderings with his mate at his side, but--but--the
birds were very good to eat.
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
a land where the railway is an incident and not an indispensable luxury.
Folk tell strange stories of drives in bullock-carts in the rains, of
breakdowns 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 the bleached or office
man, is curious, there 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 the State.
Returning, he built his hospital, 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 of that book will show; and the name of the Padre-Sahib
is honoured, as these ears have heard, throughout 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.
VIII
DIVERS PASSAGES OF SPEECH AND ACTION WHENCE THE NATURE, ARTS, AND
DISPOSITION OF THE KING AND HIS SUBJECTS MAY BE OBSERVED.
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 out of date 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 much right to have his family affairs
respected as has a British householder paying income tax.
Once upon a time, that is to say when the British power was well
established in the land and there were railways, 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
favourite wives. The place in which he lay was very near to the City;
and there was a fear that his womankind 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
enlightened municipal councils, could have saved them from the
burning-pyre, for they were the wives of a King. So the Political 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,
_that's_ it? I've been puzzling my brain for four days to find out what
on earth you were driving at. I'll 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 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 handmaidens, were packed and ready for departure; and the King
died later at the Fort, and nothing happened. Here the Englishman asked
why a frantic woman must of necessity become a _sati_, and felt properly
abashed when he was told that she _must_. There was nothing else for her
if she went out unveiled.
The rush-out forces the matter. And, indeed, if you consider the matter
from the 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, before he was taken off the bed to die upon
the ground; of the shutting of a certain mysterious door behind the
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 breaking from the
zenana as the news of the King's death went in. "I never wish to hear
anything more horrible 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 Udaipur is at Ahar, a little
village two miles east of the City. Here they go down in their robes of
state, 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 musicians playing among 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 toward a fresh birth. Once, in a neighbouring 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 severely 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 whether _sati_ is
altogether abolished 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 Lal, _C. I.
E._ To begin with, His Highness is a racial anomaly in that, 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 the Maharana Sujjun Singh in 1884. Sujjun Singh died
childless 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 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 should
suffice to explain everything. The man who could deliberately unravel
the succession of any one of the Rajput States would be perfectly
capable of explaining 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 hereditary 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 and
Thakurs of the State, _and_ the 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,
Masters 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 local 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. They are, further, well mounted on light,
wiry Mewar and Kathiawar horses. Incidentally, it may be mentioned 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 Our
service--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 Maharaja, from the official point of view,
is his want of education. He is a thoroughly good man, but was not
brought up with the kingship 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 _Angrezi_." The
_Angrezi_ spoken by the interpreter was Urdu 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
European 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
ready to take in hand the first instalment 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 his revenues--some thirty lakhs--are disposed of. The Prime
Minister's career has been a chequered and interesting one, including a
dismissal from power (this was worked by the Queens from behind the
screen), an arrest, and an attack with swords 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 supervision 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 Lal, a boy of twenty years old, has been educated at the Mayo
College, 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 be added to the list of the States that are governed
English fashion. What the end will be, after three generations of
Princes and Dewans have been put through the mill of the 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 favour of the Government which brings peace, the Sikh Sirdars are
rotting 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'être_. Pity ten thousand times more the Rajput, for he has no
_raison d'être_. 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, 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.
IX
OF THE PIG-DRIVE WHICH WAS A PANTHER-KILLING, AND OF THE DEPARTURE TO
CHITOR.
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-stands--masonry
sentry-boxes, in which five or six men may sit at ease and shoot. It had
been arranged to entertain 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
Udaipur at the beginning of the century when Tod, always in his cocked
hat to be sure, counted up the tale of accidents at the end of the day's
sport.
There is something unfair in shooting pig; but each man who went out
consoled himself with the thought that it was utterly 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.
There are ways and ways of slaying pig--from the orthodox method which
begins with "_The Boar--the Boar--the mighty Boar!_" 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 border of one of the most lovely lakes
on earth. Strike off on a semi-road, semi-hill-torrent path through
unthrifty, thorny jungle, and so climb up and up and up, till you see,
spread like a map below, the lake and the 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 chair, in a fine
two-storied Grand Stand, with an awning spread atop to keep off the sun,
while the 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 sighted,
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 demoralising. 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 scheme," 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 choose from the double-barrelled '500
Express, whose bullet is a tearing, rending shell, 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. Here 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 hills, flanked on either crest by stone walls, manned with
beaters. Immediately opposite the shooting-box, the wall on the upper or
higher hill made a sharp turn downhill, contracting the space through
which the pig would 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 down hill.
A philanthropic desire not to murder more Bhils than were absolutely
necessary to maintain a healthy current 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. Then 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 Buddhistic objections to the slaughter of living
things--but there is something in the extraordinary noise of an agitated
Bhil, which makes even the most peaceful mortals get up and yearn, like
Tartarin of Tarescon for "lions," always at a safe distance be it
understood. As the beat drew nearer, under the squealing--the
"_ul-al-lu-lu-lu_"--was heard a long-drawn bittern-like boom of
"_So-oor!_" "_So-oor!_" (Pig! Pig!) and the crashing of boulders. The
guns rose in their places, forgetting 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 over the
rocks, a pig stepped out of a cactus-bush, and the fusillade began. The
dust flew and the branches chipped, but the pig went on--a blue-grey
shadow almost undistinguishable against the rocks, and took no harm.
"Sighting shots," said the guns, sulkily. 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 bombardment of Kars,
"set piece ten thousand feet square" had been illuminated, and about
five hundred '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, drawing 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 vanished 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 hillside 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 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 knock 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 Chitor road 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
white 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, not his own, had
bagged the panther who lay shot through the spine, feebly trying to drag
herself downhill 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 enough to say that four
Englishmen, now scattered to the four winds of heaven, are each morally
certain that he and he alone shot that panther. In time, when distance
and the mirage of the sands of Uodhpur shall have softened the harsh
outlines of truth, the Englishman 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-old cub came trotting along
the hillside, 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 began to realise that they had allowed to escape,
or had driven back by their fire, a multitude of pig.
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 description.
The Englishman's attempt to compare the fusillade which greeted the
panther to the continuous drumming of a ten-barrelled Nordenfeldt was,
however, coldly received. Thus 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
sentence. The Maharana's investiture, which has already been described
in the Indian papers, had taken place, and the carriages, duly escorted
by the Erinpura Horse, were returning to the Residency. In a niche of
waste land, under the shadow of the main gate, a place strewn with
rubbish and shards of pottery, a dilapidated old man was trying to
control his horse and a _hookah_ on the saddle-bow. The blundering
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 pastures 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 Dobarra. "You must have a hobby of some kind in 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 highways, knowing not what
to-morrow will bring forth--whether the walled-in niceties of an English
household, rich in all that makes life fair and desirable, or a
sleepless night in the society of a
goods-_cum_-booking-office-_cum_-parcels-clerk, on fifteen rupees a
month, who tells in stilted English the story of his official life,
while the telegraph gibbers like a maniac 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.
X
A LITTLE OF THE HISTORY OF CHITOR, AND THE MALPRACTICES 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 Actæon who has 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. 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
sponsons 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 scraped the hillsides 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 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
before Bappa Rawul took Chitor the Mori division of the Pramar Rajputs,
who are the ruling family of Mewar, had found a hold in Bhilwara, 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 curious 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 Alluji, who built a Jain tower upon the brow of
the hill, for in those days, though the Sun was worshipped, men were all
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 Singh, called Shahabuddin 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 favourite queen became _sati_ at Chitor. But another wife,
a princess of Patun, kept her life, and when Shahabuddin sent down
Kutbuddin to waste her lands, led the Rajput army, in person, from
Chitor, and defeated 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
Mussulman, for it is written that one prince "recovered Chitor and made
the name of Rana to be recognised by all." Six princes were slain in
battles against the Mussulman, in vain attempts to clear the land 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
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 Chitor almost unarmed, saw the face in the mirror,
and was well treated; the husband of the fair Pudmini accompanying him,
in return, to the camp at the foot of the hill. Like Raja Runjeet in the
ballad the Rajput he--
"... trusted a Mussulman'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 by a trick, and Ala-ud-din demanded 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'
intrenchments. But there was no Pudmini in the litter, and her following
of handmaidens was a band of seven hundred armed men. Thus, in the
confusion 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, besiege 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 terrible Goddess, who lives in
the bowels of Chitor, had 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 desolated 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 Chitor
when the day was won, and the women were ashes underground.
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 vassal 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 labour and life are cheaper than bread and water. For two
centuries, saith Tod, Mewar flourished exceedingly and was the paramount
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 of Malwa. Kumbha Rana built a Tower of Victory,
nine stories high, to commemorate this and the other successes of his
reign, and the tower stands to-day a mark for miles across the plains.
But the well-established kingdom weakened, and the rulers took
favourites 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 predecessors, 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 _johur_, a sacrifice greater than the sacrifice of
Pudmini; and thirteen thousand were blown up in the magazines, or
stabbed or poisoned, before the gates were opened and the defenders
rushed down.
Out of the carnage was saved Udai Singh, a babe of the Blood Royal, who
grew up to be a coward, and a shame to his line. The story of his
preservation is written large in Tod, and Edwin Arnold sings it. Read
it, who are interested. But, when Udai Singh came to the throne of
Chitor, through blood and misrule, after Bahadur Shah had withdrawn from
the wreck of the Fort, Akbar sat on the throne of Delhi, and it was
written that few people should withstand the "Guardian of Mankind."
Moreover, Udai Singh was the slave of a woman. It was Akbar's destiny to
subdue the Rajputs, and to win many of them to his own service; sending
a Rajput Prince of Amber to get him far-away Arrakan. Akbar marched
against Chitor once, and was repulsed; the woman who ruled Udai Singh
heading a charge against the besiegers because of the love she bore to
her lover. Something of this sort had happened in Ala-ud-din's time,
and, like Ala-ud-din, Akbar returned and sat down, in a huge camp,
before Chitor in 1568 A.D. Udai Singh fled what was coming; and because
the Goddess of Chitor demands always that a crowned head must fall if
the defence of her home is to be successful, Chitor fell as it had
fallen before--in a _johur_ of thousands, a last rush of the men, and
the entry of the conqueror into a reeking, ruined slaughter-pen. Akbar's
sack was the most terrible of the three, for he killed everything that
had life upon the rock, and wrecked and overturned and spoiled. The
wonder, the lasting wonder, is that he did not destroy Kumbha Rana's
Tower of Victory, the memorial of the defeat of a Mahometan prince. With
the third sack the glory of Chitor departed, and Udai Singh founded
himself a new capital, the city of Udaipur. Though Chitor was recovered
in Jehangir's time by Udai Singh's grandson, it was never again made the
capital of Mewar. It stood, and rotted where it stood, till enlightened
and loyal feudatories, in the present years of grace, made attempts,
with the help of Executive Engineers, to sweep it up and keep it in
repair. The above is roughly, very roughly indeed, the tale of the sacks
of Chitor.
Follows an interlude, for the study even of inaccurate history is
indigestible to many. There was an elephant at Chitor, to take birds of
passage up the hill, and she--she was fifty-one years old, and her name
was Gerowlia--came to the dak-bungalow for the Englishman. Let not the
word dak-bungalow deceive any man into believing that there is even
moderate comfort at Chitor. Gerowlia waited in the sunshine, and
chuckled to herself like a female pauper when she receives snuff. Her
_mahout_ said that he would go away for a drink of water. So he walked,
and walked, and walked, till he disappeared on the stone-strewn plains,
and the Englishman was left alone with Gerowlia, aged fifty-one. She had
been tied by the chain on her near hind leg to a pillar of the verandah;
but the string was coir, and more an emblem of authority than a means of
restraint. When she had thoroughly exhausted all the resources of the
country within range of her trunk, she ate up the string and began to
investigate the verandah. There was more coir string, and she ate it
all, while the carpenter, who was repairing the dak-bungalow, cursed her
and her ancestry from afar. About this time the Englishman was roused to
a knowledge of the business, for Gerowlia, having exhausted the string,
tried to come into the verandah. She had, most unwisely, been pampered
with biscuits an hour before. The carpenter stood on an outcrop of rock,
and said angrily: "See what damage your _hathi_ has done, Sahib."
"'Tisn't my _hathi_," said the Sahib, plaintively. "You ordered it,"
quoth he, "and it has been here ever so long, eating up everything." He
threw pieces of stone at Gerowlia, and went away. It is a terrible thing
to be left alone with an unshackled elephant, even though she be a
venerable spinster. Gerowlia moved round the dak-bungalow, blowing her
nose in a nervous and undecided manner, and presently found some more
string and thatch, which she ate. This was too much. The Englishman went
out and spoke to her. She opened her mouth and salaamed; meaning thereby
"biscuits." So long as she remained in this position she could do no
harm.
Imagine a boundless rock-strewn plain, broken here and there by low
hills, dominated by the rock of Chitor, and bisected by a single
metre-gauge railway track running into the Infinite, and unrelieved by
even a way-inspector's trolly. In the foreground put a brand-new
dak-bungalow, furnished with a French bedstead, and nothing else; in the
verandah place an embarrassed Englishman, smiling into the open mouth of
an idiotic female elephant. But Gerowlia could not live on smiles alone.
Finding that no food was forthcoming, she shut her mouth, and renewed
her attempts to get into the verandah, and ate more thatch. To say "Hi!"
to an elephant is a misdirected courtesy. It quickens the pace, and if
you flick her on the trunk with a wet towel, she curls the trunk out of
harm's way. Special education is necessary. A little breechless boy
passed, carrying a lump of stone. "Hit her on the feet, Sahib," said he;
"hit her on the feet." Gerowlia had by this time nearly scraped off her
pad, and there were no signs of the _mahout_. The Englishman went out
and found a tent-peg, and returning, in the extremity of his wrath
smote her bitterly on the nails of the near forefoot.
Gerowlia held up her foot to be beaten, and made the most absurd
noises--squawked in fact, exactly like an old lady who has narrowly
escaped being run over. She backed out of the verandah, still squawking,
on three feet and in the open held up near and off forefoot alternately
to be beaten. It was very pitiful, for one swing of her trunk could have
knocked the Englishman flat. He ceased whacking her, but she squawked
for some minutes and then fell placidly asleep in the sunshine. When the
_mahout_ returned, he beat her for breaking her tether exactly as the
Englishman had done, but much more severely, and the ridiculous old
thing hopped on three legs for fully five minutes. "Come along, Sahib,"
said the _mahout_. "I will show this mother of bastards who is the
driver. Fat daughter of the Devil, sit down. You would eat thatch, would
you? How does the iron taste?" And he gave Gerowlia a headache, which
affected her temper all through the afternoon. She set off, across the
railway line which runs below the rock of Chitor, into broken ground cut
up with _nullahs_ and covered with low scrub, over which it would have
been difficult to have taken a sure-footed horse, so fragmentary and
disconnected was its nature.
XI.
PROVES CONCLUSIVELY THE EXISTENCE OF THE DARK TOWER VISITED BY CHILDE
ROLANDE, AND OF "BOGEY" WHO FRIGHTENS CHILDREN.
The Gamberi River--clear as a trout-stream--runs through the waste round
Chitor, and is spanned by an old bridge, very solid and massive, said to
have been built before the sack of Ala-ud-din. The bridge is in the
middle of the stream--the floods have raced round either end of it--and
is reached by a steeply sloping stone causeway. From the bridge to the
new town of Chitor, which lies at the foot of the hill, runs a straight
and well-kept road, flanked on either side by the scattered remnants of
old houses, and, here and there, fallen temples. The road, like the
bridge, is no new thing, and is wide enough for twenty horsemen to ride
abreast.
New Chitor is a very dirty, and apparently thriving, little town, full
of grain-merchants and sellers of arms. The ways are barely wide enough
for the elephant of dignity and the little brown babies of impudence.
The Englishman went through, always on a slope painfully accentuated by
Gerowlia who, with all possible respect to her years, must have been a
baggage-animal and no true _Sahib's_ mount. Let the local Baedeker speak
for a moment: "The ascent to Chitor, which begins from within the
southeast angle of the town, is nearly a mile to the upper gate, with a
slope of about 1 in 15. There are two zig-zag bends, and on the three
portions thus formed, are seven gates, of which one, however, has only
the basement left." This is the language of fact, which, very properly,
leaves out of all account the Genius of the Place who sits at the gate
nearest the new city and is with the sightseer throughout. The first
impression of repulsion and awe is given by a fragment of tumbled
sculpture close to a red daubed _lingam_, near the Padal Pol or lowest
gate. It is a piece of frieze, and the figures of the men are worn
nearly smooth by time. What is visible is finely and frankly obscene to
an English mind.
The road is protected on the cliff side by a thick stone wall, loopholed
for musketry, one aperture to every two feet, between fifteen and twenty
feet high. This wall is being repaired throughout its length by the
Maharana of Udaipur. On the hillside, among the boulders, loose stones,
and _dhak_-scrub, lips stone wreckage that must have come down from the
brown bastions above.
As Gerowlia laboured up the stone-shod slope, the Englishman wondered
how much life had flowed down this sluice of battles, and been lost at
the Padal Pol--the last and lowest gate--where, in the old days, the
besieging armies put their best and bravest battalions. Once at the head
of the lower slope, there is a clear run-down of a thousand yards with
no chance of turning aside either to the right or left. Even as he
wondered, he was brought abreast of two stone chhatris, each carrying a
red daubed stone. They were the graves of two very brave men, Jeemal of
Bedmore, and Kalla, who fell in Akbar's sack fighting like Rajputs. Read
the story of their deaths, and learn what manner of warriors they were.
Their graves were all that spoke openly of the hundreds of struggles on
the lower slope where the fight was always fiercest.
At last, after half an hour's climb, the main gate, the Ram Pol, was
gained, and the Englishman passed into the City of Chitor and--then and
there formed a resolution, since broken, not to write one word about it
for fear that he should be set down as a babbling and a gushing
enthusiast. Objects of archæological interest are duly described in an
admirable little book of Chitor which, after one look, the Englishman
abandoned. One cannot "do" Chitor with a guide-book. The Chaplain of the
English Mission to Jehangir said the best that was to be said, when he
described the place three hundred years ago, writing quaintly: "Chitor,
an ancient great kingdom, the chief city so called which standeth on a
mighty high hill, flat on the top, walled about at the least ten English
miles. There appear to this day above a hundred churches ruined and
divers fair palaces which are lodged in like manner among their ruins,
as many Englishmen by the observation have guessed. Its chief
inhabitants to-day are Zum and Ohim, birds and wild beasts, but the
stately ruins thereof give a shadow of its beauty while it flourished in
its pride." Gerowlia struck into a narrow pathway, forcing herself
through garden-trees and disturbing the peacocks. An evil guide-man on
the ground waved his hand, and began to speak; but was silenced. The
death of Amber was as nothing to the death of Chitor--a body whence the
life had been driven by riot and the sword. Men had parcelled the
gardens of her palaces and the courtyards of her temples into fields;
and cattle grazed among the remnants of the shattered tombs. But over
all--over rent and bastion, split temple-wall, pierced roof, and prone
pillar--lay the "shadow of its beauty while it flourished in its pride."
The Englishman walked into a stately palace of many rooms, where the
sunlight streamed in through wall and roof, and up crazy stone
stairways, held together, it seemed, by the marauding trees. In one
bastion, a wind-sown peepul had wrenched a thick slab clear of the wall,
but held it tight pressed in a crook of a branch, as a man holds down a
fallen enemy under his elbow, shoulder, and forearm. In another place, a
strange, uncanny wind sprung from nowhere, was singing all alone among
the pillars of what may have been a Hall of Audience. The Englishman
wandered so far in one palace that he came to an almost black-dark room,
high up in a wall, and said proudly to himself: "I must be the first man
who has been here;" meaning no harm or insult to any one. But he tripped
and fell, and as he put out his hands, he felt that the stairs had been
worn hollow and smooth by the thread of innumerable naked feet. Then he
was afraid, and came away very quickly, stepping delicately over fallen
friezes and bits of sculptured men, so as not to offend the Dead; and
was mightily relieved when he recovered his elephant and allowed the
guide to take him to Kumbha Rana's Tower of Victory.
This stands, like all things in Chitor, among ruins, but time and the
other enemies have been good to it. It is a Jain edifice, nine storeys
high, crowned atop--was this designed insult or undesigned repair?--with
a purely Mahometan dome, where the pigeons and the bats live. Excepting
this blemish, the Tower of Victory is nearly as fair as when it left
the hands of the builder whose name has not been handed down to us. It
is to be observed here that the first, or more ruined, Tower of Victory,
built in Alluji's days, when Chitor was comparatively young, was raised
by some pious Jain as proof of conquest over things spiritual. The
second tower is more worldly in intent.
Those who care to look, may find elsewhere a definition of its
architecture and its more striking peculiarities. It was in kind, but
not in degree, like the Jugdesh Temple at Udaipur, and, as it exceeded
it in magnificence, so its effect upon the mind was more intense. The
confusing intricacy of the figures with which it was wreathed from top
to bottom, the recurrence of the one calm face, the God enthroned,
holding the Wheel of the Law, and the appalling lavishness of
decoration, all worked toward the instilment of fear and aversion.
Surely this must have been one of the objects of the architect. The
tower, in the arrangement of its stairways, is like the interior of a
Chinese carved ivory puzzle-ball. The idea given is that, even while you
are ascending, you are wrapping yourself deeper and deeper in the tangle
of a mighty maze. Add to this the half-light, the thronging armies of
sculptured figures, the mad profusion of design splashed as impartially
upon the undersides of the stone window-slabs as upon the door-beam of
the threshold--add, most abhorrent of all, the slippery sliminess of the
walls always worn smooth by naked men, and you will understand that the
tower is not a soothing place to visit. The Englishman fancied
presumptuously that he had, in a way, grasped the builder's idea; and
when he came to the top storey and sat among the pigeons his theory was
this: To attain power, wrote the builder of old, in sentences of fine
stone, it is necessary to pass through all sorts of close-packed
horrors, treacheries, battles, and insults, in darkness and without
knowledge whether the road leads upward or into a hopeless _cul-de-sac_.
Kumbha Rana must many times have climbed to the top storey, and looked
out toward the uplands of Malwa on the one side and his own great Mewar
on the other, in the days when all the rock hummed with life and the
clatter of hooves upon the stony ways, and Mahmoud of Malwa was safe in
hold. How he must have swelled with pride--fine insolent pride of life
and rule and power--power not only to break things but to compel such
builders as those who piled the tower to his royal will! There was no
decoration in the top storey to bewilder or amaze--nothing but
well-grooved stone-slabs, and a boundless view fit for kings who traced
their ancestry--
"From times when forth from the sunlight, the first of our Kings
came down,
And had the earth for his footstool, and wore the stars for his
crown."
The builder had left no mark behind him--not even a mark on the
threshold of the door, or a sign in the head of the topmost step. The
Englishman looked in both places, believing that those were the places
generally chosen for mark-cutting. So he sat and meditated on the
beauties of kingship and the unholiness of Hindu art, and what power a
shadowland of lewd monstrosities had upon those who believed in it, and
what Lord Dufferin, who is the nearest approach to a king in this India,
must have thought when aide-de-camps clanked after him up the narrow
steps. But the day was wearing, and he came down--in both senses--and,
in his descent, the carven things on every side of the tower, and above
and below, once more took hold of and perverted his fancy, so that he
arrived at the bottom in a frame of mind eminently fitted for a descent
into the Gau-Mukh, which is nothing more terrible than a little spring,
falling into a reservoir, in the side of the hill.
He stumbled across more ruins and passed between tombs of dead Ranis,
till he came to a flight of steps, built out and cut out from rock,
going down as far as he could see into a growth of trees on a terrace
below him. The stone of the steps had been worn and polished by the
terrible naked feet till it showed its markings clearly as agate; and
where the steps ended in a rock-slope, there was a visible glair, a
great snail-track, upon the rocks. It was hard to keep safe footing upon
the sliminess. The air was thick with the sick smell of stale incense,
and grains of rice were scattered upon the steps. But there was no one
to be seen. Now this in itself was not specially alarming; but the
Genius of the Place must be responsible for making it so. The Englishman
slipped and bumped on the rocks, and arrived, more suddenly than he
desired, upon the edge of a dull blue tank, sunk between walls of
timeless masonry. In a slabbed-in recess, water was pouring through a
shapeless stone gargoyle, into a trough; which trough again dripped into
the tank. Almost under the little trickle of water, was the loathsome
Emblem of Creation, and there were flowers and rice around it. Water was
trickling from a score of places in the cut face of the hill; oozing
between the edges of the steps and welling up between the stone slabs
of the terrace. Trees sprouted in the sides of the tank and hid its
surroundings. It seemed as though the descent had led the Englishman,
firstly, two thousand years away from his own century, and secondly,
into a trap, and that he would fall off the polished stones into the
stinking tank, or that the Gau-Mukh would continue to pour water until
the tank rose up and swamped him, or that some of the stone slabs would
fall forward and crush him flat.
Then he was conscious of remembering, with peculiar and unnecessary
distinctness, that, from the Gau-Mukh, a passage led to the subterranean
chambers in which the fair Pudmini and her handmaids had slain
themselves. And, that Tod had written and the Station-master at Chitor
had said, that some sort of devil, or ghoul, or Something, stood at the
entrance of that approach. All of which was a nightmare bred in full day
and folly to boot; but it was the fault of the Genius of the Place, who
made the Englishman feel that he had done a great wrong in trespassing
into the very heart and soul of all Chitor. And, behind him, the
Gau-Mukh guggled and choked like a man in his death-throe. The
Englishman endured as long as he could--about two minutes. Then it came
upon him that he must go quickly out of this place of years and
blood--must get back to the afternoon sunshine, and Gerowlia, and the
dak-bungalow with the French bedstead. He desired no archæological
information, he wished to take no notes, and, above all, he did not care
to look behind him, where stood the reminder that he was no better than
the beasts that perish. But he had to cross the smooth, worn rocks, and
he felt their sliminess through his bootsoles. It was as though he were
treading on the soft, oiled skin of a Hindu. As soon as the steps gave
refuge, he floundered up them, and so came out of the Gau-Mukh, bedewed
with that perspiration which follows alike on honest toil or--childish
fear.
"This," said he to himself, "is absurd!" and sat down on the fallen top
of a temple to review the situation. But the Gau-Mukh had disappeared.
He could see the dip in the ground and the beginning of the steps, but
nothing more.
Perhaps it was absurd. It undoubtedly appeared so, later. Yet there was
something uncanny about it all. It was not exactly a feeling of danger
or pain, but an apprehension of great evil.
In defence, it may be urged that there is moral, just as much as there
is mine, choke-damp. If you get into a place laden with the latter you
die, and if into the home of the former you ... behave unwisely, as
constitution and temperament prompt. If any man doubt this, let him sit
for two hours in a hot sun on an elephant, stay half an hour in the
Tower of Victory, and then go down into the Gau-Mukh, which, it must
never be forgotten, is merely a set of springs "three or four in number,
issuing from the cliff face at cow-mouth carvings, now mutilated. The
water, evidently percolating from the Hathi Kund above, falls first in
an old pillared hall and thence into the masonry reservoir below,
eventually, when abundant enough, supplying a little waterfall lower
down." That, Gentlemen and Ladies, on the honour of one who has been
frightened of the dark in broad daylight, is the Gau-Mukh, as though
photographed.
The Englishman regained Gerowlia and demanded to be taken away, but
Gerowlia's driver went forward instead and showed him a new Mahal just
built by the present Maharana. Carriage drives, however, do not consort
well with Chitor and the "shadow of her ancient beauty." The return
journey, past temple after temple and palace upon palace, began in the
failing light, and Gerowlia was still blundering up and down narrow
by-paths--for she possessed all an old woman's delusion as to the
slimness of her waist when the twilight fell, and the smoke from the
town below began to creep up the brown flanks of Chitor, and the jackals
howled. Then the sense of desolation, which had been strong enough in
all conscience in the sunshine, began to grow and grow.
Near the Ram Pol there was some semblance of a town with living people
in it, and a priest sat in the middle of the road and howled aloud upon
his gods, until a little boy came and laughed in his face and he went
away grumbling. This touch was deeply refreshing; in the contemplation
of it, the Englishman clean forgot that he had overlooked the gathering
in of materials for an elaborate statistical, historical, geographical
account of Chitor. All that remained to him was a shuddering
reminiscence of the Gau-Mukh and two lines of the "Holy Grail,"
"And up into the sounding halls he passed,
But nothing in the sounding halls he saw."
_Post Scriptum._--There was something very uncanny about the Genius of
the Place. He dragged an ease-loving egotist out of the French bedstead
with the gilt knobs at head and foot, into a more than usually big
folly--nothing less than a seeing of Chitor by moonlight. There was no
possibility of getting Gerowlia out of _her_ bed, and a mistrust of the
Maharana's soldiery who in the day-time guarded the gates, prompted the
Englishman to avoid the public way, and scramble straight up the
hillside, along an attempt at a path which he had noted from Gerowlia's
back. There was no one to interfere, and nothing but an infinity of
pestilent nullahs and loose stones to check. Owls came out and hooted at
him, and animals ran about in the dark and made uncouth noises. It was
an idiotic journey, and it ended--Oh, horror! in that unspeakable
Gau-Mukh--this time entered from the opposite or brushwooded side, as
far as could be made out in the dusk and from the chuckle of the water
which, by night, was peculiarly malevolent.
Escaping from this place, crab-fashion, the Englishman crawled into
Chitor and sat upon a flat tomb till the moon, a very inferior and
second-hand one, rose, and turned the city of the dead into a city of
scurrying ghouls--in sobriety, jackals. The ruins took strange shapes
and shifted in the half light and cast objectionable shadows.
It was easy enough to fill the rock with the people of old times, and a
very beautiful account of Chitor restored, made out by the help of Tod,
and bristling with the names of the illustrious dead, would undoubtedly
have been written, had not a woman, a living breathing woman, stolen out
of a temple--what was she doing in that galley?--and screamed in
piercing and public-spirited fashion. The Englishman got off the tomb
and departed rather more noisily than a jackal; feeling for the moment
that he was not much better. Somebody opened a door with a crash, and a
man cried out: "Who is there?" But the cause of the disturbance was, for
his sins, being most horribly scratched by some thorny scrub over the
edge of the hill--there are no bastions worth speaking of near the
Gau-Mukh--and the rest was partly rolling, partly scrambling, and mainly
bad language.
When you are too lucky sacrifice something, a beloved pipe for choice,
to Ganesh. The Englishman has seen Chitor by moonlight--not the best
moonlight truly, but the watery glare of a nearly spent moon--and his
sacrifice to Luck is this. He will never try to describe what he has
seen--but will keep it as a love-letter, a thing for one pair of eyes
only--a memory that few men to-day can be sharers in. And does he,
through this fiction, evade insulting, by pen and ink, a scene as
lovely, wild, and unmatchable as any that mortal eyes have been
privileged to rest upon?
An intelligent and discriminating public are perfectly at liberty to
form their own opinions.
XII
CONTAINS THE HISTORY OF THE BHUMIA OF JHASWARA, AND THE RECORD OF A
VISIT TO THE HOUSE OF STRANGE STORIES. DEMONSTRATES THE FELICITY OF
LOAFERDOM, WHICH IS THE VERITABLE COMPANIONSHIP OF THE INDIAN EMPIRE,
AND PROPOSES A SCHEME FOR THE BETTER OFFICERING OF TWO DEPARTMENTS.
Come away from the monstrous gloom of Chitor and escape northwards. The
place is unclean and terrifying. Let us catch To-day by both hands and
return to the Station-master who is also booking-parcels and
telegraph-clerk, and who never seems to go to bed--and to the
comfortably wadded bunks of the Rajputana-Malwa line.
While the train is running, be pleased to listen to the perfectly true
story of the _bhumia_ of Jhaswara, which is a story the sequel whereof
has yet to be written. Once upon a time, a Rajput landholder; a
_bhumia_, and a Mahometan _jaghirdar_, were next-door neighbours in
Ajmir territory. They hated each other thoroughly for many reasons, all
connected with land; and the _jaghirdar_ was the bigger man of the two.
In those days, it was the law that the victims of robbery or dacoity
should be reimbursed by the owner of the lands on which the affair had
taken place. The ordinance is now swept away as impracticable. There was
a highway robbery on the _bhumia's_ holding; and he vowed that it had
been "put up" by the Mahometan who, he said, was an Ahab. The reive-gelt
payable nearly ruined the Rajput, and he, labouring under a galling
grievance or a groundless suspicion, fired the _jaghirdar's_ crops, was
detected and brought up before the English Judge who gave him four
years' imprisonment. To the sentence was appended a recommendation that,
on release, the Rajput should be put on heavy securities for good
behaviour. "Otherwise," wrote the Judge, who seems to have known the
people he was dealing with, "he will certainly kill the _jaghirdar_."
Four years passed, and the _jaghirdar_ obtained wealth and
consideration, and was made, let us say, a Khan Bahadur, and an Honorary
Magistrate; but the _bhumia_ remained in gaol and thought over the
highway robbery. When the day of release came, a new Judge hunted up his
predecessor's finding and recommendation, and would have put the
_bhumia_ on security. "Sahib," said the _bhumia_, "I have no people. I
have been in gaol. What am I now? And who will find security for me? If
you will send me back to gaol again I can do nothing, and I have no
friends." So they released him, and he went away into an outlying
village and borrowed a sword from one house, and had it sharpened in
another, for love. Two days later fell the birthday of the Khan Bahadur
and the Honorary Magistrate, and his friends and servants and dependants
made a little levee and did him honour after the native custom. The
_bhumia_ also attended the levee, but no one knew him, and he was
stopped at the door of the courtyard by the servant. "Say that the
_bhumia_ of Jhaswara has come to pay his salaams," said he. They let him
in, and in the heart of Ajmir City, in broad daylight, and before all
the _jaghirdar's_ household, he smote off his enemy's head so that it
rolled upon the ground. Then he fled, and though they raised the
countryside against him he was never caught, and went into Bikanir.
Five years later, word came to Ajmir that Chimbo Singh, the _bhumia_ of
Jhaswara, had taken service under the Thakur Sahib of Palitana. The case
was an old one, and the chances of identification misty, but the
suspected was caught and brought in, and one of the leading native
barristers of the Bombay Bar was retained to defend him. He said nothing
and continued to say nothing, and the case fell through. He is believed
to be "wanted" now for a fresh murder committed within the last few
months, out Bikanir way.
And now that the train has reached Ajmir, the Crewe of Rajputana,
whither shall a tramp turn his feet? The Englishman set his stick on
end, and it fell with its point Northwest as nearly as might be. This
being translated, meant Jodhpur, which is the city of the Houyhnhnms. If
you would enjoy Jodhpur thoroughly, quit at Ajmir the decent
conventionalities of "station" life, and make it your business to move
among gentlemen--gentlemen in the Ordnance or the Commissariat, or,
better still, gentlemen on the Railway. At Ajmir, gentlemen will tell
you what manner of place Jodhpur is, and their accounts, though
flavoured with oaths, are amusing. In their eyes the desert that rings
the city has no charms, and they discuss affairs of the State, as they
understand them, in a manner that would curl the hair on a Political's
august head. Jodhpur has been, but things are rather better now, a
much-favoured camping ground for the light-cavalry of the Road--the
loafers with a certain amount of brain and great assurance. The
explanation is simple. There are more than four hundred horses in His
Highness's city stables alone; and where the Houyhnhnm is, there also
will be the Yahoo. This is sad but true.
Besides the Uhlans who come and go on Heaven knows what mysterious
errands, there are bag-men travelling for the big English firms. Jodhpur
is a good customer, and purchases all sorts of things, more or less
useful, for the State or its friends. These are the gentlemen to know,
if you would understand something of matters which are not written in
reports.
The Englishman took a train from Ajmir to Marwar Junction, which is on
the road to Mount Abu, westward from Ajmir, and at five in the morning,
under pale moonlight, was uncarted at the beginning of the Jodhpur State
Railway--one of the quaintest little lines that ever ran a locomotive.
It is the Maharaja's very own, and pays about ten per cent; but its
quaintness does not lie in these things. It is worked with rude economy,
and started life by singularly and completely falsifying the Government
estimates for its construction. An intelligent bureau asserted that it
could not be laid down for less than--but the error shall be glossed
over. It was laid down for a little more than seventeen thousand rupees
a mile, with the help of second-hand rails and sleepers; and it is
currently asserted that the Station-masters are flagmen, pointsmen,
ticket-collectors, and everything else, except platforms, and
lamp-rooms. As only two trains are run in the twenty-four hours, this
economy of staff does not matter. The State line, with the
comparatively new branch to the Pachpadra salt-pits, pays handsomely and
is exactly suited to the needs of its users. True, there is a certain
haziness as to the hour of starting, but this allows laggards more time,
and fills the packed carriages to overflowing.
From Marwar Junction to Jodhpur, the train leaves the Aravalis and goes
northwards into the region of death that lies beyond the Luni River.
Sand, _ak_ bushes, and sand-hills, varied with occasional patches of
unthrifty cultivation, make up the scenery. Rain has been very scarce in
Marwar this year, and the country, consequently, shows at its worst, for
almost every square mile of a kingdom nearly as large as Scotland is
dependent on the sky for its crops. In a good season, a large village
can pay from seven to nine thousand rupees revenue without blenching. In
a bad one, "all the king's horses and all the king's men" may think
themselves lucky if they raise fifteen rupees from the same place. The
fluctuation is startling.
From a countryside, which to the uninitiated seems about as valuable as
a stretch of West African beach, the State gets a revenue of nearly
forty lakhs; and men who know the country vow that it has not been one
tithe exploited, and that there is more to be made from salt marble
and--curious thing in this wilderness--good forest conservancy, than an
open-handed Durbar dreams of. An amiable weakness for unthinkingly
giving away villages where ready cash failed, has somewhat hampered the
revenue in past years; but now--and for this the Maharaja deserves great
credit--Jodhpur has a large and genuine surplus and a very compact
little scheme of railway extension. Before turning to a consideration
of the City of Jodhpur, hear a true story in connection with the
Hyderabad-Pachpadra project which those interested in the scheme may lay
to heart.
His State line, his "ownest own," as has been said, very much delighted
the Maharaja who, in one or two points, is not unlike Sir Theodore Hope
of sainted memory. Pleased with the toy, he said effusively, in words
which may or may not have reached the ears of the Hyderabad-Pachpadra
people: "This is a good business. If the Government will give me
independent jurisdiction, I'll make and open the line straight away from
Pachpadra to the end of my dominions, _i.e._, all but to Hyderabad."
Then "up and spake an elder knight, sat at the King's right knee," who
knew something about the railway map of India and the Controlling Power
of strategical lines: "Maharaja Sahib--here is the Indus Valley State
line and here is the Bombay-Baroda line. Where would _you_ be?" "By
Jove," quoth the Maharaja, though he swore by quite another god: "I
see!" and thus he abandoned the idea of a Hyderabad line, and turned his
attention to an extension to Nagore, with a branch to the Makrana marble
quarries which are close to the Sambhar salt lake near Jeypore. And, in
the fulness of time, that extension will be made and perhaps extended to
Bahawalpur.
The Englishman came to Jodhpur at midday, in a hot, fierce sunshine that
struck back from the sands and the ledges of red rock, as though it were
May instead of December. The line scorned such a thing as a regular
ordained terminus. The single track gradually melted away into the
sands. Close to the station was a grim stone dak-bungalow, and in the
verandah stood a brisk, bag-and-flask-begirdled individual, cracking his
joints with excess of irritation.
_Nota Bene._--When one is on the Road it is above all things necessary
to "pass the time o' day" to fellow-wanderers. Failure to comply with
this law implies that the offender is "too good for his company"; and
this, on the Road, is the unpardonable sin. The Englishman "passed the
time o' day" in due and ample form. "Ha! Ha!" said the gentleman with
the bag. "Isn't this a sweet place? There ain't no _ticca-gharies_, and
there ain't nothing to eat, if you haven't brought your vittles, an'
they charge you three-eight for a bottle of whisky. Oh! it's a sweet
place." Here he skipped about the verandah and puffed. Then turning upon
the Englishman, he said fiercely: "What have you come here for?" Now
this was rude, because the ordinary form of salutation on the Road is
usually "And what are you for?" meaning "what house do you represent?"
The Englishman answered dolefully that he was travelling for pleasure,
which simple explanation offended the little man with the courier-bag.
He snapped his joints more excruciatingly than ever: "For pleasure? My
God! For pleasure? Come here an' wait five weeks for your money, an',
mark what I'm tellin' you now, you don't get it then! But per'aps your
ideas of pleasure is different from most people's. For pleasure! Yah!"
He skipped across the sands toward the station, for he was going back
with the down train, and vanished in a whirlwind of luggage and the
fluttering of female skirts: in Jodhpur the women are baggage coolies. A
level, drawling voice spoke from an inner room: "'E's a bit upset.
That's what 'e is! I remember when I was at Gworlior"--the rest of the
story was lost, and the Englishman set to work to discover the nakedness
of the dak-bungalow. For reasons which do not concern the public, it is
made as bitterly uncomfortable as possible. The food is infamous, and
the charges seem to be wilfully pitched about eighty per cent above the
tariff, so that some portion of the bill, at least, may be paid without
bloodshed, or the unseemly defilement of walls with the contents of
drinking glasses. This is short-sighted policy, and it would, perhaps,
be better to lower the prices and hide the tariff, and put a guard about
the house to prevent jackal-molested donkeys from stampeding into the
verandahs. But these be details. Jodhpur dak-bungalow is a merry, merry
place, and any writer in search of new ground to locate a madly
improbable story in, could not do better than study it diligently. In
front lies sand, riddled with innumerable ant-holes, and beyond the sand
the red sandstone wall of the city, and the Mahometan burying-ground
that fringes it. Fragments of sandstone set on end mark the resting
places of the Faithful, who are of no great account here. Above
everything, a mark for miles around, towers the dun-red pile of the Fort
which is also a Palace. This is set upon sandstone rock whose sharper
features have been worn smooth by the wash of the windblown sand. It is
as monstrous as anything in Dore's illustrations of the _Contes
Drolatiques_ and, wherever it wanders, the eye comes back at last to its
fantastic bulk. There is no greenery on the rock, nothing but fierce
sunlight or black shadow. A line of red hills forms the background of
the city, and this is as bare as the picked bones of camels that lie
bleaching on the sand below.
Wherever the eye falls, it sees a camel or a string of camels--lean,
racer-built _sowarri_ camels, or heavy, black, shag-haired trading ships
bent on their way to the Railway Station. Through the night the air is
alive with the bubbling and howling of the brutes, who assuredly must
suffer from nightmare. In the morning the chorus round the station is
deafening.
Knowing what these camels meant, but trusting nevertheless that the road
would not be _very_ bad, the Englishman went into the city, left a
well-kunkered road, turned through a sand-worn, red sandstone gate, and
sank ankle-deep in fine reddish white sand. This was the main
thoroughfare of the city. Two tame lynxes shared it with a donkey; and
the rest of the population seemed to have gone to bed. In the hot
weather, between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon all
Jodhpur stays at home for fear of death by sun-stroke, and it is
possible that the habit extends far into what is officially called the
"cold weather"; or, perhaps, being brought up among sands, men do not
care to tramp them for pleasure. The city internally is a walled and
secret place; each courtyard being hidden from view by a red sandstone
wall except in a few streets where the shops are poor and mean.
In an old house now used for the storing of tents, Akbar's mother lay
two months, before the "Guardian of Mankind" was born, drawing breath
for her flight to Umarkot across the desert. Seeing this place, the
Englishman thought of many things not worth the putting down on paper,
and went on till the sand grew deeper and deeper, and a great camel,
heavily laden with stone, came round a corner and nearly stepped on him.
As the evening fell, the city woke up, and the goats and the camels and
the kine came in by hundreds, and men said that wild pig, which are
strictly preserved by the Princes for their own sport, were in the habit
of wandering about the roads. Now if they do this in the capital, what
damage must they not do to the crops in the district? Men said that they
did a very great deal of damage, and it was hard to keep their noses out
of anything they took a fancy to. On the evening of the Englishman's
visit, the Maharaja went out, as is his laudable custom, alone and
unattended, to a road actually _in_ the city along which one specially
big pig was in the habit of passing. His Highness got his game with a
single shot behind the shoulder, and in a few days it was pickled and
sent off to the Maharana of Udaipur, as a love-gift. There is great
friendship between Jodhpur and Udaipur, and the idea of one King going
abroad to shoot game for another has something very pretty and quaint in
it.
Night fell and the Englishman became aware that the conservancy of
Jodhpur might be vastly improved. Strong stenches, say the doctors, are
of no importance; but there came upon every breath of heated air--and in
Jodhpur City the air is warm in mid-winter--the faint, sweet, sickly
reek that one has always been taught to consider specially deadly. A few
months ago there was an impressive outbreak of cholera in Jodhpur, and
the Residency Doctor, who really hoped that the people would be brought
to see sense, did his best to bring forward a general cleansing-scheme.
But the city fathers would have none of it. Their fathers had been
trying to poison themselves in well-defined ways for an indefinite
number of years; and they were not going to have any of the Sahib's
"sweeper-nonsense."
To clinch everything, one travelled member of the community rose in his
place and said: "Why, I've been to Simla. Yes, to Simla! And even _I_
don't want it!"
When the black dusk had shut down, the Englishman climbed up a little
hill and saw the stars come out and shine over the desert. Very far
away, some camel-drivers had lighted a fire and were singing as they sat
by the side of their beasts. Sound travels as far over sand as over
water, and their voices came into the city wall and beat against it in
multiplied echoes.
Then he returned to the House of Strange Stories--the Dak-bungalow--and
passed the time o' day with a light-hearted bagman--a Cockney, in whose
heart there was no thought of India, though he had travelled for years
throughout the length and breadth of the Empire and over New Burma as
well. There was a fort in Jodhpur, but you see that was not in his line
of business exactly, and there were stables, but "you may take my word
for it, them who has much to do with horses is a bad lot. You get hold
of the Maharaja's coachman and he'll drive you all round the shop. I'm
only waiting here collecting money." Jodhpur dak-bungalow seems to be
full of men "waiting here." They lie in long chairs in the verandah and
tell each other interminable stories, or stare citywards and express
their opinion of some dilatory debtor. They are all waiting for
something; and they vary the monotony of a life they make wilfully dull
beyond words, by waging war with the dak-bungalow khansama. Then they
return to their long chairs or their couches, and sleep. Some of them,
in old days, used to wait as long as six weeks--six weeks in May, when
the sixty miles from Marwar Junction to Jodhpur was covered in three
days by slow-pacing bullock carts! Some of them are bagmen, able to
describe the demerits of every dak-bungalow from the Peshin to Pagan,
and southward to Hyderabad--men of substance who have "The Trades" at
their back. It is a terrible thing to be in "The Trades," that great
Doomsday Book of Calcutta, in whose pages are written the names of
doubtful clients. Let light-hearted purchasers take note.
And the others, who wait and swear and spit and exchange anecdotes--what
are they? Bummers, land-sharks, skirmishers for their bread. It would be
cruel in a fellow-tramp to call them loafers. Their lien upon the State
may have its origin in horses, or anything else; for the State buys
anything vendible, from Abdul Rahman's most promising importations to a
patent, self-acting corkscrew. They are a mixed crew, but amusing and
full of strange stories of adventure by land and sea. And their ends are
as curiously brutal as their lives. A wanderer was once swept into the
great, still back-water that divides the loaferdom of Upper India--that
is to say, Calcutta and Bombay--from the north-going current of Madras,
where Nym and Pistol are highly finished articles with certificates of
education. This back-water is a dangerous place to break down in, as the
men on the Road know well. "You can run Rajputana in a pair o' sack
breeches an' an old hat, but go to Central Injia with money," says the
wisdom of the Road. So the waif died in the bazaar, and the
Barrack-master Sahib gave orders for his burial. It might have been the
bazaar sergeant, or it might have been an hireling who was charged with
the disposal of the body. At any rate, it was an Irishman who said to
the Barrack-master Sahib: "Fwhat about that loafer?" "Well, what's the
matter?" "I'm considtherin whether I'm to mash in his thick head, or to
break his long legs. He won't fit the store-coffin anyways."
Here the story ends. It may be an old one; but it struck the Englishman
as being rather unsympathetic in its nature; and he has preserved it for
this reason. Were the Englishman a mere Secretary of State instead of an
enviable and unshackled vagabond, he would remodel that Philanthropic
Institution of Teaching Young Subalterns how to Spell--variously called
the Intelligence and the Political Department--and giving each boy the
pair of sack breeches and old hat, above prescribed, would send him out
for a twelvemonth on the Road. Not that he might learn to swear
Australian oaths (which are superior to any ones in the market) or to
drink bazaar-drinks (which are very bad indeed), but in order that he
might gain an insight into the tertiary politics of States--things less
imposing than succession-cases and less wearisome than boundary
disputes, but very well worth knowing.
A small volume might be written of the ways and the tales of Indian
loafers of the more brilliant order--such Chevaliers of the Order of
Industry as would throw their glasses in your face did you call them
loafers. They are a genial, blasphemous, blustering crew, and preëminent
even in a land of liars.
XIII
A KING'S HOUSE AND COUNTRY. FURTHER CONSIDERATION OF THE HAT-MARKED
CASTE.
The hospitality that spreads tables in the wilderness, and shifts the
stranger from the back of the hired camel into a two-horse victoria,
must be experienced to be appreciated.
To those unacquainted with the peculiarities of the native-trained
horse, this advice may be worth something. Sit as far back as ever you
can, and, if Oriental courtesy have put an English bit and bridoon in a
mouth by education intended for a spiked curb, leave the whole
contraption alone. Once acquainted with the comparative smoothness of
English iron-mongery, your mount will grow frivolous. In which event a
four-pound steeplechase saddle, accepted through sheer shame, offers the
very smallest amount of purchase to untrained legs.
The Englishman rode up to the Fort, and by the way learnt all these
things and many more. He was provided with a racking, female horse who
swept the gullies of the city by dancing sideways.
The road to the Fort, which stands on the Hill of Strife, wound in and
out of sixty-foot hills, with a skilful avoidance of all shade; and this
was at high noon, when puffs of heated air blew from the rocks on all
sides. "What must the heat be in May?" The Englishman's companion was a
cheery Brahmin, who wore the lightest of turbans and sat the smallest of
neat little country-breds. "Awful!" said the Brahmin. "But not so bad as
in the district. Look there!" and he pointed from the brow of a bad
eminence, across the quivering heat-haze, to where the white sand faded
into bleach blue sky and the horizon was shaken and tremulous. "It's
very bad in summer. Would knock you--oh yes--all to smash, but _we_ are
accustomed to it." A rock-strewn hill, about half a mile, as the crow
flies, from the Fort was pointed out as the place whence, at the
beginning of this century, the Pretender Sowae besieged Raja Maun for
five months, but could make no headway against his foe. One gun of the
enemy's batteries specially galled the Fort, and the Jodhpur King
offered a village to any of his gunners who should dismount it. "It was
smashed," said the Brahmin. "Oh yes, all to pieces." Practically, the
city which lies below the Fort is indefensible, and during the many wars
of Marwar has generally been taken up by the assailants without
resistance.
Entering the Fort by the Jeypore Gate, and studiously refraining from
opening his umbrella, the Englishman found shadow and coolth, took off
his hat to the tun-bellied, trunk-nosed God of Good-Luck who had been
very kind to him in his wanderings, and sat down near half a dozen of
the Maharaja's guns bearing the mark, "A. Broome, Cossipore, 1857," or
"G. Hutchinson, Cossipore, 1838." Now rock and masonry are so curiously
blended in this great pile that he who walks through it loses sense of
being among buildings. It is as though he walked through
mountain-gorges. The stone-paved, inclined planes, and the tunnel-like
passages driven under a hundred feet height of buildings, increase this
impression. In many places the wall and rock runs up unbroken by any
window for forty feet.
It would be a week's work to pick out even roughly the names of the dead
who have added to the buildings, or to describe the bewildering
multiplicity of courts and ranges of rooms; and, in the end, the result
would be as satisfactory as an attempt to describe a nightmare. It is
said that the rock on which the Fort stands is four miles in circuit,
but no man yet has dared to estimate the size of the city that they call
the Palace, or the mileage of its ways. Ever since Ras Joda, four
hundred years ago, listened to the voice of a _Jogi_, and leaving
Mundore built his eyrie on the "Bird's nest" as the Hill of Strife was
called, the Palaces have grown and thickened. Even to-day the builders
are still at work. Takht Singh, the present ruler's predecessor, built
royally. An incomplete bastion and a Hall of Flowers are among the works
of his pleasure. Hidden away behind a mighty wing of carved red
sandstone lie rooms set apart for Viceroys, Durbar Halls and
dinner-rooms without end. A gentle gloom covers the evidences of the
catholic taste of the State in articles of "bigotry and virtue"; but
there is enough light to show the _raison d'être_ of the men who wait in
the dak-bungalow. And, after all, what is the use of Royalty in these
days if a man may not take delight in the pride of the eye? Kumbha Rana,
the great man of Chitor, fought like a Rajput, but he had an instinct
which made him build the Tower of Victory at, who knows what cost of
money and life. The fighting-instinct thrown back upon itself must have
some sort of outlet; and a merciful Providence wisely ordains that the
Kings of the East in the nineteenth century shall take pleasure in
shopping on an imperial scale. Dresden China snuff-boxes, mechanical
engines, electro-plated fish-slicers, musical boxes, and gilt
blown-glass Christmas-tree balls do not go well with the splendours of a
Palace that might have been built by Titans and coloured by the morning
sun. But there are excuses to be made for Kings who have no fighting to
do.
In one of the higher bastions stands a curious specimen of one of the
earliest _mitrailleuses_--a cumbrous machine carrying twenty gun-barrels
in two rows, which small-arm fire is flanked by two tiny cannon. As a
muzzle-loading implement its value after the first discharge would be
insignificant; but the soldiers lounging by assured the Englishman that
it had done good service in its time.
A man may spend a long hour in the upper tiers of the Palaces, but still
far from the roof-tops, in looking out across the desert. There are
Englishmen in these wastes, who say gravely that there is nothing so
fascinating as the sand of Bikanir and Marwar. "You see," explained an
enthusiast of the Hat-marked Caste, "you are not shut in by roads, and
you can go just as you please. And, somehow, it grows upon you as you
get used to it, and you end, y'know, by falling in love with the place."
Look steadily from the Palace westward where the city with its tanks and
serais is spread at your feet, and you will, in a lame way, begin to
understand the fascination of the Desert which, by those who have felt
it, is said to be even stronger than the fascination of the Road. The
city is of red sandstone and dull and sombre to look at. Beyond it,
where the white sand lies, the country is dotted with camels limping
into the Eiwigkeit or coming from the same place. Trees appear to be
strictly confined to the suburbs of the city. Very good. If you look
long enough across the sands, while a voice in your ear is telling you
of half-buried cities, old as old Time, and wholly unvisited by Sahibs,
of districts where the white man is unknown, and of the wonders of
far-away Jeysulmir ruled by a half-distraught king, sand-locked and now
smitten by a terrible food and water famine, you will, if it happen that
you are of a sedentary and civilised nature, experience a new
emotion--will be conscious of a great desire to take one of the lobbing
camels and get away into the desert, away from the last touch of To-day,
to meet the Past face to face. Some day a novelist will exploit the
unknown land from the Rann, where the wild ass breeds, northward and
eastward, till he comes to the Indus.
But the officials of Marwar do not call their country a desert. On the
contrary, they administer it very scientifically and raise, as has been
said, about thirty-eight lakhs from it. To come back from the influence
and the possible use of the desert to more prosaic facts. Read quickly a
rough record of things in modern Marwar. The old is drawn in Tod, who
speaks the truth. The Maharaja's right hand in the work of the State is
Maharaj Sir Pertab Singh, Prime Minister A.--D.--C. to the Prince of
Wales, capable of managing the Marwari who intrigues like a--Marwari,
equally capable, as has been seen, of moving in London Society, and
Colonel of a newly raised crack cavalry corps. The Englishman would have
liked to have seen him, but he was away in the desert somewhere, either
marking a boundary or looking after a succession case. Not very long
ago, as the Setts of Ajmir knew well, there was a State debt of fifty
lakhs. This has now been changed into a surplus of three lakhs, and the
revenue is growing. Also, the simple Dacoit who used to enjoy himself
very pleasantly, has been put into a department, and the Thug with him.
Consequently, for the department takes a genuine interest in this form
of _shikar_, and the gaol leg-irons are not too light, dacoities have
been reduced to such an extent that men say "you may send a woman, with
her ornaments upon her, from Sojat to Phalodi, and she will not lose a
nose-ring." Again, and this in a Rajput State is an important matter,
the boundaries of nearly every village in Marwar have been demarcated,
and boundary fights, in which both sides preferred small-arm fire to the
regulation club, are unknown. The open-handed system of giving away
villages had raised a large and unmannerly crop of _jaghirdars_. These
have been taken up and brought in hand by Sir Pertab Singh, to the
better order of the State.
A Punjabi Sirdar, Har Dyal Singh, has reformed, or made rather, Courts
on the Civil and Criminal Side; and his hand is said to be found in a
good many sweepings out of old corners. It must always be borne in mind
that everything that has been done, was carried through over and under
unlimited intrigue, for Jodhpur is a Native State. Intrigue must be met
with intrigue by all except Gordons or demi-gods; and it is curious to
hear how a reduction in tariff, or a smoothing out of some tangled
Court, had to be worked by shift and byway. The tales are comic, but not
for publication. Howbeit, Har Dyal Singh got his training in part under
the Punjab Government, and in part in a little Native State far away in
the Himalayas, where intrigue is not altogether unknown. To the credit
of the "Pauper Province" be it said, it is not easy to circumvent a
Punjabi. The details of his work would be dry reading. The result of it
is good, and there is justice in Marwar, and order and firmness in its
administration.
Naturally, the land-revenue is the most interesting thing in Marwar from
an administrative point of view. The basis of it is a tank about the
size of a swimming-bath, with a catchment of several hundred square
yards, draining through leeped channels. When God sends the rain, the
people of the village drink from the tank. When the rains fail, as they
failed this year, they take to their wells, which are brackish and breed
guinea-worm. For these reasons the revenue, like the Republic of San
Domingo, is never alike for two years running. There are no canal
questions to harry the authorities; but the fluctuations are enormous.
Under the Aravalis the soil is good: further north they grow millet and
pasture cattle, though, said a Revenue Officer cheerfully, "God knows
what the brutes find to eat." _Apropos_ of irrigation, the one canal
deserves special mention, as showing how George Stephenson came to
Jodhpur and astonished the inhabitants. Six miles from the city proper
lies the Balsaman Sagar, a great tank. In the hot weather, when the city
tanks ran out or stank, it was the pleasant duty of the women to tramp
twelve miles at the end of the day's work to fill their lotahs. In the
hot weather Jodhpur is--let a simile suffice. Sukkur in June would be
Simla to Jodhpur.
The State Engineer, who is also the Jodhpur State Line, for he has no
European subordinates, conceived the idea of bringing the water from the
Balsaman into the city. Was the city grateful? Not in the least. It is
said that the Sahib wanted the water to run uphill and was throwing
money into the tank. Being true Marwaris, men betted on the subject. The
canal--a built out one, for water must not touch earth in these
parts--was made at a cost of something over a lakh, and the water came
down because its source was a trifle higher than the city. Now, in the
hot weather, the women need not go for long walks, but the Marwari
cannot understand how it was that the waters came down to Jodhpur. From
the Marwari to money matters is an easy step. Formerly, that is to say,
up to within a very short time, the Treasury of Jodhpur was conducted in
a shiftless, happy-go-lucky sort of fashion, not uncommon in Native
States, whereby the Mahajuns "held the bag" and made unholy profits on
discount and other things, to the confusion of the Durbar Funds and
their own enrichment. There is now a Treasury modelled on English lines,
and English in the important particular that money is not to be got from
it for the asking, and the items of expenditure are strictly looked
after.
In the middle of all this bustle of reform planned, achieved,
frustrated, and replanned, and the never-ending underground warfare that
surges in a Native State, move the English officers--the irreducible
minimum of exiles. As a caste, the working Englishmen in Native States
are curiously interesting; and the traveller whose tact by this time has
been blunted by tramping, sits in judgment upon them as he has seen
them. In the first place, they are, they must be, the fittest who have
survived; for though, here and there, you shall find one chafing
bitterly against the burden of his life in the wilderness, one to be
pitied more than any chained beast, the bulk of the caste are honestly
and unaffectedly fond of their work, fond of the country around them,
and fond of the people they deal with. In each State their answer to a
question is the same. The men with whom they are in contact are "all
right" when you know them, but you've got to "know them first," as the
music-hall song says. Their hands are full of work; so full that, when
the incult wanderer said: "What do you find to do?" they look upon him
with contempt and amazement, exactly as the wanderer himself had once
looked upon a Globe-trotter, who had put to him the same impertinent
query. And--but here the Englishman may be wrong--it seemed to him that
in one respect their lives were a good deal more restful and
concentrated than those of their brethren under the British Government.
There was no talk of shiftings and transfers and promotions, stretching
across a Province and a half, and no man said anything about Simla. To
one who has hitherto believed that Simla is the hub of the Empire, it is
disconcerting to hear: "Oh, Simla! That's w
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