Title: Letters of Marque
Author: Rudyard, Kipling, (1865-1936)
Language: English
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                           LETTERS OF MARQUE

 [Illustration: Page 223--"They motioned silently that none must pass
              immediately before the seat of the King."]



                                LETTERS
                               OF MARQUE

                         _By_ RUDYARD KIPLING

                            ILLUSTRATED BY
                          CHARLES D. FARRAND

                            [Illustration]

                  R. F. FENNO & COMPANY: PUBLISHERS:
                          9 & 11 E. SIXTEENTH
                      STREET: NEW YORK CITY: 1899


                            COPYRIGHT, 1899
                                  BY
                         R. F. FENNO & COMPANY

                         _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._


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 country side. 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, Singapore, 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, unwashen 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 masts
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 “glimmering 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 has 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 dâk bungaloathesome 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 cockpit 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 which will be shown in
their proper place.

Dhola Rae was killed in due time, and for nine hundred years Jeypore,
torn by the intrigues of 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 North-West Provinces and was once
the capital of Sivaji, and piteously demands a “guide-book on all India,
a thing that you can carry in your trunk y’know--that gives you plain
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 afterwards the good people
of America builded their towns after this pattern, but knowing nothing
of Jey Singh, they took all the credit to themselves.

He built himself everything that pleased him, palaces and gardens and
temples, and then died, and was buried under a white marble tomb on a
hill 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 Mahomedan 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 stand-pipes. He built gas-works, set a-foot a School of Art, a
Museum, all the things in fact which are necessary to Western municipal
welfare and comfort, and saw that they were the best of 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 branded bull trips over
the rails of a steel tramway which brings out the city rubbish; the
lacquered and painted _ruth_, behind the two little stag-like trotting
bullocks, catches its primitive wheels in the cast-iron gas-lamp post
with the brass nozzle a-top, and all Rajputana, gaily-clad,
small-turbaned, swaggering Rajputana, circulates along the 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 inscript
“Welcome!” This was made when the Prince of Wales visited Jeypore to
shoot his first tiger; but the average traveller of to-day may
appropriate the message to himself, for Jeypore takes great care of
strangers and shows them all courtesy. This, by the way, 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 Elysees; but in place of the white-stone fronts of Paris, rises a
long line of open-work screen-wall, the prevailing tone of which is
pink--caramel pink, but house-owners have unlimited license to decorate
their tenements as they please. Jeypore, broadly considered, is Hindu,
and her architecture of the riotous many-arched type which even the
Globe-Trotter after a short time learns to call Hindu. It is 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 sowar in the Maharaja’s army. He explained that
his pay was six rupees a month paid bi-monthly. He was cut the cost of
his khaki blouse, brown-leather accoutrements and jack-boots; lance,
saddle, sword, and horse were given free. He refused to say for how many
months in the year he was drilled, and said vaguely that his duties were
mainly escort ones, and he had no fault to find with them. The defeat
of his quail had vexed him; and he desired the Sahib to understand that
the sowars of His 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 fore-legs did not seem to belong to the stony district. “Where did
he come from?” The sowar pointed northward and said “from Amritsar,” but
he pronounced it “Armtzar.” Many horses had been brought at the spring
fairs in the Punpab; they cost about Rs. 200 each, perhaps more, the
sowar could not say. Some came from Hissar and some from other places
beyond Delhi. They were very good horses. “That horse there,” he pointed
to one a little distance down the street, “is the son of a big Sirkar
horse--the kind that the Sirkar make for breeding horses--so high!” The
owner of “that horse” swaggered up, jaw-bandaged and cat-moustached, and
bade the Englishman look at his mouth; bought, of course, when a
_butcha_. Both men together said that the Sahib had better examine the
Maharaja Sahib’s stable, where there were hundreds of horses--huge as
elephants or tiny as sheep.

To the stables the Englishman accordingly went, knowing beforehand what
he would find, and 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 horseflesh was very limited; but he felt
certain that more than one or two of the sleek, perfectly groomed
country-breds should have been justifying their existence in the ranks
of the British cavalry, instead of eating their heads off on six seers
of gram and one of _goor_ per diem. But they had all been honestly
bought and honestly paid for; and there was nothing in the wide world to
prevent His Highness, if he wished to do so, from sweeping up the pick
and pride of all the horses in the Punjab. The attendants appeared to
take a wicked delight in saying “eshtud-bred” very loudly and with
unnecessary emphasis as they threw back the loin-cloth. Sometimes they
were wrong, but in too many cases they were right.

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 in Milianah, wild
beasts began to roar, and a crowd of little boys laughed. The lions of
Jeypore are tigers, caged in a public place for the sport of the people,
who hiss at them and disturb their royal 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 trio 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 of a Cotton Press._


And what shall be said of Amber, Queen of the Pass--the city that Jey
Singh bade his people slough as snakes cast their skins? The
Globe-Trotter will assure you that it must be “done” before anything
else, and the Globe-Trotter is, for once, perfectly correct. Amber lies
between six and seven miles from Jeypore among the “tumbled fragments of
the hills,” and is reachable by so prosaic a conveyance as a
ticca-ghari, and so uncomfortable a one as an elephant. _He_ is provided
by the Maharaja, and the people who make India their prey are apt to
accept his services as a matter of course.

Rise very early in the morning, before the stars have gone out, and
drive through the sleeping city till the pavement gives place to cactus
and sand, and educational and enlightened institutions to mile upon mile
of semi-decayed Hindu temples--brown and weather-beaten--running down to
the shores of the great Man Sagar Lake, wherein are more ruined temples,
palaces and fragments of causeways. The water-birds have their home in
the half-submerged arcades and the _mugger_ nuzzles the shafts of the
pillars. It is a fitting prelude to the desolation of Amber. Beyond the
Man Sagar the road of to-day climbs up-hill, and by its side runs the
huge stone-causeway of yesterday--blocks sunk in concrete. Down this
path the swords of Amber went out to kill. A triple wall rings the city,
and, at the third gate, the road drops into the valley of Amber. In the
half light of dawn, a great city sunk between hills and built round
three sides of a lake is dimly visible, and one waits to catch the hum
that should rise from it as the day breaks. The air in the valley is
bitterly chill. With the growing light, Amber stands revealed, and the
traveller sees that it is a city that will never wake. A few _meenas_
live in huts at the end of the valley, but the temples, the shrines, the
palaces, and the tiers-on-tiers of houses are desolate. Trees grow in
and split open the walls, the windows are filled with brushwood, and the
cactus chokes the street. The Englishman made his way up the side of the
hill to the great palace that overlooks everything except the red fort
of Jeighur, guardian of Amber. As the elephant swung up the steep roads
paved with stone and built out on the sides of the hill, the Englishman
looked into empty houses where the little grey squirrel sat and
scratched its ears. The peacock walked upon the house-tops and the blue
pigeon roosted within. He passed under iron-studded gates whereof the
hinges were eaten out with rust, and by walls plumed and crowned with
grass, and under more gateways, till, at last, he reached the palace and
came suddenly into a great quadrangle where two blinded, arrogant
stallions, covered with red and gold trappings, screamed and neighed at
each other from opposite ends of the vast space. For a little time these
were the only visible living beings, and they were in perfect accord
with the spirit of the spot. Afterwards certain workmen appeared, for it
seems that the Maharaja keeps the old palace of his forefathers in good
repair, but they were modern and mercenary, and with great difficulty
were detached from the skirts of the traveller. A somewhat extensive
experience of palace-seeing had taught him that it is best to see
palaces alone, for the Oriental as a guide is undiscriminating and sets
too great a store on corrugated iron-roofs and glazed drain-pipes.

So the Englishman went into this palace built of stone, bedded on stone,
springing out of scarped rock, and reached by stone ways--nothing but
stone. Presently, he stumbled across a little temple of Kali, a gem of
marble tracery and inlay, very dark and, at that hour of the morning,
very cold.

If, as Violet-le-Duc tells us to believe, a building reflects the
character of its inhabitants, it must be impossible for one reared in an
Eastern palace to think straightly or speak freely or--but here the
annals of Rajputana contradict the theory--to act openly. The crampt and
darkened rooms, the narrow smooth-walled passages with recesses where a
man might wait for his enemy unseen, the maze of ascending and
descending stairs leading no-whither, the ever present screens of marble
tracery that may hide or reveal so much,--all these things breathe of
plot and counter-plot, league and intrigue. In a living palace where the
sightseer knows and feels that there are human beings everywhere, and
that he is followed by scores of unseen eyes, the impression is almost
unendurable. In a dead palace--a cemetery of loves and hatreds done with
hundreds of years ago, and of plottings that had for their end--though
the grey beards who plotted knew it not--the coming of the British
tourist with guide-book and sunhat--oppression gives place to simply
impertinent curiosity. The Englishman wandered into all parts of the
palace, for there was no one to stop him--not even the ghosts of the
dead Ranis--through ivory-studded doors, into the women’s quarters,
where a stream of water once flowed over a chiselled marble channel. A
creeper had set its hands upon the lattice here, and there was dust of
old nests in one of the niches in the wall. Did the lady of light virtue
who managed to become possessed of so great a portion of Jey Singh’s
library ever set her dainty feet in the trim garden of the Hall of
Pleasure beyond the screen-work? Was it in the forty-pillared Hall of
Audience that the order went forth that the Chief of Birjooghar was to
be slain, and from what wall did the King look out when the horsemen
clattered up the steep stone path to the palace, bearing on their
saddle-bows the heads of the bravest of Rajore? There were questions
innumerable to be asked in each court and keep and cell; aye, but the
only answer was the cooing of the pigeons on the walls.

If a man desired beauty, there was enough and to spare in the palace;
and of strength more than enough. By inlay and carved marble, by glass
and colour, the Kings who took their pleasure in that now desolate pile,
made all that their eyes rested upon royal and superb. But any
description of the artistic side of the palace,

[Illustration: Page 30--“Bearing on their saddle-bows the heads of the
bravest of Rajore?”]

if it were not impossible, would be wearisome. The wise man will visit
it when time and occasion serve, and will then, in some small measure,
understand what must have been the riotous, sumptuous, murderous life to
which our Governors and Lieutenant-Governors, Commissioners and Deputy
Commissioners, Colonels and Captains and the Subalterns after their
kind, have put an end.

From the top of the palace you may read if you please the Book of
Ezekiel written in stone upon the hillside. Coming up, the Englishman
had seen the city from below or on a level. He now looked into its very
heart--the heart that had ceased to beat. There was no sound of men or
cattle, or grind-stones in those pitiful streets--nothing but the cooing
of the pigeons. At first it seemed that the palace was not ruined at
all--that presently the women would come up on the house-tops and the
bells would ring in the temples. But as he attempted to follow with his
eye the turns of the streets, the Englishman saw that they died out in
wood tangle and blocks of fallen stone, and that some of the houses were
rent with great cracks, and pierced from roof to road with holes that
let in the morning sun. The drip-stones of the eaves were gap-toothed,
and the tracery of the screens had fallen out so that zenana-rooms lay
shamelessly open to the day. On the outskirts of the city, the strong
walled houses dwindled and sank down to mere stone-heaps and faint
indications of plinth and wall, hard to trace against the background of
stony soil. The shadow of the palace lay over two-thirds of the city and
the trees deepened the shadow. “He who has bent him o’er the dead”
_after_ the hour of which Byron sings, knows that the features of the
man become blunted as it were--the face begins to fade. The same hideous
look lies on the face of the Queen of the Pass, and when once this is
realised, the eye wonders that it could have ever believed in the life
of her. She is the city “whose graves are set in the side of the pit,
and her company is, round about here graves,” sister of Pathros, Zoan
and No.

Moved by a thoroughly insular instinct, the Englishman took up a piece
of plaster and heaved it from the palace wall into the dark streets
below. It bounded from a house-top to a window-ledge, and thence into a
little square, and the sound of its fall was hollow and echoing, as the
sound of a stone in a well. Then the silence closed up upon the sound,
till in the far away courtyard below the roped stallions began screaming
afresh. There may be desolation in the great Indian Desert to the
westward, and there is desolation upon the open seas; but the desolation
of Amber is beyond the loneliness either of land or sea. Men by the
hundred thousand must have toiled at the walls that bound it, the
temples and bastions that stud the walls, the fort that overlooks all,
the canals that once lifted water to the palace, and the garden in the
lake of the valley. Renan could describe it as it stands to-day, and
Vereschagin could paint it.

Arrived at this satisfactory conclusion, the Englishman went down
through the palace and the scores of venomous and suggestive little
rooms to the elephant in the courtyard and was taken back in due time to
the Nineteenth Century in the shape of His Highness the Maharaja’s
Cotton Press, returning a profit of 27 per cent., and fitted with two
engines of fifty horsepower each, an hydraulic press capable of exerting
a pressure of three tons per square inch, and everything else to
correspond. It stood under a neat corrugated iron roof close to the
Jeypore Railway Station, and was in most perfect order, but somehow it
did not taste well after Amber. There was aggressiveness about the
engines and the smell of the raw cotton.

The modern side of Jeypore must not be mixed with the ancient.



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 a Hindu Temple--rich in marble, stone and inlay, and a
deep and tranquil silence, close to the Public Library of the State. The
brazen bull was hung with flowers, 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, in the services of
the gods of the East. A tiny little maiden, child of a monstrously ugly
priest with one chalk-white eye, staggered across the marble pavement to
the shrine and threw, with a gust of childish laughter, the blossoms
she was carrying into the lap of the great Mahadeo himself. Then she
made as though she would leap up to the bells and ran away, still
laughing, into the shadow of the cells behind the shrine, while her
father explained that she was but a baby and that Mahadeo would take no
notice. The temple, he said, was specially favored by the 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 Tændstikker
matches.

Full night brought the hotel and its curiously-composed human menagerie.

There is, if a work-a-day world will give credit, a society entirely
outside, and unconnected with, that of the Station--a planet within a
planet, where 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
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
landmark in the desert. The old arms-seller knows and avoids him, and he
is detested by the jobber of gharis who calls everyone “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.” _Hazur_ is not to be compared with it.

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 Water-works, 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 Maharajah’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 bund 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 Raj, go down to
the level of the tank, scoop up the water in your hands and drink,
thinking meanwhile of the defects of the town whence you came. The
experience will be a profitable one. There are statistics in connection
with the Water-works, figures relating to “three-throw-plungers,”
delivery and supply, which should be known to the professional reader.
They would not interest the unprofessional who would learn his lesson
among the thronged stand-pipes of the city.

While the Englishman was preparing in his mind a scathing rebuke for an
erring municipality that he knew of, a camel swung across the sands, its
driver’s jaw and brow bound mummy fashion to guard against the dust. The
man was evidently a stranger to the place, for he pulled up and asked
the 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 on
his mount. He knew nothing of Jeypore, except the names of certain
Englishmen in it, the men who, he said, had made the Water-works 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 father-land, 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 the
two made the State what it is. When Ram Singh died, Madho Singh, his
successor, a conservative Hindu, forebore 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 stand-pipes explain that the Maharaja Sahib’s
father gave the order for the Water-works and that Yakub Sahib made
them--not only in the city but out away in the district. “Did people
grow more crops thereby?” “Of course they did: were canals made to wash
in only?” “How much more crops?” “Who knows. The Sahib had better go
and ask some official.” 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 compounds
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 in to 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 Newa’s Gardens, gardens--here the
Englishman can speak from a fairly extensive experience--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.

Envy is a low and degrading passion, and should be striven against. 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 was 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
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 Akbar 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 home-sick, and South Kensington labels,
whereon the description, measurements and price of each object, are
fairly printed. These make savage one who knows how labelling is bungled
in some of the Government Museums--those starved barns that are supposed
to hold the economic 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 S. K. M. pattern to show textile fabrics,
gold lace and the like. In the recesses of the walls are more cases, and
on the railing of the gallery that runs round each of the three great
central rooms, are fixed low cases to hold natural history specimens and
models of fruits and vegetables.

Hear this, Governments of India from the Punjab to Madras! The doors
come true to the jamb, the cases, which have been through a hot weather,
are neither warped nor cracked, nor are there 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 and without
rattling; there is not a speck of dust from one end of the building to
the other, because the menial staff are numerous enough to keep
everything clean, and the Curator’s 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 herein he was quite right.

The system of the Museum is complete in intention as are its
appointments in design. At present there are some fifteen thousand
objects of art, “surprising in themselves” as, Count Smaltork would say,
a complete exposition of the arts, from enamels to pottery and from
brassware 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-plaited silk and stud-work--flanks the _tulwars_ of Marwar and
the _jezails_ of Tonk; and reproductions of Persian and Russian
brasswork 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 Gessler’s cap. They thumb the revolving cases of cloths do these
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 to
show him 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 offhand--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_
India have failed to catch. That is all!

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_--just such a game as cost the Pandavs the fair Draupadi--with
inlaid dice and gaily 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 arrogantly 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 boltholes. It was a curious little
incident, and might have meant a great deal or just nothing at all. It
distracted the attention of the ancients bowed above the _chaupur_
cloth.

In the Palace-gardens there is even a greater stillness than that about
the courts, and here nothing of the West, unless a hypercritical soul
might take exception to the lamp-posts. At the extreme end lies a
lake-like tank swarming with _muggers_. It is reached through an opening
under a block of zenana 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, in a key as near as might be to the melodious howl of
the “monkey faquir” on the top of Jakko. 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.

And so back as Pepys says, through the chu-named 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, as hath been shown, 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 the keeper of two
tiny elephants, _Indur_ and _Har_, a _Sahib_ came with the _Burra Lat
Sahib_, and spent eight days in the enclosure of the great neglected
observatory, seeing and writing things in a book. But _he_ understood
Sanskrit--the Sanskrit upon the faces of the dials, and the meaning of
the gnoma and pointers. Now-a-days no one understands Sanskrit--not even
the Pundits; but without doubt Jey Singh was a great man.

The hearer echoed the statement, though 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. 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 pen and tact of a Wilfred Blunt are needed to fitly lash
their reticence. But the people in the city and the camel-driver from
the sand-hills told of them. They themselves held their peace as to 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 to-day is that their trade is
bad, because an unsympathetic Government induces the 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.

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 comb of splintered rock a-top,
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--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 endorsed 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, shipped 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 the ponies that might happen to be
near: the released animals finding their way back to their stables alone
and unguided. There were no _syces_, and the harness hung on by special
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_ with their pack-bullocks and their women; and the sun
touched the brasses of their swords and guns till the poor wretches
seemed rich merchants come back from travelling with Sindbad.

On a rock on the right hand side, thirty-four great vultures were
gathered over the carcase 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_! 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 shyed at what the driver said was a
rock; but it jumped up in the moonlight and went away.

Then came a great blasted heath whereon nothing was more than six inches
high--a wilderness 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
way side; 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 the
wheel proudly on the tyre, to show that that at least was sound. A hasty
courtmartial revealed that there was absolutely not one single
“breakdown tonga” 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 nightfowl 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 dak cannot
stop.” The Englishman sat down upon the parcels-bag, for he felt that
there was trouble coming. The driver looked East and West and said:--“I
too will go and see if the tonga can be found, for the Sirkar’s dak
cannot stop. Meantime, Oh Sahib, do you take care of the mails--one bag
and one bag of parcels.” So he ran swiftly into the haze of the
moonlight and was lost, and the Englishman was left alone in charge of
Her Majesty’s Mails, two unhappy ponies and a lopsided tonga. He lit
fires, 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 dak
into this tonga and go forward.” Amiable heathen! He was going, he said
so, to leave the Englishman to wait in the Sahara, for certainly thirty
hours and perhaps forty-eight. Tongas are scarce on the Udaipur road.
There are a few occasions in life when it is justifiable to delay Her
Majesty’s Mails. This was one of them. Seating himself upon the
parcels-bag, the 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
_banduq_ 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_, and a revolver,
Army pattern, was printing every diamond in the chequer-work of its
handle, into his right hip. When men desired him to move, they prodded
him with the handles of _tulwars_ till they had coiled him into an
uneasy lump. Then they slept upon him, or cannoned against him as the
tonga bumped. It was an _aram_ tonga or tonga for ease. That was the
bitterest thought of all.

In due season the harness began to break once every five minutes, and
the driver vowed that the wheels would give way also.

After eight hours in one position, it is excessively 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 Trench 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, wherein he dreamed
that he had caught a Viceroy under the walls of Chitor and beaten him
with a _tulwar_ till he turned into a dak-pony whose near foreleg, was
perpetually coming off, and who would say nothing but _um_ when he was
asked why he had not built a railway from Chitor to Udaipur.



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 a revolver-bed to sleep upon--this
city of the Suryavansi, hidden among the hills that encompass the great
Pichola lake. Truly, the King who governs to-day is wise in his
determination to have no railroad to his capital. His predecessor was
more or less enlightened, and had he lived a few years longer, would
have brought the iron horse through the Dobarri--the green gate which is
the entrance of the Girwa or girdle of hills round Udaipur; and, with
the train, would have come the tourist who would have scratched his name
upon the Temple of Garuda and laughed horse-laughs upon the lake. Let
us, therefore, be thankful that the capital of Mewar is hard to reach,
and go abroad into a new and a strange land rejoicing.

Each man who has any claims to respectability walks armed, carrying his
tulwar sheathed in his hand, or hung by a short sling of cotton passing
over 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 whisky-flask
that is much handled. 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
_tazwir_; a private of the Maharana’s regular army suggested that it was
a _hathi_; 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 bands were slain. Once, in the press of
battle, Pertap, on his great horse, “Chytak,” came within striking
distance of Selim’s elephant, and slew the _mahout_, but Selim escaped,
to become Jehangir afterwards, and the Rajputs were broken. That was
three hundred years ago, and men have reduced the picture to a sort of
diagram that the painter dashes in, in a few minutes, without, it would
seem, knowing what he is commemorating. Elsewhere, the story is drawn in
line even more roughly.

Thinking of these things, the Englishman made shift to get at 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 mountings 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-vendors in Udaipur are a genuine race, for they
sell to people who really use their wares. The man in the shop was
rude--distinctly so. His first flush of 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, sewer, 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 women. His stirrups and sword-handles are even more
unusable by Westerns than those elsewhere in India, while the Bhil’s
knife-handle gives as large a grip as an English one. Now the little
Bhil is an aborigine which is humiliating to think of. His tongue, which
may frequently be heard in the City, seems to possess some variant of
the Zulu click; 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 Jaggat Singh at the beginning of the
last century. This building must be--but ignorance is a bad guide--Jain
in character. From basement to the stone socket of the temple
flag-staff, it is carved in high relief with friezes of elephants, men,
gods, and monsters in 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 heart 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 facade of the main Palace has 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, timeworn 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, be these never so
rare and curious. 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
white-walled enclosure filled with many Brahmins and ringing

[Illustration: Page 77--“As a picture, a daringly insolent picture, it
would have been superb.”]

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 ghats 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 would have been superb.

The boat turned aside to shores where huge turtles were lying, and a
stork had built her a nest, big as a hay-cock, 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 Durbar Gardens.
Here were, as Mandeville hath it, “all manner of strange fowle"--divers
and waders, after their kind, 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
birds, 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. After this and many other slaughters had
been accomplished, the boat went back in the full dusk, down narrow
water-lanes and across belts of weed, disturbing innumerable fowl on the
road, till she reached open water and “the moon like a rick afire was
rising over the dale,” and--it was not the “whit, whit, whit” of the
nightingale but the stately “_honk, honk_” of some wild geese, thanking
their stars that these pestilent _shikaris_ were going away.

If the Venetian owned the Pichola Sagar he might say with justice:--“See
it and die.” But it is better to live and go to dinner, and strike into
a new life--that of the men who bear the hat-mark on their brow as
plainly as the wellborn 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
break-downs in nullahs fifty miles from everywhere, and of elephants
that used to sink “for rest and refreshment” half-way across swollen
streams. Every place here seems fifty miles from everywhere, and the
“legs of a horse” are regarded as the only natural means of locomotion.
Also, and this to the Indian Cockney who is accustomed to 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 most 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 evergrowing 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 an “effete curiosity” as the Bengali said, in a manner which makes
it seem very near and vivid. Be pleased to listen to some of the tales,
but with all the names cut out, because a King has just as 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, there was a King who
lay dying for many days, and all, including the Englishmen about him,
knew that his end was certain. But he had chosen to lie in an outer
court or pleasure-house of his Palace; and with him were some twenty of
his favourite wives. The place in which he lay was very near to the
City; and there was a fear that his womenkind should, on his death,
going mad with grief, cast off their veils and run out into the streets,
uncovered before all men. In which case, nothing, not even the power of
the Press, and the locomotive, and the telegraph, and cheap education
and enlightened municipal councils, could have saved them from _sati_,
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
hand-maidens, 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 _sati_, and felt properly abashed
when he was told that she _must_. There was nothing else for her if she
went out unveiled deliberately.

The rush-out forces the matter. And, indeed, if you consider the matter
from a Rajput point of view, it does.

Then followed a very grim tale of the death of another King; of the long
vigil by his bedside, 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 towards a fresh birth in the endless circle of the Wheel of
Fate. Once, in a neighboring State it is said, one of the dancing-girls
stole a march in the next world’s precedence and her lord’s affections,
upon the legitimate queens. The affair happened, by the way, after the
Mutiny, and was accomplished with great pomp in the light of day.
Subsequently those who might have stopped it but did not, were 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 what is done now and again among these lonely hills
in the walled holds of the Thakurs.

But to return from the burning-ground to modern Udaipur, as at present
worked under the Maharana and his Prime Minister Rae Punna 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 clearing the politics of all the Frontier tribes from Jumrood
to Quetta.

Roughly speaking, the Maharana and the Prime Minister--in whose family
the office has been 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,
Master of the Horses, and Supervisor of Doles, which last is pretty and
touching. The State officers itself, and the Englishman’s investigations
failed to unearth any Bengalis. The Commandant of the State Army, about
five thousand men of all arms, is a retired non-commissioned officer, a
Mr. Lonergan; who, as the medals on his breast attest, has “done the
State some service,” and now in his old age rejoices in the rank of
Major-General, and teaches the Maharaja’s guns to make uncommonly good
practice. The infantry are smart and well set up, while the
Cavalry--rare thing in Native States--have a distinct notion of keeping
their accoutrements clean. 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--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 a
seat on the _guddee_ before his eyes, consequently he is not an
English-speaking man.

There is a story told of him, which is worth the repeating. An
Englishman who flattered himself that he could speak the vernacular
fairly well, paid him a visit and discoursed with a round mouth. The
Maharana heard him politely, and turning to a satellite, demanded a
translation; which was given. Then said the Maharana:--“Speak to him in
_Angrezi_.” The _Angrezi_ spoken by the interpreter was the vernacular
as the Sahibs speak it, and the Englishman, having ended his conference,
departed abashed. But this backwardness is eminently suited to a place
like Udaipur, and a “varnished” prince is not always a desirable thing.
The curious and even startling simplicity of his life is worth
preserving. Here is a specimen of one of his days. Rising at four--and
the dawn can be bitterly chill--he bathes and prays after the custom of
his race, and at six is 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 the revenues--about thirty lakhs--are
disposed of. The Prime Minister’s career has been a chequered and
interesting one, including, _inter alia_, a dismissal from power (this
was worked from behind the screen), and arrest and an attack with words
which all but ended in his murder. He has not so much power as his
predecessors had, for the reason that the present Maharaja allows little
but tiger-shooting to distract him from the 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 fash” as the irreverent Americans put it. What the end will be,
after three generations of Princes and Dewans have been put through the
mill of Rajkumar Colleges, those who live will learn.

More interesting is the question--For how long can the vitality of a
people whose life was arms be suspended? Men in the North say that, by
the favour of the Government, 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
iron-monger only. Pity the horse in reason, for that life there is his
_raison d’etre_. Pity ten thousand times more the Rajput, for he has no
_raison d’etre_. He is an anachronism in a blue turban.”

The Gaul might be wrong, but Tod wrote things which seem to support this
view, in the days when he wished to make “buffer-states” of the land he
loved so well.

Let us visit the Durbar Gardens, where little naked Cupids are trampling
upon fountains of fatted fish, all in bronze, where there are cypresses
and red paths, and a deer-park full of all varieties of deer, 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 bought from the King of Oudh’s sale.

On the best site in the Gardens is rising the Victoria Hall, the
foundation-stone of which was laid by the Maharana on the 21st of June
last. It is built after the designs of Mr. C. Thompson, Executive
Engineer of the State, and will be in the Hindu-Saracenic style; having
two fronts, west and north. In the former will be the principal
entrance, approached by a flight of steps leading to a handsome porch of
carved pillars supporting stone beams--the flat Hindu arch. To the left
of the entrance hall will be a domed octagonal tower eighty feet high,
holding the principal staircase leading to the upper rooms. A corridor
on the right of the entrance will lead to the museum, and immediately
behind the entrance hall is the reading-room, 42 by 24 feet, and beyond
it the library and office. To the right of the reading-room will be an
open courtyard with a fountain in the centre, and, beyond the courtyard,
the museum--a great hall, one hundred feet long. Over the library and
the entrance hall will be private apartments for the Maharana,
approached by a private staircase. The communication between the two
upper rooms will be by a corridor running along the north front having a
parapet of delicately cut pillars and cusped arches--the latter filled
in with open tracery. Pity it is that the whole of this will have to be
whitewashed to protect the stone from the weather. Over the
entrance-porch, and projecting from the upper room, will be a very
elaborately cut balcony supported on handsome brackets. Facing the main
entrance will be a marble statue, nine feet high, of the Queen, on a
white marble pedestal ten feet high. The statue is now being made at
home by Mr. Birch, _R.A._ The cost of the whole will be about Rs.
80,000. Now, it is a curious thing that the statue of Her Majesty will
be put some eighty feet below the level of the great bund that holds in
the Pichola lake. But the bund is a firm one and has stood for many
years.

Another public building deserves notice, and that is the Walter Hospital
for native women, the foundation-stone of which was laid by the Countess
of Dufferin on that memorable occasion when the Viceroy, behind
Artillery Horses, covered the seventy miles from Chitor to Udaipur in
under six hours. The building, by the same brain that designed the hall,
will be ready for occupation in a month. It is in strict keeping with
the canons of Hindu architecture externally, and has a high,
well-ventilated waiting-room, out of which, to the right, are two wards
for in-patients, and to the left a dispensary and consulting-room.
Beyond these, again, is a third ward for in-patients. In a courtyard
behind are a ward for low caste patients and the offices.

When all these buildings are completed, Udaipur will be dowered with
three good hospitals, including the State’s and the Padre’s, and a first
instalment of civilisation.



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-boxes, in the first sense
of the term--masonry sentry-boxes, in which five or six men may sit at
ease and shoot. It had been arranged--to 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 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 hill-side, or down the 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 attend shooting from a balcony.
These were treated with the contempt they merited. There are ways and
ways of slaying pig--from the orthodox method which begins with “_The
Boar--The Boar--The mighty Boar!_” 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 pukka, two-storeyed 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 _bundobust_,” and fell to testing
his triggers as though he had been a pot-hunter from his birth. Derision
and threats of exposure moved him not. “Give me an arm-chair!” said he.
“This is the proper way to deal with pig!” And he put up his feet on the
ledge and stretched himself.

There were many weapons to have choice among--from the double-barrelled
.500 Express, whose bullet is a tearing, rending 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. Herein they were moved by envy, which passion was ten-fold
increased when--but this comes later on. The beat was along a deep gorge
in the 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 downhill.

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; while a silence fell upon the party, and very far away up
the gorge the heated afternoon air was cut by the shrill tremolo squeal
of the Bhil beaters. Now a man may be in no sort or fashion a
_shikari_--may hold 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 of 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!_” 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 among 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; and the company mourned that the brute had got
away. The beat came nearer, and then the listener discovered what the
bubbling scream was like; for he forgot straightway about the beat and
went back to the dusk of an Easter Monday in the gardens of the Crystal
Palace, before the 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 magnificently handsome 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
light upon all these tales.

Then the mask shut down, as he clicked out the cartridge and, very
sweetly, gave it as his opinion that some other gun, and not his own,
had bagged the panther, who lay shot through the spine, feebly trying to
drag herself 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 Jodhpur 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 hill-side, and was bowled over by a very pretty shot behind the left
ear and though 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. So harshly is truth treated all the world
over.

And then, after a little time, came the end, and a return to the road in
search of new countries. But shortly before the departure, the
Padre-Sahib, who knows every one in Udaipur, read a sermon in a
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 _shouk_ 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--see “even to the
uttermost farthing.” A little further, and he came upon the black bulk
of Chitor between him and the morning sun. It has already been said
that the Fort resembles a man-of-war. Every distant view heightens this
impression, for the swell of the sides follows the form of a ship, and
the bastions on the south wall make the sponsions in which the
machine-guns are mounted. From bow to stern, the thing more than three
miles long, is between three and five hundred feet high, and from
one-half to one-quarter of a mile broad. Have patience, now, to listen
to a rough history of Chitor.

In the beginning, no one knows clearly who scarped the hill-sides of the
hill rising out of the bare plain, and made of it a place of strength.
It is written that, eleven and a half centuries ago, Bappa Rawul, the
demi-god whose stature was twenty cubits, whose loin-cloth was five
hundred feet long, and whose spear was beyond the power of mortal man to
lift, took Chitor from “Man Singh, the Mori Prince,” and 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 Bawul took Chitor, the Mori Division of the Pramar Rajputs,
who are the ruling family of Mewar, had found a hold in Bhilwar, and for
four centuries before that time had ruled in Kathiawar; and had royally
sacked and slain, and been sacked and slain in turn. But these things
are for the 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 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 Northmen 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 favorite 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
Mussalman, for it is written that one prince “recovered Chitor and made
the name of Rana to be recognized by all.” Six princes were slain in
battles against the Mussalman, in vain attempts to clear far away Gya
from the presence of the infidel.

Then Ala-ud-din Khilji, the Pathan Emperor, swept the country to the
Dekkan. In those days, and these things are confusedly set down as
having happened at the end of the thirteenth century, a relative of Rana
Lakhsman Singh, the then Rana of Chitor, had married a Rajput princess
of Ceylon--Pudmini, “And she was fairest of all flesh on earth.” Her
fame was sung through the land by the poets, and she became, in some
sort, the Helen of Chitor. Ala-ud-din heard of her beauty and promptly
besieged the Fort. When he found his enterprise too difficult, he prayed
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--

    “ ...trusted a Mussalman’s word
    Wah! Wah! Trust a liar to lie!
    Out of his eyrie they tempted my bird,
    Fettered his wings that he could not fly.”

Pudmini’s husband was caught, and Ala-ud-din 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’
entrenchments. But there was no Pudmini in the litter, and the following
of handmaidens was a band of seven hundred armed men. Thus, in the
confusion of a campfight, 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 excepting
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 in the underground
palace.

Ajai Singh, the one surviving son of Lakhsman 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. Of this, more hereafter.

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_ greater than the _johur_ 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 mis-rule, 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 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 and memorial of the defeat of a Mahomedan 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 rooted 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. The
_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 _moonj_ string only, 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 _moonj_
string, and she ate it all, while the _mistri_ 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 _mistri_
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 the _mistri_, “and it has been here
ever so long, eating up everything.” Herewith 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, 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 fore-ground put a brand-new
dak-bungalow furnished with a French bedstead and nothing else; and, 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 _moonj_
string. To say “H!” 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 on the
feet, Sahib!” said he; “Hit 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.

Then, as Rider Haggard used to say--though the expression was patented
by at least one writer before he made it his own--a curious thing
happened. 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 _mahout_. Fat daughter of the Devil, sit down! You
would eat string, 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
south-east angle of the town, is nearly a mile to the upper gate, with a
slope of about 1 in 15. There are two zig-zag bends, and on the three
portions thus formed, are seven gates, of which one, however, has only
the basement left.” This is the language of fact which, very properly,
leaves out of all account the Genius of the Place who sits at the gate
nearest the new city and is with the sightseer throughout. The first
impression of repulsion and awe is given by a fragment of tumbled
sculpture close to a red daubed _lingam_, near the Padal Pol or lowest
gate. It is a piece of frieze, and the figures of the men are worn
nearly smooth by time. What is visible is finely and frankly obscene to
an English mind.

The road is protected on the _khud_ side by a thick stone wall,
loopholed for musketry, one aperture to every two feet, between fifteen
and twenty feet high. This wall is being repaired throughout its length
by the Maharana of Udaipur. On the hill side, among the boulders, loose
stones and _dhao_-scrub, lies stone wreckage that must have come down
from the brown bastions above.

As Gerowlia laboured up the stone-shod slope, the Englishman wondered
how much life had flowed down this sluice of battles, and been lost at
the Padal Pol--the last and lowest gate--where, in the old days, the
besieging armies put their best and bravest battalions. Once at the head
of the lower slope, there is a clear rundown of a thousand yards with no
chance of turning aside either to the right or left. Even as he
wondered, he was brought abreast of two stone chhatris, each carrying a
red daubed stone. They were the graves of two very brave men, Jeemal of
Bednore, and Kalla, who fell in Akbar’s sack fighting like Rajputs. Read
the story of their deaths, and learn what manner of warriors they were.
Their graves were all that spoke openly of the hundreds of struggles on
the lower slope where the fight was always fiercest.

At last, after half an hour’s climb, the main gate, the Ram Pol, was
gained, and the Englishman passed into the City of Chitor and--then and
there formed a resolution, since broken, not to write one word about it
for fear that he should be set down as a babbling and a gushing
enthusiast. Objects of archæological interest are duly described in an
admirable little book of Chitor which, after one look, the Englishman
abandoned. One cannot “do” Chitor with a guide-book. The Padre of the
English Mission to Jehangir said the best that was to be said, when he
described the place three hundred years ago, writing quaintly:--“Chitor,
an ancient great kingdom, the chief city so called which standeth on a
mighty high hill, flat on the top, walled about at the least ten English
miles. There appear to this day above a hundred ruined churches and
divers fair palaces which are lodged in like manner among their ruins,
as many Englishmen by the observation have guessed. Its chief
inhabitants to-day are Zum and Ohim, birds and wild beasts, but the
stately ruins thereof give a shadow of its beauty while it flourished in
its pride.” Gerowlia struck into a narrow pathway, forcing herself
through garden-trees and disturbing the peacocks. An evil guide-man on
the ground waved his hand, and began to speak; but was silenced. The
death of Amber was as nothing to the death of Chitor--a body whence the
life had been driven by riot and sword. Men had parcelled the gardens of
her palaces and the courtyards of her temples into fields; and cattle
grazed among the remnants of the shattered tombs. But over all--over
rent bastion, split temple-wall, pierced roof and prone pillar--lay the
“shadow of its beauty while it flourished in its pride.” The Englishman
walked into a stately palace of many rooms, where the sunlight streamed
in through wall and roof, and up crazy stone stairways, held together,
it seemed, by the marauding trees. In one bastion, a wind-sown peepul
had wrenched a thick slab clear of the wall, but held it tight pressed
in a crook of a branch, as a man holds down a fallen enemy under his
elbow, shoulder and forearm. In another place, a strange, uncanny wind,
sprung from nowhere, was singing all alone among the pillars of what may
have been a Hall of Audience. The Englishman wandered so far in one
palace that he came to an almost black-dark room, high up in a wall, and
said proudly to himself:--“I must be the first man who has been here;”
meaning thereby no harm or insult to any one. But he tripped and fell,
and as he put out his hands, he felt that the stairs had been worn
hollow and smooth by the tread of innumerable naked feet. Then he was
afraid, and came away very quickly, stepping delicately over fallen
friezes and bits of sculptured men, so as not to offend the dead; and
was mightily relieved when he recovered his elephant and allowed the
guide to take him to Kumbha Rana’s Tower of Victory.

This stands, like all things in Chitor, among ruins, but time and the
other enemies have been good to it. It is a Jain edifice, nine storeys
high, crowned atop--Was this designed insult or undesigned repair?--with
a purely Mahomedan dome, wherein the pigeons and the bats live.
Excepting this blemish, the Tower of Victory is nearly as fair as when
it left the hands of the builder whose name has not been handed down to
us. It is to be observed here that the first, or more ruined, Tower of
Victory, built in Alluji’s days, when Chitor was comparatively young,
was raised by some pious Jain, as proof of conquest over things
spiritual. The second tower is more worldly in intent.

Those who care to look, may find elsewhere a definition of its
architecture and its more striking peculiarities. It was in kind, but
not in degree, like the Jugdesh Temple at Udaipur, and, as it exceeded
it in magnificence, so its effect upon the mind was more intense. The
confusing intricacy of the figures with which it was wreathed from top
to bottom, the recurrence of the one calm face, the God enthroned,
holding the Wheel of the Law, and the appalling lavishness of
decoration, all worked towards the instilment of fear and aversion.

Surely this must have been one of the objects of the architect. The
tower, in the arrangement of its stairways, is like the interior of a
Chinese carved ivory puzzle-ball. The idea given is that, even while you
are ascending, you are wrapping yourself deeper and deeper in the tangle
of a mighty maze. Add to this the half-light, the thronging armies of
sculptured figures, the mad profusion of design splashed as impartially
upon the undersides of the stone window-slabs as upon the door-beam of
the threshold--add, most abhorrent of all, the slippery sliminess of the
walls worn smooth by naked men, and you will understand that the tower
is not a soothing place to visit. The Englishman fancied presumptuously
that he had, in a way, grasped the builder’s idea; and when he came to
the top storey and sat among the pigeons his theory was this:--To attain
power, wrote the builder of old, in sentences of fine stone, it is
necessary to pass through all sorts of close-packed horrors,
treacheries, battles and insults, in darkness and without knowledge
whether the road leads upward or into a hopeless _cul-de-sac_. Kumbha
Rana must many times have climbed to the top storey, and looked out
towards the uplands of Malwa on the one side and his own great Mewar on
the other, in the days when all the rock hummed with life and the
clatter of hooves upon the stony ways, and Mahmoud of Malwa was safe in
hold. How he must have swelled with pride--fine insolent pride of life
and rule and power,--power not only to break things but to compel such
builders as those who piled the tower to his royal will! There was no
decoration in the top storey to bewilder or amaze--nothing but
well-grooved stone-slabs, and a boundless view fit for kings who traced
their ancestry--

    “From times when forth from the sunlight, the first of
        our kings came down,
    And had the earth for his footstool, and wore the stars
        for his crown.”

The builder had left no mark behind him--not even a mark on the
threshold of the door, or a sign in the head of the topmost step. The
Englishman looked in both places, believing that those were the places
generally chosen for mark-cutting. So he sat and meditated on the
beauties of kingship, and the unholiness of Hindu art, and what power a
shadow-land of lewd monstrosities had upon those who believed in it, and
what Lord Dufferin, who is the nearest approach to a king in this India,
must have thought when A.-D.-C.’s clanked after him up the narrow
steps. But the day was wearing, and he came down--in both senses--and,
in his descent, the carven things on every side of the tower and above
and below, once more took hold of and perverted his fancy, so that he
arrived at the bottom in a frame of mind eminently fitted for a descent
into the Gau-Mukh, which is nothing more terrible than a little spring,
falling into a reservoir, in the side of the hill.

He stumbled across more ruins and passed between tombs of dead Ranis,
till he came to a flight of steps, built out and cut out from rock,
going down as far as he could see into a growth of trees on a terrace
below him. The stone of the steps had been worn and polished by naked
feet till it showed its markings clearly as agate; and where the steps
ended in a rock-slope, there was a visible glair, a great snail track,
upon the rocks. It was hard to keep safe footing on the sliminess. The
air was thick with the sick smell of stale incense, and grains of rice
were scattered upon the steps. But there was no one to be seen. Now this
in itself was not specially alarming; but the Genius of the Place must
be responsible for making it so. The Englishman slipped and bumped on
the rocks, and arrived, more suddenly than he desired, upon the edge of
a dull blue tank, sunk between walls of timeless masonry. In a
slabbed-in recess, water was pouring through a shapeless stone gargoyle,
into a trough; which trough again dripped into the tank. Almost under
the little trickle of water, was the loathsome Emblem of Creation, and
there were flowers and rice around it. Water was trickling from a score
of places in the cut face of the hill, oozing between the edges of the
steps and welling up between the stone slabs of the terrace. Trees
sprouted in the sides of the tank and hid its surroundings. It seemed as
though the descent had led the Englishman, _firstly_, two thousand years
away from his own century, and _secondly_, into a trap, and that he
would fall off the polished stones into the stinking tank, or that the
Gau-Mukh would continue to pour water placidly until the tank rose up
and swamped him, or that some of the stone slabs would fall forward and
crush him flat.

Then he was conscious of remembering, with peculiar and unnecessary
distinctness, that, from the Gau-Mukh, a passage led to the subterranean
chambers in which fair Pudmini and her handmaids had slain themselves.
Also, that Tod had written and the Station-master at Chitor had said,
that some sort of devil, or ghoul, or some thing, stood at the entrance
of that approach. All of which was a nightmare bred in full day, and
folly to boot; but it was the fault of the Genius of the Place, who made
the Englishman feel that he had done a great wrong in trespassing into
the very heart and soul of all Chitor. And, behind him, the Gau-Mukh
guggled and choked like a man in his death-throe. The Englishman endured
as long as he could--about two minutes. Then it came upon him that he
must go quickly out of this place of years and blood--must get back to
the afternoon sunshine, and Gerowlia, and the dak-bungalow with the
French bedstead. He desired no archæological information, he wished to
take no notes, and, above all, he did not care to look behind him, where
stood the reminder that he was no better than the beasts that perish.
But he had to cross, the smooth, worn rocks, and he felt their sliminess
through his boot-soles. It was as though he were treading on the soft,
oiled skin of a Hindu. As soon as the steps gave refuge, he floundered
up them, and so came out of the Gau-Mukh, bedewed with that perspiration
which follows alike on honest toil or--childish fear.

“This,” said he to himself, “is absurd!” and sat down on the fallen top
of a temple to review the situation. But the Gau-Mukh had

[Illustration: Page 130--“And behind him the Gau-Mukh guggled and choked
like a man in his death-throe.”]

disappeared. He could see the dip in the ground, and the beginning of
the steps, but nothing more.

In defence, it may be urged that there is moral, just as much as there
is mine, choke-damp. If you get into a place laden with the latter you
die, and if into the home of the former you ... behave unwisely, as
constitution and temperament prompt. If any man doubt this, let him sit
for two hours in a hot sun on an elephant, stay half-an-hour in the
Tower of Victory, and then go down into the Gau-Mukh, which, it must
never be forgotten, is merely a set of springs “three or four in number,
issuing from the cliff face at cow-mouth carvings, now mutilated. The
water evidently percolating from the Hathi Kund above, falls first in an
old pillared hall and thence into the masonry reservoir below,
eventually, when abundant enough, supplying a little waterfall lower
down.” That, Gentlemen and Ladies, on the honour of one who has been
frightened of the dark in broad daylight, is the Gau-Mukh, as though
photographed.

The Englishman regained Gerowlia and demanded to be taken away, but
Gerowlia’s driver went forward instead and showed him a new Mahal just
built by the present Maharana. If a fourth sack of Chitor could be
managed for a Viceroy’s edification, the blowing up of the new Mahal
would supply a pleasant evening’s entertainment. Near the Mahal lie the
remains of the great tanks of Chitor, for the hill has, through a great
part of its length, a depression in the centre which, by means of bunds,
stored, in the old time, a full supply of water. A general keeping in
order is visible throughout many of the ruins; and, in places, a
carriage-drive is being constructed. Carriage-drives, however, do not
consort well with Chitor and the “shadow of her ancient beauty.” The
return journey, past temple after temple and palace upon palace, began
in the failing light, and Gerowlia was still blundering up and down
narrow bye-paths--for she possessed all an old woman’s delusion as to
the slimness of her waist--when the twilight fell, and the smoke from
the town below began to creep up the brown flanks of Chitor, and the
jackals howled. Then the sense of desolation, which had been strong
enough in all conscience in the sunshine, began to grow and grow:--

    “The sun’s eye had a sickly glare,
      The earth with age was wan,
     The skeletons of ages stood
      Around that lonely man.”

Near the Ram Pol there was some semblance of a town with living people
in it, and a priest sat in the middle of the road and howled aloud upon
his Gods, until a little boy came and laughed in his face heretically,
and he went away grumbling. This touch was deeply refreshing; in the
contemplation of it, the Englishman clean forgot that he had overlooked
the gathering in of materials for an elaborate statistical, historical,
geographical account of Chitor. All that remained to him was a
shuddering reminiscence of the Gau-Mukh and two lines of the “Holy
Grail.”

    “And up into the sounding halls he passed,
    But nothing in the sounding halls he saw.”

_Post Scriptum._--There was something very uncanny about the Genius of
the Place. He dragged an ease-loving egotist out of the French bedstead
with the gilt knobs at head and foot, into a more than usually big
folly--nothing less than a seeing of Chitor by moonlight. There was no
possibility of getting Gerowlia out of _her_ bed, and a mistrust of the
Maharana’s soldiery who in the day time guarded the gates, prompted the
Englishman to avoid the public way, and scramble straight up the
hillside, along an attempt at a path which he had noted from Gerowlia’s
back. There was no one to interfere, and nothing but an infinity of
pestilent nullahs and loose stones to check. Owls came out and hooted at
him, and animals ran about in the dark and made uncouth noises. It was
an idiotic journey, and it ended--Oh horror! in that unspeakable
Gau-Mukh--this time entered from the opposite or brushwooded side, as
far as could be made out in the dusk and from the chuckle of the water
which, by night, was peculiarly malevolent.

Escaping from this place, crab-fashion, the Englishman crawled into
Chitor and sat upon a flat tomb till the moon, a very inferior and
second-hand one, rose, and turned the city of the dead into a city of
scurrying ghouls--in sobriety, jackals. Also, the ruins took strange
shapes and shifted in the half light and cast objectionable shadows.

It was easy enough to fill the rock with the people of old times, and a
very beautiful account of Chitor restored, made out by the help of Tod,
and bristling with the names of the illustrious dead, would undoubtedly
have been written, had not a woman, a living, breathing woman, stolen
out of a temple--What was she doing in that galley?--and screamed in
piercing and public-spirited fashion. The Englishman got off the tomb
and departed rather more noisily than a jackal; feeling for the moment
that he was not much better. Somebody opened a door with a crash, and a
man cried out:--“Who is there?” But the cause of the disturbance was,
for his sins, being most horribly scratched by some thorny scrub over
the edge of the hill--there are no bastions worth speaking of near the
Gau-Mukh--and the rest was partly rolling, partly scrambling, and mainly
bad language.

When you are too lucky sacrifice something, a beloved pipe for choice,
to Ganesh. The Englishman has seen Chitor by moonlight--not the best
moonlight truly, but the watery glare of a nearly spent moon--and his
sacrifice to Luck is this. He will never try to describe what he has
seen--but will keep it as a love-letter, a thing for one pair of eyes
only--a memory that few men to-day can be sharers in. And does he,
through this fiction, evade insulting, by the dauberie of pen and ink, a
scene as lovely, wild, and unmatchable as any that mortal eyes have been
privileged to rest upon?

An intelligent and discriminating public are perfectly at liberty to
form their own opinions.



XII.

     _Contains the History of the Bhumia of Jharwasa, 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 Jharwasa, which is a story the sequel whereof
has yet to be written. Once upon a time, a Rajput landholder, a
_bhumia_, and a Mahomedan _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 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 Mahomedan 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 durbar 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 Jharwasa 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
country-side against him he was never caught, and went into Bikanir.

Five years later, word came to Ajmir that Chimbo Singh, the _bhumia_ of
Jharwasa, had taken service under the Thakur Sahib of Palitana. The case
was an old one, and the chances of identification musty, 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 North-West as nearly as might be. This
being translated, meant Jodhpur, which is the city of the Hounhnhyms
and, that all may be in keeping, the occasional resting-place of
fugitive Yahoos. 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 of 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 crisp and curdling 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
Hounhnhym 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 in the least. The State line, with the
comparatively new branch to the Pachbadra 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 the 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 “rupees fifteen only” from the same
place. The fluctuation is startling.

From a country-side, 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 and the
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-Pachbadra 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-Pachbadra
people:--“This is a good business. If the Government will give me
independent jurisdiction, I’ll make and open the line straightaway from
Pachbadra 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
and here is the Bombay-Baroda. 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 mid-day, 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. He was also snorting like an
impatient horse.

_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-gharries, 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. An’ Encore at that! 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 peoples’. For
pleasure! Yah!” He skipped across the sand towards 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 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 Mahomedan 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 round, towers
the dun-red piles 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. A camel has as wide a range of speech as an
elephant. The Englishman found a little one, crooning happily to itself,
all alone on the sands. Its nose-string was smashed. Hence its joy. But
a big man left the station and beat it on the neck with a seven-foot
stick, and it rose up and sobbed.

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
sunk 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 sunstroke, 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 drew on, 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 will be pickled
and sent off to the Maharana of Udaipur, as a love-gift, on account of
the latter’s investiture. 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!” This compliment should be engrossed in the archives of
the Simla Municipality. Sanitation on English lines is not yet
acceptable to Jodhpur.

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 to the genial, 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 in language punctuated by free
spitting. 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 debtors. 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 Raymon’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 by sea. And their
ends are as curiously brutal as their lives. A wanderer was once swept
into the great, still backwater 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. This backwater 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 pice,” 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 storecoffin 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 for Teaching Young Subalterns how to
Spell--variously called the Intelligence and the Political
Department--and giving each _omedwar_ 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--here speaks Ferdinand Count
Fathom, in an Intermediate compartment, very drunk and very
happy--“Worth knowing a little--Oh no! Not at all.”

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
pre-eminent 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 the 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 ironmongery, 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 night-mare. 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 _Fogi_ 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’etre_ 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, blownglass,
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 work to do--at least
such work as their fathers understood best.

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: it was eaten with rust.

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 Ewigkeit 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-way 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. That will be when Rider Haggard
has used up Africa and a new “She” is needed.

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.” Also, and this in a Rajput State is an important matter, the
boundaries of nearly every village in Marwar have been demarcated, and
boundary _rixes_, in which both sides preferred small-arm fire to the
regulation _lathi_, are unknown. The open-handed system of giving away
villages had raised a large and unmannerly crop of _jaghirdars_. These
have been taken 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 by-way. 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 the _gumnameh_ was not altogether an
unknown animal. 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 Balsamand 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
Balsamand into the city. Was the city grateful? Not in the least. It
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 the tank 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 re-planned, and the never-ending underground warfare that surges in
a Native State, moved 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 Wilfred-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
certain 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 looked 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:--“O Simla! That’s where you Bengalis go. We
haven’t anything to do with Simla down here.” And no more they have.
Their talk and their interests run in the boundaries of the States they
serve, and, most striking of all, the gossipy element seems to be cut
out altogether. It is a backwater of the river of Anglo-Indian life--or
is it the main current, the broad stream that supplies the motive power,
and is the other life only the noisy ripple on the surface? You who have
lived, not merely looked at, both lives, decide. Much can be learnt from
the talk of the caste--many curious, many amusing, and some startling
things. One hears stories of men who take a poor, impoverished State as
a man takes a wife, “for better or worse,” and, moved by some
incomprehensible ideal of virtue, consecrate--that is not too big a
word--consecrate their lives to that State in all single-heartedness and
purity. Such men are few, but they exist to-day, and their names are
great in lands where no Englishman travels. Again the listener hears
tales of grizzled diplomats of Rajputana--Machiavellis who have hoisted
a powerful intriguer with his own intrigue, and bested priestly cunning,
and the guile of the Oswal, simply that the way might be clear for some
scheme which should put money into a tottering Treasury, or lighten the
taxation of a few hundred thousand men--or both; for this can be done.
One tithe of that force spent on their own advancement would have
carried such men very far.

Those who know anything of the internals of government, know that such
men must exist, for their works are written between the lines of the
Administration Reports; but to hear about them and to have them pointed
out, is quite a different thing. It breeds respect and a sense of shame
and frivolity in the mind of the mere looker-on, which may be good for
the soul.

Truly the Hat-marked Caste are a strange people. They are so few and so
lonely and so strong. They can sit down in one place for years, and see
the works of their hands and the promptings of their brain, grow to
actual and beneficent life, bringing good to thousands. Less fettered
than the direct servant of the Indian Government, and working over a
much vaster charge, they seem a bigger and a more large-minded breed.
And that is saying a good deal.

But let the others, the little people bound down and supervised, and
strictly limited and income-taxed, always remember that the Hat-marked
are very badly off for shops. If they want a necktie they must get it up
from Bombay, and in the rains they can hardly move about; and they have
no amusements and must go a day’s railway journey for a rubber, and
their drinking water is doubtful; and there is rather less than one lady
_per_ ten thousand square miles.

After all, comparative civilisation has its advantages.



XIV.

     _Among the Houyhnhnmns._


Jodhpur differs from the other States of Rajputana in that its Royalty
are peculiarly accessible to an inquiring public. There are wanderers,
the desire of whose life it is “to see Nabobs,” which is the
Globe-trotter’s title for any one in unusually clean clothes, or an Oudh
Taluqdar in gala dress. Men asked in Jodhpur whether the Englishman
would like to see His Highness. The Englishman had a great desire to do
so, if His Highness would be in no way inconvenienced. Then they
scoffed:--“Oh, he won’t _durbar_ you, you needn’t flatter yourself. If
he’s in the humour he’ll receive you like an English country-gentleman.”
How in the world could the owner of such a place as Jodhpur Palace be in
any way like an English country-gentleman? The Englishman had not long
to wait in doubt. His Highness intimated his readiness to see the
Englishman between eight and nine in the morning at the Raika-Bagh. The
Raika-Bagh is not a Palace, for the lower storey and all the detached
buildings round it are filled with horses. Nor can it in any way be
called a stable, because the upper storey contains sumptuous apartments
full of all manner of valuables both of the East and the West. Nor is it
in any sense a pleasure-garden, for it stands on soft white sand, close
to a multitude of litter and sand training tracks, and is devoid of
trees for the most part. Therefore the Raika-Bagh is simply the
Raika-Bagh and nothing else. It is now the chosen residence of the
Maharaja who loves to live among his four hundred or more horses. All
Jodhpur is horse-mad by the way, and it behoves anyone who wishes to be
anyone, to keep his own race-course. The Englishman went to the
Raika-Bagh, which stands half a mile or so from the city, and passing
through a long room filled with saddles by the dozen, bridles by the
score, and bits by the hundred, was aware of a very small and lively
little cherub on the roof of a garden-house. He was carefully muffled,
for the morning was chill. “Good morning,” he cried cheerfully in
English, waving a mittened hand. “Are you going to see my faver and the
horses?” It was the Maharaj Kanwar, the Crown Prince, the apple of the
Maharaja’s eye, and one of the quaintest little bodies that ever set an
Englishman disrespectfully laughing. He studies English daily with one
of the English officials of the State, and stands a very good chance of
being thoroughly spoiled, for he is a general pet. Also, as befits his
dignity, he has his own carriage or carriages, his own twelve-hand
stable, his own house and retinue, and everything handsome about him.

A few steps further on, in a little enclosure in front of a small
two-storeyed white bungalow, sat His Highness the Maharaja, deep in
discussion with the State Engineer. He wore an English ulster, and
within ten paces of him was the first of a long range of stalls. There
was an informality of procedure about Jodhpur which, after the strained
etiquette of other States, was very refreshing. The State Engineer, who
has a growing line to attend to, cantered away, and His Highness after a
few introductory words, knowing what the Englishman would be after,
said:--“Come along, and look at the horses.” Other formality there was
absolutely none. Even the indispensable knot of hangers-on stood at a
distance, and behind a paling, in this most rustic country residence. A
well-bred fox-terrier took command of the proceedings, after the manner
of dogs all the world over, and the Maharaja led to the horse-boxes. But
a man turned up, bending under the weight of much bacon. “Oh! here’s
the pig I shot for Udaipur last night. You see that is the best piece.
It’s pickled, and that’s what makes it yellow to look at.” He patted the
great side that was held up. “There will be a camel sowar to meet it
half way to Udaipur; and I hope Udaipur will be pleased with it. It was
a very big pig.” “And where did you shoot it, Maharaja Sahib?” “Here,”
said His Highness, smiting himself high up under the armpit. “Where else
would you have it?” Certainly this descendant of Raja Maun was more like
an English country-gentleman than the Englishman in his ignorance had
deemed possible. He led on from horse-box to horse-box, the terrier at
his heels, pointing out each horse of note; and Jodhpur has many.
“There’s _Raja_, twice winner of the Civil Service Cup.” The Englishman
looked reverently, and _Raja_ rewarded his curiosity with a vicious
snap, for he was being dressed over, and his temper was out of joint.
Close to him stood _Autocrat_, the grey with the nutmeg marks on the
off-shoulder, a picture of a horse, also disturbed in his mind. Next to
him was a chestnut Arab, a hopeless cripple, for one of his knees had
been smashed and the leg was doubled up under him. It was _Turquoise_,
who, six or eight years ago, rewarded good feeding by getting away from
his _sais_, falling down and ruining himself, but who, none the less,
has lived an honoured pensioner on the Maharaja’s bounty ever since. No
horses are shot in the Jodhpur stables, and when one dies--they have
lost not more than twenty-five in six years--his funeral is an event. He
is wrapped in a white sheet which is strewn with flowers, and, amid the
weeping of the _saises_, is borne away to the burial ground.

After doing the honours for nearly half an hour the Maharaja departed,
and as the Englishman had not seen more than forty horses, he felt
justified in demanding more. And he got them. _Eclipse_ and _Young
Revenge_ were out down-country, but _Sherwood_, at the stud, _Shere
Ali_, _Conqueror_, _Tynedale_, _Sherwood II._, a maiden of Abdul
Rahman’s, and many others of note, were in, and were brought out. Among
the veterans, a wrathful, rampant, red horse still, came _Brian Boru_,
whose name has been written large in the chronicles of the Indian turf,
jerking his _sais_ across the road. His near fore is altogether gone,
but as a pensioner he condescends to go in harness, and is then said to
be a “handful.” He certainly looks it.

At the two hundred and fifty-seventh horse, and perhaps the twentieth
block of stables, the Englishman’s brain began to reel, and he demanded
rest and information on a certain point. He had gone into some fifty
stalls, and looked into all the rest, and in the looking had searchingly
sniffed. But, as truly as he was then standing far below _Brian Boru’s_
bony withers, never the ghost of a stench had polluted the keen morning
air. This City of the Houyhnhnmns was specklessly clean--cleaner than
any stable, racing or private, that he had been into. How was it done?
The pure white sand accounted for a good deal, and the rest was
explained by one of the Masters of Horse:--“Each horse has one _sais_ at
least--old _Ringwood_ he had four--and we make ’em work. If we didn’t
we’d be mucked up to the horses’ bellies in no time. Everything is
cleaned off at once; and whenever the sand’s tainted it’s renewed.
There’s quite enough sand you see hereabouts. Of course we can’t keep
their coats so good as in other stables, by reason of the rolling; but
we can keep ’em pretty clean.”

To the eye of one who knew less than nothing about horse-flesh, this
immaculate purity was very striking, and quite as impressive was the
condition of the horses, which was English--quite English. Naturally,
none of them were in any sort of training beyond daily exercise, but
they were fit and in such thoroughly good fettle. Many of them were out
on the various tracks, and many were coming in. Roughly, two hundred go
out of a morning, and it is to be feared, learn from the heavy going of
the Jodhpur courses, how to hang in their stride. This is a matter for
those who know, but it struck the Englishman that a good deal of the
unsatisfactory performances of the Jodhpur stables might be accounted
for by their having lost the clean stride on the sand, and having
to pick it up gradually on the less holding down-country
courses--unfortunately when they were _not_ doing training gallops, but
the real thing. This small theory is given for instant contradiction by
those who understand.

It was pleasant to sit down and watch the rush of the horses through the
great opening--gates are not affected--going on to the country-side
where they take the air. Here a boisterous, unschooled Arab shot out
across the road and cried “Ha! Ha!” in the scriptural manner, before
trying to rid himself of the grinning black imp on his back. Behind him
a Cabuli--surely all Cabulis must have been born with Pelhams in their
mouths--bored sulkily across the road, or threw himself across the path
of a tall, mild-eyed Kurnal-bred youngster, whose cocked ears and
swinging head showed that, though he was so sedate, he was thoroughly
taking in his surroundings, and would very much like to know if there
were anybody better than himself on the course that morning. Impetuous
as a school-boy and irresponsible as a monkey, one of the Prince’s polo
ponies, not above racing in his own set, would answer the query by
rioting past the pupil of Parrott, the monogram on his body-cloth
flapping free in the wind, and his head and hogged tail in the elements
as Uncle Remus hath it. The youngster would swing himself round, and
polka-mazurka for a few paces, till his attention would be caught by
some dainty Child of the Desert, fresh from the Bombay stables, sweating
at every sound, backing and filling like a rudderless ship. Then,
thanking his stars that he was wiser than some people, number 177 would
lob on to the track and settle down to his spin like the gentleman he
was. Elsewhere, the eye fell upon a cloud of nameless ones, purchases
from Abdul Rahman, whose worth will be proved next hot weather, when
they are seriously taken in hand--skirmishing over the face of the land
and enjoying themselves immensely. High above everything else, like a
collier among barges, screaming shrilly, a black, flamboyant Marwari
stallion with a crest like the crest of a barb, barrel-bellied,
goose-rumped and river-maned, pranced through the press, while the
slow-pacing waler carriage-horses eyed him with deep disfavour, and the
Maharaj Kanwar’s tiny mount capered under his pink, roman nose, kicking
up as much dust as the _Foxhall_ colt who had got on to a lovely patch
of sand and was dancing a saraband in it. In and out of the tangle,
going down to or coming back from the courses, ran, shuffled, rocketed,
plunged, sulked or stampeded countless horses of all kinds, shapes and
descriptions--so that the eye at last failed to see what they were, and
only retained a general impression of a whirl of bays, greys, iron
greys, and chestnuts with white stockings, some as good as could be
desired, others average, but not one distinctly bad.

“We have no downright bad ’uns in this stable. What’s the use?” said the
Master of Horse calmly. “They are all good beasts and, one with another,
must cost more than a thousand each. This year’s new ones bought from
Bombay and the pick of our own studs, are a hundred strong about. May be
more. Yes, they look all right enough; but you can never know what they
are going to turn out. Live-stock is very uncertain.” “And how are the
stables managed: how do you make room for the fresh stock?” “Something
this way. Here are all the new ones and Parrott’s lot, and the English
colts that Maharaja Pertab Singh brought out with him from Home.
_Winterlake_ out o’ _Queen’s Consort_, that chestnut with the two white
stockings you’re looking at now. Well, next hot weather we shall see
what they’re made of and which is who. There’s so many that the trainer
hardly knows ’em one from another till they begin to be a good deal
forward. Those that haven’t got the pace, or that the Maharaja don’t
fancy, they’re taken out and sold for what they’ll bring. The man who
takes the horses out has a good job of it. He comes back and says:--‘I
sold such and such for so much, and here’s the money!’ That’s all. Well,
our rejections are worth having. They have taken prizes at the Poona
Horse Show. See for yourself. Is there one of those there that you
wouldn’t be glad to take for a hack, and look well after too? Only
they’re no use to us, and so out they go by the score. We’ve got sixty
riding-boys, perhaps more, and they’ve got their work cut out to keep
them all going. What you’ve seen are only the stables. We’ve got one
stud at Bellara, eighty miles out, and they come in sometimes in droves
of three and four hundred from the stud. They raise Marwaris there too,
but that’s entirely under native management. We’ve got nothing to do
with that. The natives reckon a Marwari the best country-bred you can
lay hands on; and some of them are beauties! Crests on ’em like the top
of a wave. Well there’s that stud, and another stud and, reckoning one
with another, I should say the Maharaja has nearer twelve hundred than a
thousand horses of his own. For this place here, two wagon-loads of
grass come in every day from Marwar Junction. Lord knows how many
saddles and bridles we’ve got. I never counted. I suppose we’ve about
forty carriages, not counting the ones that get shabby and are stacked
in places in the city, as I suppose you’ve seen. We take ’em out in the
morning, a regular string all together, brakes and all; but the
prettiest turn-out we ever turned out was Lady Dufferin’s pony
four-in-hand. Walers--thirteen-two the wheelers I think, and
thirteen-one the leaders. They took prizes at Poona. That _was_ a pretty
turn-out. The prettiest in India. Lady Dufferin, she drove it when the
Viceroy was down here last year. There are bicycles and tricycles in the
carriage department too. I don’t know how many, but when the Viceroy’s
camp was held, there was about one a-piece for the gentlemen, with
remounts. They’re somewhere about the place now, if you want to see
them. How do we manage to keep the horses so quiet? You’ll find some o’
the youngsters play the goat a good deal when they come out o’ stable,
but, as you say, there’s no vice generally. It’s this way. We don’t
allow any curry-combs. If we did, the _saises_ would be wearing out
their brushes on the combs. It’s all elbow grease here. They’ve got to
go over the horses with their hands. They must handle ’em, and a native
he’s afraid of a horse. Now an English groom, when the horse is doing
the fool, clips him over the head with a curry-comb, or punches him in
the belly; and that hurts the horse’s feelings. A native, he just stands
back till the trouble is over. He _must_ handle the horse or he’d get
into trouble for not dressing him, so it comes to all handling and no
licking, and that’s why you won’t get hold of a really vicious brute in
these stables. Old _Ringwood_ he had four _saises_, and he wanted ’em
every one, but the other horses haven’t more than one _sais_ a-piece.
The Maharaja he keeps fourteen or fifteen horses for his own riding. Not
that he cares to ride now, but he likes to have his horses; and no one
else can touch ’em. Then there’s the horse that he mounts his visitors
on, when they come for pig-sticking and such like, and then there’s a
lot of horses that go to Maharaja Pertab Singh’s new cavalry regiment.
So you see a horse can go through all three degrees sometimes before he
gets sold, and be a good horse at the end of it. And I think that’s
about all!”

A cloud of youngsters, sweating freely and ready for any mischief, shot
past on their way to breakfast, and the conversation ended in a cloud of
sand and the drumming of hurrying hooves.

In the Raika-Bagh are more racing cups than this memory holds the names
of. Chiefest of all was the Delhi Assemblage Cup--the Imperial Vase, of
solid gold, won by _Crown Prince_. The other pieces of plate were not so
imposing. But of all the Crown Jewels, the most valuable appeared at the
end of the inspection. It was the small Maharaj Kanwar lolling in state
in a huge barouche--his toes were at least two feet off the floor--that
was taking him from his morning drive. “Have you seen _my_ horses?” said
the Maharaj Kanwar. The four twelve-hand ponies had been duly looked
over, and the future ruler of Jodhpur departed satisfied.



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._


“A twenty-five per cent. reduction all roun’ an’ no certain leave when
you wants it. _Of_ course the best men goes somewhere else. That’s only
natural, and ’eres this sanguinary down mail a stickin’ in the eye of
the Khundwa down! I tell you, Sir, India’s a bad place--a very bad
place. ’Tisn’t what it was when I came out one and thirty years ago, an’
the drivers was getting their seven and eight ’undred rupees a month an’
was treated as _men_.”

The Englishman was on his way to Nasirabad, and a gentleman in the
Railway was explaining to him the real reason of the decadence of the
Empire. It was because the Rajputana-Malwa Railway had cut all its
employes twenty-five per cent. And, in truth, there is a good deal of
fine free language where gentlemen in the carriage department,
foremen-fitters, station and assistant stationmasters do foregather. It
is ungenerous to judge a caste by a few samples; but the Englishman had
on the road and elsewhere seen a good deal of gentlemen on the Railway,
and is prepared to write down here that they spend their pay in a manner
that would do credit to an income of a thousand a month. Now they are
saying that the twenty-five per cent. reduction is depriving them of the
pleasures of life. So much the better if it makes them moderately
economical in their expenditure. Revolving these things in his mind,
together with one or two stories of extravagance not quite fit for
publication, the Englishman came to Nasirabad, before sunrise, and there
to a tonga. Imagine an icy pause of several minutes followed by
language. Quoth Ram Baksh, proprietor, driver, _sais_, and everything
else, calmly:--“At this time of the year and having regard to the heat
of the sun who wants a top to a tonga? I have no top. I have a top, but
it would take till twelve o’clock to put it on. And behold, Sahib, Padre
Martum Sahib went in this tonga to Deoli. All the officer Sahibs of
Deoli and Nasirabad go in this tonga, for _shikar_. This is a
‘shutin-tonga!’” When Church and Army are brought against one, argument
is in vain. But to take a soft, office-bred unfortunate into the
wilderness, upon a skeleton, a diagram of a conveyance, is brutality.
Ram Baksh did not see it, and headed his two thirteen-hand rats straight
towards the morning sun, along a beautiful military road. “We shall get
to Deoli in six hours,” said Ram Baksh the boastful, and, even as he
spoke, the spring of the tonga bar snapt “mit a harp-like melodious
twang.” “What does it matter?” said Ram Baksh. “Has the Sahib never seen
a tonga-iron break before? Padre Martum Sahib and all the officer Sahibs
in Deoli"--“Ram Baksh,” said the Englishman sternly, “I am not a Padre
Sahib nor an officer Sahib, and if you say anything more about Padre
Martum Sahib or the officers in Deoli I shall grow very angry, and beat
you with a stick, Ram Baksh.”

“Humph,” said Ram Baksh, “I knew you were not a Padre Sahib.” The little
mishap was patched up with string, and the tonga went on merrily. It is
Stevenson who says that the “invitation to the road,” nature’s great
morning song, has not yet been properly understood or put to music. The
first note of it is the sound of the dawn-wind through long grass, and
the last, in this country, the creaking of the bullock wains getting
under way in some unseen _serai_. It is good, good beyond expression, to
see the sun rise upon a strange land and to know that you have only to
go forward and possess that land--that it will dower you before the day
is ended with a hundred new impressions and, perhaps, one idea. It is
good to snuff the wind when it comes in over grassy uplands or down from
the tops of the blue Aravalis--dry and keen as a new-ground sword. Best
of all is to light the First Pipe--is there any tobacco so good as that
we burn in honour of the breaking day?--and, while the ponies wake the
long white road with their hooves and the birds go abroad in companies
together, to thank your stars that you are neither the Subaltern who has
Orderly Room, the ’Stunt who has _kacherri_, or the Judge who has Court
to attend; but are only a loafer in a flannel shirt, bound, if God
please, to “Little Boondi,” somewhere beyond the faint hills across the
plain.

But there was alloy in this delight. Men had told the Englishman darkly
that Boondi State had no love for Englishmen, that there was nowhere to
stop, and that no one would do anything for money. Love was out of the
question. Further, it was an acknowledged fact that there were no
Englishmen of any kind in Boondi. But the Englishman trusted that Ganesh
would be good to him, and that he would, somehow or other, fall upon his
feet as he had fallen before. The road from Nasirabad to Deoli, being
military in its nature, is nearly as straight as a ruler and about as
smooth. It runs for the most part through “Arthurian” country, just such
a land as the Knights of the Round Table went a-looting in--is gently
sloping pasture ground, where a man could see his enemy a long way off
and “ride a wallop” at him, as the Morte D’Arthur puts it, of a clear
half mile. Here and there little rocky hills, the last off-shoots of the
Aravalis to the west, break the ground; but the bulk of it is fair and
without pimples. The Deoli Force are apparently so utterly Irregular
that they can do without a telegraph, have their mails carried by
runners, and dispense with bridges over all the fifty-six miles that
separate them from Nasirabad. However, a man who goes shikarring for any
length of time in one of Ram Baksh’s tongas would soon learn to dispense
with anything and everything. “All the Sahibs use my tongas; I’ve got
eight of them and twenty pairs of horses,” said Ram Baksh. “They go as
far as Gangra, where the tigers are, for they are ‘shutin-tongas.’” Now
the Englishman knew Gangra slightly, having seen it on the way to
Udaipur; and it was as perverse and rocky a place as any man would
desire to see. He politely expressed doubt. “I tell you my tongas go
anywhere,” said Ram Baksh testily. A hay-waggon--they cut and stack
their hay in these parts--blocked the road. Ram Baksh ran the tonga to
one side, into a rut, fetched up on a tree-stump, rebounded on to a
rock, and struck the kunkur. “Observe,” said Ram Baksh; “but that is
nothing. You wait till we get on the Boondi road and I’ll make you
shake, shake like a _botal_.” “Is it _very_ bad?” “I’ve never been to
Boondi myself, but I hear it is all rocks--great rocks as big as the
tonga.” But though he boasted of himself and his horses nearly all the
way, he could not reach Deoli in anything like the time he had set
forth. “If I am not at Boondi by four,” he had said, at six in the
morning, “let me go without my fare.” But by mid-day he was still far
from Deoli, and Boondi lay twenty-eight miles beyond that station. “What
can I do?” said he. “I’ve laid out lots of horses--any amount. But the
fact is I’ve never been to Boondi. I shan’t go there in the night.” Ram
Baksh’s “lots of horses” were three pair between Nasirabad and
Deoli--three pair of undersized ponies who did wonders. One place, after
he had quitted a cotton waggon, a drove of _Bunjaras_ and a man on
horseback, with his carbine across his saddle-bow, the Englishman came
to a stretch of road, so utterly desolate that he said:--“Now I am
clear of everybody who ever knew me. This is the beginning of the waste
into which the scape-goat was sent.”

From a bush by the road side sprang up a fat man who cried aloud in
English:--“How does Your Honour do? I met Your Honour in Simla this
year! Are you quite well? Ya-as, I am here. Your Honour remembers me? I
am travelling. Ya-as. Ha! Ha!” and he went on, leaving His Honour
bemazed. It was a Babu--a Simla Babu, of that there could be no doubt;
but who he was or what he was doing, thirty miles from anywhere, His
Honour could not make out. The native moves about more than most folk,
except railway people, imagine. The big banking firms of Upper India
naturally keep in close touch with their great change-houses in Ajmir,
despatching and receiving messengers regularly. So it comes to pass that
the necessitous circumstances of Lieutenant McRannamack, of the Tyneside
Tail-twisters, quartered on the Frontier, are thoroughly known and
discussed, a thousand miles south of the cantonment where the
light-hearted Lieutenant goes to the “beastly _shroff_.”

This is by the way. Let us return to the banks of the Banas river, where
“poor Carey,” as Tod calls him, came when he was sickening for his last
illness. The Banas is one of those streams which runs “over golden sands
with feet of silver,” but, from the scarp of its banks, Deoli in the
rains must be isolated. Ram Baksh, questioned hereon, vowed that all the
Officer Sahibs never dreamed of halting, but went over in boats or on
elephants. According to Ram Baksh the men of Deoli must be wonderful
creatures. They do nothing but use his tongas. A break in some low hills
give on to the dead flat plain in which Deoli stands. “You must stop
here for the night,” said Ram Baksh. “I will not take my horses forward
in the dark; God knows where the dak-bungalow is. I’ve forgotten, but
any one of the Officer Sahibs in Deoli will tell you.” Those in search
of a new emotion would do well to run about an apparently empty
cantonment, in a disgraceful shooting-tonga, in search of a place to
sleep in. Chaprassis come out of the back verandahs, and are rude, and
regimental Babus hop out of godowns and are flippant, while in the
distance a Sahib looks out of his room, where he has evidently been
sleeping, and eyes the dusty forlorn-hope with silent contempt. It
should be mentioned that the dust on the Deoli road not only powders
but masks the face and raiment of the passenger.

Next morning Ram Baksh was awake with the dawn, and clamorous to go on
to Boondi. “I’ve sent a pair of horses, big horses, out there and the
_sais_ is a fool. Perhaps they will be lost, I want to find them.” He
dragged his unhappy passenger on to the road once more and demanded of
all who passed the dak-bungalow which was the way to Boondi. “Observe!”
said he, “there can be only one road, and if I hit it we are all right,
and I’ll show you what the tonga can do.” “Amen,” said the Englishman
devoutly, as the tonga jumped into and out of a larger hole. “Without
doubt this is the Boondi road,” said Ram Baksh; “it is so bad.”

Beyond Deoli the cultivated land gave place to more hills peppered with
stones, stretches of _ak_-scrub and clumps of thorn varied with a little
jhil here and there for the benefit of the officers of the Deoli
Irregular Force.

It has been before said that the Boondi State has no great love for
Sahibs. The state of the road proves it. “This,” said Ram Baksh, tapping
the wheel to see whether the last plunge had smashed a spoke, “is a very
good road. You wait till you see what is ahead.” And the funeral
staggered on--over irrigation cuts, through buffalo wallows, and dried
pools stamped with the hundred feet of kine (this by the way is the most
cruel road of all), up rough banks where the rock ledges peered out of
the dust, down step-cut dips ornamented with large stones, and along
two-feet deep ruts of the rains, where the tonga went slantwise even to
the verge of upsetting. It was a royal road--a native road--a Raj road
of the roughest, and, through all its jolts and bangs and bumps and dips
and heaves, the eye of Ram Baksh rolled in its blood-shot socket,
seeking for the “big horses” he had so rashly sent into the wilderness.
The ponies that had done the last twenty miles into Deoli were nearly
used up, and did their best to lie down in the dry beds of nullahs.
[_Nota bene._--There was an unbridged nullah every five minutes, for the
set of the country was towards the Mej river. In the rains it must be
utterly impassable.]

A man came by on horseback, his servant walking before with platter and
meal bag. “Have you seen any horses hereabouts?” cried Ram Baksh.
“Horses! horses! What the Devil have I to do with your horses? D’you
think I’ve stolen them?” Now this was decidedly a strange answer, and
showed the rudeness of the land. An old woman under a tree cried out in
a strange tongue and ran away. It was a dream-like experience, this
hunting for horses on a “blasted heath” with neither house nor hut nor
shed in sight. “If we keep to the road long enough we must find them.
Look at the road! This Raj ought to be smitten with bullets.” Ram Baksh
had been pitched forward nearly on to the off-pony’s rump, and was in a
very bad temper indeed. The funeral found a house--a house walled with
thorns--and near by were the two big horses, thirteen-two if an inch,
and harnessed quite regardless of expense.

Everything was re-packed and re-bound with triple ropes, and the Sahib
was provided with an extra cushion; but he had reached a sort of
dreamsome Nirvana; having several times bitten his tongue through, cut
his boot against the wheel-edge, and twisted his legs into a
true-lover’s-knot. There was no further sense of suffering in him. He
was even beginning to enjoy himself faintly and by gasps. The road
struck boldly into hills with all their teeth on edge, that is to say,
their strata breaking across the road in a series of little ripples. The
effect of this was amazing. The tonga skipped merrily as a young fawn,
from ridge to ridge, and never seemed to have both wheels on the ground
at the same time. It shivered, it palpitated, it shook, it slid, it
hopped, it waltzed, it ricochetted, it bounded like a kangaroo, it
blundered like a sledge, it swayed like a top-heavy coach on a
down-grade, it “kicked” like a badly coupled railway carriage, it
squelched like a country-cart, it squeaked in its torment, and, lastly,
it essayed to plough up the ground with its nose. After three hours of
this performance, it struck a tiny little ford, set between
steeply-sloping banks of white dust, where the water was clear brown and
full of fish. And here a blissful halt was called under the shadow of
the high bank of a tobacco field.

Would you taste one of the real pleasures of Life? Go through severe
acrobatic exercises in and about a tonga for four hours; then, having
eaten and drank till you can no more, sprawl, in the cool of a nullah
bed with your head among the green tobacco, and your mind adrift with
the one little cloud in a royally blue sky. Earth has nothing more to
offer her children than this deep delight of animal well-being. There
were butterflies in the tobacco--six different kinds, and a little rat
came out and drank at the ford. To him succeeded the flight into Egypt.
The white bank of the ford framed the picture perfectly--the Mother in
blue, on a great white donkey, holding the Child in her arms, and
Joseph walking beside, his hand upon the donkey’s withers. By all the
laws of the East, Joseph should have been riding and the Mother walking.
This was an exception decreed for the Englishman’s special benefit. It
was very warm and very pleasant, and, somehow, the passers by the ford
grew indistinct, and the nullah became a big English garden, with a
cuckoo singing far down in the orchard, among the apple-blossoms. The
cuckoo started the dream. He was the only real thing in it, for the
garden slipped back into the water, but the cuckoo remained and called
and called for all the world as though he had been a veritable English
cuckoo. “Cuckoo--cuckoo--cuck;” then a pause and renewal of the cry from
another quarter of the horizon. After that the ford became distasteful,
so the procession was driven forward and in time plunged into what must
have been a big city once, but the only inhabitants were oil-men. There
were abundance of tombs here, and one carried a life-like carving in
high relief of a man on horseback spearing a foot-soldier. Hard by this
place the road or rut turned by great gardens, very cool and pleasant,
full of tombs and black-faced monkeys who quarrelled among the tombs,
and shut in from the sun by gigantic banians and mango trees. Under the
trees and behind the walls, priests sat singing; and the Englishman
would have enquired into what strange place he had fallen, but the men
did not understand him.

Ganesh is a mean little god of circumscribed powers. He was dreaming,
with a red and flushed face, under a banian tree; and the Englishman
gave him four annas to arrange matters comfortably at Boondi. His priest
took the four annas, but Ganesh did nothing whatever, as shall be shown
later. His only excuse is that his trunk was a good deal worn, and he
would have been better for some more silver leaf, but that was no fault
of the Englishman.

Beyond the dead city was a jhil, full of snipe and duck, winding in and
out of the hills; and beyond the jhil, hidden altogether among the
hills, was Boondi. The nearer to the city the viler grew the road and
the more overwhelming the curiosity of the inhabitants. But what befel
at Boondi must be reserved for another chapter.



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._


It is high time that a new treaty were made with Maha Rao Raja Ram
Singh, Bahadur, Raja of Boondi. He keeps the third article of the old
one too faithfully, which says that he “shall not enter into
negotiations with anyone without the consent of the British Government.”
He does not negotiate at all. Arrived at Boondi Gate, the Englishman
asked where he might lay his head for the night, and the Quarter Guard
with one accord said:--“The Sukh Mahal, which is beyond the city,” and
the tonga went thither through the length of the town, of which more
presently, till it arrived at a pavilion on a lake--a place of two
turrets connected by an open colonnade. The “house” was open to the
winds of heaven and the pigeons of the Raj; but the latter had polluted
more than the first could purify. A snowy-bearded chowkidar crawled out
of a place of tombs which he seemed to share with some monkeys, and
threw himself into Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He was a great deal worse than
Ram Baksh, for he said that all the Officer Sahibs of Deoli came to the
Sukh Mahal for _shikar_ and--never went away again, so pleased were
they. The Sahib had brought the honour of his Presence, and he was a
very old man, and without a _purwana_ could do nothing. Then he fell
deeply asleep without warning; and there was a pause, of one hour only,
which the Englishman spent in seeing the lake. It, like the jhils on the
road, wound in and out among the hills, and, on the bund side, was
bounded by a hill of black rock crowned with a _chhatri_ of grey stone.
Below the bund was a garden as fair as eye could wish, and the shores of
the lake were dotted with little temples. Given a habitable house--a
mere dak-bungalow--it would be a delightful spot to rest in. Warned by
some bitter experiences in the past, the Englishman knew that he was in
for the demi-semi-royal or embarrassing reception, when a man, being the
unwelcome guest of a paternal State, is neither allowed to pay his way
and make himself comfortable, nor is he willingly entertained. When he
saw a one-eyed munshi, he felt certain that Ganesh had turned upon him
at last. The munshi demanded and received the _purwana_. Then he sat
down and questioned the traveller exhaustively as to his character and
profession. Having thoroughly satisfied himself that the visitor was in
no way connected with the Government or the “Agenty Sahib Bahadur,” he
took no further thought of the matter; and the day began to draw in upon
a grassy bund, an open work pavilion, and a disconsolate tonga.

At last the faithful servitor, who had helped to fight the Battle of the
Mail Bags at Udaipur, broke his silence, and vowing that all these
devil-people--not more than twelve--had only come to see the tamasha,
suggested the breaking of the munshi’s head. And, indeed, that seemed
the only way of breaking the ice; for the munshi had in the politest
possible language, put forward the suggestion that there was nothing
particular to show that the Sahib who held the _purwana_ had really any
right to hold it. The chowkidar woke up and chaunted a weird chaunt,
accompanied by the Anglo-Saxon attitudes, a new set. He was an old man,
and all the Sahib-log said so, and within the pavilion were tables and
chairs and lamps and bath-tubs, and everything that the heart of man
could desire. Even now an enormous staff of _khalassis_ were arranging
all these things for the comfort of the Sahib Bahadur and Protector of
the Poor, who had brought the honour and glory of his Presence all the
way from Deoli. What did tables and chairs and eggs and fowls and very
bright lamps matter to the Raj? He was an old man and.... “Who put the
present Raja on the guddee?” “Lake Sahib,” promptly answered the
chowkidar. “I was there. That is the news of many old years.” Now Tod
says it was he himself who installed “Lalji the beloved” in the year
1821. The Englishman began to lose faith in the chowkidar. The munshi
said nothing but followed the Englishman with his one workable eye. A
merry little breeze crisped the waters of the lake, and the fish began
to frolic before going to bed.

“Is nobody going to do or bring anything?” said the Englishman faintly,
wondering whether the local jail would give him a bed if he killed the
munshi. “I am an old man,” said the chowkidar, “and because of their
great respect and reverence for the Sahib in whose Presence I am only a
bearer of orders and a servant awaiting them, men, many men, are
bringing now _kanats_ which I with my own hands will wrap, here and
there, there and here, in and about the pillars of this place; and thus
you, O Sahib, who have brought the honour of your Presence to the Boondi
Raj over the road to Deoli, which is a _kutcha_ road, will be provided
with a very fine and large apartment over which I will watch while you
go to kill the tigers in these hills.”

By this time two youths had twisted _kanats_ round some of the pillars
of the colonnade, making a sort of loose-box with a two-foot air-way all
round the top. There was no door, but there were unlimited windows. Into
this enclosure the chowkidar heaped furniture on which many generations
of pigeons had evidently been carried off by cholera, until he was
entreated to desist. “What,” said he scornfully, “are tables and chairs
to this Raj? If six be not enough, let the Presence give an order, and
twelve shall be forthcoming. Everything shall be forthcoming.” Here he
filled a _chirag_ with kerosene oil and set it in a box upon a stick.
Luckily, the oil which he poured so lavishly from a quart bottle was
bad, or he would have been altogether consumed.

Night had fallen long before this magnificence was ended. The
superfluous furniture--chairs for the most part--was shovelled out into
the darkness and by the light of a flamboyant _chirag_--a merry wind
forbade candles--the Englishman went to bed, and was lulled to sleep by
the rush of the water escaping from the overflow trap and the splash of
the water-turtle as he missed the evasive fish. It was a curious sight.
Cats and dogs rioted about the enclosure, and a wind from the lake
bellied the _kanats_. The brushwood of the hills around snapped and
cracked as beasts went through it, and creatures--not jackals--made
dolorous noises. On the lake it seemed that hundreds of water-birds were
keeping a hotel, and that there were arrivals and departures throughout
the night. The Raj insisted upon providing a guard of two sepoys, very
pleasant men on four rupees a month. These said that tigers sometimes
wandered about on the hills above the lake, but were most generally to
be found five miles away. And the Englishman promptly dreamed that a one
eyed tiger came into his tent without a _purwana_. But it was only a
wild cat after all; and it fled before the shoes of civilisation.

The Sukh Mahal was completely separated from the city, and might have
been a country-house. It should be mentioned that Boondi is jammed into
a V-shaped gorge--the valley at the main entrance being something less
than five hundred yards across. As it splays out, the thickly-packed
houses follow its line, and, seen from above, seem like cattle being
herded together preparatory to a stampede through the gate. Owing to the
set of the hills, very little of the city is visible except from the
Palace. It was in search of this latter that the Englishman went abroad
and became so interested in the streets that he forgot all about it for
a time. Jeypore is a show-city and is decently drained; Udaipur is
blessed with a State Engineer and a printed form of Government; for
Jodhpur the dry sand, the burning sun, and an energetic doctor have done
a good deal, but Boondi has none of these things. The crampedness of the
locality aggravates the evil, and it can only be in the rains which
channel and furrow the rocky hill-sides that Boondi is at all swept out.
The Nal Sagar, a lovely little stretch of water, takes up the head of
the valley called the Banda Gorge, and must, in the nature of things,
receive a good deal of unholy drainage. But setting aside this weakness,
it is a fascinating place--this jumbled city of straight streets and
cool gardens, where gigantic mangoes and peepuls intertwine over
gurgling water-courses, and the cuckoo comes at mid-day. It boasts no
foolish Municipality to decree when a house is dangerous and
unhabitable. The newer shops are built into, on to, over and under,
time-blackened ruins of an older day, and the little children skip about
tottering arcades and grass-grown walls, while their parents chatter
below in the crowded bazaar. In the back slums, the same stones seem to
be used over and over again for house-building, perhaps, because there
is no space to bring up laden buffaloes. Wheeled conveyances are scarce
in Boondi City--there is scant room for carts, and the streets are paved
with knobsome stones, unpleasant to walk over. From time to time an
inroad of _Bunjaras_’ pack-bullocks sweeps the main street clear of
life, or one of the Raja’s elephants--he has twelve of them--blocks the
way. But, for the most part, the foot passengers have all the city for
their own.

They do not hurry themselves. They sit in the sun and think, or put on
all the arms in the family, and, hung with ironmongery, parade before
their admiring friends. Other men, lean, dark men, with bound jaws and
only a tulwar for weapon, dive in and out of the dark alleys, on errands
of State. It is a blissfully lazy city, doing everything in the real,
true, original native way, and it is kept in very good order by the
Durbar. There either is or is not an order for everything. There is no
order to sell

[Illustration: Page 202--“One of the Raja’s elephants--he has twelve of
them--blocks the way.”]

fishing-hooks, or to supply an Englishman with milk, or to change for
him Currency Notes. He must only deal with the Durbar for whatever he
requires; and wherever he goes he must be accompanied by at least two
men. They will tell him nothing, for they know or affect to know nothing
of the city. They will do nothing except shout at the little innocents
who joyfully run after the stranger and demand _pice_, but there they
are, and there they will stay till he leaves the city, accompanying him
to the gate, and waiting there a little to see that he is fairly off and
away. Englishmen are not encouraged in Boondi. The intending traveller
would do well to take a full suit of Political uniform with the
sun-flowers, and the little black sword to sit down upon. The local god
is the “Agenty Sahib,” and he is an incarnation without a name--at least
among the lower classes. The educated, when speaking of him, always use
the courtly “Bahadur” affix: and yet it is a mean thing to gird at a
State which, after all, is not bound to do anything for intrusive
Englishmen without any visible means of livelihood. The King of this
fair city should declare the blockade absolute, and refuse to be
troubled with anyone except “Colon-nel Baltah Agenty Sahib Bahadur” and
the Politicals. If ever a railway is run through Kotah, as men on the
Bombay side declare it must be, the cloistered glory of Boondi will
depart, for Kotah is only twenty miles easterly of the city and the road
is moderately good. In that day the Globe-Trotter will pry about the
place, and the Charitable Dispensary--a gem among dispensaries--will be
public property.

The Englishman was hunting for the statue of a horse, a great horse
hight Hunja, who was a steed of Irak, and a King’s gift to Rao Omeda,
one time monarch of Boondi. He found it in the city square as Tod had
said; and it was an unlovely statue, carven after the dropsical fashion
of later Hindu art. No one seemed to know anything about it. A little
further on, one cried from a bye-way in rusty English:--“Come and see my
Dispensary.” There are only two men in Boondi who speak English. One is
the head, and the other the assistant, teacher of the English side of
Boondi Free School. This third was, some twenty years ago, a pupil of
the Lahore Medical College when that institution was young; and he only
remembered a word here and there. He was head of the Charitable
Dispensary; and insisted upon, then and there, organising a small
durbar, and pulling out all his books for inspection. Escape was
hopeless: nothing less than a formal inspection and introduction to all
the native Baids would serve. There were sixteen beds in and about the
courtyard, and between twenty and thirty out-patients stood in
attendance. Making allowances for untouched Orientalism, the Dispensary
is a good one, and must relieve a certain amount of human misery. There
is no other in all Boondi. The operation-book, kept in English, showed
the principal complaints of the country. They were:--“Asthama,”
“Numonia,” “Skin-diseas,” “Dabalaty,” and “Loin-bite.” This last item
occurred again and again--three and four cases per week--and it was not
until the Doctor said--“_Sher se mara_” that the Englishman read it
aright. It was “lion-bite,” or tiger, if you insist upon zoological
accuracy. There was one incorrigible idiot, a handsome young man, naked
as the day, who sat in the sunshine, shivering and pressing his hands to
his head. “I have given him blisters and setons--have tried native and
English treatment for two years, but it is no use. He is always as you
see him, and now he stays here by the favour of the Durbar, which is a
very good and pitiful Durbar,” said the Doctor. There were many such
pensioners of the Durbar--men afflicted with chronic “asthama” who
stayed “by favour,” and were kindly treated. They were resting in the
sunshine, their hands on their knees, sure that their daily dole of
grain and tobacco and opium would be forthcoming. “All folk, even little
children, eat opium here,” said the Doctor, and the diet-book proved it.
After laborious investigation of everything, down to the last indent to
Bombay for Europe medicines, the Englishman was suffered to depart.
“Sir, I thank....” began the Native Doctor, but the rest of the sentence
stuck. Sixteen years in Boondi does not increase knowledge of English;
and he went back to his patients, gravely conning over the name of the
Principal of the Lahore Medical School--a College now--who had taught
him all he knew, and to whom he intended to write. There was something
pathetic in the man’s catching at news from the outside world of men he
had known as Assistant and House Surgeons who are now Rai Bahadurs, and
his parade of the few shreds of English that still clung to him. May he
treat “loin-bites” and “catrack” successfully for many years. In the
happy, indolent, fashion that must have merits which we cannot
understand, he is doing a good work, and the Durbar allows his
Dispensary as much as it wants.

Close to the Dispensary stood the Free School, and thither an
importunate munshi steered the Englishman who, by this time, was
beginning to persuade himself that he really was an accredited agent of
Government sent to report on the progress of Boondi. From a
peepul-shaded courtyard came a clamour of young voices. Thirty or forty
little ones, from five to eight years old, were sitting in an open
verandah learning _hissab_ and Hindustani, said the teacher. No need to
ask from what castes they came, for it was written on their faces that
they were Mahajans, Oswals, Aggerwals, and in one or two cases it
seemed, Sharawaks of Guzerat. They were learning the business of their
lives and, in time, would take their fathers’ places, and show in how
many ways money may be manipulated. Here the profession-type came out
with startling distinctness. Through the chubbiness of almost babyhood,
or the delicate suppleness of mature years, in mouth and eyes and hands,
it betrayed itself. The Rahtor, who comes of a fighting-stock, is a fine
animal and well-bred; the Hara, who seems to be more compactly-built, is
also a fine animal; but for a race that show blood in every line of
their frame, from the arch of the instep to the modelling of the head,
the financial--trading is too coarse a word--the financial class of
Rajputana appears to be the most remarkable. Later in life many become
clouded with fat on jowl and paunch; but in his youth, his quick-eyed,
nimble youth, the young Marwar, to give him his business-title, is
really a thing of beauty. Also his manners are courtly. The bare ground
and a few slates sufficed for the children who were merely learning the
ropes that drag States; but the English class, of boys from ten to
twelve, was supplied with benches and forms and a table with a cloth
top. The assistant teacher, for the head was on leave, was a self-taught
man of Boondi, young and delicate looking, who preferred reading to
speaking English. His youngsters were supplied with “The Third English
Reading Book,” and were painfully thumbing their way through a doggerel
poem about an “old man with hoary hair.” One boy, bolder than the rest,
slung an English sentence at the visitor and collapsed. It was his
little stock-in-trade, and the rest regarded him enviously. The Durbar
supports the school, which is entirely free and open; a just distinction
being maintained between the various castes. The old race prejudice
against payment for knowledge came out in a reply to question.--“You
must not sell teaching,” said the teacher, and the class murmured
applausively:--“You must not sell teaching.”

The population of Boondi seems more obviously mixed than that of the
other States. There are four or five thousand Mahomedans within its
walls and a sprinkling of aborigines of various varieties, besides the
human raffle that the Bunjaras bring in their train, with Pathans and
sleek Delhi men. The new heraldry of the State is curious--something
after this sort. _Or_, a demi-man, _sable_, issuant of flames, holding
in right hand a sword and in the left a bow--_all proper_. In chief, a
dagger of the _second_, sheathed _vest_, fessewise over seven arrows in
sheaf of the _second_. This latter blazon Boondi holds in commemoration
of the defeat of an Imperial Prince who rebelled against the Delhi
Throne in the days of Jehangir, when Boondi, for value received, took
service under the Mahomedan. It might be, but here there is no
certainty, the memorial of Rao Rutton’s victory over Prince Khoorm, when
the latter strove to raise all Rajputana against Jehangir his father; or
of a second victory over a riotous lordling who harried Mewar a little
later. For this exploit, the annals say, Jehangir gave Rao Rutton
honorary flags and kettle-drums which may have been melted down by the
science of the Herald’s College into the blazon aforesaid. All the
heraldry of Rajputana is curious and, for such as hold that there is
any worth in the “Royal Science,” interesting. Udaipur’s shield is,
naturally _gules_, a sun in splendor, as befits the “children of the sun
and fire,” and one of the most ancient houses in India. Her crest is the
straight Rajput sword, the _khanda_; for an account of the worship of
which very powerful divinity read Tod. The supporters are a Bhil and a
Rajput, attired for the forlorn-hope; commemorating not only the
defences of Chitor, but also the connection of the great Bappa Rawul
with the Bhils who even now play the principal part in the Crown-Marking
of a Rana of Udaipur. Here, again, Tod explains the matter at length.
Banswara claims alliance with Udaipur and carries a sun, with a label of
difference of some kind. Jeypore has the five-coloured flag of Amber
with a sun, because the House claim descent from Rama, and her crest is
a kuchnar tree, which is the bearing of Dasaratha, father of Rama. The
white horse, which faces the tiger as supporter, may or may not be the
memorial of the great _aswamedha yuga_ or horse sacrifice that Jey
Singh, who built Jeypore, did _not_ carry out.

Jodhpur has the five-coloured flag, with a falcon, in which shape Durga,
the patron Goddess of the State, has been sometimes good enough to
appear. She has perched in the form of a wagtail on the howdah of the
Chief of Jeysulmir, whose shield is blazoned with “forts in a desert
land,” and a naked left arm holding a broken spear, because, the legend
goes, Jeysulmir was once galled by a horse with a magic spear. They tell
the story to-day, but it is a long one. The supporters of the
shield--this is canting heraldry with a vengeance!--are antelopes of the
desert spangled with gold coin, because the State was long the refuge of
the wealthy bankers of India.

Bikanir, a younger House of Jodhpur, carries three white hawks on the
five-coloured flag. The patron Goddess of Bikanir once turned the thorny
jungle round the city to fruit-trees, and the crest therefore is a green
tree--strange emblem for a desert principality. The motto, however, is a
good one. When the greater part of the Rajput States were vassals of
Akbar, and he sent them abroad to do his will, certain Princes objected
to crossing the Indus, and asked Bikanir to head the mutiny because his
State was the least accessible. He consented, on condition that they
would all for one day greet him thus:--“_Jey Jangal dar Badshah!_”
History shows what became of the objector and Bikanir’s motto:--“Hail to
the King of the Waste!” proves that the tale _must_ be true. But from
Boondi to Bikanir is a long digression, bred by blissful idleness on the
bund of the Burra. It would have been sinful not to let down a line into
those crowded waters, and the Guards, who were Mahomedans, said that if
the Sahib did not eat fish, they did. And the Sahib fished luxuriously,
catching two and three pounders, of a perch-like build, whenever he
chose to cast. He was wearied of schools and dispensaries, and the
futility of heraldry accorded well with laziness--that is to say Boondi.

It should be noted, none the less, that in this part of the world the
soberest mind will believe anything--believe in the ghosts by the Gow
Mukh, and the dead Thakurs, who get out of their tombs and ride round
the Burra Talao at Boondi--will credit every legend and lie that rises
as naturally as the red flush of sunset, to gild the dead glories of
Rajasthan.



XVII.

     _Shows that there may be Poetry in a Bank, and attempts to show the
     Wonders of the Palace of Boondi._


“This is a devil’s place you have come to, Sahib. No grass for the
horses, and the people don’t understand anything, and their dirty pice
are no good in Nasirabad. Look here!” And Ram Baksh wrathfully exhibited
a handful of lumps of copper. The nuisance of taking a native out of his
own beat is that he forthwith regards you not only as the author of his
being, but of all his misfortunes as well. He is as hampering as a
frightened child and as irritating as a man. “_Padre Martum Sahib_ never
came here,” said Ram Baksh, with the air of one who had been led against
his will into bad company.

A story about a rat that found a piece of turmeric and set up a bunnia’s
shop had sent the one-eyed munshi away, but a company of lesser munshis,
runners and the like, were in attendance, and they said that money might
be changed at the Treasury, which was in the Palace. It was quite
impossible to change it anywhere else--there was no _hookum_. From the
Sukh Mahal to the Palace the road ran through the heart of the city, and
by reason of the continual shouting of the munshis, not more than ten
thousand of the fifty thousand people of Boondi knew for what purpose
the Sahib was journeying through their midst. Cataract was the most
prevalent affliction, cataract in its worst forms, and it was,
therefore, necessary that men should come very close to look at the
stranger. They were in no sense rude, but they stared devoutly. “He has
not come for _shikar_, and he will not take petitions. He has come to
see the place, and God knows what he is.” The description was quite
correct, as far as it went; but, somehow or another, when shouted out at
four cross-ways in the midst of a very pleasant little gathering it did
not seem to add to dignity or command respect.

It has been written “the _coup d’oeil_ of the castellated Palace of
Boondi, from whichever side you approach it, is perhaps the most
striking in India. Whoever has seen the Palace of Boondi can easily
picture to himself the hanging gardens of Semiramis.” This is true--and
more too. To give on paper any adequate idea of the Boondi-ki-Mahal is
impossible. Jeypore Palace may be called the Versailles of India;
Udaipur’s House of State is dwarfed by the hills round it and the spread
of the Pichola lake; Jodhpur’s House of Strife, grey towers on red rock,
is the work of giants; but the Palace of Boondi, even in broad
day-light, is such a Palace as men build for themselves in uneasy
dreams--the work of goblins more than the work of men. It is built into
and out of hill side, in gigantic terrace on terrace, and dominates the
whole of the city. But a detailed description of it were useless. Owing
to the dip of the valley in which the city stands, it can only be well
seen from one place, the main road of the city; and from that point
seems like an avalanche of masonry ready to rush down and whelm the
gorge. Like all the other Palaces of Rajputana, it is the work of many
hands, and the present Raja has thrown out a bastion of no small size on
one of the lower levels, which has been four or five years in the
building. Only by scaling this annex, and, from the other side of the
valley, seeing how insignificant is its great bulk in the entire scheme,
is it possible to get some idea of the stupendous size of the Palace. No
one knows where the hill begins and where the Palace ends. Men say that
there are subterranean chambers leading into the heart of the hills,
and passages communicating with the extreme limits of Taragarh, the
giant fortress that crowns the hill and flanks the whole of the valley
on the Palace side. They say that there is as much room under as above
ground, and that none know the whole extent of the Palace. Looking at it
from below, the Englishman could readily believe that nothing was
impossible for those who had built it. The dominant impression was of
height--height that heaved itself out of the hillside and weighed upon
the eyelids of the beholder. The steep slope of the land had helped the
builders in securing this effect. From the main road of the city a steep
stone-paved ascent led to the first gate--name not communicated by the
zealous following. Two gaudily painted fishes faced each other over the
arch, and there was little except glaring colour ornamentation visible.
This gate gave into what they called the _chowk_ of the Palace, and one
had need to look twice ere realising that this open space, crammed with
human life, was a spur of the hill on which the Palace stood, paved and
built over. There had been little attempt at levelling the ground. The
foot-worn stones followed the contour of the ground, and ran up to the
walls of the Palace smooth as glass. Immediately facing the Gate of the
Fish was the Quarter-Guard barracks, a dark and dirty room, and here,
in a chamber hollowed out in a wall, were stored the big drums of State,
the _nakarras_. The appearance of the Englishman seemed to be the signal
for smiting the biggest of all the drums, and the dull thunder rolled up
the Palace _chowk_, and came back from the unpierced Palace walls in
hollow groaning. It was an eerie welcome--this single, sullen boom. In
this enclosure, four hundred years ago, if the legend be true, a son of
the great Rao Bando, who dreamed a dream as Pharaoh did and saved Boondi
from famine, left a little band of Haras to wait his bidding while he
went up into the Palace and slew his two uncles who had usurped the
throne and abandoned the faith of their fathers. When he had pierced one
and hacked the other, as they sat alone and unattended, he called out to
his followers, who made a slaughter-house of the enclosure and cut up
the usurpers’ adherents. At the best of times men slip on these smooth
stones; and when the place was swimming in blood, foothold must have
been treacherous indeed.

An inquiry for the place of the murder of the uncles--it is marked by a
staircase slab, or Tod, the accurate, is at fault--was met by the answer
that the Treasury was close at hand. They speak a pagan tongue in
Boondi, swallow half their words, and adulterate the remainder with
local _patois_. What can be extracted from a people who call four miles
variously _do kosh_, _do kush_, _dhi khas_, _doo-a koth_, and _diakast_,
all one word? The country-folk are quite unintelligible; which
simplifies matters. It is the catching of a shadow of a meaning here and
there, the hunting for directions cloaked in dialect, that is annoying.
Foregoing his archæological researches, the Englishman sought the
Treasury. He took careful notes; he even made a very bad drawing, but
the Treasury of Boondi defied pinning down before the public. There was
a gash in the brown flank of the Palace--and this gash was filled with
people. A broken bees’ comb with the whole hive busily at work on
repairs, will give a very fair idea of this extraordinary place--the
Heart of Boondi. The sunlight was very vivid without and the shadows
were heavy within, so that little could be seen except this clinging
mass of humanity huggling like maggots in a carcase. A stone staircase
ran up to a rough verandah built out of the wall, and in the wall was a
cave-like room, the guardian of whose snowy-carpeted depths was one of
the refined financial classes, a man with very small hands and soft, low
voice. He was girt with a sword, and held authority over the Durbar
funds. He referred the Englishman courteously to another branch of the
department, to find which necessitated a blundering progress up another
narrow staircase crowded with loungers of all kinds. Here everything
shone from constant contact of bare feet and hurrying bare shoulders.
The staircase was the thing that, seen from without, had produced the
bees’ comb impression. At the top was a long verandah shaded from the
sun, and here the Boondi Treasury worked, under the guidance of a
grey-haired old man, whose sword lay by the side of his comfortably
wadded cushion. He controlled twenty or thirty writers, each wrapped
round a huge, country paper account-book, and each far too busy to raise
his eyes.

The babble on the staircase might have been the noise of the sea so far
as these men were concerned. It ebbed and flowed in regular beats, and
spread out far into the courtyard below. Now and again the
_click-click-click_ of a scabbard tip being dragged against the wall,
cut the dead sound of trampling naked feet, and a soldier would stumble
up the narrow way into the sun-light. He was received, and sent back or
forward by a knot of keen-eyed loungers, who seemed to act as a buffer
between the peace of the Secretariat and the pandemonium of the
Administrative. Saises and grass-cutters, mahouts of elephants, brokers,
mahajuns, villagers from the district, and here and there a shock-headed
aborigine, swelled the mob on and at the foot of the stairs. As they
came up, they met the buffer-men who spoke in low voices, and appeared
to filter them according to their merits. Some were sent to the far end
of the verandah, where everything melted away in a fresh crowd of dark
faces. Others were sent back, and joined the detachment shuffling for
shoes in the _chowk_. One servant of the Palace withdrew himself to the
open, underneath the verandah, and there sat yapping from time to time
like a hungry dog:--“The grass! The grass! The grass!” But the men with
the account-books never stirred. Other men knelt down in front of them
and whispered. And they bowed their heads gravely and made entry or
erasure, turning back the rustling leaves. Not often does a reach of the
River of Life so present itself that it can without alteration be
transferred to canvas. But the Treasury of Boondi, the view up the long
verandah, stood complete and ready for any artist who cared to make it
his own. And by that lighter and less malicious irony of the Fate, who
is always giving nuts to those who have no teeth, the picture was
clinched and brought together by a winking, brass hookah-bowl of quaint
design, pitched carelessly upon a roll of dull-red cloth full in the
foreground. The faces of the accountants were of pale gold, for they
were an untanned breed, and the face of the old man their controller was
like frosted silver.

It was a strange Treasury, but no other could have suited the Palace.
The Englishman watched open-mouthed, blaming himself because he could
not catch the meaning of the orders given to the flying chaprassies, nor
make anything of the hum in the verandah and the tumult on the stairs.
The old man took the commonplace Currency Note and announced his
willingness to give change in silver. “We have no small notes here,” he
said. “They are not wanted. In a little while, when you next bring the
Honour of your Presence this way, you shall find the silver.”

The Englishman was taken down the steps and fell into the arms of a
bristled giant who had left his horse in the courtyard, and the giant
spoke at length, waving his arms in the air, but the Englishman could
not understand him and dropped into the hub-bub at the Palace foot.
Except the main lines of the building there is nothing strange or
angular about it. The rush of people seems to have rounded and softened
every corner, as a river grinds down boulders. From the lowest tier, two
zigzags, all of rounded stones sunk in mortar, took the Englishman to a
gate where two carved elephants were thrusting at each other over the
arch; and, because neither he nor any one round him could give the gate
a name, he called it the “Gate of the Elephants.” Here the noise from
the Treasury was softened, and entry through the gate brought him into a
well-known world, the drowsy peace of a King’s Palace. There was a
court-yard surrounded by stables, in which were kept chosen horses, and
two or three _saises_ were sleeping in the sun. There was no other life
except the whirr and coo of the pigeons. In time--though really there is
no such a thing as time off the line of railway--an official appeared
begirt with the skewer-like keys that open the native bayonet-locks each
from six inches to a foot long. Where was the Raj Mahal in which,
sixty-six years ago, Tod formally installed Ram Singh, “who is now in
his eleventh year, fair and with a lively intelligent cast of face”? The
warden made no answer, but led to a room, overlooking the court-yard, in
which two armed men stood before an empty throne of white marble. They
motioned silently that none must pass immediately before the _takht_ of
the King, but go round, keeping to the far side of the double row of
pillars. Near the walls were stone slabs pierced to take the butts of
long, venomous, black bamboo lances; rude coffers were disposed about
the room, and ruder sketches of Ganesh adorned the walls. “The men,”
said the warden, “watch here day and night because this place is the
Rutton Daulat.” That, you will concede, is lucid enough. He who does not
understand it, may go to for a thick-headed barbarian.

From the Rutton Daulat the warden unlocked doors that led into a hall of
audience--the Chutter Mahal--built by Raja Chutter Lal, who was killed
more than two hundred years ago in the latter days of Shah Jehan for
whom he fought. Two rooms, each supported on double rows of pillars,
flank the open space, in the centre of which is a marble reservoir. Here
the Englishman looked anxiously for some of the atrocities of the West,
and was pleased to find that, with the exception of a vase of artificial
flowers and a clock, both hid in _mihrabs_, there was nothing that
jarred with the exquisite pillars, and the raw blaze of colour in the
roofs of the rooms. In the middle of these impertinent observations,
something sighed--sighed like a distressed ghost. Unaccountable voices
are at all times unpleasant, especially when the hearer is some hundred
feet or so above ground in an unknown Palace in an unknown land. A gust
of wind had found its way through one of the latticed balconies, and had
breathed upon a thin plate of metal, some astrological instrument, slung
gong-wise on a tripod. The tone was as soft as that of an Aeolian harp,
and, because of the surroundings, infinitely more plaintive.

There was an inlaid ivory door, set in lintel and posts crusted with
looking-glass--all apparently old work. This opened into a darkened room
where there were gilt and silver charpoys, and portraits, in the native
fashion, of the illustrious dead of Boondi. Beyond the darkness was a
balcony clinging to the sheer side of the Palace, and it was then that
the Englishman realised to what a height he had climbed without knowing
it. He looked down upon the bustle of the Treasury and the stream of
life flowing into and out of the Gate of the Fishes where the big
_nakarras_ lie. Lifting his eyes, he saw how Boondi City had built
itself, spreading from west to east as the confined valley became too
narrow and the years more peaceable. The Boondi hills are the barrier
that separates the stony, uneven ground near Deoli from the flats of
Kotah, twenty miles away. From the Palace balcony the road to the eye is
clear to the banks of the Chumbul river, which was the Debatable Ford in
times gone by and was leaped as all rivers with any pretensions to a
pedigree have been, by more than one magic horse. Northward and easterly
the hills run out to Indurgarh, and southward and westerly to territory
marked “disputed” on the map in the present year of grace. From this
balcony the Raja can see to the limit of his territory eastward, like
the good King of Yves his empire is all under his hand. He is, or the
politicals err, that same Ram Singh who was installed by Tod in 1821,
and for whose success in killing his first deer, Tod was, by the
Queen-Mother of Boondi, bidden to rejoice. To-day the people of Boondi
say:--“This Durbar is very old, so old that few men remember its
beginning, for they were in our father’s time.” It is related also of
Boondi that, on the occasion of the Queen’s Jubilee, they said proudly
that their ruler had reigned for sixty years, and he was a man. They saw
nothing astonishing in the fact of a woman having reigned for fifty.
History does not say whether they jubilated; for there are no Englishmen
in Boondi to write accounts of demonstrations and foundation-stones
laying to the daily newspapers, and then Boondi is very, very small. In
the early morning you may see a man being pantingly chased out of the
city by another man with a naked sword. This is the dak and the dak
guard; and the effect is as though runner and swordsman lay under a
doom--the one to fly with the fear of death always before him, as men
fly in dreams, and the other to perpetually fail of his revenge. But
this leaves us still in the swallow nest balcony.

The warden unlocked more doors and led the Englishman still higher, but
into a garden--a heavily timbered garden with a tank for gold fish in
the midst! For once the impassive following smiled when they saw that
the Englishman was impressed. “This,” said they, “is the Rang Bilas.”
“But who made it?” “Who knows? It was made long ago.” The Englishman
looked over the garden-wall, a foot high parapet, and shuddered. There
was only the flat side of the Palace, and a drop on to the stones of the
zigzags scores of feet below. Above him was the riven hillside and the
decaying wall of Taragarh, and behind him this fair garden, hung like
Mahomet’s coffin, full of the noise of birds and the talking of the wind
in the branches. The warden entered into a lengthy explanation of the
nature of the delusion, showing how--but he was stopped before he had
finished. His listener did not want to know “how the trick was done.”
Here was the garden, and there were three or four storeys climbed to
reach to it. _Bus._ At one end of the garden was a small room, under
treatment by native artists who were painting the panels with historical
pictures, in distemper. Theirs was florid polychromatic art, but
skirting the floor was a series of frescoes in red, black and white, of
combats with elephants, bold and temperate as good German work. They
were worn and defaced in places; but the hand of some bye-gone limner,
who did not know how to waste a line, showed under the bruises and
scratches, and put the newer work to shame.

Here the tour of the Palace ended; and it must be remembered that the
Englishman had not gone the depth of three rooms into one flank. Acres
of building lay to the right of him, and above the lines of the terraces
he could see the tops of green trees. “Who knew how many gardens, such
as the Rang Bilas, were to be found in the Palace?” No one answered
directly, but all said that there were many. The warden gathered up his
keys, and locking each door behind him as he passed, led the way down to
earth. But before he had crossed the garden, the Englishman heard, deep
down in the bowels of the Palace, a woman’s voice singing, and the voice
rang as do voices in caves. All Palaces in India excepting dead ones,
such as that of Amber, are full of eyes. In some, as has been said, the
idea of being watched is stronger than in others. In Boondi Palace it
was overpowering--being far worse than in the green shuttered corridors
of Jodhpur. There were trap-doors on the tops of terraces, and windows
veiled in foliage, and bull’s eyes set low in unexpected walls, and many
other peep-holes and places of vantage. In the end, the Englishman
looked devoutly at the floor, but when the voice of the woman came up
from under his feet, he felt that there was nothing left for him but to
go. Yet, excepting only this voice, there was deep silence everywhere,
and nothing could be seen.

The warden returned to the Chutter Mahal to pick up a lost key. The
brass table of the planets was sighing softly to itself as it swung to
and fro in the wind. That was the last view of the interior of the
Palace, the empty court, and the swinging sighing _jantar_.

About two hours afterwards, when he had reached the other side of the
valley and seen the full extent of the buildings, the Englishman began
to realise first that he had not been taken through one-tenth of the
Palace; and secondly, that he would do well to measure its extent by
acres, in preference to meaner measures. But what made him blush hotly,
all alone among the tombs on the hill side, was the idea that he with
his ridiculous demands for eggs, firewood, and sweet drinking water,
should have clattered and chattered through any part of it at all.

He began to understand why Boondi does not encourage Englishmen.



XVIII.

     _Of the Uncivilised Night and the Departure to Things Civilised.
     Showing how a Friend may keep an Appointment too well._


“Let us go hence, my songs, she will not hear. Let us go hence together
without fear!” But Ram Baksh the irrepressible sang it in altogether a
baser key. He came by night to the pavilion on the lake, while the
sepoys were cooking their fish, and reiterated his whine about the
devildom of the country into which the Englishman had dragged him.
_Padre Martum Sahib_ would never have thus treated the owner of sixteen
horses, all fast and big ones, and eight superior “shutin tongas.” “Let
us get away,” said Ram Baksh. “You are not here for _shikar_, and the
water is very bad.” It was indeed, except when taken from the lake, and
then it only tasted fishy. “We will go, Ram Baksh,” said the Englishman.
“We will go in the very early morning, and in the meantime here is fish
to stay your stomach with.”

When a transparent _kanat_, which fails by three feet to reach ceiling
or floor, is the only bar between the East and the West, he would be a
churl indeed who stood upon “invidious race distinctions.” The
Englishman went out and fraternised with the Military--the four-rupee
soldiers of Boondi who guarded him. They were armed, one with an old
Tower musket crazy as to nipple and hammer, one with a native-made
smooth-bore, and one with a composite contrivance--English sporting
muzzle-loader stock with a compartment for a jointed cleaning-rod, and
hammered octagonal native barrel, wire-fastened, with a tuft of cotton
on the foresight. All three guns were loaded, and the owners were very
proud of them. They were simple folk, these men at arms, with an
inordinate appetite for broiled fish. They were not _always_ soldiers
they explained. They cultivated their crops until wanted for any duty
that might turn up. They were paid, now and again, at intervals, but
they were paid in coin and not in kind.

The _munshis_ and the vakils and the runners had departed after seeing
that the Englishman was safe for the night, so the freedom of the little
gathering on the bund was unrestrained. The _chowkidar_ came out of his
cave into the firelight. Warm wood ashes, by the way, like Epp’s cocoa,
are “grateful and comforting” to cold toes. He took a fish and
incontinently choked, for he was a feeble old man. Set right again, he
launched into a very long and quite unintelligible story while the
sepoys said reverently:--“He is an old man and remembers many things.”
As he babbled, the night shut in upon the lake and the valley of Boondi.
The last cows were driven into the water for their evening drink, the
waterfowl and the monkeys went to bed, and the stars came out and made a
new firmament in the untroubled bosom of the lake. The light of the fire
showed the ruled line of the bund springing out of the soft darkness of
the wooded hill on the left and disappearing into the solid darkness of
the bare hill on the right. Below the bund a man cried aloud to keep
wandering pigs from the gardens whose tree-tops rose to a level with the
bund-edge. Beyond the trees all was swaddled in gloom. When the gentle
buzz of the unseen city died out, it seemed as though the bund were the
very Swordwide Bridge that runs, as every one knows, between this world
and the next. The water lapped and muttered, and now and again a fish
jumped, with the shatter of broken glass, blurring the peace of the
reflected heavens.

    “And duller should I be than some fat weed
     That rots itself at ease on Lethe’s wharf.”

The poet who wrote those lines knew nothing whatever of Lethe’s wharf.
The Englishman had found it, and it seemed to him, at that hour and in
that place, that it would be good and desirable never to return to the
Commissioners and the Deputy Commissioners any more, but to lie at ease
on the warm sunlit bund by day, and, at night, near a shadow-breeding
fire, to listen for the strangled voices and whispers of the darkness in
the hills; thus after as long a life as the _chowkidar’s_, dying easily
and pleasantly, and being buried in a red tomb on the borders of the
lake. Surely no one would come to reclaim him, across those weary, weary
miles of rock-strewn road.... “And this,” said the _chowkidar_, raising
his voice to enforce attention, “is true talk. Everybody knows it, and
now the Sahib knows it. I am an old man.” He fell asleep at once, with
his hand on the _chillam_ that was doing duty for a whole _hukka_ among
the company. He had been talking for nearly a quarter of an hour.

See how great a man is the true novelist! Six or seven thousand miles
away, Walter Besant of the Golden Pen had created Mr. Maliphant--the
ancient of figureheads, in _All Sorts and Conditions of Men_, and here,
in Boondi, the Englishman had found Mr. Maliphant in the withered flesh.
So he drank Walter Besant’s health in the water of the Burra Talao. One
of the sepoys turned himself round, with a clatter of accoutrements,
shifted his blanket under his elbow, and told a tale. It had something
to do with his _khet_, and a _gunna_ which certainly was not sugar-cane.
It was elusive. At times it seemed that it was a woman, then changed to
a right of way, and lastly appeared to be a tax; but the more he
attempted to get at its meaning through the curious patois in which its
doings or its merits were enveloped, the more dazed the Englishman
became. None the less the story was a fine one, embellished with much
dramatic gesture which told powerfully against the firelight. Then the
second sepoy, who had been enjoying the _chillam_ all the time, told a
tale, the purport of which was that the dead in the tombs round the lake
were wont to get up of nights and _shikar_. This was a fine and ghostly
story; and its dismal effect was much heightened by some clamour of the
night far up the lake beyond the floor of stars.

The third sepoy said nothing. He had eaten too much fish and was fast
asleep by the side of the _chowkidar_.

[Illustration: Page 234--“This was a fine and ghostly story.”]

They were all Mahomedans, and consequently all easy to deal with. A
Hindu is an excellent person, but ... but ... there is no knowing what
is in his heart, and he is hedged about with so many strange
observances.

The Hindu or Mahomedan bent, which each Englishman’s mind must take
before he has been three years in the country is, of course, influenced
by Province or Presidency. In Rajputana generally, the Political swears
by the Hindu, and holds that the Mahomedan is untrustworthy. But a man
who will eat with you and take your tobacco, sinking the fiction that it
has been doctored with _shrab_, cannot be very bad after all.

That night when the tales were all told and the guard, bless them, were
snoring peaceably in the starlight, a man came stealthily into the
enclosure of _kanats_ and woke the Englishman by muttering _Sahib_,
_Sahib_ in his ear. It was no robber but some poor devil with a
petition--a grimy, welted paper. He was absolutely unintelligible, and
additionally so in that he stammered almost to dumbness. He stood by the
bed, alternately bowing to the earth and standing erect, his arms spread
aloft, and his whole body working as he tried to force out some
rebellious word in a key that should not wake the men without. What
could the Englishman do? He was no Government servant, and had no
concern with _urzis_. It was laughable to lie in a warm bed and watch
this unfortunate heathen, clicking and choking and gasping in his
desperate desire to make the _Sahib_ understand. It was also
unpleasantly pathetic, and the listener found himself as blindly
striving to catch the meaning as the pleader to make himself
comprehended. But it was no use; and in the end the man departed as he
had come--bowed, abject, and unintelligible.

Let every word written against Ganesh be rescinded. It was by his
ordering that the Englishman saw such a dawn on the Burra Talao as he
had never before set eyes on. Every fair morning is a reprint, blurred
perhaps, of the opening of the First Day; but this splendour was a thing
to be put aside from all other days and remembered. The stars had no
fire in them and the fish had stopped jumping, when the black water of
the lake paled and grew grey. While he watched, it seemed to the
Englishman that some voice on the hills were intoning the first verses
of Genesis. The grey light moved on the face of the waters till, with no
interval, a blood-red glare shot up from the horizon and, inky black
against the intense red, a giant crane floated out towards the sun. In
the still shadowed city the great Palace drum boomed and throbbed to
show that the gates were open, while the dawn swept up the valley and
made all things clear. The blind man who said:--“The blast of a trumpet
is red” spoke only the truth. The breaking of the red dawn is like the
blast of a trumpet.

“What,” said the _chowkidar_, picking the ashes of the overnight fire
out of his beard, “what, I say, are five eggs or twelve eggs to such a
Raj as ours? What also are fowls--what are"--.... “There was no talk of
fowls. Where is the fowl-man from whom you got the eggs?” “He is here.
No, he is there. I do not know. I am an old man, and I and the Raj
supply everything without price. The _murghiwalla_ will be paid by the
State--liberally paid. Let the _Sahib_ be happy! _Wah_! _Wah_!”

Experience of _beegar_ in Himalayan villages had made the Englishman
very tender in raising supplies that were given _gratis_; but the
_murghiwalla_ could not be found, and the value of his wares was, later,
paid to Ganesh--Ganesh of Situr, for that is the name of the village
full of priests, through which the Englishman had passed in ignorance
two days before. A double handful of sweet smelling flowers made the
receipt.

Boondi was wide awake before half-past seven in the morning. Her
hunters, on foot and on horse, were filing towards the Deoli Gate to go
_shikarring_. They would hunt tiger and deer they said, even with
matchlocks and muzzle-loaders as uncouth as those the _Sahib_ saw. They
were a merry company and chaffed the Quarter-Guard at the gate
unmercifully when a bullock-cart, laden with the cases of the “Batoum
Naphtha and Oil Company” blocked the road. One of them had been a
soldier of the Queen, and, excited by the appearance of a _Sahib_, did
so rebuke and badger the Quarter-Guard for their slovenliness that they
threatened to come out of the barracks and destroy him.

So, after one last look at the Palace high up the hill side, the
Englishman was borne away along the Deoli road. The peculiarity of
Boondi is the peculiarity of the covered pitfall. One does not see it
till one falls into it. A quarter of a mile from the gate, it and its
Palace were invisible. The runners who had chivalrously volunteered to
protect the wanderer against possible dacoits had been satisfactorily
disposed of, and all was peace and unruffled loaferdom. But the
Englishman was grieved at heart. He had fallen in love with Boondi the
beautiful, and believed that he would never again see anything half so
fair. The utter untouchedness of the town was one-half the charm and its
associations the other. Read Tod, who is far too good to be chipped or
sampled, read Tod luxuriously on the bund of the Burra Talao, and the
spirit of the place will enter into you and you will be happy.

To enjoy life thoroughly, haste and bustle must be abandoned. Ram Baksh
has said that Englishmen are always _dikking_ to go forward, and for
this reason, though beyond doubt they pay well and readily, are not wise
men. He gave utterance to this philosophy after he had mistaken his road
and pulled up in what must have been a disused quarry hard by a
cane-field. There were patches and pockets of cultivation along the
rocky road, where men grew cotton, _til_, chillies, tobacco, and
sugar-cane. “I will get you sugar-cane,” said Ram Baksh. “Then we will
go forward, and perhaps some of these jungly fools will tell us where
the road is.” A “jungly fool,” a tender of goats, did in time appear,
but there was no hurry; the sugar-cane was sweet and purple and the sun
warm.

The Englishman lay out at high noon on the crest of a rolling upland
crowned with rock, and heard, as a loafer had told him he would hear,
the “set of the day,” which is as easily discernible as the change of
tone between the rising and the falling tide. At a certain hour the
impetus of the morning dies out, and all things, living and inanimate,
turn their thoughts to the prophecy of the coming night. The little
wandering breezes drop for a time, and, when they blow afresh, bring the
message. The “set of the day” as the loafer said, has changed, the
machinery is beginning to run down, the unseen tides of the air are
falling. The moment of the change can only be felt in the open and in
touch with the earth, and once discovered, seem to place the finder in
deep accord and fellowship with all things on the earth. Perhaps this is
why the genuine loafer, though “frequently drunk,” is “always polite to
the stranger,” and shows such a genial tolerance towards the weaknesses
of mankind, black, white, or brown.

In the evening when the jackals were scuttling across the roads and the
cranes had gone to roost, came Deoli the desolate, and an unpleasant
meeting. Six days away from his kind had bred in a Cockney heart a great
desire to see an Englishman again. An elaborate loaf through the
cantonment--fifteen minutes’ walk from end to end--showed only one
distant dog-cart and a small English child with an ayah. There was grass
in the soldierly-straight roads, and some of the cross-cuts had never
been used at all from the days when the cantonment had been first laid
out. In the western corner lay the cemetery--the only carefully-tended
and newly-whitewashed thing in this God-forgotten place. Some years ago
a man had said good-bye to the Englishman; adding cheerily:--“We shall
meet again. The world’s a very little place y’know.” His prophecy was a
true one, for the two met indeed, but the prophet was lying in Deoli
Cemetery near the well, which is decorated so ecclesiastically with
funeral urns. Truly the world is a _very_ little place that a man should
so stumble upon dead acquaintances when he goes abroad.



THE LAST.

     _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._


In the morning the tonga rattled past Deoli Cemetery into the open,
where the Deoli Irregulars were drilling. They marked the beginning of
civilisation and white shirts; for which reason they seemed altogether
detestable. Yet another day’s jolting, enlivened by the philosophy of
Ram Baksh, and then came Nasirabad. The last pair of ponies suggested
serious thought. They had covered eighteen miles at an average speed of
eight miles an hour, and were well conditioned little rats. “A Colonel
Sahib gave me this one for _bakshish_,” said Ram Baksh, flicking the
near one. “It was his _baba’s_ pony. The _baba_ was five years old. When
he went away, the Colonel Sahib said:--‘Ram Baksh, you are a good man.
Never have I seen such a good man. This horse is yours.’” Ram Baksh was
getting a horse’s work out of a child’s pony. Surely we in India work
the land much as the Colonel Sahib worked his son’s mount; making it do
child’s work when so much more can be screwed out of it. A native and a
native State deals otherwise with horse and holding. Perhaps our extreme
scrupulousness in handling may be Statecraft, but, after even a short
sojourn in places which are dealt with not so tenderly, it seems absurd.
There are States where things are done, and done without protest, that
would make the hair of the educated native stand on end with horror.
These things are of course not expedient to write; because their
publication would give a great deal of unnecessary pain and
heart-searching to estimable native administrators who have the hope of
a Star before their eyes, and would not better matters in the least.

Note this fact though. With the exception of such journals as, occupying
a central position in British territory, levy blackmail from the
neighbouring States, there are no independent papers in Rajputana. A
King may start a weekly, to encourage a taste for Sanskrit and high
Hindi, or a Prince may create a Court Chronicle; but that is all. A
“free press” is not allowed, and this the native journalist knows. With
good management he can, keeping under the shadow of our flag, raise two
hundred rupees from a big man here, and five hundred from a rich man
there, but he does not establish himself across the Border. To one who
has reason to hold a stubborn disbelief in even the elementary morality
of the native press, this bashfulness and lack of enterprise is amusing.
But to return to the over-the-way administrations. There is nothing
exactly wrong in the methods of government that are overlaid with
English terms and forms. They are vigorous, in certain points, and where
they are not vigorous, there is a cheery happy-go-luckiness about the
arrangement that must be seen to be understood. The shift and play of a
man’s fortune across the Border is as sudden as anything in the days of
Haroun-al-Raschid of blessed memory, and there are stories, to be got
for the unearthing, as wild and as improbable as those in the _Thousand
and One Nights_. Most impressive of all is the way in which the country
is “used,” and its elasticity under pressure. In the good old days the
Durbar raised everything it could from the people, and the King spent as
much as ever he could on his personal pleasures. Now the institution of
the Political has stopped the grabbing, for which, by the way, some of
the monarchs are not in the least grateful--and smoothed the outward
face of things. But there is still a difference, and such a difference,
between our ways and the ways of the other places. A year spent among
native States ought to send a man back to the Decencies and the Law
Courts and the Rights of the Subject with a supreme contempt for those
who rave about the oppressions of the brutal bureaucrat. One month
nearly taught an average Englishman that it was the proper thing to
smite anybody of mean aspect and obstructive tendencies on the mouth
with a shoe. Hear what an intelligent loafer said. His words are at
least as valuable as these babblings. He was, as usual, wonderfully
drunk, and the gift of speech came down upon him. The conversation--he
was a great politician this loafer--had turned on the poverty of
India:--“Poor!” said he. “Of course it’s poor. Oh yes! D--d poor! And
I’m poor, an’ you’re poor, altogether. Do you expect people will give
you money without you ask ’em? No. I tell you, Sir, there’s enough money
in India to pave _Hell_ with if you could only get at it. I’ve kep’
servants in my day. Did they ever leave me without a hundred or a
hundred and fifty put by--and never touched? _You mark that._ Does any
black man who has been in Guv’ment service go away without hundreds an’
hundreds put by--and never touched? You mark that. Money! The place
stinks o’ money--just kept out o’ sight. Do you ever know a native that
didn’t say _Garib admi_? They’ve been sayin’ _Garib admi_ so long that
the Guv’ment learns to believe ’em, and now they’re all bein’ treated as
though they was paupers. I’m a pauper, an’ you’re a pauper--we ’aven’t
got anything hid in the ground--an’ so’s every white man in this
forsaken country. But the Injian he’s a rich man. How do I know? Because
I’ve tramped on foot, or warrant pretty well from one end of the place
to the other, an’ I know what I’m talkin’ about, and this ere Guv’ment
goes peckin’ an’ fiddlin’ over its tuppenny-ha’penny little taxes as if
it was afraid. Which it is. You see how they do things in ----. It’s six
sowars here, and ten sowars there, and--‘Pay up, you brutes, or we’ll
pull your ears over your head.’ And when they’ve taken all they can get,
the headman, he says:--‘This is a dashed poor yield. I’ll come again.’
_Of course_ the people digs up something out of the ground, and they
pay. I know the way it’s done, and that’s the way to do it. You can’t go
to an Injian an’ say:--‘Look here. Can you pay me five rupees?’ He
says:--‘_Garib admi_,’ of course, an’ would say it if he was as rich as
a banker. But if you send half a dozen sowars at him and shift the
thatch off of his roof, he’ll pay. Guv’ment can’t do that. I don’t
suppose it could. There is no reason why it shouldn’t. But it might do
something like it, to show that it wasn’t going to have no nonsense.
Why, I’d undertake to raise a hundred million--what am I talking of?--a
hundred and fifty million pounds from this country _per annum_, and it
wouldn’t be strained _then_. One hundred and fifty millions you could
raise as easy as paint, if you just made these ere Injians understand
that they had to pay an’ make no bones about it. It’s enough to make a
man sick to go in over yonder to ---- and see what they do; and then come
back an’ see what we do. Perfectly sickenin’ it is. Borrer money! Why
the country could pay herself an’ everything she wants, if she was only
made to do it. It’s this bloomin’ _Garib admi_ swindle that’s been going
on all these years, that has made fools o’ the Guv’ment.” Then he became
egoistical, this ragged ruffian who conceived that he knew the road to
illimitable wealth, and told the story of his life, interspersed with
anecdotes that would blister the paper they were written on. But through
all his ravings, he stuck to his hundred-and-fifty-million-theory, and
though the listener dissented from him and the brutal cruelty with which
his views were stated, an unscientific impression remained and was not
to be shaken off. Across the Border one feels that the country is being
used, exploited, “made to sit up,” so to speak. In our territories the
feeling is equally strong of wealth “just round the corner,” as the
loafer said, and a people wrapped up in cotton wool and ungetatable.
Will any man, who really knows something of a little piece of India and
has not the fear of running counter to custom before his eyes, explain
how this impression is produced, and why it is an erroneous one? This
digression has taken us far from the child’s pony of Ram Baksh.

Nasirabad marked the end of the Englishman’s holiday, and there was
sorrow in his heart. “Come back again,” said Ram Baksh cheerfully, “and
bring a gun with you. Then I’ll take you to Gungra, and I’ll drive you
myself. Drive you just as well as I’ve driven these four days past.” An
amicable open-minded soul was Ram Baksh. May his tongas never grow less.

“This ’ere Burma fever is a bad thing to have. It’s pulled me down
awful; an’ now I am going to Peshawar. _Are_ you the Station-Master?” It
was Thomas--white cheeked, sunken-eyed, drawn-mouthed Thomas--travelling
from Nasirabad to Peshawar on pass; and with him was a Corporal new to
his stripes and doing station duty. Every Thomas is interesting, except
when he is too drunk to speak. This Thomas was an enthusiast. He had
volunteered, from a Home-going regiment shattered by Burma fever, into a
regiment at Peshawar, had broken down at Nasirabad on his way up with
his draft, and was now journeying into the unknown to pick up another
medal. “There’s sure to be something on the Frontier,” said this gaunt,
haggard boy--he was little more, though he reckoned four years’ service
and considered himself somebody. “When there’s anything going,
Peshawar’s the place to be in, they tell me; but I hear we shall have to
march down to Calcutta in no time.” The Corporal was a little man and
showed his friend off with great pride:--“Ah, you should have come to
us,” said he; “we’re the regiment, we are.” “Well, I went with the rest
of our men,” said Thomas. “There’s three hundred of us volunteered to
stay on, and we all went for the same regiment. Not but what I’m saying
yours is a good regiment,” he added with grave courtesy. This loosed the
Corporal’s tongue, and he discanted on the virtues of the regiment and
the merits of the officers. It has been written that Thomas is devoid of
_esprit de corps_, because of the jerkiness of the arrangements under
which he now serves. If this be true, he manages to conceal his
feelings very well; for he speaks most fluently in praise of his own
regiment; and, for all his youth, has a keen appreciation of the merits
of his officers. Go to him when his heart is opened, and hear him going
through the roll of the subalterns, by a grading totally unknown in the
_Army List_, and you will pick up something worth the hearing. Thomas,
with the Burma fever on him, tried to cut in, from time to time, with
stories of his officers and what they had done “when we was marchin’ all
up and down Burma,” but the little Corporal went on gaily.

They made a curious contrast--these two types. The lathy, town-bred
Thomas with hock-bottle shoulders, a little education, and a keen desire
to get more medals and stripes; and the little, deep-chested,
bull-necked Corporal brimming over with vitality and devoid of any ideas
beyond the “regiment.” And the end of both lives, in all likelihood,
would be a nameless grave in some cantonment burying-ground, with, if
the case were specially interesting and the Regimental Doctor had a turn
for the pen, an obituary notice in the _Indian Medical Journal_. It was
an unpleasant thought.

From the Army to the Navy is a perfectly natural transition, but one
hardly to be expected in the heart of India. Dawn showed the railway
carriage full of riotous boys, for the Agra and Mount Abu schools had
broken up for holidays. Surely it was natural enough to ask a child--not
a boy, but a child--whether he was going home for the holidays; and
surely it was a crushing, a petrifying thing, to hear in a clear treble,
tinged with icy _hauteur_:--“No! I’m on leave. I’m a midshipman.” Two
“officers of Her Majesty’s Navy"--mids of a man-o’-war in Bombay ----
were going Up-country on ten days’ leave! They had not travelled much
more than twice round the world; but they should have printed the fact
on a label. They chattered like daws, and their talk was as a whiff of
fresh air from the open sea, while the train ran eastward under the
Aravalis. At that hour their lives were bound up in and made glorious by
the hope of riding a horse when they reached their journey’s end. Much
had they seen “cities and men,” and the artless way in which they
interlarded their conversation with allusions to “one of these
shore-going chaps you see” was delicious. They had no cares, no fears,
no servants, and an unlimited stock of wonder and admiration for
everything they saw, from the “cute little well-scoops” to a herd of
deer grazing on the horizon. It was not until they had opened their
young hearts with infantine abandon that the listener could guess from
the incidental _argot_ where these pocket-Ulysseses had travelled. South
African, Norwegian, and Arabian words were used to help out the slang of
Haslar, and a copious vocabulary of shipboard terms, complicated with
modern Greek. As free from self-consciousness as children, as ignorant
as beings from another planet of the Anglo-Indian life into which they
were going to dip for a few days, shrewd and observant as befits men of
the world who have authority, and neat-handed and resourceful
as--blue-jackets, they were a delightful study, and accepted freely and
frankly the elaborate apologies tendered to them for the unfortunate
mistake about the “holidays.” The roads divided and they went their way;
and there was a shadow after they had gone, for the Globe-Trotter said
to his wife:--“What I like about Jeypore"--accent on the first syllable,
if you please--“is its characteristic easternness.” And the
Globe-Trotter’s wife said, “Yes! It is purely Oriental.”

This was Jeypore with the gas-jets and the water-pipes as was shown at
the beginning of these trivial letters; and the Globe-Trotter and his
wife had not been to Amber. Joyful thought! They had not seen the soft
splendour of Udaipur, the night-mare of Chitor, the grim power of
Jodhpur and the virgin beauty of Boondi--fairest of all places that the
Englishman had set eyes on. The Globe-Trotter was great in the matter of
hotels and food, but he had not lain under the shadow of a tonga in soft
warm sand, eating cold pork with a pocket-knife and thanking Providence
who put sweet-water streams where wayfarers wanted them. He had not
drunk out the brilliant cold-weather night in the company of a King of
loafers, a grimy scallawag with a six days’ beard and an unholy
knowledge of native States. He had attended service in cantonment
churches; but he had not known what it was to witness the simple solemn
ceremonial in the dining-room of a far away Residency, when all the
English folk within a hundred-mile circuit bowed their heads before the
God of the Christians. He had blundered about temples of strange deities
with a guide at his elbow; but he had not known what it was to attempt
conversation with a temple dancing-girl (_not_ such an one as Edwin
Arnold invented), and to be rewarded for a misturned compliment with a
deftly heaved bunch of marigold buds on his respectable bosom. Yes, he
had undoubtedly lost much, and the measure of his loss was proven in
his estimate of the Orientalism of Jeypore.

But what had he who sat in judgment upon him gained? One perfect month
of loaferdom, to be remembered above all others, and the night of the
visit to Chitor, to be remembered even when the month is forgotten. Also
the sad knowledge that of all the fair things seen, the inept pen gives
but a feeble and blurred picture.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let those who have read to the end, pardon a hundred blemishes.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Letters of Marque" ***

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