1 ajrrs i ojns -< I ^lUBRARY^/- ^OF-CAUFOi?^ ^(?Aavaani'^ 1WEUNIVER% O ^(yOJUVDJO"^ ^TiUDKVSOl^ %a3MNfl-3WV ,^\^E•UNIVER5'/A o •^ -^tUBRARYOc. xj^tllBRARYQc. its i ^lUBRARYGc ^IUBRARYQa, ^ii^OJIWDJO'^ "^(SOdnVDJO^ 5jdEUNIVER% _ ^ o ^•10SAKCEI% %il3AINa-3WV 00 so ZX3 -< A-OFCAIIFO/?^ ^OAavaani^ ^OFCALIF0% 3? ^m' I I' £27 ^WEUNIVERy/A %130NVS01^ o "^/JHiAINa^WV =3 ,5MEUNIVER5//) ^lOSANCElfj>^ o -s^'E-UBRARYQ^- ^^^lIBRARYQc. ^1 1:^, I 1 J FYS 1 iini IIBRARYQ^^ ^HIBRARYQ^ ^ ^A ^OFCAllF0fi»^ .^WEUNIVERS/A AWEUNIVERS/a avVOSANCEI^ o _ .. _ CO so >- o ^^HIBRARYQ<- V NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. BY MOUNTSTUART E. GRANT DUEE, Member for the Elgin District of Burghs, and late Under-Secretary of State for India. AUTHOR OF "studies IN EUROPEAN POLITICS," ",A POLITICAL SURVEY," &C. WITH nOUTE MAP. ITottbon : MACMILLAN AND CO. 187G. [The liiijht of Translation and Rqyrodudlon i^ Eeservcd.] LONDON : Ti, CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, BREAD STREET HILL. a?5 413 PEEFACE. The following pages were written cliiefly in Steam- sliips and E^ailway Carriages, or late at niglit, after the occupations of the day were over, and were sent home week by week to my usual travel- ling companions — none of whom, as it chanced, were able to accompany me on my Indian Journey. They were printed in the Contemporary Review, as they are reprinted now, with hardly any alteration, because I think that most persons, whom I wish to address, will care more for notes, however rough and fragmentary, which bear the mark of having been written in immediate contact with the things to which they relate, than for a far more elaborate book composed at home, with all the advantages of libraries and leisure. In the words of a great master of a kind of writing which I should like 515S76 LIB SETS VI PREFACE. to see commoRei' than it is in the works of travellers — " J'ai cherche a indiqner le plus cle faits possibles. J'aime mieux que le lecteur trouve une phrase pen elegante, et qu'il ait une petite idee de plus." An Article on India, Political and Social, writ- ten under circumstances which are sufficiently explained in the Article itself, has heen added at the end of the volume. 51, PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, HOME, January, 1876. EREATA. Pack 30, /o;- "Dainuan," mid "Damaiui." ,, 96, for "We sat muler a marble canopy," read "He sat uiuler a marble canopy." ,, 133. My attention has been called to the fact that, misled by the older authorities, I have very much underestimated the extent of the territories of the Maharajah of Jummoo and Cashmere. Mr. Drew, in his book published in 1875, estimates them at 68,000 sc[uare miles. Much of course of this vast extent is mere wilderness. ,, H6, fov " Indian Oihce," read "India Office.'' NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. LuMiGNY, Nov. S7'd, 1874.— And so the anni- Tersary of our sad break-up at Nismes, when the priests were chanting the De Profundis in the streets, the anniversary of our pleasant start from Cairo for the Pirst Cataract, was to be the day of this parting also. As we were nearing the French land yesterday, I caught sight of Mr. S , who, with his wife (whom you remember at Corfu), was returning to his post. They had engaged a carriage from Calais to Paris, in which they were so good as to offer us seats ; so that I had an opportunity of hearing much that has been going on in Greece since we were there. As Finlay's letters have become few and far between, this was no small piece of good fortune. I came hither from Paris this morning, to spend the day, having arranged, as you will recollect, for a little oasis of Prench home-life on the rather weary journey from London to Turin. And that I certainly find to perfection, in this fair and stately place, peopled by recollections. 2 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. It is strange to see what an odd and unlieard- of sort of proceeding this Indian expedition of mine seems to my kind friends here. Turin, Nov. htli. — A journey of some two-and- twenty hours hrought us from Paris to this place, where, if I except one night in 1871, I have never heen since I went out to see Cavour, in December, 1860. "A good deal has happened since;" but materially Turin has lost nothing by the transfer of the capital. The population has largely in- creased, and several new industries have sprung up. We climbed, this afternoon, to the Superga. A soft, more than semi-transparent mist filled all the valley, out of which rose only a few peaks, covered with snow, and clear-cut, as if they had been in Attica. The view was not so lovely as I once before saw it ; but, such as it was, my companion pronounced it more beautiful than anything in California. The same weather which I liad at Lumigny con- tinues. There is a cloudless sky, with a thin haze through the day ; but it becomes perfectly clear after darkness has fallen. The frosty starlight at Amberieu last night was worthy of St. Agnes. I remembered, as Ave passed Chambdry, an amusing story which my father used to tell of a visit paid by him at that place, fifty years ago, to the famous adventurer, De Boigne. After much conversation upon Indian subjects, they came to finance, and my father expressed some uneasiness about that side of the Company's affairs. " Oh," TUKIX — PAllMA. 3 said De Boigne, " the Company need never suffer from want of money. They have one unfailing resource." " What is that ? " asked my father, eagerly. " Flonder China,'' was the characteristic reply. How we do flit about the world now-a-days ! Exactly a week ago, I was on Tweedside, close to Neidpath Pell, which was still clad in the last hues of autumn, though soon to look as dreary as Scott describes it in the opening verses oi 3Iarmion ; and now I have just come down from the last home of the House of Savoy, having, in the mean- time, given my anti-Cassandra address in Edinburgh, had my final talk with Mallet over Indian affairs, heard from Benan, in the Rue Yanneau, his views about the exploration of Yemen, and done I know not how many other things. Still, all this will be, within a generation, con- sidered quite slow work, if C is right. I told you, I think, that, on the 25th October, after listening for some time to his views about flying- machines, I said, " Do I really understand you correctly when I understand you to say that within twenty years you think we shall go to New York in a day ? " and that he answered, "I don't see how it can be otherwise." Such a statement, coming from a man of his great scientific position, donne (I penser. Parma, Nov. Gth. — Of the people I knew in Turin, every one is dead or departed, except Count Sclopis, the Geneva Arbitrator, and his wife, in b2 4 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOUUNEY. whose hospitable salon I spent yesterday evening, coming on to this place this afternoon — a pleasant journey, made pleasanter by the society of Mr. and Mrs. S . It grew dark soon after we arrived ; and we could only see the outside of the many-tiered baptistery or the fine Lombard cathe- dral — falling back upon dinner and a bottle of Scandiano, a by no means contemptible white wine, which we drank in honour of Hyperion/ Bologna, Nov. Sth. — Of the Parma Correggios, I can tell you little that you do not know already. Those in the churches are almost invisible to ordinary eyes ; and one has to content oneself with Toschi's small but excellent copies. The easel pictures are in much better preservation ; and I quite subscribe to the ruling of Mengs, that the "Giorno" here is superior to its pendant, the "Notte of Dresden." Charming, too, and well preserved, are the child- ren in the Camera di S. Paolo ; but the room is, and always must have been, absurdly dark. Over the fireplace, by the way, is a motto, excellent for these times, " Ignem ne gladio fodias" — Don't poke the fire with a sword. Here, in Bologna, I have re-seen and seen much. On no former occasion did I visit the great secular- ized monastery of S. Michele in Bosco, which rises close to the walls on one of the last spurs of the ^ " Nay, the old Lombard, Matteo Maria Bojardo, set all the church bells in Scandiano ringing, merely because he had found a name for one of his heroes. Here also shall church bells be rung, but more solemnly." BOLOGNA. 5 Ajieunines — -;i grand place, AA^th a corridor nearly 500 feet long, and commanding most glorious views. It was sunset as we went up to it, and the whole air became gradually full of music, as, one by one, the hundred churches of the great city took up the burden which we have heard so often when together on the A'enetian lasrunes. o One could not forget that a similar usage, in a city hard by, inspired some of the most beautiful lines in modern poetry — " Ave Maria ! blessed be the hour ! The time, the clime, the place where I so oft Have felt that luoment in its fullest power Sink o'er the earth so beautiful and soft. While swung the deep bell in the distant tower, Or the faint dying day-hymn stole aloft, And not a breath crept through the rosy air, And yet the forest leaves seemed stirred with prayer." Nov. 9th. — On the Ionian sea. — We left Bologna (in which the general election for the Italian parliament was proceeding quietly enough) at one o'clock P.M. yesterday, by the quick train Avhich runs only once a week, in fifteen hours, to Brindisi, with the Indian mail, and crossed the Bubicon in more senses than one. Before we reached Ancona, the sun had gone down behind the Apennines, gilding their peaks as it departed ; and Loretto soon afterwards stood black against the sky, hiding for a moment the evening star. Pescara, Eoggia, Bari, were successively left behind ; and before 6 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOUllNEY. six o'clock, we were steaming out of harbour in the Gwalior. Now we have just got out of the Straits of Otranto, seeing at once the town which gives them their name, and the beautiful outline of Cape Linsruetta in Chimari. I had miscalculated the clearness of the atmosphere, and had not at all expected to see the Albanian mountains, nor those delicious islands through which we sailed in the Baturno. Nov. 10th. — When I came on deck this morning the yellow cliffs of Zante were behind us, and we were running for the islet of Prote, at the southern extremity of the Gulf of Arcadia. Ear off to the right of our course lay Strovali, the Strophades of old days, and the fabled home of the Harpies. The day was fine, and the sea calm from nine till one, so that I saw admirably a good deal of the coast, which night stole from us in 1871, especially the island of Sphacteria, Avliich protects the roads of Navarino, and is thus as famous in modern as in ancient history. Then came Modon and Sapienza, and Cabrera, all of which you recollect, but the mountains of the interior were partially veiled in clouds, and not so well seen as you saw them. Tlie nearer mountains, especially tliose which look down on the Gulf of Arcadia, were, however, as clear as possible. Nov. mil. — We had passed Cabrera, and were nearly off Vcnetico, with its attendant Ant rocks. ARCADIA CRETE. / when we saw that it was raining heavily in Maina, and Cerigo was quite invisible. Soon the storm struck us, and we tumbled about to the southward, over an angry sea, " with nothing beautiful or desirable in it," save when the wind, blowing athwart our track, turned up masses of water, having exactly that shade of blue which one sees so often down the rifts of a glacier. This morning we are running along the southern shore of Crete, with heavy rain, but far less wind than we had twenty hours ago. Nov. 12111. — At twelve o'clock yesterday we were still 30 it was wanted constructively, but because it was a symbol of the faith; while in their tombs and palaces even this is generally wanting. The truth of the matter is, the Mahometans had forced themselves upon the most civiliz;ed and most essentially building race at that time in India, and the Chalukyas conquered their con- querors, and forced them to adopt forms and ornaments which were superior to any the invaders knew or could have introduced. The result is a style which combines all the elegance and finish of Jaina or Chalukya art with a certain largeness of conception which the Hindu never quite attained, but which is characteristic of the people who at this time were subjecting all India to their sway." A drive to a long-deserted but once lordly pleasure-place at some distance from the city, on the banks of the Saburmuttee, which bringing down onlv the draina2:e of the AravuUi rano^e, is not to compare in volume to the Taptee or the Nerbudda, enabled us to see the park-like charac- ter of Guzerat. Amongst the most conspicuous trees is the Tamarind, whose delicate foliage, seen against the blue sky, is exceedingly beautiful. D 2 3G NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOTJUNEY. Common too, fair of leaf and inconspicuous of fiower, is the Neem, a Ilelia related to that beauti- ful Melia which we saw in Shereef Pasha's garden, and which last species is called here the Indian lilac. Much more conspicuous, though not medi- cinally useful, is the MilUngtonia suherosa, with long pendant white flowers. The banian is every- where, and I see for the first time the great Feronia elephantimi covered with fruit hard and nearly as large as cricket-balls. On our way home we visited another great Jain temple, built very re- cently, and much praised by Pergusson. The almost Gregorian chants, and the incense, were like a good deal I have seen and heard before. Here, however, the worshippers strike a bell to call the attention of 'the god. It is not the bell that summons the worshippers. Breakfast over, we go to see a Hindoo gentleman, who engar- landed us with jasmine, and showed us bushels of jewels, returning to bargain for Kinkhab, some of which we buy, and to look at gold and silver orna- ments, none of which were sufficiently unlike things familiar to me to make them tempting. Very beautiful ornaments are said to be made here, but only to order. After a visit to a great Jain banker, and the inspection of his family treasures in pearl and gold, we rode to Sirkej, a ruined royal mosque, cemetery, and pleasure-house some miles from the town. Mr. Burgess, from whom I have had a note to-night, tells me that it is not faintly to be compared to AHMEDABAU — FRUIT. 37 Oodeypore ; but, seen at sunset, it is certainly one of the prettiest places I have ever beheld — a great deep placid expanse of water surrounded by the most graceful architecture, with long lines of steps leading down to it on all sides. These are the elements of the scene, but only its elements. A huge crocodile floated calmly on the surface, which did not prevent some natives leaping into the water feet foremost from the top of one of the neighbouring pavilions, a height of some thirty feet. This was my first crocodile. You remember how vainly we looked for his brethren on the Nile. To-day, too, introduced me to the Mina, or Indian starling — a pretty, tame little creature — as yester- day introduced me to the green parrots, here very numerous and self-asserting. The road to Sirkej led us first past a Guzeratti village, said by our guide to be characteristic — and very comfortable it looked under its old trees — then over a wide expanse of plain, overgrown with what they here call the tiger-grass and a bright yellow cassia. We sent Bernardo, K 's Portuguese servant, to buy some fruits in the bazaar. He has brought back the Custard apple and the Guava, neither of which seemed to me good, but I am told that, if one were to eat the former at Poona in the rains, one would think differently. He also brought the water-chestnut {Trapa bisjnnosa), which is largely eaten here, and consumed in immense quan- tities in Cashmere. I thought it pleasant, but 38 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. its cultivation is very miscliievous to the tanks, which fill up rapidly with mud wherever it is grown, as Sleeman tells us in his pleasant Rambles, and as T observed for myself to-day in a small tank at Sirkej. Amongst other subjects about which I have had conversations here with persons whose opinions seemed to me worthy of consideration, were the state of the native army, the indebtedness of the cultivators, the amendments wanted to make the examinations for the civil service altogether satis- factory. "We returned to Bombay via Surat, traversing by daylight all that part of the line which we had not seen on our way north. The traffic-manager, who accompanied us for some hours and gave me much information about the state and j^rospects of the line, mentioned to me that the population of part of the country through which we passed was 475 to the square mile. It was well cultivated, and covered with timber. One might have fancied oneself in Warwickshire at midsummer, if the grass had been as green as the trees. At the large, bustling station of Baroda, some Afghans, with Jewish faces and skull-caps, were getting horses into the train, and one of the railway officials told me that in the cotton season they have workmen on this line, who have come all tlie way from Bokhara. Baroda is, as you know, the capital of the Guicovvar, and we at one time meant to stay for a BARODA — SUllAT. 39 day there ; but, in the existing state of affairs, with a change of residents impending and other diflO.- cnlties, this would not be expedient. We went to Surat chiefly to see friends, but found the place much more interesting than we had expected. The Nawab of Beyla met us at the station, and in his train, for the first time, Ave saw a state-elephant, painted and gorgeously capari- soned. The tombs of the governors of the English and Dutch factories in the seventeenth century took me quite by surprise. They are immense structures, obviously meant to impress the natives with a sense of the greatness of those who here "lay in glory, every man in his own house." It was the same policy which made all the employes of the English factory in those days dine off plate, and have each course introduced by a flourish of trumpets. Our own cemetery is kept in fair order by private subscription, but the Dutch much wants attention, getting rapidly overgrown, and having an evil repute as a resort of snakes. At the house of the Actins^-collector I met a large party of native gentlemen, many of them connected with the municipality, a very active and efficient body, as the well-watered and clean streets clearly prove. Here too, in India, my eye first fell on the long rows of huts (lines as they are called), in which the Sepoys live, and the regiment, the 26th N.L, which is stationed here. As we drove through the town in the evening, a noise of discordant drums and 40 NOTES or AN INDIAN JOURNEY, fifes attracted us to a street, in which the prelimi- nary ceremonies of a marriage were going on. It was illuminated from end to end with little lamps, at the expense of the bridegroom, below which a crowd, clad in the usual white garments of the country, moved up and down. At this place, also, I had much instructive talk with a variety of persons, all looking at the country and its people from different angles — with the Commissioner of the division, now on his march through the collectorates which he superintends, with the Acting-collector, with the Judge, and with our host, the Assistant-judge, wlio had formerly been in the political department, and had much that was new to me to tell, especially about Kattiawar. On our way to the station we looked in at the High School, where the "sixth form" was reading Cowper intelligently, visiting also the Nawab of Beyla, and another Mahometan noble- man, who had, like him, married into the Surat family. At both houses we were received with much state — the ceremonies within being partly tliose you have seen in Turkey, and partly the scenting and engarlanding of which I have already spoken. How I wish we could send home some of the garlands, especially those which are made of jasmine and roses. Some people think the scent of tlic former (a larger variety than our English one) rather overpowering, but I cannot say that I find it so while the flowers are quite fresh. As we moved south from Surat, I noted one or BOMBAY AGAIN — DR. WILSON. 41 two things — e.g.i the increasing numbers of the Plantain, as we get further into the tropics, the transition from a Guzaratti-speaking to a Mahratti- speaking population, the vast number of iron bridges on this costly but much-used line, the fine views of the Ghauts, of which we saw little going north, as they were on the sunny side. Bombay, Dec. Sfh. — We went this morning with the Secretary to Government over part of the Secretariat, which commands, I suppose, one of the finest sea views to be had from any Government office in the world, and in which the arrangements of the council-room, &c., had of course a certain interest. Later, Ave drove round a large part of the town with Dr. Wilson — a great pleasure — to be put in the same class, as going over Canterbury Cathedral with the author of the Memorials, the Greyfriars churchyard with Robert Chambers, or Holyrood with poor Joseph Robertson. Dr. Wilson has been here nearly fifty years, and has seen genera- tion after generation of officials rise, culminate, and disappear. It would take too long to enumerate all the things we saw, but I note especially a Shiali mosque, the first I ever looked upon ; the street which supplies all Asia with Mahometan books, more being reproduced here (by lithography chiefly) than in Constantinople or any other city ; a small mosque, which forms the centre of whatever is fanatical and dangerous in the Mussulman popula- 42 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. tion of Bombay ; a tiny temple of tlie monkey god Hanuman; and opposite it a much larger one, dedicated to Siva. We walked through the second of these, amidst a ghastly but amical)le crowd of worshippers, chiefly men from Guzerat. You remember thinking El Azhar one of the most extraordinary places you ever entered. Well, this temple is as much more unfamiliar than El Azhar, as that is than St. Sophia. The centre is formed by a tank, in which people were bathing, and round which there w^ere, I think, four different shrines. Sacred cattle encumbered the pathway, while hideous and filthy devotees squatted about every- where — one, who was smeared with ashes from head to foot, being pre-eminently unpleasant. " What are they doing in that corner ? " said I to a Mahratta Brahmin, naked to the waist, but speaking English perfectly. "Preaching," he replied, "just as in your churches." In spite of this courteous recognition of kinship, I must say that such a place as this makes one understand a good deal of iconoclastic zeal, both Mussulman and Christian — however much one may be convinced that, in religious matters at least as much as in any others, a short cut is apt to be the longest way round. Another curious building, which we saw but did not enter, was a temple of those Jains who call themselves Dhoondias, " men of research," and reject idols. Many of tlicso remarkable objects were, by the BOMBAY — EPITAPH. 43 way, either on or near the very line of road which we drove along, on the evening of the 28th ult., and which I have noted as inferior in picturesque effect to Cairo. A pleasant little dinner concluded the evening, in the course of which many subjects were discussed by persons whose opinions it was interesting to hear — as, for instance, the tone of the vernacular press, the character of the first generation of educated natives, the nature of the political rocks ahead in India, if any, &c. A projws of a recent circular of the Government about European graves, a striking epitaph was cited, which ran somewhat as follows : — " Here lies the body of , whose last wish — put a stone over me, and write upon it that I died fighting my guns — is thus fulfilled." One of the party mentioned that he once had to send his horse ninety-three miles to be shod, and that from a town of 13,000 inhabitants. It was a black soil district, and the natives did not protect their horses' feet. Our host put into my hands a volume of the Bombay records, containing, amongst other things Sir Arthur Wellesley's holograph despatch to Mr. Jonathan Duncan, after the battle of Assaye, in which he informs him that he has "compleatly" defeated the armies of Dowlut Uao Scindiali and the Rajah of Berar. Dec. dth. — We were up long before day, and off to see the Colaba obscrvatorv, which is chieflv 44 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOTJUNEY. important for its magnetic and meteorological work. Mr. Chambers, its distinguished head, showed us over it; and here, too, we saw the beautiful planet which had given us so much pleasure on the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, shorn of her beauties, and like a small black pea on the disk of the sun. I leave Bombay with a much stronger impression than I had of its great Asiatic as distinguished from merely Indian importance. It is, and will be, more and more to aH this part of the world what Ephesus or Alexandria were to the eastern basin of the Medi- terranean in the days of the E^oman Empire. I wish I could give it a fortnight, and be allowed to pick Dr. Wilson's brains all the time ; but the *' limitations of existence " say no to that. And now, before we turn our faces towards Northern India, is there anything which lias struck me much, and which I have forgotten to note ? Female Beauty. — I have seen none, unless a monkey of some ten summers, who begged from us at Ahmedabad, might claim to be an exception. Many admirable figures there are, no doubt. The peasant women, walking into Surat in the morn- ing, with loads on their heads, and undraped more than half way up the leg, wore certainly very finely formed. Eurther north, we found them wearing a hideous petticoat. The Bo}ibhay Markets. — An admirable building, BOMBAY. 45 and most instructive, if one went there, as I must try to do when I return, with some one who knows well the various products of the country — fruit, vegetables, and seeds. We bought a large jar of splendid Bagdad dates for a rupee. Types of Character. — Three young civilians, of from four to six years' standing, in different places, and having had different trainings. Are these the men with reference to whom some per- sons tells us that the competitive system has been a failure ? If so, I should like to know what result they would call a success ! Bombay Cathedral. — Part of it the oldest, or about the oldest ecclesiastical building in India, and very ugly — the modern additions very much better. The service was choral, but the singing might easily have been improved. It was curious to see the punkah for the first time as an article of Church furniture. Life at a Station loith feio Europeans. — The game of Badminton in the early morning — the keen interest of every one in his own work — the anxious watching for the arrival of the English mail — the young civilian, landed just a fortnight, and starting for " the districts," to see the kind of work he is hereafter to do. will say he has not had enough of birds. beasts, &c. ; so I will note having seen, at Ahme- dabad, the beautiful Sarus crane — the creature which is said to die if its mate is killed, and which 46 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY". is accordingly spared by all but' the most brutal. Of jackals we have heard many. At Surat they held a council close by, while we were at dinner, and I am sure all but resolved to invite them- selves in. The little trotting bullocks, like Shet- land ponies, and going about the same pace in a light cart, at that place ; the Mysore bullocks, with erect, antelope-looking horns, in the streets of Bombay ; the great buffaloes, wallowing as they do in the Pontine Marshes ; a few fireflies at Matheran ; the coppersmith bird, which makes a noise like hammering metal, have been, in addition to others, mentioned in their proper place — the live creatures, other than human, which have struck me most. Dec. dth. — We left Bombay soon after 10 a.m., Mr. Le. Mesurier, the agent of the Great Indian Peninsula Bailway, accompanying us as far as Callian (where a branch goes off to Poonah) and giving us much valuable information. Some of the views before you leave the low ground are enchanting. One of a singularly beautiful mountain, the site of an historical fortress, seen over a foreground of water and wide levels studded with palm trees, dwells especially in my memory. The first station at which we stopped beyond the suburbs of Bombay was Tanna. This is the place alluded to by Sir Bartle Prere, who in his book on Indian Ilissions says : — "An officer, Colonel Douglas, who in 1808 served on outpost LEAVE BOMBAY — JUNGLE FIRE. 47 duty at Tanna, twenty miles north of Bombay, then the northern frontier of the British possessions in Western India, lived to com- mand fifty years later as brigadier at Peshawur, a frontier station more than a thousand miles as the crow flies, in advance of his quarters as an ensign. Almost the whole of the intermediate territory had in the meantime fallen under the rule, more or less direct, of the British crown." Beyond Callian the ascent of the Thull Ghaut commences, and a noble piece of engineering it is. Eine forests of teak border the road on each side for some way up. You understand of course that at this season almost every tree has got its leaves, though very few are in flower. There is one leaf- less giant amongst these forests, with white and ghostly branches tipped with flower buds, whose name I have not yet discovered. On our way up I saw one of those jungle fires to which my attention was called at dinner last night, as illustrating a passage in the History of the Malirattas : — " The Mahometans, whilst exhausting themselves, were gradually exciting that turbulent predatory spirit, which, though for ages smothered, was inherent in the Hindoo natives of Maharashtra ; in this manner the contention of their conquerors stirred those latent embers, till, like the parched grass, kindled amid the forests of the Syhadree Mountains, they burst forth in spreading flame, and men afar off" wondered at the conflagration."* Arrived at the top we came to a bare upland region which was not without certain features of resem- blance to my familiar Buchan. Par away, however, on either side stretched outliers of the Ghauts, long reaches of level ridge, * Grant Duff's History of the Mahratias. Vol. L 48 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. on which, as on a necklace, were strung, at intervals, peaks, or what would have been peaks, if some giant had not cut off their points with his sword. Near Nassick, where Sir G. Campbell wished, not without having a good deal to say for his idea, to place the capital of India, there is a remarkable group of these strangely-shaped hills. Soon after we passed the station for that place, and crossed the infant Godavery, it grew dark, and we saw nothing more for many hours. When we woke on the morning of the 10th, we had left behind Kandeisli and Berar, and were in the heart of the Central Provinces. We had missed the great junction of Bhosawul, whence a line runs to Nagpore, through the TJmrawuttee cotton district. We had missed Kundwah, whence a line is being constructed to Holkar's capital of Indore, and were far north of the Taptee. The operations of washing and dressing were hardly over when we reached Sohagpore, the breakfast station, and saw to the south the fine range of the Satpoora, and the Mahdeo group, near the new Sanitarium of Pachmurree, for more information about which see Porsyth's Highlands of Central India, which is something very much better than a mere record of sport. We are now in the great Nerbudda valley, upon secondary rocks. The country is covered with young wheat, as we saw the plain between Abydos and the Nile. I observe, too, some flax j\ist THE NERBUDDA — JUBBULPOUE. 49 coming into flower. Other crops there are which I have not yet made out. The station gardens are perfectly lovely. One of the ConvolviilacecBi which covers all the buildings and is in full flower, is a great feature. The country is not unlike what the J3eauce would be if thinlv scattered mans^oes and still more thinly scattered palms {Phoenix sylvestris) were substituted for its formal lines of poplars. I have just, by a judiciously planned raid at one of the stations, gathered the Mysore thorn {Ccesalpinia sepiaria) which gJ-ows, in great quan- tities, all along our track, and looks as the laburnum would look if its flowers were in a spike instead of being pendant. As we advance, we see the Vindhya range to the north, and cross the Nerbudda, here a river of moderate size, very unlike the mighty flood which we left at Broach. The country gets more wooded, and several tanks are passed, with picturesque buildings on their banks. The Satpoora are still to the south of us, and quite close there is a small and singu- larly rugged ridge belonging to their system, and marking the site of Jubbulpore, which we reach between twelve and one, having traversed 614 miles since we left Bombay — a little more than the distance from London to Inverness. Railway travelling in Europe would be a very different thing from what it is, if one could sleep as well as we did last night, and wash like civilized beings in the morning. B tells me that in E 50 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. America these things are much better managed than even here. It is delightfully cool — quite a different climate from that below the Ghauts. We slept on sofas and our mattresses, in the ordinary Cashmere sleeping dress of this region, under a light blanket, and towards morning the addition of a railway rug was pleasant. The dust is our great enemy, and from it it is vain to fly, so we pass much of our time on the platform in front of our carriage and see the country admirably. When we retreat into our saloon, and its blue windows are shut, we see the world as R-enan, in a delicious passage, says the author of the Imitation saw it, " revetu d'une teinte d'azur comme dans les miniatures du quatorzieme siecle." The houses of the peasantry, on which my eye has fallen, since we got into the Central Provinces, are smaller and poorer than those I chanced to observe in Guzerat or the Mahratta country. " May Heaven defend us from the Evil One, and from" hasty generalizations ! At Jubbulpore begins the East Indian Railway, and the stations, for some reason which I cannot yet fathom, become gardenless. We have now (three p.m.) a range of low hills on our right which connects the Satpoora with the Rajmahal range, to the south of the Ganges. On our left is the prolongation of the Vindhya mountains, which is commonly known as the Kymore Hills. ALLAHABAD. 51 The streams we cross still run to the Nerhudda, but soon we shall come to the water-parting, which separates the basin of that river from the basin of the Ganges and its tributary the Sone. Gradually the two ranges approached, and we ran on through a valley that reminded me of a Highland strath, as the temperature of the December evening did of August in Ross-shire. It was dark before we reached Sutna, the station near which General Cunningham recently made the remarkable Buddhistic discoveries which I men- tioned in my address to the Orientalist Congress last September. By half-past ten we were at Government House in Allahabad, having traversed some 830 miles since we ran out of Bombay — something like the distance from Brindisi to Alexandria. Dec. Wth. — The morning was given to visits and conversation, after which I went to see the pro- ceedings of the High Court, where Special Appeals were being tried. In the afternoon a party of us visited the Fort, which stands near the confluence of the Jumna with the Ganges. All confluences in India are more or less sacred, but this one is particularly so, both rivers being holy, and every morning thousands of persons come to bathe in the waters over which we look. The sunset, as seen from the ramparts, was fine, and we had something very like the Egyptian after- glow, under the crescent moon, from the balcony E 2 52 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. of one of our companions in the Malioa, who resides here. Of the various objects of interest in the Fort, that which I was most glad to see was the pillar dating from the age of Asoka, say e.g. 250, one of the oldest architectural monuments in India. You will find it figured in Pergusson's Handbook. Curious, too, was the stump of the sacred banian, on which the Chinese pilgrim, Hiouen Thsang, looked in the seventh century. Dec. 12th. — A pretty long walk in the cold, crisp morning took me over admirable roads made of kunkur, a material of which we have all heard, but which I first here actually see, to the house of a resident who kindly shows me his whole esta- blishment. I see the stables, the cattle, the sheep, the fowls, the wheat fields, the swimming bath, and whatever else is characteristic of a pros- perous Anglo-Indian menage in these parts. Last, not least, I walk over the garden, on which its owner bestows great care. There I come to know the Mhowa [Bassia lati- folia)i one of the most important of Indian trees, and see too the tasselled Duranta^ the large Chinese jasmine, the Peacock flower {Foyntziana pulcJier- rima)^ the Quisqualis, another favourite Anglo- India shrub, with much else. I have explained to me the method by which turf is formed and kept alive in this thirsty land, and am taught to dis- criminate between some of the more important foods of the people — the pulse called gram (Cicer A PEEP AT NATIVE LIEE. 53 Arletiniim, whence the nickname of Cicero), the millet [Feme ilia via setacea)^ known as Bajra, &c. Then the difficulties which attend vine, peach, and English melon culture in this climate are ex- plained to me, and I learn by taste the merits of Hibiscus Suhdariffa, a raalvaceous plant, whose calyx, strange to say, makes excellent jam. After breakfast comes more political talk with the Lieutenant-Governor of the most instructive kind — while the afternoon is given to the native town, where I have, under the most admirable auspices, a whole succession of peeps into the life of the people. I see the small stores of the pawn- brokers, chiefly in silver ornaments. I see a lapidary cutting gems with bow and wheel. I see cowries used as change, forty- eight going to the anna, which is equivalent to l\d. I see the sweet- meat shops, and toy shops, and guitar shops, and a manufactory of lac bracelets. Lastly, I assist at a curious little scene. A weaver has bou2:ht five-shillings' worth of gold, and wants it made into a nose-ring. He covenants with a working jeweller to make it — he paying the jeweller about a penny for his labour, which is to last an hour — the employer sitting by all the while and watching, in the attitude of a cat, that none of his gold be purloined — an arrangement by which he also gets the benefit of the jeweller's fire for an hour on a December afternoon. I first see the gold in the shape of a pea, then I see it assume the shape of a small bar. As we pass homeward, it has become 64 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOUKNEY. a completed nose-ring, for which, having made the weaver understand, through my guide, that the transaction will be largely to the advantage of all concerned, I give seven shillings and carry it off in triumph. Inexorable night came upon us long before my curiosity was satisfied, and yet I have been told ten times over that there is nothing to see in Allahabad. LucKNOW, Dec. 16th. — A journey of 165 miles, much of it performed by night, took me to the capital of Oudh, vid Cawnpore, where I stayed long enough to see what has given the place its dismal celebrity. I have been refreshing my recollections of those sad days by George Trevelyan's eloquent book, but you would hardly thank me for recalling the details of one of the most unrelieved tragedies in English history. The scenes of some of its most hideous passages are veiled by luxuriant gardens, to which wise local regulations have affixed a semi-sacred character. " The tower has sunk in the castle moat, And the cushat warbles her one clear note In the elms that grow into the brooding sky, Where Anstice sat long ago waiting to die." I spent most of my time at Cawnpore in the house which once belonged to our friends the H s, a roomy, pretty bungalow — that is, being interpreted, a villa in which screens and curtains A GARDEN ON THE GANGES. 55 largely do the work done by partition walls in temperate climates. On either side lie wide spaces of turf — what was his rose garden on this, and hers on that. Both are still kept up, more or less, but in this climate the plants soon want renewing. From the broad veranda behind the drawing- room the eye ranges over a vast plain, which, but for its atmosphere and colouring, might be any part of the left bank of the Danube below Pesth. Between the house, however, and that plain spread the broad waters of the Ganges, compara- tively scanty at this season, I need hardly say, but in the rains thinking nothing of inundating twenty square miles on its northern shore. Bight below the veranda is a baclavater, along the margin of which had collected in great quanti- ties the flowers of the Tagetes maximiis, a sort of tall marigold, very sacred here. These had been oflPered to the hallowed stream by the devotees at a bathing station just above the upper end of the garden, and on the backwater. From that bathing station a long wooden bridge leads to a low islet of shingle, upon which many Brahmins had erected each his own little sacred bathing-shed. Beyond was another branch of the river, and yet beyond a further shingle bank and the deep Avater channel of the hour, down which an uncouthly-shaped boat now and then glided. My attention was called to the proceedings of a party on the further margin of the deep water 56 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. channelj and through a telescope I saw them making arrangements for burniog a body, to which, ere long, the slowly curling smoke showed that they had set fire. Here, in Lucknow, we have been the guests of the Judicial Commissioner, and have seen very fairly, thanks to him, all the most important points in this huge place. There is little very good in the way of architec- ture. The best buildings are two royal tombs, and the Imambarra, a huge edifice in the fort, which is now converted into a depot for ordnance. Other things, such as the Great Mosque, look imposing at a distance, but are seen, when one gets near, to be poor and tawdry. The historic sites connected with the Mutiny are of the highest interest, and here, though God knows the tragedy was deep enough, it was not the unrelieved tragedy of Cawnpore. I wish our friend G could have gone with me over the Residency. I think even he would have admitted that his countrymen, although they are not much less apt than their neighbours to get into scrapes, have a marvellous genius for getting out of them. The ruins have been left, most wisely, just as they were after the storm had swept by ; but tablets fixed here and there mark the most famous spots — Johannes's House, the Baillie Guard-gate, the room where Sir Henry Lawrence died, &c. Here, too, the scenes of the death-struggle have THE PARKS OF LUCKNOW. 5? been veiled in gardens. A model in the Museum (or in the Vernacular, the House of Wonders), hard by, is said accurately to represent the ground as it was when the conflict commenced. I know scarcely any city of the second order which can vie with the capital of Oudh in the beauty of its parks. Stockholm and Copenhagen no doubt surpass it ; but I do not remember any other place of the same size which does. To the finest of these parks is attached the name of Sir Charles AVingfield, who was Chief Com- missioner here, and who sat for Gravesend in the Parliament of 1868-74. Thither I went one day under the guidance of the Director of the Horticultural Gardens, and saw many new trees, amongst the most noticeable of which were the Bael {JEgle Ilarmelos), so im- portant medicinally, the fragrant sandal- wood, and Bauhinia purpurea with its superb flowers and scimitar-like pods. It is strange that, although not one sinorle tree which I saw is ELio:lish, the general effect of the whole, when palms are not in view, should be precisely that of a carefully-planted English arboretum in which pines are not grown. Very instructive also was a visit to the Horticul- tural Gardens, where I became acquainted with the Sal {Sliorea 'robusta), almost as important in the north as the teak is in the south of India ; with the Asclepias gigantea, producing one of the strongest fibres in the world ; and with the Ccesalpinia Sappan, which gives us the redwood of 58 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. commerce. Careful and successful experiments are being made here in growing delicate plants under houses formed of split bamboo, with a view to defend them at once against the hot winds of summer and the frosts of winter. They are trying also the date-palm from the Persian Gulf, and are doing very well Avith the Cintra orange. We went over much of the native town with the superintendent of police, who keeps a population of 270,000 in order with 700 constables. AVe saw many of the shops, and lamented the way in which the jewellery is being spoiled with a view to meet a demand which has just arisen in England for a very uninteresting kind of bangle. Some of the plate is good, and pieces of rude but very effective enamel can be picked up. We attended a gathering of pawnbrokers, who sat in conclave daily to have articles brought to them for purchase or hypothecation. The chief of them show ed me a very large diamond, for which he asked 20,000 rupees, and it was obvious that his transactions were on a great scale ; yet his income-tax, even when the rate was 3^ per cent., was only 225 rupees. It was amusing to see, as we entered the little courtyard, the family cow — kept not for use but for luck. Many of the Mahometans here belong to the Shiah sect, as did the royal family, and that sect has possession of the Great Mosque. I did not observe any difference in its arrangements from those of the Soonees. AN OUDH VILLAGE. 59 We were met in one of the narrow streets by a most picturesque string of camels, attended by Afghans, who were bringing down dried fruits and Persian cats for sale from beyond the passes. At Lucknow and Cawnpore conversation turned a good deal on the events of 1857 ; on the sort of natives who were likely to be useful in Government employ ; on the position of the uncovenanted service with reference to leave rules and pensions ; on the gradual disappearance from this place of the professional criminal class, which had been ab- normally developed in the evil times before annexa- tion ; on the transfer of a considerable part of the population to Hyderabad in the Deccan, and to Calcutta, when a more ordered state of things superseded the old days of anarchy and rapine. Dec. nth. — We left Lucknow yesterday in excellent company, and, thanks to the courtesy of the Oudli and E,ohilcund Railway authorities, were able to get the greatest advantage from it, going on ahead of the ordinary train, and dropping down as from the clouds in the midst of an Oudh village, over which we walked, observing the shrine under the Peepul tree, the gathering of people in the little market-place, the extreme cleanliness of even the poorest hovels, fresh plastered at frequent intervals, sometimes even daily, by the women. The vast majority of the houses were of mud, but here and there was a dwelling of brick. Several of these had doors of carved wood, with the fish of the expelled 60 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. dynasty upon them, dooi's wliich may have once ornamented some stately mansion at Lucknow. The head-man told ns that his family had been here since the days of the Delhi emperors. It belongs to the writer caste, but has gradually made money, and, having bought out some of the old proprietors, now holds sufficient land to give it a local status. The conversation, as we hurried on to Cawnpore, turned on the question how far these villages appreciated our rule. " True it is," said one of our companions, " every man is now secure from the old violence and the old oppression, but I doubt whether they did not like better the former state of things — when the king sent a regiment against a village which did not pay its taxes. The village knew when the regiment was coming, and put its possessions in safe keeping — then fought the regiment, perhaps successfully. If unsuccessful, it paid up, and was free from inter- ference for some years, while the troops were coercing other villages. Now we take far less at a time, and in a peaceful way, but the idea of resistance to us is ridiculous, and our tax-collectors, although their demands are moderate and their methods merciful, are yet inexorable as fate." We crossed a large piece of land covered with low scrub. "What is that?" I asked. "That," said C " is a Dak jungle {Butea frondosa) ; Pullus or Pallas they call it in the south. It has been said that this tree gave its name to the AGRA. 61 battle of Plassey, which Avas fought Id a Dak jungle." The sight of this, the first piece of juDgle I had seen in the north, made me understand Jacquemont's disappointment with his first Indian jungle. He would not have been disappointed if he had begun with Matheran. On the Oudh and E-ohilcund line we returned to the station gardens, of which we lost sight at Jubuulpore. In more ways than one, indeed, this line has profited by the experience of its pre- decessors, and prides itself upon its accommodation for native travellers being particularly good. Amongst other boons to them, it has adopted a plan of setting down and taking up passengers at convenient places wliere there are no stations ; a proceeding for which its very slow rate of speed gives great facilities. At Cawnpore Ave again joined the East Indian and went by a very slow train to Agra, reaching Sir J. Strachey's camp about midnight, wiiere we found our tents pitched, and all comfortably arranged. The thermometer at this season falls very low during the night in Northern India. As we passed to the station at Lucknow, we saw them collecting the ice which had formed in shallow pans put out for the purpose ; and here, under canvas, it is very decidedly cold. During the journey from Cawnpore to Agra, I heard a point bearing on the endless controversy about Indian public works more forcibly stated than hitherto. ''It is all very well," said one of my 62 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOUKNEY. fellow-travellers, for people at home to say, ' Don't make sanguine estimates ; ' but suppose we don't make sanguine estimates, Avhat happens ? By no possibility can we keep the amount of our estimates secret. It gets out, and then every native sub- ordinate does his very utmost to take care that lie and Jiis work well up to our estimate. Making sanguine estimates is absolutely necessary if we mean to keep down actual costs." Agra, Dec. Idlh. — This camp life is an admirable institution. As soon as weather and the state of business permit, the Indian magnate of every degree leaves his usual abode, and starts to inspect his county, province, or kingdom, as the case may be. Sir J. Strachey, for instance, will for the next two or three months be moving slowly over his wide dominions, which are about as populous as Great Britain. Soon after sunrise, he drives or rides out, examines schools, gaols, lunatic asylums, remains of antiquity which are in need of repair, and so forth, returning to a late breakfast between ten and eleven. Then come a number of hours devoted to seeing a variety of officials, and to carrying on the ordinary duties of government, while the evening is given chiefly to receiving at dinner the principal local officials, who come into camp from all the districts round to see the Lieutenant-Governor, and often to settle by a short conversation matters which might otherwise have involved much loss of time in correspondence. You will have observed that we have stayed a good AX INDIAN WINDSOR. G3 deal in the large towns with judicial officers. They are the only persons of position who at this time of the year are stationary. The executive officers are nearly all on the wing. The camp is a pretty sight. A broad street of tents leads to the pavilion of the Lieutenant- Governor, over which a flag flies, and in which his guests assemble. For the rest, everything goes on as in a large well-appointed house in Europe. More than thirty people sat down the other night to dinner. On the 17th there was a formal reception of native noblemen and officials, each of whom, from the least to the greatest, advanced as his name was called, and made his obeisance. Some of the former class were remarkable for the antiquity of their family — Rajpoots of the Rajpoots — but none of much political note. The chief objects of interest in and near Agra are the fort, Sikundra, the tomb of Itmad-ood- Dowlah, and the Taj. Our first view of the fort was a very striking one. We saw it in the early morning, ere yet the mist had cleared away, over a foreground of waste interspersed with Mahometan tombs. The beauti- ful outlines of what we afterwards learned to call the Pearl Mosque seemed really built up of pearl, and stood out clear and distinct, while the two ends of the huge pile over which it rises faded away in the darkness. Later, we went carefully over the whole of this 64 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. Indian Windsor, under the best guidance wliicliAgra affords. I was most agreeably surprised — surprised, I say, because from a perusal of Eergusson's book, I bad been led to suppose that we should see much more Vandalism than now meets the eye. Since he was here, Government has taken up in good earnest the protection of this glorious building ; has spent £10,000 most judiciously, and is deter- mined to spend whatever is necessary to remove all removable mischief, and prevent all preventible decay. The fort was the work of Akbar, one of the few really great men of native Indian history. It is a mass of dark red sandstone, battlemented, and strong enough in its day, though now of little military importance. On this noble foundation Akbar's successors reared many lovely buildings, almost all of white marble. Pre-eminent in beauty is the Pearl Mosque, to which I have already alluded, and of which Pergusson (to whom pray refer for a commentary on all I am writing, since I do not attempt to set down more than impressions) observes : — " By far the most elegant mosque of this age — perhaps, indeed, of any period of Moslem art — is the Mootee Mesjid, or Pearl Mosque, built by Shah Jehan, in the palace of Agra. Its dimen- sions are considerable, being externally 235 feet east and west, by 190 north and south, and the courtyard 155 feet square. " Its mass is also considerable, as the whole is raised on a ter- race of artificial construction, by the aid of which it stands well out from the surrounding buildings of the fort. Its beauty resides in its courtyard, which is wholly of white marble from the pave- ment to the summit of its domes. The western part, or mosque SUA II JEIIAN. 65 properly so called, is of wliitri marble inside and out, ai^d except an inscription from the Koran, inlaid with, black marble as a frieze, has no ornament whatever beyond the lines of its own graceful architecture. It is, in fact, so far as I know, less orna- mented than any other building of the same pretensions, forming a singular contrast with the later buildings of this style in Spain and elsewhere, which depend almost wholly for their effect on the rich exuberance of the ornament with which they are overlaid," I was extremely pleased with the Jasmine Bower, the apartment, that is, of the favourite sultana, in which evervthino; has been done that grace of form, combined with inlaid and polished marble, can do for the cage of a pet bird. Beautiful, too, are the rooms in which Shah Jeban ended his long and disastrous reign. His last sight on earth must have l)een the divine and glorious building, which will keep his otherwise unhonoured memory fresh to all time. "Der Mensch erfiihrt er sey auch wer er mag Ein letztes Gliick und einen letzten Tag." As I stood looking towards the Taj from the rooms in which Shah Jehan died, there came into my mind those other rooms which S will remember, and which struck us both so much ; the rooms, I mean, in which Philip II. breathed his last, with his eyes on the altar of the dark Escorial Church. The Mogul, though a prisoner, had by much the best of it. At Sikundra is the tomb of Akbar, built by his son. It stands in a stately square of gardens, approached by noble though partially ruined gate- F 66 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOUUNEY. ways, and is, like the fort, built of red sandstone below, and white marble above. Here, however, the red sandstone is disposed in the most exquisite and intricate architectural forms, while the white marble court, high in air, which surrounds the cenotaph of the mighty emperor, is a worthy sister to the Jasmine Bower and the rooms of Shah Jehan. The actual tomb is far below, a plain mass of white marble, just in the same position as that occupied by the dead monarch in the tumulus of Alyattes. Here, in fact, we have the last and glorified development of the very same idea which heaped up that mighty mound on the plain of Sardis, and reared the Pyramids over the valley of the Nile. Dec. 21st. — The tomb of Itmad-ood-Dowlah is one of the earliest works in the style of those buildings which lend so much beauty to Agra. He was a Persian adventurer, prime minister of Jehan- geer, father of the famous Noor Jehan, and grand- father of her niece, often carelessly confounded with her Moomtaza-Mehal, the lady who sleeps beneath the Taj. The tomb of Itmad-ood-Dowlah stands in a garden, and may well have been a pleasure place for the living before it became the last home of the dead. Here it was that my attention was first drawn to the distinction between the tombs of men and women in this part of the world. The former have carved upon them a writing-case, the latter a slate, THE TAJ. 67 to indicate their respective relations as active and passive. We have now visited the Taj three times, once in the early morning and twice in the afternoon, lingering on both these last occasions to see it li^ up, first by the sunset and then by the moon, just as we used to do in the case of the Parthenon, when we were together at Athens. One thinks, of course, of the Parthenon, for it is the one building, so far as I know, in all the earth, which is fit to be named in the same breath as this. Nothing that has been written does the Taj any sort of justice, and we may wait another 250 years for a worthy description, unless some one can persuade Mr. Ruskin to come hither and write of it as he has written of the Campanile at Florence. Men who can really tell of such things as they deserve come only at long intervals. A grand gateway, that would itself be an object of first-rate importance in most great cities, leads into a garden, which is, even in December, supremely lovely — perhaps a quarter of a mile in length by the same in breadth. A long avenue of cypresses, separated by a line of fountains, which only play on great occasions, leads the eye to the foot of the building, which rises from a vast plat- form of red sandstone. One passes up along the fountains, while the green parrots, perched on the tops of the masses of foliage behind the cypresses, scream to each other, and flash hither and thither F 2 68 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. in the sun. Arrived at the platform, you see that the Jumna is flowing beneath, and that either side of the platform is bounded by a most beautiful mosque — the one for use, the other, as being im- properly placed with reference to Mecca, merely to satisfy the eye. On this first platform stands another of white marble, with a minaret of the same material at each corner, and out of this, more in colour like a snow-peak than anything else I ever beheld, but of the most exquisite finish and symmetry, springs up the wondrous edifice itself. Its general form is quite familiar to you from photographs or drawings, but I have met with no picture, photograph or drawing which at all conveys the impression which Avords have equally failed to render. The queen and her husband are buried, as Akbar is, in a vault below. It is only their monuments that are above ground. These, as well as the screen surrounding them, are, like everything else about tbe place, in perfect taste, and, like most things about it, in admirable preservation. The usual adornments of Agra are the adorn- ments here — inlaid and perforated marbles; and here they reach the highest point of perfection which they have reached in India. The last time we were at the Taj the interior was illuminated by Bengal lights, so that we could see all the texts from the Koran, in the exquisite Arabic characters, which are inlaid over it. Perhaps, of all the points of view, that from the A VILT AGE. G9 centre of the Western Mosque is the most heautiful, if one goes there just as the sunset is flushing the whole of the building, that can be seen from thence. * * -rr * # * We spent, the other day, a most instructive morning in going, with a first-rate settlement officer, over a native village, or joint estate, the unit of the country for revenue purposes. Our friend had arranged everything beforehand, so that, when we arrived on the spot, we were met by nearly all the six head men, or Lumberdars, as they are called, and by most of the sixteen Putteedars, or inferior shareholders. There, also, present in the flesh, Avas a live Puttwarree, or village accountant, with the map and all the village books, so that we could have explained to us the whole system by which the Government demand is regulated, and see at a glance the statistics of the place in the English abstract. The village which we examined contained 2,157 acres, of which 935 were quite uncultivable, and 1,222 were cultivable. We walked over a large part of these last with the people, saw the various kinds of land, varying from wretchedly poor fields, growing Cassia offici- nalis (the true senna of our youth — not the same, by the way, as the Alexandrian senna which we saw in the desert near Cairo), to fields covered with splendid crops of young corn, or old jowarrce, Avorthy of the Nile banks. These few hours were worth a great deal of 70 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. reading, even although such reading has to be done in Maine's Village Communities, which our guide pronounced to be as accurate as some of you know it to be interesting and suggestive. Another day we went to the gaol, now unfortun- ately rather full — crimes against property always here, as at home, being in the closest relations to the prosperity or adversity of the country, and the Bengal demand having this year raised the prices of provisions. In no country, it was truly said to me the other day, is there so much poverty and so little destitution as in this, in ordinary times ; but the margin between a sufficiency and famine is so small, the people live so much from hand to mouth, that abnormal prices at once produce wide-spread misery. The most interesting thing in the gaol is the carpet manufactory, which is rapidly improving — this quick-witted, quick-handed people learning to \\ eave with extraordinary facility, and the greatest care being now taken to avoid aniline dyes, and to stick to native patterns. It is vexatious, though not surprising, to hear that the restrictions of caste prevent any of the liberated prisoners, whose ancestors have not been weavers from time immemorial, carrying on the trade which they have learnt in prison. The rest of my time in Agra has chiefly gone in long talks with all manner of people engaged in carrying on the business of the country, from the Lieutenant-Governor down to young men who have THE SALT HEDGE. 71 just landed in India — a large camp like this afford- ing infinite facilities for hearing all kinds of views on all kinds of subjects. I am struck by the much greater amount of responsibility which is thrown on juniors in the Secretariat here than is thrown on persons of the same age at home. Work is done here by men of seven or eight-and-twenty which no clerk in a Secretary of State's ofiice would be allowed to touch until he was a grey-haired grandsire at the head of his department. Dec. 2^7x1. — We started yesterday morning, with Sir John Strachey, on a visit to the Maharajah of Bhurtpore, who had invited to his capital the liieutenant-Governor and his guests. The journey was accomplished in about an hour, thanks to the newly-opened State railway — the first railway I have seen on the metre gauge, whose battles I used to have to fight. Soon after leaving Agra we passed the too famous Salt hedge — a Customs line, which runs some 1,800 miles across India, like another wall of China. It is formed chiefly of close, all but impenetrable masses of thorny plants, and is as effective a barrier as impolicy could desire. I heartily hate it, with all that it represents, and am very glad that no one ever took to attacking the Indian Government on this point, when I had charge of its interests in the House of Commons. At the frontier of his dominions, some of the Maharajah's ofiicers joined the train, to bring their 72 NOTES OF AN INDIxiN JOURNEY. master's respects to the Lieutenant-Governor, and we moved on through a country exactly like that we had quitted, for the Bhurtpore State was, during the minority of the present ruler, long under British management. Presently we came to a large jungle. "What are those bushes?" I asked. " Pilu," answered one of my companions ; " camels eat it, the cattle shelter under it, and the berries are good for food. When the courtiers at Lahore were exhausted by the dissipations of the capital, they used to go off to the neighbourhood of Mooltan to drink camel's milk and eat pilu berries as a restorative." It was not till I got home and looked at Brandis's book that I saw that the pilu, which we rushed past, w^as a plant about which I have a great curiosity — no other than the Salvadora Per- sica, which has been identified with the mustard- tree of the Gospels. Later in the day, I asked another person about the woodland in which the pilu w^as growing. " It is," said he, "a preserve of the Maharajah's." " Does he shoot ? " I asked. " No," w^as the reply. " He thinks it wrong to take life, and never shoots. When he sees cattle overworked on the road, he buys them and puts them in there to live happily ever afterwards," holding, apparently, to the good maxim of Jehangeer — " that a monarch should care even for the beasts of the field, and that the very birds of heaven should receive their due at the foot of the throne." MALLIA. 73 The place is full of cattle, wild, or run wild, and also of deer. Arrived at the station, Sir John Strachey was met by His Highness, and we all proceeded through the town to the Residency. I looked with great interest on the old mud wall, one of the very few defences in India that ever foiled, even for a time, the terrible Feringhee. Lord Lake's failure before Bhurtpore occurred about the time my father went to India, and I have often heard him say that when, as a boy of twenty, he was returning to camp from the not politically important, but desperately contested capture of Mallia, he first realized that he had been in a rather serious afi'air, when on his saying to an old officer — " I suppose this was nothing to Bhurt- pore," the latter replied — " Paith, I don't know. Certainly not so bad for round shot, but for sniping I think this was rather the worst of the two." I asked, by the by, a week or two ago, a gentle- man, who had been employed in Kattiawar, about the Mallia people, and was amused to find that they had retained their bad character to our own times. Quite lately they used to keep horses in their houses, which they treated exactly as mem- bers of the family. These trusty little beasts they would mount in the night and be sixty miles off before any one knew they had started, in the true Pindarree fashion. Then, after a reasonable amount of robbery, they used to dash home again, :ind go about their ordinary business, Avitli an aj)pcarance of perfect innocence. 74 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. The Maharajah has on paper an army of 5,000, of which, perhaps, 3,000 are efficient troops. The cavalry looked very good, and is, I am assured, very good, but the weapon of the troopers is a sort of scimitar, which would only be useful for cutting, not for the thrust. We soon again left the Residency, to pay our respects at the palace, where we were once more presented to His Highness, while all the leading personages of the Court made their obeisance to Sir John. The visit concluded with the attar and pan, of which I have spoken ere now, but without the engarlanding. Almost immediately after we had got back came the return visit of the Maharajah, with of course more salutes of heavy guns, and more marshalling of gaily dressed horsemen on very fair horses. That sort of thing, as you may imagine, went on all day. It always does on such occasions, when certain specified forms of courtesy mean a great deal, and must be most rigidly adhered to on both sides. When the ceremonial was over, I walked up and down the Residency garden with S , a dis- tinguished Oxford man, steadily rising into im- portance here. The half wild, half tame peafowl, which swarm in this neighbourhood, were calling all round the country. I could have fancied myself at Hampden. The shadoAvs lengthened, and a sound of bells lloatcd up from the town. "What is that?" I WILD BEASTS. 75 asked. " Only the priests ringing for evening service," replied my companion. "Dear me," I answered, " we miglit be back again on the slope over Hincksey." The sunset faded, and the jackals began their chorus. I complained of having seen so few wild animals — not even an antelope — though I have passed through districts where I know they abound. "That is pure accident," said S , " you must have been close to many. People, however, have exaggerated expectations as to the number of wild animals they will see in India. Much of the country is far too thickly peopled, and too well cultivated. Have you any curiosity to see a tiger killed?" "Not the least," said I, " for in truth next to being killed by a tiger, the thing I should least like would be to kill one, but I should very much like to spend a night where I could hear the cries of the wild beasts. A friend of mine once enjoyed that pleasure to i)crfection in the Goa territory, and I wish to be as fortunate as he." "Ah," answered S- , "this is the wrong time of year ; your best chance would be in March or April. At present all the wild beasts are off for shelter to the deepest recesses of the forests. Even in the Sewalik Hills, which are full of tigers, you have hardly a chance of seeing one." " E ," I said, " whom all men know to be proverbial for his accuracy, told me that he knew the case of a tiger in the Central Provinces, at whose door was laid the death of no less tliau 330 76 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. people." " That surprises me," replied S ; ''I thought the elephant which killed fifty people, and frightened away the inhabitants of I know not how many villages, was the most remarkable case of tlie kind on record." "No," I said, "E told me that these 336 cases were authenticated. The same tiger may have killed others whose death was never traced to him." Later, we drove to the palace to dine. The whole line of streets through which we passed was most effectually illuminated by very simple means — a framework fastened in front of the shops, to which were attached five rows of small earthen- ware pans, with a little oil in each. Great triumphal arches, at intervals, were covered in the same way, and were really most brilliant. At length we reached the palace, the whole of which was outlined with light. I have never seen a more beautiful illumination, though some present said they had done so, especially at Ulwur, where the lie of the ground is very favourable, and at Benares, where the river lends itself admirably to such displays. The dinner was in the European manner. Our host, I need scarcely say, did not eat with us, but joined us at dessert, when some toasts were proposed. After dinner there were fireworks — very pretty, and not too long continued. The blaze of green and red, and blue, contrasted admirably with the black masses of people, which covered the house- tops, and filled the open space in front of the FUTTElIPOlll!: SIKRl. 77 Palace garden, the beds in which were all edged with coloured lamps. This morning we drove some thirteen miles to Puttehpore Sikri — our carriages being drawn some- times by horses, and sometimes by camels, good draught cattle on sandy roads. Euttehpore Sikri was a creation of Akbar's, and rose round the dwelling of a saint who is buried in the centre of the splendid buildings which crown the summit of one of the last Vindhyas, just before they sink into the great plain of Haj- pootana. On the slopes lay the city, surrounded by a great wall, much of which still remains. High above towered, and still towers, the gateway, one of the grandest in the world, and almost dwarfing the noble mosque to which it leads. It is somewhere, I think, on that gateway that an in- scription occurs characteristic of the Broad Church Mahometanism of the great Emperor : — " Jesus, on whom be peace, has said, the world is merely a bridge ; you are to pass over it, and not to build your dwellings upon it." Everywhere, at Euttehpore Sikri, hardly less in the mosque than elsewhere, does one see the inflaence of Hindu art. Eergusson says : — "Akbar's favourite and principal residence was at Futtehpore Sikri, near Agra, where he built the great mosque, and in its im- mediate proximity a palace, or rather a group of palaces, which, in their way, are more interesting than any others in India. No general design seems to have been followed in their erection ; but pavilion afier pavilion was added as residences, either for himself /» NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY'. or for bis favourite wives. These were built as the taste of the rao- mpiit dictated, some in the Himlu, some in the Moslem style. The palace has no pretension to be regarded as one great architectural object ; but as a picturesque group of elegant buildings it is un- rivalled. All are built of red sandstone of the hill on which the palace stands ; no^ marble and no stucco either inside or out, all the ornaments being honestly carved in relief on the stone, and the roofs as well as tlie floors all of the same material, and characterized by that singular Hindu-like aversion to an arch which Akbar alone of all the Moslem monarchs seems to have adopted." There are some enchanting little bits of domes- tic architecture at Euttehpore Sikri. The house of Beerbul, the house of the Coustantinopolitan princess and others, ought to be quite as famous as the Ca d'Oro, and wDl be when their vates sacer appears. The short summer of this marvellous place did not outlast the reign of Akbar, and it has long been one vast ruin. Let no one imagine, however, that it is being maltreated, as it was when Pergusson . saw it. " Nous avons change tout cela " — thank God. The present rulers of India are in matters of taste as much in advance of the Marquis of Hastings and Lord William Bentinck as our English Church architecture is now in advance of that of forty years ago. JFrom Euttehpore Sikri we drove back to Bliurt- pore. Here, as at Agra, I see that the Acacia lehhek of Egypt is one of the commonest trees. I observe, too, more frequently, I think, than further south, the Parkinsonia d'ujitata^ which we first met ' There is a great deal of marble round the tomb of the saint, exqui- sitely wrought, but in tlie secular buildings I saw none. THE METRE GAUGE. 79 with on the way to Heliopolis, and note in this my first native state, that the intrusive prickly poppy [Argemone Mexicana) has taken possession of all waste places as coolly as it does in British territory. We met many of the country people — a hardy race, reputed to be excellent cultivators. The appearance of the young wheat this year is such as is likely, I hope, to reward their toil. They are Jats ; but, unlike many of their blood who have become Sikhs, hold to Brahminical orthodoxy. It has got much warmer at night. Clouds are collecting, and the weather-wise prophesy the speedy coming of the Christmas rain. If it comes, say they, the crops in the North-west will be splendid ; if it does not come, they will be good. I stopped at a silversmith's as we drove through the town and bought a silver bracelet, whose pre- eminently barbaric character seemed likely to please one of our friends. At the station there was more ceremonial — more firing of guns — and then we rushed over the thirty-one miles which separated us from Agra. I will admit that when we travelled at more than twice the normal rate of speed — at thirty-nine instead of fifteen or sixteen miles an hour — my late client, the metre gauge railway, shook at least as much as was pleasant. It is agreeable to have to add that this, the first of the new State Railways, is turning out well. I have had a very kind invitation to Dholeporc 80 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOUKNEV. from the Resident in charge of that, the other Jat state of Kajpootana, a smaller place than Bhurt- pore, which covers about 2,000 square miles. The present Rana of Dholepore, a nice spirited little hoy, came to see Sir John on Saturday, and be- haved himself with infinite aplomb. Dec. 2Mh. — How little do even the most intelli- gent people at home who have not made a special study of India at all realize what an enormous country it is. I have just been reading an article, obviously by a man of sense and ability, from which it is clear that he believes the one great subject in India at this moment to be the Bengal famine. I landed twenty-seven days ago, yet I have hardly heard it named. At Allahabad I saw a gentleman who, with a considerable staff, had been engaged in collecting transport for the afflicted districts. In Agra, I heard the failure of rain in Bengal and in some districts of the North-west alluded to as having driven up the grain market. Other mention of the Bengal calamity I have heard none, except when I have introduced the subject. Railways, irrigation, drainage, the best forms of settlement, the rela- tion of the cultivator and the money-lender, the state of the native army, the merits and demerits of our system of education — these are, I think, the matters which seem most talked of where I have been travelling. The modern system of " special correspondence " is very disturbing to the mental focus, bringing some UMBALLA. 81 tilings into undue prominence, and throwing others far too much into the shade. UmballAj Christmas Day. — A long journey of some sixteen hours brought us, about three a.m., to this place, whither we had been bidden by the Commander-in-Chief, and where we found the most delightful tents ready to receive us. We passed AUygurh, and at Ghazeeabad left the East Indian system for that of the Scinde, Lahore, and Punjab line. Night fell there, and we continued our journey past Meerut, with its sinister memories of 1857, Mozuffernugger, and Saharunpore. The country, as long as the light lasted, was of the same character as that through which we travelled from Cawnpore to Agra. Often we observed the good effects of irrigation ; sometimes we saw land on which had fallen, as far as I could judge, the same calamity as that we had observed in Oudh — a Reh etfl.orescence on the surface of the soil, indicating the presence of chemical substances fatal to vegetation. The most conspicuous plant of cultivation was the tall Urrah [Cajanus Indicus),' now covered with its yellow leguminous flower, always a pre- carious crop so far north, as it cannot stand much frost, but very valuable when it does succeed. Up very early to see the Himalayas; which, however, obstinately remained in the mist, and the only faint glimpse of them which I obtained was much later in the day, on the way to church. G 82 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. The church is handsome, very handsome if judged hy an Indian standard, and filled with a large, chiefly military, congregation. Dec. 26ih. — E^ode with the Commander-in-Chief round the cantonment, which he himself laid out some thirty years ago, and admirahly laid out it is. These cities of villas, inhahited by Europeans, out- side and often far away from the native cities of the same name, each villa standing in its park, or compound, as it is called, from, I believe, a Portuguese word having the same root as coupon^ are one of the most curious features of India, and utterly unlike anything at home. This one is purely military, the small civil station being some miles off. "We saw the general arrangement of the place, and stopped to go through as well a native hospital as the hospital of the rifle brigade. The latter seemed to be what it should, but I cannot say quite as much for the former ; the rule that the native soldier should receive so much pay, and find himself in all things, producing rather questionable results when it is applied to hospital management. The subject, however, thanks to the peculiarities of native habits, is surrounded with difiiculty. During our ride, and later in the day, I had an opportunity of hearing Lord Napier's views on all the points in connection with the native army which we have heard most talked of in the last four weeks, and highly reassuring these views were, formed as they had been from a far wider survey INVITED TO PATTIALA. 83 of the whole subject than any to which we had listened. Some interesting types presented themselves amongst the Commander-in-Chief's visitors to-day, as for instance, sons of Dost Mohammed ; a Sikh landed proprietor ; two Afghans who had sided with us in the war, and had done excellent service in the mutiny, &c. &c. Lahore, Dec. ^Ist. — We have been moving about so rapidly that I have had no time to write. First I must tell you of Pattiala, whither we were invited by the Maharajah, who sent his carriages for us. On the way I caught a glimpse of the Indian jay, by far the most beautiful bird I have ever seen in a wild state. Then came, as we hurried at racing pace along the excellent road, the grand Serais built by the Moguls for the reception of travellers. One of these, that of Kajpoora, " firm as a fortress, with its fence of stone," stands close to the humble posting bunga- low, and the still humbler railway station. How curiously, I thought, would a voyager from another planet be apt to mistake the re- lative power of the people who raised these edifices ! At Rajpoora and other places we found officers of His Highness and bodies of horsemen, some of whom galloped on to convey the news of our coming from post to post. About two miles from the capital the Maharajah G 2 84i NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. met us, whereupon we immediately left the carriage in which we were, and joined him. After some 300 yards we all got down again and entered the state carriage, in which we remained till we reached a point of the road at which some fifty elephants were drawn up on one side of the way, and a large number of led horses on the other. The elephants had gilded or silver-plated howdahs, and the led horses, beautiful animals, thoroughly conscious of their own beauty, were splendidly caparisoned. Leaving the state carriage, I followed the Maharajah up a ladder into the howdah of his elephant, w^hile my two companions ascended another, and the procession moved forwards. Pirst came the standard of Pattiala, borne on a great elephant attended by two smaller ones ; then followed a body of cavalry ; next came the state carriage ; then a company of musicians playing, and playing excellently well, Scotch airs on the bagpipe. After these went men on foot in scarlet dresses and armed with silver snears, while the line was closed by the elephants in double column. As we entered the town a salute was fired, and we passed on through streets and under housetops crowded with spectators. As soon as we had got beyond the further gate, we came on two long lines of extremely smart- looking troops, horse and foot. These lined the way till we reached the gate of the " Pearl Garden," where, under a second salute, we A NAUTCH. 85 descended from the "huge, earth-shaking beast," who did not particularly like the firing, though he behaved with great dignity. A man then advanced and presented us with bouquets of a very fragrant narcissus, near the jonquil, the Maharajah mean- time taking my hand, and leading me along a row of fountains, and under the shade of oranges and loquats, to the door of the lovely little garden- house which he put at our disposal. There, after a few moments, we were left to instal ourselves and to dine. As soon as dinner was over, we set forth to visit our entertainer at his great palace in the town. Stopping at the foot of a long flight of stairs, we ascended them into a wide open space, wliile the band played *' God Save the Queen ; " and the Maharajah, advancing to the door, led me into a. magnificent hall, blazing with innumerable lights, and filled with people in gorgeous dresses. It was exactly the kind of thing a child imagines when it first hears of kings and courts. Sitting there in the centre of the durbar, we assisted at our first nautch, an entertainment with which, in the days of E-unjeet Singh, even the greatest afiPairs of state used to be mingled. Only one of the performers was pretty ; and as for propriety, the ceremony was grave enough to have been a religious service at the funeral of a bishop. That over, there were fireworks, with, of course, many admirable little bits of Rembrandt amidst the crowd. 86 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. This, however, was not all of Pattiala. AYork- shops, witli steam machinery ; an admirably managed gaol ; a school, where I made the boys read Napier's account of the battle of Albuera, which they did very well; the state jewels; a court jester ; a wrestling tournamentj in which the knights who contended were elephants ; and a long visit to the palace, which contains at least one room which might be the boudoir of the queen of the fairies — a room which is the ne plus ultra of all that exquisite artistic feeling can do witli colour and gold — were only some of the other occupations and amusements which our thoughtful host had provided for his visitors from the West, who were only able to stay a few hours instead of the days for which his hospitable kindness would fain have detained them. From Pattiala we transferred ourselves to Deyrali, between the Sewalik range and the outer Himalaya, having on the way back to Umballa much pleasant talk of Eastern Europe and Western Asia with Colonel M , our companion in the Pattiala visit, who knew India as well as the Levant, and the Levant as well as India. If you look to the north from any piece of open ground in Deyrah, you see what seems to be a little snow close to the top of the outer Himalaya. When you have looked a moment, you find out that it is not snow, but white houses dotted about. Those houses are the sanitaria of Landour and Mussoorie. "EN route" for landour. 87 We were bound for the first, and I was soon on the back of a charming little Arab, whose arm-chair canter was highly favourable to botaniz- ing, and under the guidance of Dr. Brandis, the Inspector-General of Indian forests. Within the first four miles of our ride, he brushed away a fearful heresy which I cherished about the Neem ; having four weeks ago — will you believe it ? — been led by some corrupter of the true faith to confound Melia Azadirachta with Melia Azedarach. Then he confirmed my orthodox but hesitating opinions about the Sissoo, showed me Cedrela toona, with its Ailantliu8-\{^(SkSiL^ leaf, and the soapnut {Sapindus emarginatus), now yellow, like so many of our own trees in autumn. Then came Bombax ceiba, the silk-cotton tree, covered with its scarlet flowers, and Uottlera tinctorial which furnishes an important dye, with much else. As we drew near the base of the hills, our friend cried, " Now look to the left, and you will see your first Sal forest. The young Sal always takes that cylindrical shape." I looked, and saw what might have been to my bad eyes a Thuringian pinewood, so closely does the huge-leaved Sal ape in its early stage the growth of needle-leaved trees. Soon we were on the Himalayan slope, and I had then to change my Arab for a mountain pony. Ere long Ave heard a familiar sound which had not reached my ear since I heard, at Carolside, the Leader " singing down to the vale of Tweed." It was a mountain brook making its way to the 88 XOTES or AN INDIAN JOURNEY. Ganges. Soon came another familiar sight, a toll-bar ; but close to it another, less familiar one, the flower-adorned shrine of a Hindu ascetic. On we went with fine views of the plains — the kind of views one has from the Apennine looking to the west — and gradually rose from one belt of vegeta- tion to another. On the lower slope Euphorbia royliana was everywhere, a huge plant of thoroughly tropical appearance. Then came BauMnia retusa, Justicea adhatoda^ and Hamiltonia suaveolens. At length our guide, plucking something — *' You know this." It was a maple — Acer ohlon- gus. We had reached the region where European genera become pretty numerous, and soon saw Alnus Nepalensis, Fyrus variolosa, Ilex dipyrenay Quercus incana, Andromeda ovalifolia, &c. The two trees, however, which interested me most were the Deodara and Rhododendron, neither of which were very numerous. Still, there they were, in their own home. At about 7,500" feet I gathered Sonchus oleraceus, a familiar British species, which is, however, I believe, to be found in the plains, and a Euphorbia, which was either the Amygda- loides of our spring woodlands, or something quite close to it. Other plants which I was particularly glad to see on this excursion were Malionia Nepa- lensis, Cupressus torulosa, JBenthamia fragifera, and Leycesteria formosa, dear to the British pheasant. We had clambered a long time over the path- ways of Landour, when a glimpse told us that the great view we had come so far to see would not be THE HIMALAYAS. 89 denied us, and we were soon on the top of Lallteeba, the Red Hill, and in presence of the grandest mountain chain in the whole world. Our friend, with that care and exactitude which took his countrymen to Paris, had provided himself with a compass and the most accurate maps, so that he could check his local knowledge in the best way. AVell, then, look with me due north. You will see a range of snow mountains about sixty-eight miles off, and 17,000 feet high. Behind them flows the Sutlej, making its way down to the plains. Then, as the eye moves eastward, it is shut out from a view of the snow by the Snakes' nill, Nagteeba, an eminence of about 9,000 feet. Still further round towards the east the snow begins again, and is continuous. Pirst comes a mighty mass some fifty miles off, and 20,000 feet high, which rises behind the sacred Jumnootri; then the still higher mass of Banderpanch, and a horn like the Pic du Midi, south of Pau ; then a mass of about 22,000 feet beyond the line of the Bagaruttee, which feeds the Ganges. The highest point of this mass is Mount Moira. Still further to the east, and sixty miles oflF, is the mighty Kidernath, 22,832 feet in height, quite a little hill compared to Everest or Kinchinjunga, but higher than any mountain out of the Himalayas, looking down on Chimborazo and Kilimanjaro, and equal to Mont Blanc with Skiddaw and Snowdon on the top of it. Still further east, near the head-waters of the Alaknanda, another feeder of the Ganges, 90 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. the chain sinks, and one sees no more snow. Somewhere between the eye and the Mount Moira range lies Gaugootri. It is the fact of Jumnootri and Gangootri both lying between the eye and these mountains which has made people errone- ously apply to some of their dizzy heights the names of these two sacred spots. Now turn to the south. Hight in front you will see the valley of the Doon, one of the prettiest bits of country in India or anywhere else. Slightly to the west you will remark a stream making its way to the Jumna, and a good deal to the east another making its way to the Ganges ; while beyond the Doon, and shutting out from it the hot winds of summer, as the Himalayas shut out the cold winds of winter, is the Sewalik range. Away to the west of it, but out of sight, is another hallowed place, Hurdwar, where the Ganges issues from the hills. I thought of the fine sentence (I think. Bishop Thirlwall's) which lingers somewhat imperfectly in my mind — " The fulness of the stream is the glory of the fountain, and it is because the Ganges is not lost amidst its parent hills, but deepens and widens till it reaches the sea, that so many pilgrimages are made to its springs." And again of the words in Mackintosh's paper on Lord Cornwallis — "His remains are interred on the spot where he died, on the banks of that famous river which waters no country not either blessed by his government or visited by his renown, and in the heart of that province, so long the chosen seat of religion and THE SAL FOREST. 91 learning in India, whicli under the influence of his beneficent system, and under the administration of good men whom he had chosen, had risen from a state of decline and confusion to one of prosperity probably unrivalled in the happiest times of its ancient princes. ' His body is buried in peace, and his name liveth for evermore.' " AVe started betimes on the 30tli, and rode rapidly towards the Eastern Doon, through lanes full of the large sweet-scented Jasminum hirsutiim, which was covered with a heavy dew. In the immediate neighbourhood of Deyrah the Flnus longifolla and the larger bamboo, plants of very different climates, meet and flourish. Except at Jubbulpore, I had never seen the latter in anything like its natural state, and very beautiful it is in that state. Yester- day I observed several other bamboos, amongst them a small species occurring at a high elevation. We dismounted at the bottom of a hill, and pro- ceeded slowly across an orchard of mangoes to the edge of the Sal forest. As we advanced, I saw that the branches of the mangoes were covered by two species of orchids — both, I believe, Cattleyas, but I speak with some hesitation. And what was the Sal forest like ? Well, at the point where we entered it, and passed the Govern- ment pillars marking off the reserved from the village woodland, it was very like the broken ground between the Missenden road and the great avenue at Hampden. When we had entered it, however, the totally different look of the soil struck the eye at once. Here, there was neither the grass of an English park, nor the bed of dry 92 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. leaves wMch you find in a close beecliwood. The surface, swept by frequent fires, was as hard as stone, and dotted only with plants which had grown up since the last of these had passed that way. Conspicuous amongst such plants were a dwarf palm (Phosmx acaulis) and an aspara- gus, said to have lovely white flowers at the proper season. Amongst the trees, I was most interested by the Sal itself, by the Hugenia Jam- bolana, by the Lagerstroemia parviflora^ a near relation of that lovely Lagerstroemia which so much delighted us at Venice, recalling, as it did, in autumn the spring glories of the lilac. I had no idea to what an extent the creepers of these regions are the enemies of the forester, and it went to my heart to see the heavy Nepaulese knife applied to the Butea superba, the De^^ris scandens, the Loranthus longifolia, a handsome cousin of our common mistletoe, and other plants of an equally attractive appearance and equally encroaching disposition. From the Eastern we hurried to the Western Doon, and were soon among the plantations of the Deyrah Tea Company, where unhappily we were only able to stay a very short time, during which, however, thanks to the courtesy and intelligence of the superintendent, I learned more about tea than I had ever known before. First, I saw the plant in flower. You know, or don't know, that it is a camellia, and very like a miniature copy of the well-known ornament of our winter conservatories. THE DEYRAH TEA PLANTATIONS. 93 Then I was told the distiaction betvyeen the Chinese plant and its taller relative, which is wild in Assam. It is not grown in the Deyrah planta- tion, but a hybrid between it and the Chinese plant is. Next I learned the difference between black tea and green. Both come from the same plant, but the former is fermented and the latter is unfer- mented. I asked about the half-fabulous teas one has heard of, which never come into the market, " tea of the Wells of the Dragon," for instance. Such things, I was told, if ever made, would be the young unexpanded leaf plucked and prepared separately. Then I asked about Flowery Pekoe, which, in my ignorance, I supposed to contain portions of the flower. Elowery Pekoe, I was told, is the very finest kind of black tea, and has its name from the soft down of the young unexpanded leaf which may be perceived upon it. A little of it is some- times prepared separately. Orange Pekoe, which is much the same, has its name from the colour of the unexpanded leaf when dried. Its orange colour enables it to be easily distinguished and picked out. You must understand, that save and except the half mythological teas I have alluded to, all black tea, from Orange Pekoe down through Pekoe and Souchong to Bohea, which last is made of the largest and oldest leaves, and all green tea from young Hyson down to Hyson- skin, are plucked 94 NOTES or AN INDIAN JOURNEY. and prepared together. The sorting is an after process, done partly by sieve, partly by hand. We saw the initiatory process : and it will please you to know that the curled and shrivelled form in which all tea appears is entirely due to its being first heated, and then most carefully rolled between the hands of the operator and a kind of rough matting. Eurther we could not follow it, for we had to hasten away, and I am at the end of my Latin as far as tea manufacture is concerned, ex- cept that I saw the sorting process going on, and would be, I think, qualified to pick out the Orange Pekoe. I had to leave Deyrah without seeing the estab- lishment of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, for which I was very sorry, and I had to leave Saha- runpore without seeing the Botanical Garden, but one cannot put the work of thirty-six hours into twenty-four. The first part of our way from Deyrah to Saha- runpore, where we joined the railway, was through the pretty Sewalik Hills, to explore which I would most willingly have given some days. At one of the places where we changed horses, I got down to gather some leaves of Sal. This had the good effect of betraying me to one of the young forest officers, whom you may remember seeing at Nancy when I went to have a look at our Indian students there in 1872. He came with us to the point where the cultivated land meets the forest, and named for me Colutea Nepalensis, a superb sister of THE GOLDEN TEMPLE OF UMRITSUR. 95 the Bladder Senna, said to be hardy in England, and a great ornament to the Sewalik at this season. In Saharunpore, I had much conversation with Dr. Jameson, the honoured founder of the tea industry in N'orth-Western India, at his house in or close to the Botanical Garden, which was tantalizing to a degree, hut it was, alas ! in the middle of the night. When we awoke this morning, we were at Kur- tarpore, on the farther side of the Sutlej, in the Jullunder Doah. Soon we crossed the huge bed of the Beas, and ran on to Umritsur — i.e., Amrita Saras, the fountain of Immortality, which is the great emporium of this part of India and the sacred city of the Sikhs. AVe soon started, under the auspices of General Reynell Taylor, to see the Golden Temple, which stands in the middle of a great tank, and is con- nected with the land by a marble causeway. It is called golden because the upper part of it is gilt all over, like the dome of the Isaac's Church in Petersburg. We put on slippers, as one does at St. Sophia, a ceremony rarely insisted on in the mosques of India, and followed our guide along the edge of the tank, which is set with a few trees, amongst which I observed the Jujube, and so across the causeway to the graceful little temple. Several men were busy decking out the small baldacchino under which the sacred book of the Sikhs, the Adee Granth, is kept. Three others, were playing on musical instruments, and singing 96 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOUUNEY, rather noisily. There is a great deal of mosaic work on the marhle of the temple, and nothing can be prettier than the gilding of the interior, which is more like what people in England associate with the Alhamhra than anything else which occurs to me. It is very small, little more than a chapel. The Capella palatina at Palermo comes into one's mind, but the feeling of the Golden Temple is quite different, and much more riant. "We returned across the causeway, and went to another building, where the initiatory rites of the Sikh religion are performed, and where we found one of the officiating priests reading the Granth. We sat under a marble canopy, with groups of the faithful standing on either side — exquisite architecture behind and above. "We stood in a court-yard slightly below. I have seen nothing in India which would have made such an historical picture. Porm, colour, everything was there. Paul Veronese never painted anything, I dare venture to say, that delighted his eye so much as this scene would have done. ***** ^t TJmritsur is a busy, well-ordered, and extremely picturesque place. Here and there stand up from amidst the green of its gardens the towers of the old nobles, making one think of Plorence, but most of the houses are only of two stories. I was glad to see many quite recently built, of great archi- tectural merit, and charmingly adorned with wood carvinj?. GOVINDGHUR. 97 [Before we left, we did some business with the shawl merchants. By the way, I never knew till the other day, that the Rampore shawls took their name, not from the Rampore with whose name one is familiar, but from Kampore, the capital of the mountain state of Bussahir, high up the Sutlej. They are now, however, chiefly made in the plains. We paid a visit to the Fort of Govindghur, over which I walked with the very intelligent com- manding ofl&cer, to whom I put many questions as to what he would do under such and such circum- stances, and was pleased to find that he had thought of all contingencies. It was at Govindghur that, as I heard, not on this, but on another occasion, a very significant conversation took place some years ago. Sikh nobleman : " Why is that mortar inclined in that direction, which does not seem the natural one ? " British Artillerist : " Sir, it is pointed at your Holy of Holies. The distance is yards. The proper charge is of gunpowder. It will drop a shell within twenty feet." Happily our relations with the Sikhs have long been as friendly as possible, and there is, please God, as little likelihood of a shell from Govindghur ever finding its way to the Golden Temple as there is of its finding its way to St. Paul's. My conversation at this place, and several others which I have had lately, have been so far useful, H 98 NOTES or AN INDIAN JOrRNEY. that they have called my attention to certain aspects of our military position in India which had not come much under my notice when at the India Office. * * "r * * * Jan. 1st, 1875. — Indian stations — the European quarters, that is, of Indian towns — are puilt in contempt of the saying, " What a pity it is that life is so short when everything else is so long ! '* but of all Indian stations Lahore must, I think, he the one in which that true saying is held in least honour. The distances are quite awful. Early, however, this morning we set forth under the care of the Senior Judge of the Chief Court and the Commissioner, to visit the native city — an object which was effected j^artly in carriages, partly on foot, and partly on tlie '' huge earth-shaking beast," who is most useful in narrow and crowded streets, as it never enters into his head to tread on or hurt any one. The things most worth seeing were the Great Mosque, the Eort, the Tomb of Hunjeet Singh, that of Gooroo Govind, the Mosque of AYazir Ali, the Gardens and the Tomb of Jehangeer. The Great Mosque was built by Aurungzebe out of the confiscated estates of his brother Dara, whose fate, in spite of his great and many failings, excited a good deal of compassion. Hence it has never been popular, and even to this day the faithful prefer other buildings of very inferior pretensions. THE FORT. 99 It is a stately pile, whether seen from near or far, but not of first-rate merit. In its noble quadrangle I observed far the largest Banian I have yet seen — the first, indeed, which gives me any conception of what that tree is when it begins to get on in life. The Eort is of little military importance, and has been much injured both by the Sikhs and ourselves, but it contains manv beautiful bits, and commands an admiral)le view as well of the city as of the dusty wilderness which spreads around it. At one time the Havee ran close under its walls when it must have presented an appearance not unlike its brethren in Agra and Allahabad. Much of the exterior is ornamented with a coating of what one can only call porcelain plaster — a style of decoration I have never seen before, and the art of which is said to be lost. Kashi is the technical term for it. The effect produced is exactly that of the most brilliant Spanish azulejos, or blue encaustic tiles, but it must have been very much cheaper, and it is extremely to be wished that the process should be rediscovered. The decorations on the outside of the Port belong to the age of Jehangeer, and bear witness to his well-known eclecticism. Numerous figures of ani- mals abhorrent to true Mussulman feeling are very visible. Mithraic emblems are said to occur, and there are some figures which are suspiciously like the European devil — the occurrence of which is referred by some authorities to the teaching h2 100 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY, of the Jesuits, who are known to have had some influence at Jehangeer's court. The tomb of the okl lion has not much archi- tectural merit, and, like that of Gooroo Govind, the tenth supreme pontiff of the Sikhs, who gave a political turn to their religion, is chiefly important historically. Some of Ptunjeet's wives, who burnt themselves on his funeral pyre, lie round him, and bear testimony to a curiously different state of society from that wliich now exists at Lahore, after the lapse of little more than a generation. Speaking of a similar practice, that of Johar or self-devotion, the author of a remarkable pamphlet on the Antiquities of Laliore observes — " The suicide of Calanus, the Indian, at Pasargadte, and that of Zarmanochegas at Athens (Strabo, lib. xv.^ chapter 1), are other instances of the performance of this rite. But we need not go back to antiquity for examples ; only the other day a peasant of the Kangra district, a leper, deliberately burnt himself to death. According to the official report, ' one of his brothers handed him a light and went away, a second brother watched the burning, and a third thought it a matter of such small interest that he went about his usual avocations.' " "We looked through a small but rather interest- ing armoury in the Eort. One of my companions showed me a strangely-shaped bow. " How long is it since they have used that in actual warfare?" said I. " Not so long," replied he. " I myself had an arrow fired at me during the siege of Mooltan." The Mosque of Wazir Ali is chiefly interesting as being the best specimen, or one of the best, of the Kashi work, to which I have already alluded, A POLO MATCH. 101 while the tomb and garden of Jehangeer are more or less in the style of those of the Taj, They are situated far to the west of the city, beyond the Ravee, and must have been very striking indeed before later rulers took to plundering them for their own constructions. The tomb of the great Noor Jehan, who sleeps hard by, has suffered very much more than that of her husband. Now the authorities are devoting a very little money to keeping the antiquities of Lahore in something like order, ])ut there is still much to be done. On our way back from the tomb of Jehangeer we saw a polo match, which was being played between the young Nawab of Bhawulpoor's people and some English officers. The boy rode extremely well, and the whole scene, backed as . it was by the buildings of the city, was striking and characteristic. Jan. 2nd. — A true Punjab day — the Avhole air full of dust, the snn represented by a pale disc, like the moon seen through clouds. This, with the thermometer at 90° Eahr. in the coolest room, and anything you please out of doors — no uncommon occurrence in the hot weather — must be delectable. At present it is chilly. The glass has been down at 21° or 22° Eahr. in the night lately ; but, not being in tents, we feel the cold less than we did at Agra. "We drove in the afternoon to the Great Shalimar Gardens. The fountains played ; but there was no great head of water on, and the weather was most unpropitious. 102 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. "VYe adjourned to a grove of Sissoo, under which the boys from six neighbouring village schools had been collected — Sikhs, Hindus, and Mahometans. Some of them were very intelligent. I asked one youth of about fourteen which was the most powerful country in Europe after England. " Ger- many," he replied. " And the next to Germany?" " Russia," he said. I demurred, and asked him what he thought of Erance. " Oh, France," he said, " was once very powerful ; but her disasters in the late war were so great that she is no longer so." Then I asked him what was the ecclesiasti- cal capital of his religion. He was a Hindu. " Benares," he answered. " And what is the ecclesiastical capital of the most numerous body of Christians ? " I inquired. " Rome," he replied. " Do you know what is going on in that country?" I said, pointing to Spain. " A war between the people who want a republic and those who want a monarchy," was the answer. Having seen a village in the North-west, we wished to see one in the Punjab under the guidance of the Deputy Commissioner ; so the accountant of the one in which Shalimar is situated attended with his maps and books. This village, unlike the one I have described near Agra, belongs almost wholly to one family, and there is only a single Lumberdar, the head of that family. He is absent on a pilgrimage to Mecca; but his son came, and Ave had a long conversation with him and others as to the amount A PUNJAB VILLAGE. 103 of the Government demand, the rent paid by the cultivators, the nature of their occupancy rights, and so forth. There was present also the Tehsildar, a most important officer in the Punjab — this one, for instance, having 363 villages under him — the Canoongoe, or superintendent of accountants in the Tehsil, and, as I have said, the accountant, or Putwarree, himself, besides numerous villagers. "With these we went off to visit the village ; saw its mosque, built near the tomb of a holy man, with the hereditary guardian of the tomb ; went into a house, due notice having been given to the women of our approach ; noticed the stable or cow- house below, the sleeping and sitting room above with a little goat tied up in them — the cooking apparatus — the household vessels, chiefly earthen- ware, not as in apparently not wealthier houses, which I had seen at Ahmedabad, of brightly polished brass or copper. Then we tasted the parched Indian corn, which was admirably good and the chupattee (or ordinary bread), exactly like the scone of Northern Scotland, which you re- member finding also in the Troad. We saw, too, the village weighman, an important personage, who manages, inter alia, the public entertainment of strangers by the village, and levies a rate for that and other purposes, with which Government never interferes. We stopped at a draper's shop, and examined the goods. Most were English ; some, however, were native cottons, but of no great merit. Lastly, we 104h notes of an INDIAN JOURNEY. had the village hard produced, who sang hideously, to a sort of lyre. We had heen led specially to desire to see him from having examined a village pedigree (an admirable institution, recently, if I mistake not, made an official village record), to Avhich was prefixed a short account of the foundation of the village by its common ancestor. The one we saw, which was not that of the village I have been describing, went back for four hundred years, and rested, to some extent, on the authority of the village bard, whose business it is to know all about genealogies. It was an elaborate document, I know not how many feet in length, but long enough, as it seemed to me, to have recorded even the history of that great Erench house which is said to have on its pedigree a representation of the Due of that day going, hat in hand, to congratulate the Blessed Virgin on the birth of her Son, and being addressed by her with the words : " Couvrez-vous, mon cousin." There was a large tree in the village which I did not recognize, and of which I asked the name. It was my friend the Pilu (see my note on Bhurtpore), whose acquaintance I thus succeeded in making. The old moat which we found round Bunjeet Singh's Lahore has been turned into gardens, and the whole of the adjoining country, which — except so far as a few very ancient trees formed an excep- tion — was a howling wilderness, is now swathed in wood. I observed in some abundance a familiar form, which I came upon for the first time in these sikunder's grass. 105 lands, as I passed tbrougli Mussoorie — the weeping willow. It seems odd to see a tree Avliicli I always associate with Stratford-on-Avon — the most English spot in England — amidst such un-English scenery. I note, ])y the hy, that the last accredited guess as to the tree of the 137th Psalm connects it, not with the Salla: JBabi/lonica, hut with the Popidus Eiiphratica. Mrs. has shown me a large number of flower-paintings. She first obtains an exact out- line of the living plant by a very simple process of nature-printing, and then colours the outline care- fully. The results are minutely accurate and very beautiful. One portfolio illustrated a journey through Cashmere, and made one long for a summer there. As I drove yesterday with , I asked him if he knew the scientific name of the tall grass which I heard called tiger-grass at Ahmedabad, and which is very abundant here. I think it is a Sacchar^nn, but am not quite sure. " No," he said, "but the people in this neighbourhood call it Sikunder's grass, as they still call the main branch of a river Sikunder's Channel. Strange — is it not ? — how that great individuality looms through history — " On parlera de sa gloire, Sous le chaume bien longtemps ; L'humble toit dans cinquante ans ' Xe connaitra pas d'autre histoire.",^ "You remember 's maintaining, half seriously, ' " Cinquante ans " in France is 2,200 here. 108 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. that the villagers in the plain between Hampden and Oxford, when they speak of the Prince, still mean Prince E-upert. How long impressions remain, and how quickly details fade away 1 " It is a thousand pities," said a resident here to me yesterday, " that no one wrote down the table-talk of Runjeet Singh, who was always saying noteworthy things. A few years ago there were men alive who could have done it, but now it is too late." I still see very few animals — a pair of hoopooes, and the mungoose, the hereditary enemy of the cobra, at this place ; the lammergeier at Landour ; several birds of the hawk kind, including a large ugly kite, which acts as a scavenger ; a fine tiger in confinement at Pattiala; another just caught, and vincla recusans very much indeed, poor beast ; a little lynx also, there, nearly as pretty, and some- what more amiable than the one who used to live in that house in the Zoological Gardens, of which the keeper observed when ■ asked him if the Suricate bit, " Bites, sir ? everything bites here ! " Will you have a wild beast story, of which you may believe as much as you please ? A tigress who lived in captivity at Lahore made her escape one day, and not unnaturally startled the station pretty considerably. At length the gardener in whose domain her cage was situated went to the proper authority, and begged to be ordered to take the runawav back. " Order vou to A WILD BEAST STORY. 107 take it back ! " was the reply — " I'll give you no sucli order — it would be ordering you to be killed." "Not at all, sir," said the man. "Only give me the order, and I will take the tigress back." " I'll give you no such order, but you may do as you please," was the rejoinder. Hereupon the man, taking off his turban, walked up to the creature, which was lying in a shrubbery which it had pro- bably mistaken for a jungle, and after a courteous salutation, said to her, " In the name of the power- ful British Government, I request you to go back to your cage." At the same time he put his un- folded turban round her neck and led her back. The poor fellow lost his life not long afterwards, while trying the same experiment on a bear, whose political principles were not equally good. Jan. Srd. — A much finer day, with occasional relapses into dust-gloom, and thunder. We went in the morning to the church in the civil station. It was, like many of the buildings round Lahore, originally a tomb — the tomb, they say, of a dancing-girl. I know not whether that was so ; but sure I am that it has been sufficiently consecrated since to satisfy all moderate require- ments, though, naturally enough, many residents desire a more convenient and more ecclesiastical building. The Lahore of to-day is a mere shadow of its former self. " If Lahore were not inhabited," ran the old saying, " Ispahan would be half the world." 108 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. Its fame had reached the ear of Milton, who speaks of "Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can, And Samarchand by Oxus, Temir's throne, To Paquin of Sinfiean kings ; and thence To Agra and Lahore of Great Mogul." Paradise Lose, Bk. xi. v. 388 — 391. You hardly drive a hundred yards in some directions without seeing that in its prime it was an immense city ; but a long series of calamities had brought it very low before we took the country, and the capital began to rise from its ruins in a new and much altered shape. Seen from above, the native town presents a far more varied outline to the sky than any other I have yet seen in India, thanks to many houses being higher, to the close-set minarets and domes, as well as to the fact that the lofty fort rises in, and not, as at Agra and Allahabad, outside of it. In the afternoon we went with our host and the General commanding the Lahore division to the church of Meeanmeer, a very good building, much the best of the kind I have seen since I landed. It is amusingly characteristic of India and its ways that the march to and taking of Magdala was one of the episodes in the life of the architect. Jan. 4^th. — We left Lahore at eight o'clock, and were forwarded along the partially completed State railway to Wuzeerabad, some sixty miles off. The line crosses the Havee, the ancient Hydraotes, soon after leaving the station, and traverses the parched THE CHENAB AND ITS BRIDGE. 109 dreariness of the Retclina Doab, passing Goojran- walla, a populous trading town, but no other place of importance. At Wuzeerabad, we were met by the post carri- ages, which were to take us on to the westward. Leaving our servants to make the necessary arrangements, and to go round by a bridge of boats, we started, with the engineer in charge of the Chenab bridge, to see the works, travelling partly in a trolly and partly by boat. Nothing that I have seen in India has taken me so much by surprise as this river. To judge from the maji, the Chenab, the ancient Acesines, does not seem to be greater than his neighbours. Even now, how- ever, his waters are much more ample. We saw people wading the Ravee, whereas the Chenab was at this, the driest moment of a particularly dry season, rushing along thirty feet deep. In the rains it is a fearful torrent, some S^ miles in width, and terribly rapid. Communication between the banks is often impossible, no available boat having been yet able to live in those swirling waves. The bridge is going to be a grand construction, and may, perhaps, be finished in 1876, before the end of the Indian financial year, on the 81st of March. It has been built to carry comparatively light trains, not the much heavier ones now contemplated, since the change in the policy about the use of the metre gauge on the line towards Peshawur. After saying good-bye to our friendly and 110 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. hospitable guide, we continued our journey from the western bank of the Chenab, along the Grand Trunk Hoad, which is bordered here, as in other parts of it which I have seen, by long lines of Babool, under which a horseman can canter along as he miglit among the beech-bordered lanes of the Chilterns. The pace was good, and we got into the posting bungalow, the inn of this country, in time to have a stroll under magnificent starlight before we went to our rough but sufhciently com- fortable beds. Shortly before reaching our night quarters, we crossed the Jhelum, Hydaspes of classic memory, the river, too, of the Vale of Cashmere. Jan. hth. — We are close to the boundary of the Maharajah of Cashmere, and all day a grand snowy range in his territories is a joy to our eyes. It is more like the Pyrenees, as seen in early spring, from Pau, than any other which I remember ; but much more serrated and higher. I thought about the finest of many fine views was the one from the post-house at 120 miles from Lahore. Our way for some time lay over the spurs of the Salt range, which stood up to the south of us. The sections that met my eye were soft sandstone, clay, conglomerate, and loose rolled pebbles. We pushed on through a country cut to pieces by the rains — a perfect labyrinth of ravines and clay-banks ; I never saw anything like it in surface or colouring except the district of Radicofani on the old Sienna road to Home. Here and there RAWUL PINDEE. Ill clay-banks have taken the shape of the famous earth pillars, near Botzen, but I saw none nearly so high. As we neared our destination, Ave came to the camp of a European regiment on its march, over which hovered a number of vultures, who must surely have been reading some of the outpourings of our alarmists about E^ussia and her sinister designs. Soon we overtook a portion of the regi- ment, the men marching, the women in bullock- carts thatched with dried grass, the sick in litters, or doolies, the same beneficent contrivances which a great English orator mistook for a ferocious tribe which carried off the wounded ! At length we reached Rawul Pindee, whose trim Dodonsea hedges and well painted railings were a strange contrast to the region through which we had been passing. Here, under the roof of the General command- ing the division, we passed a very pleasant evening, with much interesting talk about Indian military affairs. Jan. Qth. — We continued our journey, starting about 6 A.M., and running straiglit to the west- ward. Most beautiful was the sunrise as we looked back, the unclouded horizon one blaze of red, on the upper edge of which was the moon, and high above this again, the morning star. Day dawned on the same sort of dusty wilderness which we traversed yesterday. The hills were nearer, and we knew that the Sanitarium of Murree was only five hours to the north, but we 112 NOTES or AN INDIAN JOURNEY. did not see the snowy range till we had got a good many miles on our way. Traffic on the road much as yesterday and the day before — long strings of camels (R counted one of 193 on the 4th), small laden donkeys, and bullock- carts. The population is of course very scanty, for there is nothing to eat. What people there are live in mud villages, very like those of Egypt. Some seventeen miles from Rawul Pindee, a solid but extremely ugly monument commemorates the name of General Nicholson. We climbed to the platform at its base, through scrub composed chiefly of the Justicea Adhatoda, now covered with its white acanthoid flowers, and looked over the treeless and desolate landscape, which would be frightful if it were not for its clear atmosphere, and depressing if it were not for its crisp, almost frosty air. Somewhere near this is the site of Taxila. Ere long, we came to a bright little river, of thoroughly European appearance, and passed into a country which might be in the Basque provinces. Long lines of fruit-trees, now without their leaves, are planted in the fields. I cannot see, as we gallop by, what they are, but they are wholly un- Indian, as we have hitherto seen India, in their general effect. There was not much to claim our attention be- tween this and the Indus at Attock, which we reached soon after mid-day, having left fifty-five miles behind us. THE INDUS AT ATTOCK. 113 The view from the posting bungalow is fine. Right in front the horizon is bounded by a chain of mountains, some west, some east of the great river. The mass which abuts on it to the north- west is the Mahabun, which certain geographers identify with the Aornos of Alexander, while others give that name to the hill which rises oppo- site Attock. Between the mountains and the Indus is a great level, while between it and the spot where we stand, is furthest off a channel, about as broad as the Spey at Pochabers, and very like it ; then a gravel bank ; then another swiftly -running branch of the river about the same size as the first ; then a considerable breadth of black rocks, covered in the rains, but dry and parched now ; then the post road, and the broken ground of the hill on which the posting bungalow is built. The executive engineer employed here accom- panied us about the place, showed us the old Mahometan fort, the bridge of boats, and the site of the unfinished tunnel under the Indus. The river at Attock is comparatively narrow, and this is one of the things which have given the place its great historical importance. Above it the Indus is wild and unrestrained, but here it again enters a hilly region, and flows for many miles through a deep and, as I am told, very picturesque gorge. The Indus left behind, we hurried on up the western bank, and reached ere long the mouth of the Cabul river. 114 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. We ran along its southern bank, over a dreary- plain, where little grows, at least at this season ; but, after passing Nowshera, where there is a pretty large body of troops, we came into a more cnltivated country, with careful irrigation. At length, before it was dark, we got into Peshawur, having passed over one hundred miles in less than twelve hours, in spite of stoppages. Jan. 1th. — A gloomy morning. We went out early under the guidance of the Commissioner, with whom we are staying, and climbed to the top of the old Residency, which, in still older days, was the house of Avitabile. The mountains were only half-seen through the mist which veiled them. It is a sad pity that rain has not fallen since Septem- ber. A day of rain in the valley would have covered the mountains with snow almost to their base, wiiile at the same time they would have become perfectly clear. As it was, however, we could make out a good deal, and learned, amongst other things, that the fold in the nearest range, which we had guessed to be the mouth of the Khyber, was really and indeed what we took it to be. AVe consoled ourselves by reflecting that if the weather had been clear it would also have been extremely cold. A fire has been known to be thought agreeable at Peshawur as late as the 24ith of May. In the afternoon we drove through the city. All the roofs are flat in this country, ])ut here they have round them a sort of wattled palisade, to A DTITVE THROUGH PESHAWUR. 115 enable the women to go abont unseen. From our vantage ground, at the top of the highest build- ing in the place, we could, however, inspect the nurseries, which were not more interesting to strangers than others elsewhere. In these regions, you are aware, one only sees women who cannot afford a servant going about in the streets, and here in Peshawur those one does see are closely veiled, not in the delightful semi- transparent pretences of Stamboul, but in a stout white garment cut into lattice work at the eyes. As we looked over the housetops, I said to my guide : " Now, what town to the westward will this compare with ? How is it by Meshed ? " " Oh, Meshed," he replied, " is a much more con- siderable place, with some very good buildings indeed." " And how is it by Herat ? " "If you remember," he replied, " we never saw Herat. We had to turn aside." " How, then, by Candahar ? " " Well, very much the same, putting the great Mosque there out of the comparison." As we drove through the streets, our questions were many. "Who is that?" "An Afreedee." "And that?" "Probably a hill Momund." " And that ? " "A Hindoo of the town." " And that?" "A Mussulman of the town." "And that ? " "A Cabulee." " And that ? " " A head- man of one of our outlying villages." "And that?" "A Hindoo of the hills, who is to the wild Pathans what the Jews were to England in the middle ages." "And that?" "A Ghilzie, i2 116 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. one of the fellows who killed so many of our soldiers in the retreat from Cabul ; " and so on. The place is a " Sentina Gentium." Among other characteristic sights, I note the saddle-bags of rough Persian carpet, the piles of chopped sugar-cane, the short strings of jasmine flowers, the strong matting and rope, made from the Chamcerops mtchiana, the scarves of thick dark-blue cotton, with bright coloured ends, often worn as a plaid, the strong Cabul ponies, the Bazaar, built by Avitabile, and full of silk-workers. One street I saw was narrow, and had a look of Cairo, but most were fairly broad, and sanitary considerations had had tlieir due weight. If Peshawur lias less to show in the way of buildings than many places of 52,000 inhabitants, the cause is partly to be sought in its exposed situation, and partly in its great liability to earth- quakes. Most of the walls are built in compart- ments, with a view to render these as little destructive as possible. After our return home, our host came to my room, and we had a long talk, by no means the first in our lives, over certain aspects of what is commonly called the Central Asian Question, but which, if it is to be spoken of in the singular number at all, w^ould be more accurately, if less conveniently, described as the Russo-Anglo-Turco- Egypto - Perso - Indo - Afghan - Uzbek question : a ridiculous word, no doubt, but not ridiculous if it impresses on the mind the truth that what we call REVIEW OF THE PESHAAVUR BRIGADE. 117 the Central Asian Question is really, like the equally misnamed Eastern Question in Europe, made up of a great number of questions. On some of these questions, and these the ones which touch ourselves most nearly, there is no better authority living than Sir E-ichard Pollock, and it is well that such an important political out- post as this is under the care of so well-informed and cool-headed a watcher of events. Jan. ^th. — General Wilson, commanding the Peshawur brigade, was good enough to have the troops out for us to see. We started after an early breakfast, and riding past the uncompleted fortified inclosure, soon found ourselves in the open plain, on the other side of the so-called Circular road, to be beyond which, in ordinary circumstances, is to be " out of bounds." Presently we joined the General, and reined in our horses at a point where we had the whole force between us and the mouth of the Khyber. It was very dusty, and we feared that as soon as the troops got into motion nothing could be dis- cerned ; but a light breeze, springing up from the north, carried the dust away. This is, I suppose, tlie grandest parade-ground in the whole of the Empire, as the Phoenix Park in Dublin is perhaps the prettiest. The force, though not large, was worthy of its place of exercise. There was the Horse Artillery and the 17th, and the 72nd High- landers, and a regiment of lancers, whose nucleus was llodson's horse, and the corps which takes its 118 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. name from the historical defence of Khelati- Ghilzie, with several others of not less efficiency and fame. Last, but not least, was the Elephant battery, with its gigantic Armstrongs, famous all through Central Asia. The wise beasts saluted as they passed General Wilson, I was going to say like any Christian, when it occurred to me that I could not by possibility use a more inappropriate expression, for never was there a force to which the lines in the " Siege of Corinth " could be more emphatically applied : — "They were of all tongues and creeils, Some were those who counted beads, ►Some of mosque and some of church, And some, or I mis-say, of neither." It was a striking sight, and none the less striking because one knew that the men before us, and those who were lying behind them, on the road along which we have come, could walk over any- thing and everything between this and the Syr Daria. I yield, I trust, to no British politician in pacific, and, indeed, in warmly friendly feelings towards Russia, but I am all the freer to indulge those feelings, because I well know that so far from having any cause to fear her aggression we could, if need were, which God forbid ! make her position in Central Asia wholly intolerable. When will people learn that, as I have said before, our difficulty is not in (jocerning India but in governing it loell ? We are strong enough now to try to govern it well, and are doing so. If we were nUEREE sing's EOOHJ oil TOWEll. 119 weaker, we might be tempted to conciliate tlie violent and turbulent classes by a warlike policy. If we thought a warlike policy a right or wise one, we could occupy all Afghanistan, and hold it with the greatest ease. Let no one dream, misled by the fiasco of Lord Auckland, that there is any doubt about that. But what good would or could come to us from so doing — from annexing new expenses and responsibilities without any new ad- vantage ? When the review was over, we returned to the Circular road, and then, striking off to the left, reached, before very long, Hurree Sing's Boorj or tower (observe our familiar Burg and Burgh in so unfamiliar a setting). This is the last outpost of the British Government towards the Khyber, the old Fort of Jumrood being no longer occupied. We should have liked to go on, as is often done, to the actual opening of the Pass ; but the Commissioner asked me not to ask him to take us there at this particular moment, and I need not say his word in such a matter was law. Leaning, however, over the parapet of the tower, I took him round the whole circle of hills and outposts, sparing him, I am afraid, nothing. I had often studied all this on the map, and often forgot it. I shall not forget it now, but tlie very motives which made me unmerciful to him make me merciful to you, for you would remember as little the relative position of the places as I used to do. 120 KOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. When we arrived at the Boorj, we were met by the officers m charge, and here, for the first time, I heard Pushtoo, the language of the Afghans, wliich is as much harsher tlian German as German is harsher tlian Italian. Erom the Khyber to where we stood, a distance of some five miles, stretches a stony plain, and there is nothing imposing in the actual opening. X0ONO2, fj-lv alg TrjXovpov rjicofxtv iriZov ^Kvdrji' ee Oi/dor, aj3(iT0v etc epi^fxiaf, the first lines of the Fro7netheus Vinctus, came into my head, as I gazed to the westward. If any Russian Chauvinist, with more zeal than sense, likes to take this as an omen, I wish him much joy of it ; and I also ofi'er it to all those English- men who think we should be, as matters stand at present, the better for having a great power as our immediate neighbour. I have not seen the Argemone Ilexicana, on one single occasion, since I mentioned it at Bhurtpore. It evidently does not like this comparatively northern climate ; but I am amused to see that the Asclepias llamiltoni, which I saw first at Ahmedabad, and which, after following us to Lahore, has had a representative every few yards along the Grand Trunk road through the whole 270 miles — for all the world like the police in Warsaw, in January, 1 864 — has faithfully attended us to the " terminus imperii." After inspecting the first Clepsydra, or water- clock, wliich I ever met with, and plucking some KHYBEE FJlOIsTlEll AND TUE KUYEEREES. 121 leaves from one of the last trees in the realms of law and order — Zlzyphus jujuha it was — universal in the parts of the trans-Indus district we have crossed — we turned and rode back to Peshawur, passing many Khyherees coming in to the great metropolis with their wretched little merchandize — chiefly a large reed used for matting, on wretched little bullocks. " Is that a man or a woman ? " I said to my guide, pointing to a figure before us. " Oh, a woman," said he; "a man would have a better coat ;" adding, as we passed, " What a hard face it is — never had a luxury in her life ! " And so I cantered back, by no means more inclined than I was when I considered the ques- tion at the India OflB.ce towards a " blood and iron" policy with these poor devils, though some persons, who ought to have had better information, talked the other day of another frontier raid, because a blockhead of a soldier, wandering help- lessly after dinner, had been carried oif over the frontier — and this, though the Warden of the Marches sent him back, without our paying a penny, and the villagers came in and offered to raze the houses of the vagabonds who had been concerned in the outrage. The man Avas brought to Peshawur, and very deservedly put under arrest by his Colonel for being absent without leave ; but the frontier is a long way oflp, while a sensa- tional story is easily manufactured, and pays cent, per cent. 122 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. Passing through the approaches of the old E^esidency, and among the huildings used for judicial purposes, we noticed the iDicturesque group of suitors in this open-air " Salle des pas 2)erclus." It was at Peshawur, you know, that Shere Ali, who lived to murder Lord Mayo, used to stand with a drawn sword to defend the pre- siding judicial officer against the — alas! far from chimerical — danger of a sword-cut from a dis- appointed suitor. We tarried for some time amongst the trees, conspicuous amongst which was the superb Bauhinia variegata, now covered with its pinkish purple flowers, and for the hundredth time I regretted, as I saw the magnificent pods of the Cassia fistula, that I should not see in bloom that infinitely glorified cousin of the Laburnum. In the afternoon we went, by invitation of the General, to see some of the warlike games of the country. A course of three or four hundred yards was covered with soft earth. Near one end of it a tent-peg, say one foot high by two or three inches wide, was fixed in the ground. Towards this a horseman dashed at full speed with his thirteen or fourteen feet lance. He came on, some- times silently, oftener with a long, low, anxious cry, and very generally succeeded in transfixing the tent-peg, and whirling it round his head in triumph as he galloped out of the lists. It had been getting clearer all the afternoon, and towards sunset there was a very bright gleam. A GLIMPSE OF THE HINDOO KOOSII. 123 After I had looked for some time at the tent- pegging, as it is infelicitously called, Colonel G , to whom I shall feel eternally grateful, said to me : " If you will come behind the tent, you will now have a good view. Tliere," said he, " are the hills of Swat, and there," pointing far to the west, " is the Safed Koh ; and there, right through that gap to the northward, is the end of the Hindoo Koosh." That last sight was one of the things I had not promised myself when I left England, for I did not know of tlie depression in the nearer chains which alone made it j^ossible to see that range of mighty name. There, however, it was, perhaps 150 miles away ; but as clear as sun and snow could make it, and I knew that the Oxus was flowing behind " from his high mountain cradle in Pamere," and that the " roof of the world" was not very far off. By the time I had looked long enough at the mountains tlie game was changed, and the object was now for the horseman, galloping from one end of the lists, to slice three oranges fixed on three poles, about four feet high, placed at intervals along them. This was done by several, while others sliced only one or two of tlie oranges, and some none at all. It was satisfactory to hear that many of our European soldiers succeed in these feats quite as well as the native troops. To-day, however, the latter had the best of it. Conversation here turned of course largely on frontier matters. To neglect Quid be II loos us 124 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. Cantaher et Scythes cogltet would not have been Horace's advice if there had been no Adrian sea. The Akhoond of Swat, who is a sort of Prester John at Whitehall, is decidedly no myth in the Peshawur valley. Earthquakes are another toj)ic of talk with strangers, and the Greco-Buddhist excavations in the neighbourhood are a third. A beautiful and very tame little musk-deer, belonging to the Commissioner, was quite a novel sight to me. Many stories are told of the ring of wild tribes between us and Cabul, their good and evil qualities. I should like to see an essay on the political influence of Scott and Byron on our appreciation of mountaineers. It is not so long ago since the Scotch Highlander was thought of by his lowland neighbours as nothing better than a polecat to be put to death where found. Now we think quite differently, and the tribes on the frontier reap the benefit of our change of view. They are not, I observe, praised for the virtues for which Ma- hometans are often praised. I remember, when I first came under the spell of the Crescent in 1851, when Omar Pasba was trampling down the old feudal nobility of Bosnia, being very much struck with the way in whicli people in Austrian Croatia talked of the truthfulness and reliableness of their Turkish neighbours. These Mahometans of the Afghan border are liars and thieves, but it does not seem to occur to them that lying and thieving PATH AN TRAITS. 125 are other than quite honourable and respectable pursuits. On the other hand, they are faithful in service, and as brave as lions. They are good friends, these Pathans, and zealous ; but their zeal requires now and then to be tempered by discretion. One of them had ob- served his master, a young Deputy-Commissioner, not a little fussed and worried, to get ready for the visit of his immediate superior. " That gentle- man's coming, I observe, gives you much trouble," said the faithful creature one day ; " you don't seem to find it pleasant. Would you like him not to come again ? " Another remarked to his employer, an officer who was poor and popular, " Have you no rich relations. Sahib, in England ? If you have, I think I could arrange that you should succeed to their property I " Over the border their want of respect for human life is almost cynical. A traveller arrived in an Afreedee village one morning, and was detained by the people, who seemed inclined to plunder liim. " You will do me no harm," he said, " I am a descendant of the Prophet." "Ah," replied the devout villagers, "you are exactly the man we have been looking for. AVe have long wanted a shrine." So they kept his property, cut his throat, and built his sepulchre. And yet who shall say that these people are not capable of acquiring the finest flowers of civiliza- tion? I read in a missionary report, the other day, a story of one of them who, showing good 126 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. dispositions, obtained one book after another. When there were no more to be had, he cut short controversy by declaring that he had had a revela- tion from God to the effect that the Koran was infallible. Surely the grandson of so promising a bibliomane might become the customerof a twentieth century Quaritch or Techener, and live to cry with genuine enthusiasm, as he examined a doubtful edition, " Ah, c'est la bonne ; voila les fautes qui ne sont pas dans la mauvaise ! " It is fair to add that the author of the report, a man, they tell me, of merit and ability, quite appreciated the humour of the situation. What a distance we have already travelled over Indian soil, and how far away we are from the latitudes through which we passed to reach Bombay ! Aden is in 12° 45^, Peshawur is just short of 34", and not much south of the shores of Crete. One does, indeed, feel oneself at the end of the world. Our pomegranates come from Candahar ; our stewed prunes from Bokhara. I have bought a rug from Kayn, in Khorassan, a great-coat in the nature of an Ulster, for railroad travelling, which was made in Cabul, to say nothing of a set of Russian tea-cups, which have come down the Khyber, and arc the correct tiling for every gentle- man to have in Afghanistan. In gratitude to a dealer who described his lazuli as lajwurdi, and made me remember how near I was to its home in Badakshan, I bought his whole stock, which was, by the way, neither very good nor very extensive — a criticism THE RHYTHM OF ST BERNARD. 127 which equally applies to the ferozes or turquoises from Nishapur, in Persia, which I added to my collection. I sat late over the fire in this, the most English house I have seen in India. Erontier lines are, and always have been to me, in the highest degree solemnizing ; and of all frontier lines I know none so solemnizing as that which I have seen to- day, where the grandest political experiment that has ever been tried in the world comes to an end. I wished I had brought with me to read once again in this place the thoughts which one of the few statesmen of the old world who would have understood and sympathized with our work in India wrote down on another frontier line, very familiar to me too, " amongst the Quadi by the Granua," I had not done so, however, but in this mood I took up the Rhythm of St. Bernard, which, oddly enough, I had never seen in the Latin till a friendly hand lent it to me at Lahore. How wonderfully fine some bits of it are ! Take the opening : — " Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus Ecce niinaciter imminet Arbiter Ille supremus : Irumiuet, irumiaet, ut mala terminet, sequa coronet, Recta remuneret, anxia liberet, a3tliera donet." And again — " Pax erit omnibus ilia fidelibus, ilia beata Irresolubilis, invariabilis, intemerata : Pax sine crimine, pax sine turbine, pax sine rixa ; Meta laboribus, atque tumultibus anchora fixa Pax erit omnibus unica. Sed quibus 1 Immaculatis, Pectore mitibus, ordine stantibus, ore sacratis." 128 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. Sealkote, Jan. \Wi. — I turned my back on Peshawur, with many regrets, for I know that they spoke only too truly who said that we had seen its beautiful valley to the least possible advantage. In the flush of spring, when the horseshoe of mountains is still clad in snow, while its peach and quince gardens are in full flower, it must be enchanting. The landscape of the Peshawur district, just now, is not wintry, but things look more wintry than we have seen them do elsewhere — that is to say, the pastures are brown, the young corn has not made the fields more than half green, and many trees have lost, or are rapidly losing, their leaves— the mulberry and the Fojmlus Euphratica amongst them. In order to reach this place, we had to return on our track as far as Wuzeerabad, We came along at a great pace, the service to and from Peshawur being most efiiciently performed. Though the carriages are of a rough-and-ready kind, I have never seen better posting in any country. Those w^ho wish to learn how bad Indian posting was, and still I fear is, in some places, should read Bayard Taylor. Nowshera demanded a second glance as we passed. It is now a very different place from that which is described by Bishop Cotton in his letters, and still more from what it was when Uunjeet Singh broke here the power of the Afghans and prepared the way for the British arms. We "LALLA ROOKH." 129 stopped a little time at Attock, and had some talk with several officers quartered there. Two of them were interested in the history and antiquities of the neighbourhood ; but it was not until I had left it far behind that I learned that there was a dealer in engraved gems there, whose stores I should like to have seen, having, as you know, carried into this nineteenth century that very eighteenth century taste. At Hassoon Abdool we turned aside to see the valley where Moore makes the disguised Prince of Bucharia sing the " Light of the Harem" to Lalla Rookh — not one of his happiest efforts — but containing one or two pass- ages which every one knows, such as — "There's a beauty for ever unchangingly bright, Like the long sunny lapse of a summer-day's light." And — " Alas ! how light a cause may move Dissension between hearts that love." I lingered for a time, seeing the fish fed by an old Sikh priest in the clear deep waters of a little basin, on the edge of which I gathered the maiden- hair, which carried my thoughts to the fountain of Egeria. Eurtlier on was a deserted garden, in which there was a tomb overgrown with jasmine. Of course, the " Ineptia Ciceroniana " had chris- tened it the grave of Lalla Rookh. We spent a delightful evening at Kawul Pindee amongst people who had cultivated most success- fully the amiable science of making sti angers feel like old friends in about half-an-hour. Here, too, K 130 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOTJRNEY. I saw with my bodily eye the native dealer who sent to the British Museum a coin of a Bactrian King unknown to history, for which he got, if I remember rightly, £100. AVe turned aside, on our way to Jhelum, to examine the Manikyala Tope, a curious Buddhist monument absurdly named the tomb of Bucephalus. Half the village crowded round, offering coins for sale. I bought thirty-five (none of which looked good for anything), on the chance of some one being interesting, but fear that the neighbour- hood of the dealer above alluded to will make my speculation a very unprofitable one. The day was pleasant, like one of the hot days we sometimes have in England towards the end of April, but the distance was obscured by dust and mist, so that the snowy range, which had been so great a pleasure as we went westward, was never once seen. At the posting bungalow of Jhelum we made the native in charge talk Punjabi, while our Portuguese servant put what he said into Hindus- tani, so that we might see the kind of difi"erence between them ; and we did not forget to drink the waters that liad come down from Cashmere, as we drank at Attock those which had flowed by Leh and Iskardo. Perhaps I a little over-rated, the other day, the barrenness of the Sind Sagar Doab, as the country between the Jhelum and the Indus is called, not having made enough allowance for tlie crops being SEALKOTE. 131 but little above ground, tbanks to tbe extreme and almost alarming drought ; but I was struck with the far more civilized look of the country between Jhelum and the Chenab. At Wuzeerabad the carriages of the Maharajah of Cashmere, who had invited me to visit him, met us and took us up to Sealkote, through a country of great fertility, in which the sugar-cane is largely grown. Here we were welcomed most warmly by General B , who commands the brigade, and was one of our companions in the Malwa. We drove in the pleasant morning air through the pretty station of Sealkote, the prettiest I liave yet seen in India, and were soon over the British boundary. The Pir Punjal, and other great Hima- layan ranges, rose in front of us through the thin dust-mist like the ghosts of mountains. If we could have made the journey in a balloon we should have seen them splendidly, for we should have been above the semi-opaque stratum. As it was, how- ever, they were extremely beautiful, with their strange spiritual look. At length we arrived at a ti'act of broken ground covered with jungle, and exchanged our carriages for elephants, advancing slowly through thickets in which Butea frondosa., and Acacia modesta were the prevailing trees, while Justicea Adhatoda had it all its own way, where trees were not. The Euphorbia Boyliana, which might at a distance be taken for a plant of the Coal Measures, towered o^er our heads, even when we were mounted on our elephants, and was 2 K 132 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. really a grand object. Armed men, in bright colours, ran before us, their uniforms shining through the woodland. At length we came to a rather broad river, which " the huge earth-shaking beast " forded with that deliberation which makes him so amusing, my companion describing to me how he had once crossed the Jumna with the water streaming into his howdah. At the foot of the slope on which Jummoo is built, the heir apparent of Cashmere met us on an elephant, accompanied by the father of the well-known minister, Kirpa Kam, who was, I regret to say, himself ill, and unable to appear. We proceeded slowly through part of the city to the house where the Maharajah receives his European guests, which stands on the edge of an enchanting valley, and is separated from the picturesque fortress of Bao by the river, which we forded as we approached the place. After various ceremonies had been gone through, we were left for some time, during which General B -, who is an enthusiastic and excellent artist, took us carefull}^ to the best points of view. In the afternoon, we again mounted our ele- phants and proceeded to the Palace, through winding streets of one-storeyed houses, so narrow that a skilful jumper could have sprung down from the liowdah on to their roofs. We were received at the door of the hall of audience by the Maharajah, who, after the usual civilities, led me to a room in another part of the building, which overlooked the river-valley, and NATIVE MUSIC — JUMMOO. 133 commanded a quite lovely prospect. Thence we returned to the hall of audience, where we assisted at another Nautch, a sort of pantomimic perform- ance, showing some skill in the performers. This was followed hy native music, which had a good deal of interest for me. Amongst other things, I saw the Vina. If you remember, Moore makes Peramorz take her Vina from the hands of Lalla Eookh's little Persian slave, before he begins to sins: at Hassoon Abdool. He Avould have been a very confident suitor who made such an experi- ment, for the Vina is as unlike as possible to the typical lover's lute. It is about six feet in length, with two huge bottle-shaped gourds at either end. I wish him much joy of such an instrument. I had a great deal of talk with his Highness, through various interpreters, about politics, books, coins, &c. We were speaking of my Indian tour and the objects of it. " Ah," said he, " between the eye and the ear there may be little more than two or three fingers' breadth, but still there is a mighty difference between hearing and seeing." Jummoo is, as you know, the winter capital of the Maharajah, whose territory extends over some 25,000 square miles — is, therefore, about the size of Scotland, less the counties of Perth and Inver- ness. The famous shawls are chiefly made in the neighbourhood of his summer capital Srinuggur, the chief town of the vale of Cashmere, which is separated from Jummoo by about 125 miles of 131 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. mountam-marching enchanting in summer, but out of the question at this season. We dined, of course, by ourselves, but from time to time the Maharajah sent us native dishes, some of which were excellent. Then we had fireworks. The night was perfectly still and very propitious to them. Seven fire balloons floated high in the air, and got exactly into the position of the Great Bear and the Pole- star. I called the attention of one of my com- panions to this, who, pointing it out to the Maha- rajah, said, "It is only your Highness who can add to the number of the constellations." When the fireworks were over, we took our leave, and very picturesque was the ride home under the crescent moon through the dark silent streets, with our attendants clamouring in front to drive the sacred bulls and the camels out of the way. This morning w^e started soon after sunrise, accompanied by the son of Kirpa E-am and others. Just as we came in sight, through the city gate, of the woodland which I described yesterday, the troops presented arms, and the band struck up " God save the Queen." Then we slowly descended the steep declivity on which Jummoo is built. As we were crossing the river. General B called out to me, *' It would take a fine reach of the Bhine to beat this " — and so it would. Some half an hour passed, however, before we saw the full glories of Jummoo. We had crossed most of the woodland, and had descended from our elephants. AN INDIAN PARADISE. 135 when we reached a point where, in the clearer morning, the mountains stood out in all their heauty. On the left stretched the mighty snowy chain of the Pir Punjal — rising, I suppose, to about 17,000 or 18,000 feet. Then, in the middle of the background, came an outer range, not snowy, somewhat lower than Taygetus, and rather like it ; lastly, far to the right, another snowy range on the borders of Thibet. Between us and the mountains lay Jummoo, witli its white pyramidal temples shining in the sun, and surrounded by a near landscape which wanted nothing to make it perfect. It was the most beautiful land view I ever beheld. The Maharajah is a lucky man, with heaven for his winter and the seventh heaven for his summer capital. We said farewell, with many regrets, to our friend. General B , who reminded me not un- frequently of Leopold von Orlich. I need hardly say that the remembrance of that most excellent man has often been with me in this land which he loved so well, and which he tried so hard to make better known to his countrymen. Prom Sealkote we returned by Wuzeerabad to Lahore. I was amused, the other day, by hearing the native explanation of the many changes that had taken place about the gauge of this railway. " You know," say the politicians of the Bazaar, " they are only governed by a woman, and women are apt not to know their own minds." 136 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. Jan, \Mh. — On our way from Lahore to Dellii. — We have passed TJmritsur, where I had a few moments of most interesting and memorable talk with General Uennell Taylor, who received us so kindly as we went north. Since that we have left behind Jullundur, Loodiana, and the fort of Phillour, whence the army that attacked Delhi drew its munitions. As we traversed the great Sutledge Bridge, there came back to my mind a wonderful epigram of events not universally known. No sooner had the rear- guard of the aveng- ing army returned from Afghanistan than the mighty river came down like a wall, and swept away the two bridges by which it had crossed. I was amused to observe, on a bank in the middle of the channel, my friend the Argemone Mexicana. I know not whether the conjecture I made the other day is correct, or whether it too has been delayed by the Sutledge on its career of conquest. Jan. Ibth. — We reached Delhi at a very early hour this morning, after a journey of some nineteen hours, and have already seen much. The fort — the residence of the Moguls till their wicked folly swept them and all that they repre- sented into annihilation amidst the whirlwind of 1857 — is still noble and beautiful, though the hand of the Persian, the Afghan, and the Mahratta had fallen heavily upon it long before it passed into our PRAYER AT THE JTJMMA MUSJID. 137 keeping ; for the eigliteentli-century history of Delhi is the history of one frightful sack and massacre after another. There is nothing in it which is, to my mind, as beautiful as the Jasmine Bower or the Pearl Mosque of Agra. The buildings, however, are for the most part on a larger scale ; not so, by the way, what is here kno^Ti as the Pearl Mosque, which is a mere Cappellina. I had stupidly fancied the hall round which are inscribed the famous words, " If there is a Paradise upon earth it is here, it is here," to have been a hall in our sense of the term ; but it is nothing of the kind. It is a series of open arcades of white marble ; but it deserves all Eergusson says of it. We went to see the Friday prayer at the Jumma Musjid, and here only in India have I heard the cry of the Muezzin. We were on one of the minarets at the time, while he was far below, only about forty feet above the great paved court — an innovation which cannot be considered an improve- ment. We descended immediately, and saw the service from two points, first enfilading the long lines of worshippers from the side of the arcades which here, as elsewhere in India, form the Mosque proper, and secondly looking straight across the great court to the Mecca Niche. Nothing could be more striking than the way in which the people, two thousand perhaps in all, knelt and rose, stood up and prostrated themselves 138 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. as one man. It brought to my memory the sad and famous lines of Alfred de Musset : — " Christ ! je ne suis pas de ceux que la priere Dans tes temples muets amene k pas tremblants ; Je ne suis pas de ceux qui vont a ton Calvaire, En se frappant le coeur, baiser tes pieds sanglants ; Et je reste debout, sous tes sacres portiques, Quand ton peuple fidele, autour des noirs arceaux, Se courbe en murmurant sous le vent de cantiques, Comme au souffle du Nord un peuple de roseaux. Je ne crois pas, 6 Christ, a ta parole sainte, Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux, D'un siecle sans espoir nait un si^cle sans craiiite, Les comctes du notre ont depeuple les cieux." As a spectacle, the prayer in the Jumma Musjid to-day was most impressive, and on the last Eriday in E^amazan, when from thirty to forty thousand people assemble, and the whole mighty enclosure is filled, it must be one of the great spectacles of the world, but sound is wanting. There is no " vent de cantiques." Probably the voices of a vast multitude, repeating the responses, would give something of the same effect, but a few thousand are lost in the vast space. A good deal of our time went this afternoon in looking over a great quantity of Delhi art manu- factures, which a native gentleman had collected at his house for our inspection. These are better known at home than most Indian things of the kind, and consist chiefly of jewellery made in imitation of the Babool flower, of miniatures on ivory, sometimes excellent, of embroidered shawls, THE SITE OF DELHI. 139 and other textile fabrics of which this place is a great emporium. The Black Mosque, a characteristic specimen of the second or sterner phase of Pathan architecture, and a Jain temple, also claimed some notice, hut far less than the famous ridge, along which we drove, recalling the details of that equally wonder- ful and glorious feat of arms which is known as the siege of Delhi in 1857, though the idea of our scanty force besieging the hosts who were collected in the city recalls the story of the Prussian soldier on the field of Leuthen, who, being asked how he had taken a flock of prisoners, replied — " If you please, sir, I surrounded them." Jan. 16th. — I have never received a satisfactory reply to a question which frequently recurs to my mind. Why was this site chosen for a great city ? It does not appear to have any peculiar natural advantage. And yet, if the archaeologists are right, there have been thirteen great cities here at one time or another. This rather featureless plain would seem to have been important as far back as the days of Nineveh and Babylon, although there is nothing above ground now which has the slightest claim to any such antiquity. Delhi has been called the Home of Asia, but it will perhaps convey to your minds no very in- accurate idea of the real state of the case if I say that where in the European Home you have a great ruin like the Colosseum or the Baths of Caracalla, you have in or near the Asiatic Borne 140 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. the remains of a great city, and that the whole face of the country between the remains of these cities is dotted with tombs as thickly as the line of the Appian Way. It is a wonderful, but at the same time a rather melancholy, not to say irritating sight. Nowhere in the world is the disproportion between the monuments of men and their lives so great. The Emperor Humayoun, whose name you probably do not know, or hardly know, sleeps in a tomb which might have been appropriate to Marcus Aurelius. A wretched miscreant, of whom little can be said, except that he was probably the patentee of Thuggism — that is, of systematic murder by strangulation — is revered as a saint, and has a sepulchre which would have been almost too good for St. Francis. The most passionate admirer of Gustavus or Cromwell would never have wished them a nobler resting-place than the tomb of Toghluck Shah, while all Europe would have been astonished if Erance had raised to Turgot, or Italy to Cavour, a memorial faintly comparable to that which covers the dust of the Sufter Jung, of whom the best that can be reported is that he was not the most infamous minister of the later Moguls. The last tomb erected in the enclosure, sacred to the supposed inventor of Thuggism, is in honour of a scoundrel who was well known to Colonel Sleeman, and is by him described as having died THE TOMB OF A HINDU PRINCESS. 141 of too much clierry-brandy — the only liquor, as he expressed it, which the English had that was worth drinking. As I looked at his monument, an extremely graceful one, I thought of the last grave-stone I had seen in Europe, under its cluster of meagre firs amidst the bare landscape of the Brie. " Marmoreo Licinus tumulo jacet, at Cato nullo, Pompeius parvo — Quis putet esse Deos 1 " To the credit, however, of human nature, it ought to be stated that there is one monument, to a member of the house of Timur, which is to be regarded with very different feelings from those which are inspired by that of Mirza Jehangeer, above alluded to. It is the tomb of the sister of Dara and Aurungzebe, and its inscription runs as follows : — " Let 110 rich canopy cover my grave : This grass is a fit covering For the tomb of the poor in spirit, Tlie huml^le, the transitory Jehanara, Tlie Disciple of the holy men of Chist, The daughter of the Emperor Shah Jehan." Small wonder if Colonel Sleeman misread the second last line, and put Christ instead of Chist ! Rich marbles surround and partly cover the tomb, but the grass is still allowed to do so too, in part compliance with her wish. Of course I admired the great Kootub Minar, but I think it has been overpraised. The three lowest storeys are admirable, no doubt — red sand- 142 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. stone grandly fluted and beautifully carved, but the two higber ones, in wMcb much white marble has been injudiciously used, detract from its effect as a whole. The remains of the great Mosque, hard by, the first ever built in the plains of India, are most noble, and have, at first sight, a strangely Gothic look. I was just thinking of Tintern, as I walked towards them, when R came up and said, " Dear me — how like fountains ! " Most memorable, too, is the Alai Darwaza, or Gate, of which Pergusson says : — " It was erected by Ala uddeen Khilji, and the date, 1310, is found among its inscrij)tions. It is, therefore, about a century- more modern than the other buildings of the place, and displays the Pathan style at its period of greatest perfection, when the Hindu masons had learned to fit their exquisite style of decoration to the forms of their foreign masters. Its walls are decorated in- ternally with a diaper pattern of unrivalled excellence, and the mode in which the square is changed into an octagon is more simply elegant and appropriate than any other example I am acquainted with in India." But why should I linger over ruins, the magni- ficence of which no one can realize without having seen them ? If I could have had you with me by the Asoka pillar, in Perozabad, one of the thirteen ruined cities of which I spoke — have showed you the wide field of desolation in which it lies, and the three vultures who sat a bowshot off, enjoying the congenial spectacle — if I could have wandered with you over the gigantic remains of Purana Killa, or of the still more gigantic Toghluckabad THE BEST HANDBOOK FOR DELHI. 143 (mightiest, perhaps, of all the astounding creations of imperial caprice in this land of marvels), description would have heen superfluous. To those who have not done so I fear sucb description as I could give would he of no avail. I know, at least, how awfully indigestihle I found Mr. Beglar's and even General Cunningham's pages, when I had occasion to look through them last autumn. The guide-hooks I have used on the spot are Keene's, Cooper's, and Harcourt's — all useful, hut none of them, I should think, easy or even endurahle reading, at a distance from the scenes described. The best manual for the traveller to take to Delhi would, I think, be the Travels of a Hindoo, by Mr. Bholonauth Chunder. His book was published in 1869, and its author made use of the most reliable writings that had preceded his own. I had had a copy on my shelves for some years, but had only read a little of it. It is, however, really extremely well worth reading, for more reasons than one, though even Mr. Bholonauth Chunder's best selected extracts from his predecessors, and his own often very judicious remarks, would hardly bear readiuor at a distance from Delhi. Jan. 19th. — A second visit to the Xootub — this time with a large party — an inspection of the great works at the head of the new Jumna Canal, with the engineer in charge, various conversations with Sir John Strachey and officers in his camp (which we left, if you remember, on the 24th Dec, and rejoined at this place on the IGth), were my other 144 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY chief events at Delhi ; hut I did not forget to see (as I had heen wisely enjoined to do) the Jumma Musjid at half-past eight o'clock in the morning, nor to look at it along the line of the Darweezah Street. A visit hy moonlight, and a second ascent of one of its minarets, were not works of obliga- tion, but withal very pleasant. At Delhi, we returned to the Neem, planted everywhere here, hut which I have hardly seen in the northern districts. The Millingtonia suherosa is also very common ; the Baccain, the other Melia which I confused at first with the Neem, is much less frequent. We have had more breeze here than in most other places, and I owe to that having heard a sound quite new to me — the rustle of the Peepul, which the gods love, and which is altogether different from that of any tree to which I happen to have listened. In Delhi, I came for the first time on traces of the uneasiness which is said to be inspired in the minds of some of the well-to-do natives of India hy the Hussian advances in Asia — a gentleman of the mercantile class having questioned me under the shadow of the Kootub Mosque about the possible advent of strangers more formidable even than the Pathans who raised that noble pile. Here, too, I succeeded, at last, in getting hold of Dr. Macleod's Peeps at the Far East, and in reading his account of some of the places we have seen — interesting, of course, to me, as show- ing me how things struck one who made, like THE SABEE. 145 myself, a hurried journey through India during the cold season, and looked at the country from a somewhat different standpoint. Jan. 19th. — We left Delhi early this morning in a special train along with Sir John Strachey. It was bitterly cold till the sun had got out of bed, and looked for some little time about him. Icicles hung on the water-pipes. All of us were in great- coats of one kind or another ; and some eyen wore furs that would have done good service on the banks of the Neva. There was little to interest in the first part of the journey. At length we reached Rewarree, the station to which comes down the trade of Bewanee, which is carried on bv camels, and rises to a fii^ure of something like a million sterling — the pastoral west sending hither enormous amounts of ghee, and receiving back chiefly piece goods and sugar. My attention was drawn to the Sabee river, as an interesting illustration of the engineering difficulties of this country. The Sabee is a stream which, for, say a generation, goes on quite respect- ably and peaceably ; then it suddenly goes mad, and covers a whole district in a few hours. And small blame to it, if, as happened not very long ago, fourteen inches of rain fall in thirty-six hours. Of course, it would be impossible to provide by any bridges against such exceptional dangers as this. There is nothing for it but to let the river liave its own way on the rare occasions when it loses its senses. 146 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. We had left some sixty miles behind before we began to get amongst the AravuUiSj the mountain system (not range, for it is no real continuous range) of Rajpootana, whose southern slopes, as I mentioned when writing to you from Ahmedabad, are partly drained by the Sabarmuttee, the river of that place. By twelve o'clock we were at Ulwur, where lunch was provided for a large party. I talked here with a very intelligent physician about the opium-eating and poppy-liquor drinking of the people. lie told me that he could never see that either did much harm. Any bad results he had connected with the latter practice arose rather from the large amount of liquor consumed than from the fact that the liquor was an infusion of poppy-heads. The Ulwur chief who reigned while I was at the Indian Office has, happily for his subjects, been gathered to his fathers. A boy of fourteen has succeeded, and the State is being managed during his minority by the Paramount Power. A distinguished British official, who told me the story, shot some time ago an antelope, in the neighbourhood of an Ulwur village. He sent to ask for a couple of sticks and some string, with which to carry it, offering of course to pay for them. The people came and said, " We have no string and no sticks." " Oh, then," he replied, *' let me have a blanket, that will do as well." " We have no blankets,'' Avas the rejoinder. " We NATIVE EXTORTIONS. 147 have nothing hnt the clothes we stand up in here. Whatever we get we eat. No man dares to have money in this State. The chief's soldiery plunder us of everything." This agreeable state of things has of course been terminated for the present, and peace will continue in Ulwur — at least until the blessings of independence are restored to it. Many districts through which we have passed are quite uncultivated, chiefly from the want of water. The cattle are largely fed on the chopped twigs of Zizijphus jujuha, which, along with stunt- ed Bahool, the Cappm^is ap)hyllci, and a tall grass, n^e the prevailing plants. I have seen a quantity r)eacocks feeding just like pheasants in England, -**x._ at last a herd of antelopes. A fellow-traveller gave me a curious piece of his experience as to the oppressions exercised even in a model native State like Jeypore, against the will of course of the ruler. Some years ago my in- formant fell in with a party of Patlian traders who, with their camels, had come through the Kliyher to traffic in India. " In the passes," they said, " we had no trouble. "VYe knew exactly the blackmail we had to pay, and we paid it. In British territory we had no trouble, but here in Ulwur, we have been robbed of every single penny we possess, and what to do in Jeypore we know not." My informant, being a person of some in- fluence, took the men under his protection, and when they arrived at the Jeypore frontier, asked L 2 148 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. the Customs officer what they would have to pay- to frank them to the capital. " So much," the man replied. " Very well ; make out a receipt for that sum, and I will see it paid — three of the camels to he handed over as security." The officer agreed ; the receipt was given ; hut during the whole journey to Jeypore city, it was one hattle with local extortioners all along the road, every one claiming transit duty under one pretence or another. Before it was dark we had reached the house of Colonel Beynon, the Resident of Jeypore, some two hundred miles from Delhi, having traversed part of the intervening space at a rate of over forty miles an hour. This, he it rememhered, over the metre gauge. The Maharajah came to the station to meet Sir John, hut the visit was a strictly private one, and almost all ceremony was dispensed with. I spent an hour, hefore dressing for dinner, in walking ahout by moonlight in the Residency Garden, the best-cared-for private garden I have yet seen in India, famous for cypresses of almost Plorentine dimensions. Tiie Maharajah of Jeypore is, in point of rank, the second of the Princes of E-ajpootana, yielding only to the Rana of Oodeypore, who represents one of the oldest families known to exist in the world — a family so old, if all tales are true, that its connection with Maurice, the Emperor of Constantinople, is rather a modern incident in its history. AMBER AND ITS OLU PALACE. 149 Jan. 20th. — We drove this morning into the city, famous for the regularity of its streets, then mounted and rode to Amber, the old capital of the dynasty, and a most striking place. It lies on the slope of a rocky hill, along the crest of which fortifications of the most picturesque kind were carried of old, and still remain to beautify what they can no longer defend. The approach to the outer gateway, up a long incline, might have been in the basin of the Mediterranean if the Euphorbia Roy liana had not come in to scatter an illusion which the cactus, so common in Sicily, helped to foster. The old palace, its mysterious Zenana passages, courts pleasant with jasmine and pomegranate, perforated marble and quaint stained glass, de- tained us Ions:— the delicious view Avliich it com- mands still lono^er. The forenoon was largely spent amongst the manufactures of Jeypore — hideous marble gods, turban pieces, roughly cut carbuncles, and un- equalled enamel. As usual, there was very little of the last in the market ; but I succeeded in securing one or two characteristic bits. To my thinking there is no enamel, ancient or modern, at all to compare with it ; but the secret of its manufacture is monopolized by one or two families. The afternoon was given to the Maharajah's stud, to the seven- storied palace in the town, which is Cull of beauty, and commands admirable views, 150 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. thoTigli not equal, perhaps, to those to be enjoyed from the old eyry of this great Bajpoot race. Then came a visit to the large and, as I am assured, really excellent college, to the fine Jardin Anglais, and to certain for the most part very un- happy and unusually savage tigers. One who allowed his head to he scratched and patted (not, I beg to state, by me) was a contrast to the rest. The Maharajah objects to tigers being killed, unless they are really mischievous; saying play- fully, as 1 have heard, that they are his best forest officers. Of course, when they begin to do serious harm, they are destroyed or captured. Here, and only here, have I seen a hunting leopard being taken out for his walk like a big dog in London, only with his eyes bandaged. Hawk- ing, too, is an amusement of this place, as it is also of Pattiala and Jummoo, in both of which we came upon falconers with their very attractive charges. At night we dined at the palace, and had another quite exquisite display of fireworks — fountains of light playing alongside of, and being reflected in, the lines of water fountains in the stately garden. Jan, 1\st, — We left Jeypore betimes, and went slowly over forty miles of line, not yet ballasted, to Siimbhar. The country was very waste ; far- scattered rocky hills and plains tufted with the tall grass I have so often mentioned, being the sights on which the eye most frequently fell. Jeypore lies high, between fourteen and fifteen SAMBIIAll AND ITS SURROUNDING COUNTRY. 151 hundred feet above the sea, if I mistake not. The morning was searcliingly cold, yet by a little after eleven o'clock the sun was as hot as it is in July at home. I was reminded of the climate at Madrid — " El aire de Madrid es tan sotil Qae luata a un hombre, y no apaga a un candil." Unjustly, however, I fancy ; for save for the flies, which are a very Egyptian plague, Jeypore must be an exceptionally pleasant place. True, the thermometer sometimes stands at 115° Eahr. immediately after sunset ; but it falls rapidly in this sandy region, and the nights are cool. Arrived at Sambhar, I mounted an elephant and went with Sir John to look at the salt far out into the bed of the lake. The lake itself had for the present retired so much that I did not actually see the water at all; but far away over its basin stood the hills of Jodhpore, beckoning me into new lands which I have not time to penetrate. Looking in another direction, I saw the edge of the Great Indian desert, of which the country we have traversed to-day is " only the antechamber." Then we had a slow progress through the shabby little town, in tlie course of which my elephant, which knew, as they know most things, my interest in the Salvadora Fersica, took me under one just coming into flower, and enabled me, by tasting the leaf, to see very clearly why it was called the mustard tree. Kext followed breakfast, and a speech from Sir 152 NOTES or AX INDIAN JOURNEY. John, in which he did ample justice to his three themes : — 1. The success thus far of the State lines. 2. The excellent prospects of the Uajpootana railway system. 3. The great importance of the treaties conclu- ded a year or two ago, by which we obtained a lease of the Sambhar Lake. The experiments of the creation of State lines, and the acquisition of our rights over Sambhar, having both been made under the auspices of the Duke of Argyll, all that the Lieutenant-Governor said was of course of peculiar interest to me. I told you, some weeks ago, how well the Agra section of the Kajpootana State lines is doing. The Delhi part of the system is not, and could not yet do as well, but the figures of the system, as a whole, are most satisfactory, and there is no doubt that with the completion of the unfinished line, over which we have to-day travelled, they will become better. The acquisition of our present rigJits over Sdmbhar will, I hope, lead ere long to the aboli- tion of many hundred miles of my enemy, the Salt line, and to the beginning of a new Customs policy, while it will largely increase the su2)ply of salt in all our northern provinces, in some of which it has undoubtedly been too scanty. The salt tax in India is as far as possible from being a grievance, but the restriction of the sources of salt supply has been a great hardship. ULAVUR. 15e3 All that will now be at an end, and the native States concerned in the transaction, Jeypore and Jodhpore, have already largely benefited by it. Pleasant, too, it is to think that the E^ajpootana railway system will make so terrible a scarcity as that of 18G8-9 an impossibility ; nor should the political importance of having one day a second line of communication between Bombay and the Punjab be overlooked or underrated. Prom Siimbhar we returned to Jeypore, where, however, we did not tarry long, but it was very late before we got to Ulwur, where we dined and slept. Jan. 22nd. — I had no intention of going to Ulwur when I landed in India, and am ashamed to say that I had no notion w^hat sort of a place it was. A letter, however, from Mr. Lyall, urged me not to pass it by, and he had also written to Sir John to the same effect. Early in the morning, accordingly, we drove out to see what was to be seen. And verily we were not disappointed. I drove with a well-informed denizen towards the city, passing the various English institutions which follow us in these lands. There was the High School, there was the Pives Court, there was the New Ilospital, admirably planned after the last European lights. Suddenly we came to the ditch, and all was changed. The great gate, flanked by a huge piece of ordnance, stood up before us, with its sharp spikes looking defiance. " I never drive through ISA NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. such a gfite," said my companion, " without think- ing of the story of the two E^ajpoots who disputed as to which shoukl he Commander-in-Chief. The Prince promised that he who first entered the hesieged town should have that honour. One sought to enter hy escalade, the other to force the gate on his elephant. The elephant refused to face the spikes, when its rider, throwing himself in front, told the driver to urge the animal against his hody, thereby bursting in the gate just as he died. The followers of his rival, however, who was mortally wounded at the top of the wall, threw in his body first, so that he died Commander-in-Chief. No sooner had we passed the gate than we saw, towering a thousand feet above our heads, the wonderfully picturesque fortress, with an outwork perhaps three or four hundred feet lower down. The street, in whicli we were, led us nearly straight to the Palace, full of exquisite jewels, armour, and books, one of which, a copy of the Giilisfan, and a product of this century, was certainly amongst the most perfect illuminated manuscripts I ever saw. Hardly less beautiful was a Koran, and both had been so deliciously bound by a living artist that I have made interest to add to my book- cabinet a specimen of his work. Who would have thought that Ulwur and Northampton could com- pete on equal terms in this charming art with London and Paris ? The honours of the Palace were gracefully done by the young chief, who had l)ecn suddenly taken A "constituent" in INDIxV. 155 from a more than private station to fill his great 2)lace, and is still almost a cliild. After we had seen as much of tlie interior as we wished, he led us to the outside of the building, where, right under the fortress of which I have spoken, w^as a tank, with temples on the further side of it, and at one end that tomb which is figured by Fergusson, and which seems to me a perfect gem. In the garden near it was a large tree, covered with what seemed, at a distance, some strange black fruit. It was a mighty company of flying foxes, taking their natural rest. From the Palace in the town we drove to another known as the Pearl, and deserving its name, where we had breakfast. Just before we sat down a gentleman stepped up to me and said, " Mr. Grant Dufi", allow me to introduce myself to you as a constituent. You see you are looked after even here." And hardly had I sat down when the lady who sat by me said, " I recognized you at once this morning, for I heard you give your inaugural address, as Lord Hector, at Aberdeen." The three north-eastern counties of Scotland certainly have their own share of the w^orld. We ran back the eighty odd miles from Ulwur at a very good pace, and by half-past three were in Delhi, where we had to say good-bye to Sir John Strachey and the pleasant society which surrounds him, of which we have seen so much in the last few weeks. 156 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOTJUNEY. Jan. 23rd. We slept in our carriage, the train not starting till 2.45 a.m., and by breakfast time were at Toondla, the junction for Agra. Thence Ave ran on, and are now past Cawnpore. There is little new to note as we rush along. Did I mention the wells of the North- West Provinces, with their two patient grey bullocks walking up and down an inclined plane to draw the water ? In the Punjab the villagers have the Sakia of the Upper Nile, the Persian wheel as Anglo- Indians call it. I don't think I did mention these, nor the frequent crops of oil-seeds, often I suppose mustard (Sinapis ramosa), and often rape or some- thing very like it. I observe, too, to-day a little bajra (Penlcillaria spicata) still left in the fields ; and they bring for sale to the stations the acid, but not unpleasant, Averrlioa Carambola, and the cultivated jujube. After we passed Cawnpore it became evident that a good deal of rain had fallen. There was much water in the pools along the line, on the margin of which several pretty water-birds were playing. The fields looked greener, and soon we came to barley in the ear. It was dark before we reached Berhampore, and, with the exception of a long delay at Allahabad, I was conscious of nothing except hearing the famous name of Mirzapore called in the night, till we reached the junction of Mogul Serai, and, soon after, Benares. The Maharajah's carriage came to meet us, and took us in no long time across the Ganges and past AN ENGLISH HOME IN BENARES. 157 many noble specimens of the toddy palm, which showed that we were once more in warmer regions, to the house of the head of the Government College. Jan. 21 th. — We left our kind host yesterday evening, and are now well on our way to Calcutta. I have enjoyed no place more than Benares, although some others have interested me more. Mr. Griffith lives in a lovely house, which, furnished with all Indian requirements within, looks nevertheless, from the outside, like the ideal English parsonage, and might well be the scene of one of Miss Sewell's novels. Behind stretches a garden, far the loveliest I have seen in India, and one of the loveliest I have seen anywhere ; a garden in which European care has combined with a semi-tropical climate to produce the most delightful results. Here, in the month of January, I found, amongst other flowers of an English garden, the white candytuft, the daisy, the mignonette, the violet, the Escholtzia, the common yellow marigold, the heartsease, the China aster, and roses of many sorts, known to florists but unknown to me, from Count Cavour and Souvenir de Malmaison upwards and downwards. These took one's thoughts to the north, but here, too, I found the Bignonia venusta in all the glory of its flower, a wall of blossom of the brightest orange. Here was the exquisite leaf of the Vva7Ha longifolia, and the lichi which Macaulay has made famous. 158 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOLKNEY. Here was the Colvillia, alas, not in flower, but grow- ing into a great tree. Here were the Kadumba and the Asoka of the poets, and here, above all, were the most graceful bamboos, now trimmed into hedges, now growing as high as our highest elms. Nor did the sympathies of the owner of this paradise confine himself to his plants. Even the forlorn dogs of the native town ventured to pay an occasional visit, sure that they would not be roughly treated ; the mungooses ran about almost tame, and the most fascinating tree-cats, divided into two families of Montagues and Capulets, inhabited two neighbouring bamboo clumps, stay- ing their feuds from time to time, to make a descent on the peaches or loquats of their kind entertainer. Beyond the garden, and forming its boundary on one side, rose the College, a Gothic building, which does not bear minute inspection, for it was built a good many years ago, by an amateur architect, but the general effect of wdiich, seen from a little distance, is very good. This institution dates from the time of Warren Hastings, who took over the Sanskrit college of the Benares family, and now consists of two separate institutions, one of which gives an Eng- lish education, while the other is still governed in all its details by the laws of Menu. I was introduced to some of the Pundits, amongst them to one who was honourably men- by Professor Max Mliller in his address to the THE GOLDEN TEMPLE OF BENAllES. 150 Orientalists last year. Several are men of very great learning ; and, indeed, there are, scattered through India, as I am assured, many native scholars who could hold their own in Sanskrit with the greatest luminaries of the West. One of our first excursions was to the great Buddhist monument of Sarnath, once the centre of a group of religious houses. Tliere seems no doubt that Buddha himself was here, and a little lake hard by is still pointed out as the place where he washed his clothes. It was with no small pleasure that I found myself, for the first time, on the track of that most wonderful person — one, I suppose, of the most wonderful persons whom the ages have ever seen. On the 25th, the day sacred to Ganesa, the elephant-headed god of wisdom, we visited his temple, which was crowded with worshippers making their offerings. Then we went on to others, including the so-called Golden Temple, which is extremely sacred, but — like all the temples in Benares — somewhat mean in appearance. The whole place was sloppy with the sacred waters of the Ganges, and the holy well hard by was a mere pool of sulphuretted hydrogen. At length we reached the observatory built by Jey Sing, who laid out the town of Jeypore, and is one of the few natives of the country figuring in the last-century history of India for whom one can feel any respect. From the top of it the eye ranged over a wide 160 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. prospect, the most interesting part of whicli was the great river, which here forms a curve not less beautiful than, and very like, " the stream-like windings of that glorious street " in the English Benares. Thence we descended, and, embarking on the broad bosom of the Ganges, floated slowly down past the various ghauts or bathing-places. These are bordered with houses, some of them of almost palatial dimensions, and connected with the most famous names in modern Indian history. There, for instance, is one which now belongs to Scindia, and once was the "property of the last Peishwah, Bajee Eao. That other is owned by the Oodeypore family ; a third was built by one of the Bajahs of Nagpore ; while a fourth, far more interesting than all the rest, was the work of Ahalia Bye, who, if she had only lived in Europe, might well have had her biography written by him who told the story of St. Elizabeth. In front of them a motley crowd, of all ages and of both sexes, goes through the ceremony of bath- ing in the sacred Ganges, and at the same time of performing its toilet, with the utmost propriety, and in a steady, business-like way. There was nothing that I could see in the slightest degree solemn or beautiful in the human part of the scene. One woman of the better class, with a fine face and gentle expression, who was dressing her little boy, was the only pleasing animate object on which my eye rested. VISIT TO THE MAHARAJAH OF BENARES. 161 The gliauts themselves are, however, extremely picturesque, and there was a good deal more colour scattered along them than is usual in an Indian crowd. They have, of course, their religious side, but they are also a kind of club, the great marts of gossip, and the birthplaces of canards. A stranger wlio knows this goes away from all of them, except the burning ghaut, which is sufficiently dismal, rather amused than impressed. All classes bathe here, but women of the higher order come very early, and return home generally before daybreak. The Jains bathe too, but only when they Avisli for a bath, and connect with the act of bathing no religious ideas. We spent much time in the Kinkhab shops, looking through and collecting some of the charac- teristic manufactures of the place, and much, too, amongst the singularly handsome and efiPective brass work. An afternoon was agreeably filled up by a visit to the Maharajah of Benares in his great castle of Ramnuggur, a noble pile which rises straight out of the Ganges, not very far from the city, but on the opposite side of the river. He entertained us with native music of various kinds, and with dramatic recitations ; but we were unable to stay to witness the performances of some actors whom he had in waiting, and who would, judging from the characters which they were to sustain, have performed a sort of mystery. One of them re- presented the Muse Saraswati, a second Ganesa, M 162 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. a third tlie father of llama, and a fourth, shade of Heiurich Heine, no other than thy Wasischta. One of the many indications of the change which is coming over this country may he found in the fact that even in Benares we did not see one of those disgusting ascetics whose self-tortures were once so common a sight in India. The numher of holy hulls, too, must have heen once far greater. We encountered few, and very friendly, good-natured hrutes they were. At a temple sacred to Durga, the wife of Siva, we came on a great company of monkeys — the brownish- red kind, not the grey creature which we saw at Ahmedahad ; hut they too must have heen once much more numerous. Amongst people we met was Mr. Sherring, a missionary, and the author of an excellent work on the city, which we used as our guide-book. We had also, while in Benares, a number of most instructive conversations with a native of high position and very great intelligence, a Jain by religion. I do not believe that anything would have induced this gentleman to dine with a Euro- pean, or to taste meat ; yet how very unlike are the opinions contained in the following passage to those which are associated in our minds with a pro- fession of adhesion to any form of Indian religion ! " Many orthodox Hindus will not concede so much. They will say it is against religion to hold that imagination of tlie poets had anything to do with what is recorded in the Sastras. In the opinion of such men, if a person is represented as having his head us large as the top of a mountain, his nostrils and ears must bo OPINIONS OF A JAIN. 103 as big as caves ! They will not for a moment stop to question whence he got a horse or a wife befitting him. If one's face was likened to the moon and his eye to the lotus, the former must be eclipsed and the latter must yield fruit. Jackals, foxes, bulls, aud other animals, whose stories are related by Vishnu Surma in the Hitopades, must be supposed to have been endowed with human speech and understanding. The people of Burmah still call their sovereign by the appellatitm of gold : let then his hands and feet be melted, and put into the mould. Again, if you ask : In spite of the immense increase of population, Hindustan at present does not contain more than two hundred millions of inhabitants — whence could Ram or Yudhishthir raise an army of thousands of millions 1 they will never admit that this is only the hyperbole of their poets ; but when they are made to understand the economy of population, and that the whole world is not sufficient to contain so many beings, they will, though confused, at once remark that in former times the extent of Hindustan was vastly larger, but that the influence of the Kali-yug had contracted it ! To men of such a temper of mind we have only to say that our purpose is neither to lay down nor to take away any religious system. We intend to give the history of our country, that is to say, those facts and events which would be admitted by men of all religions, and which can be established by evidence forthcoming. We have nothing to do with the faith, tenets, or prejudices of any nation or sect. We shall give here an instance to illustrate what we mean by facts falling within the province of history, and religious belief and persuasions. That Banaras was visited by Aurangzeb, and the temple of Visvesvar was demolished by him, is an historical event. Hindus, ]\Iusalmans, Jains, and Christians, will all admit this ; it is recorded in their historical works, and part of the building is still to be seen behind the Masjid. This, therefore, is a fact worth relating, but that Visvesvar jumped into the Juan Vapi (the well of wisdom) after having intimated this to his priest in a dream, is a matter of faith to the Hindus alone, and does not belong to history. " In the same manner the birth of Jesus Christ in Judea in the year 57 of Sambat era, or about it, his preaching amongst the people, and his crucifixion, are facts, but his being the Son of God, and the Saviour of the world, is simply a matter of faith to Christians only. Again, the birth of ]\[uhammad at ]\Iakka M 2 164 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. (Mecca) in 569 a.d., and his waging war for tlie spread of Islam, his flight to Madina, and his death there, are events recognized by history, but his being the apostle of God, and the deliverer of his followers, will be believed by the Muhammadans alone. In short, our readers must learn what history means, and with this knowledge they will not take ofience at what we write. But those •who do not know what history is have generally so deep-rooted a prejudice that they think whatever they believe is right, and what another affirms can never be so, though it be supported with as strong arguments as possible. Such men are not entitled to read this book. Fools of the common folly feel themselves wiser than those who can render a reason."* Our host, Mr. Griffith, has just finished a trans- lation of the Hamayana, using the metre which Sir Walter Scott did so much to popularize, and using it with very great success. I promise my- self no little pleasure on my homeward journey from reading a series of translations published by him several years ago, some from the Eamayana, some from other Sanskrit writers. To read the Ramayana itself would be, as the French say, a work of long breath. Mr. Griffith's translation fills five octavo volumes. On the whole, Benares was far less mysterious and more modern than I expected to find it. The site of the city is of gigantic antiquity, but the existing city is not old. In tliat respect, and in that only, it resembles Eavenna. A capital little account of the Massacre of Benares, resting chiefly on the authority of Mount- stuart Elphinstone, but written by Sir John Davis, was forwarded to me while there, and I have been ' " History of llimlustnu," by Eaja Siva Prasad. Bonnrcs, 1874. PATNA. 165 reading it to-day. The most curious part of the story is the defence of his family and himself hy Mr. Davis, Sir John's father, who escaped to the top of his house, armed with nothing better than a spear, used by one of his native attendants rather for state than for war. With this he defended a steep staircase leading to the roof till the troops arrived, thus escaping the fate which overtook some of his countrymen and colleagues. Mountstuart Elphinstone, then a very young man, was at the time assistant to Mr. Davis, who filled himself the office of judge. Jan. 27th. — By the time I had dressed this morning we were at Patna, having left behind Buxar, the scene of Munro's " king-making vic- tory " in 1764 ; Arrali, so gallantly defended in the mutiny, as Trevelyan has admirably told in his " Competition Wallah ; " and the great Sone bridge. One sees nothing of the town, now a place of secondary importance, but long, under the name of Palibothra, the spot in India best known to the Western world, for hither came Megasthenes, the envoy of Seleucus, and here he tarried lonsr. o The country is a vast sheet of cultivation, as far as the eye can reach. The toddy palm and the mango are the prevailing trees. There is a great deal of the Cajamis Indicus on the ground, much castor oil, some tobacco, and endless fields of corn. Here, too, for the first time in India, I see the poppy, that great friend of the human race, which 16G NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. is so unjustly decried, because many do not use but abuse it. Wh saw the Eastern sky black with clouds the other day as we looked from Benares, and there has evidently been a deluge here — so that the crops are looking surprisingly happy. I wish I could hear that our friends have had the same in the land of the Five Elvers. I have never looked on a plain so blessed as this, in the German sense of the word, no, not in Egypt, for in Egypt you never lose, even in the Delta, the sense of the neighbourhood of the desert. Here the vast sheet of green gives one the feeling of infinite extent. At length we reach Luckieserai (look at the map), and leaving the arc proceed along its chord, through the northern parts of those liighlands along whose south-western slopes we ran between Jubbulpore and Allahabad. Then followed a good deal of pleasing hill scenery, and much land overgrown with jungle, in which I should like to have spent a day with Dr. Brandis. Then we passed into the Baneegunge coal-field, which, as the best authority in India on such matters lately assured me, is practically inex- haustible. The mineral wealth below the soil bids fair here, as elsewhere, to make the soil itself unspeakably hideous. It was dark before we reached Burdwan, and half-past ten before w^e arrived at our destination in Calcutta. CALCUTTA. 167 Government House, Thursday, Feb. Uh. — I have passed here a very interesting week, although, from the fact that the largest portion of my time has gone in conversation, there is less perhaps than usual to note for my friends. On the morning of the 28th, exactly two months after my arrival in India, I saw for the first time that famous Council-room in which so much business that has at a later stage passed through my hands has been discussed by so many persons with whom I have in various ways been brought into contact. The picture of Hastings, which ap- propriately dominates it, gives, to laij thinking, much more of the character of tlie man than that at the India Office — the face well reflecting the motto on the frame, " Mens sequa in arduis." On the 29th, I went to seethe great bridge over the Ilooghly opened to allow ships to pass. My companion was Mr. Tisza, one of the two Hunga- rian statesmen of that name, who has broken down in health, and has come out here to recruit. It is a wonderful work, and everything that skill could do seems to have been done to make it per- manent ; but much dinger is to be feared from the cyclones to wliicli Calcutta is subject, and which might well dash two or three drifting ships asjainst it. The 30th was given in large measure to that terrible subject which is associated with the last days of each session, for under the guidance of the financial secretary I visited the Currency depart- 168 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. ment, the Mint, the Assay Office, and the Bank of Bengal — a very instructive morning's work, though not perhaps one which would afford very attractive matter for description. The same night I went with the Lieutenant- Governor of Bengal to the great Mahometan educational establishment known as the Madrisa, where I was introduced to the leading Mahome- tan residents in Calcutta ; saw a great number of the pupils, and inspected their rooms. There seems no doubt that within the last year or two the followers of the prophet have taken much more kindly to their books, at least in this place, than they have ever done before — a happy circumstance, which will, it is to be hoped, rid us in another generation of a political inconvenience of some magnitude. The 31st was spent at Barrackpore, where the Viceroy usually goes for the Sunday. There he can walk to church, as he might in England, instead of going in state, and there he escapes, to some extent, from the tremendous pressure of business which makes his splendid position so terribly trying even to the strongest men. It is a charming, quiet spot, with an odd look of Kew Gardens. The house is built close to the river, and commands a most glorious reach of it. Right opposite is Serampore, of missionary fame, a pretty place which jute-mills are beginning to invade. The park contains many good trees— amongst BARRACKPORE. 169 o^^bers some lovely Casuarinas, wliicli certain peoj^le abuse, but wbicb, combining sometbing of tbe gTOwtb of tamarisk witb sometbing of tbe growtb of tbe pine, are to my eye yery pleasing, beautiful specimens of Terminalia catappa, wbose leaves are now reddening to tbeir fall, Crescentia ciijete (tbe calabasb tree), and mucli else. A pleasant stroll tbrougli lanes bordered by tbe most graceful bamboos, and across patcbes of jungle amongst vi^bicb the picturesque buts of tbe peasantry were tbickly set, took us to tbe filtering beds, tbrougb wbicb tbe waters of tbe Ganges pass to suj)ply Calcutta. Of all tbe changes wbicb we liave recently introduced, none has been more beneficent than this, and there is every reason to hope that, under the joint influence of good drainage and good water-supply, Calcutta Avill really become tbe healthy city which the late Mr. Gregson rather paradoxically maintained it to be in a discussion which he bad in the House twelve years ago — while it was still in its old filthy and dangerous state. We returned from Barrackpore on Monday, and I attended, after dinner, a most interesting Benga- lee theatrical performance at the house of a native gentleman. The Viceroy was present, and every- thing was done by our host to make the evening agreeable to him and to his other guests. On the 2nd, I went round the Port, witb Mr. Schalch, Chairman of the Port Trust, partly by water, partly by land, seeing all the manifold 170 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. improvements wliich have so immensely facilitated the operations of trade, and having their de- tails explained by the persons responsible for them. On the 3rd, I spent the forenoon at the Botani- cal Gardens with the curator, Dr. King. They are the first which I have seen oat of Europe, and, as you may suppose, the wealth of new objects was rather overpowering. The cyclones have done frightful mischief here, but many fine trees still remain. Amongst the best are some grand maho- ganies, Pcerocarpus Indicus, a giant from Burmali, a Banian tree, which was not alive when Plassey was fought, but which has now a girth of eighteen yards, and shades a space of eight hundred feet in circumference. On it grow many other plants well known in our hothouses at home, of the genera Hoya, Fotlios, Cereus, &c. It was no small plea- sure to see in the open ground the nutmeg, the cinnamon, the coffee, the cocoa, and the jacktree. Palms were numerous. I added to those I knew, the well-named Oreodoxa regia, from Cuba, the Cory- pha elata, the Talipot [Corypha taller a), from wliich fans and umbrellas are made, the Arenga sacclia- rifera, one of the sources of sago, and very hand- some, the Wallichia ohlonglfolla^ which goes up in some part of the Himalayas to 4,400 feet, growing with the birch and the alder. The creeping Calami, finding their way up the tall Casuarinas, were an altogether novel sight to me, and I noticed to-day, for the first time, the sound of the SOME QUESTIONS IN NATURAL KISTORY. 171 ■wind in these trees — like that of the pine, but still with a difference. My attention having been called to a very strange relative of the rhubarb, I was led to ask whether that long-standing puzzle of botanists, the real origin of the rhubarb of commerce, had been made out. I was told that it had at last, and that the species which giv^es it has been named Rheum officinale. It is, I think, a plant of Western China. I took the opportunity, while in this land of science, of asking the names of various birds I had seen on my wanderings. One which I observed at Benares, and which has the odd habit of going about in flocks of seven, is the Ilalacocercus terricolor. The natives call these flocks the seven sisters. The coppersmith, which I heard at Bombay and again here, is the XcuitholcBma Indica. A bee-eater, green, with a bronze head, which I saw to-day, is Merops viricUs, and another most lovely creature which was flying about in the gardens — a kind of kingfisher — is Halcijon Smyr- nensis. Few of the smaller herbaceous plants are in flower; but I came upon two Limnantliemums, one very like the Bogbean, a bladder-wort, and the only ground orchid of the plains of Bengal, the sweet-scented Zeuxina sulcata. I saw, too, the tree orchid of the plains, a species of Yanda; but, unlike the Zeuxina, it was not in flower. 172 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. Both here and at Barrackpore, I have ohserved in great abundance a little composite which I have never seen elsewhere. It turns out to be a South American species, Trlclax iwocumheyis, which has run wild. The Ipo}iicea aurea, a primrose convol- vulus, is well worthy of an English hothouse. I never saw it cultivated. I went at night to a large gathering at the house of Mr. Kesliub Chunder Sen, so well known in England, where I was introduced to a great many native gentlemen, whose acquaintance I was glad to make. All went on as at our evening parties in England, except that the music was national, and that our entertainer had thoughtfully provided various thins:s which had the couleur locale. There was a native juggler, for example, and there was also a potter working with his wheel in a corner of the room after a most surprising fashion. I thought of Omar Khayyam's lines : — " As under cover of departing day Slunk hunger-stricken Eamazan away Once more within the potter's house alone, I stood surrounded by the shapes of clay, Shapes of all sorts and sizes, great and small, That stood along the floor and by the wall ; And some loquacious vessels were, and some Listened perhaps but never talked at all." Here, of course, one has heard a great deal about the Bengal famine. Amongst other things, a A NATIVE POEM ON THE BENGAL FAMINE. 173 translation of a native poem has been put into my hands, from which I extract the following : — • " The news readied London that no ryot of IMitbila could live for want of grain. 'Now may your Majesty's pity bo moved. "In the year 1281, God sent no rain. The Queen resolved that no ryot should be allowed to die for want of grain. At her Majesty's order the scarcity of grain in Mithila disappeared. All hail ! all hail ! Hail throughout the world, great Queen of London. " In what lacs and lacs of maunds was grain imported ! What had never been heard with the ear, was now seen by the eye. "Those who work on tanks and embankments earn substance according to their strength. The children, the old, the weakly poor, are kept alive by charity ; the better class of cultivators take advances of grain without interest, to their hearts' content. The whole of Mithila is overjoyed, and sings the praises of Londoners. "The noble-hearted officers of Government travel from village to village to see that no ryot may die from want of grain. ' Let not a single ryot die,' Such was the order from London. From Barrh town to Durbangah a railway is brought in an instant. Grain is imported by every one who likes. Mithila is overjoyed at the flight of famine. " Wherever there is scarcity, thither is grain at once carried ; ■wherever water fails, there are tanks at once dug. Honest men are praised, skilled men are provided with work, good men are lilced, but rogues are badly off. Saith the poet Chundra : ' Go, see Calcutta, and the cities of the world, the steamers, telegraphs, railways, and other useful inventions — see the good roads lead- ing to the four holy places.' Peerless in glory is the Great Queen." I see I have not chronicled my visit to the High Court, nor several Badminton parties, which are in Calcutta really an important part of life, the chief means indeed by which all sorts of people grave and gay, take that exercise which is needed to n4i NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. preserve it. At one of these I met some Bengalee ladies, an almost nnheard-of circumstance even in onr days, so slowly does ancient prejudice lose its hold over the minds of the people of India. It would be unpardonable, too, not to record some pleasant rides, for the Maidan of Calcutta is 3'eally the best riding-ground in any capital I know. Imagine Hyde Park bounded by a river, in which a line-of-battle ship can lie close to the shore. Imagine, further, that you may ride over that Hyde Park in almost any direction, and you will under- stand my highly favourable estimate of it. Feb. 6th. — I left Government House yesterday, and went to Belvedere, the residence of Sir Bichard Temple, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. In the course of a lono^ ride before breakfast this morning, he showed me the greater part of the European quarter. The native quarter I visited some days ago. The first seems to me the best, the second the worst, specimen of its class whicli I have seen in India. Later in the day I went to St. Xavier's, the great Jesuit School of Calcutta. It is worked almost entirely by Belgians, and has for its head Eather Lafont, a man of very considerable scientific attain- ments. That is probably one reason for its success in the examinations of the Calcutta University. Before dinner we had a long ramble in the pleasant gardens of this most delightful house, and since dinner there has been a large gathering of Bensjalee authors. THE PLEASURES OF THE INDIAN CLIMATE. 1/5 Feb. Qth. — Our ride this mornino' took us alons; the shipping and across the bridge to Howrah. The other chief event of the day, in the way of sight-seeing, has been a visit to a large native school, known as the Oriental Seminary, to be present at the distribution of prizes by Mr. Justice Phear. lliursday, Feb. 11///. — Another charming, quiet Sunday at Barrackpore began our last week in Calcutta. Tlie weather had been hot since we were there, and the flowering trees were coming out. Yet a fcAV days, and the great Bombax w'ill be one mass of crimson flowers. Already some had opened, and I almost saw the buds bursting. A grand white creeper too (the Beaumontia) had been added to those which were in blossom last week. There are many drawbacks to Indian life, but assuredly there are many compensations. How strange it is to read of the dreadful winter you have been having, amidst the profusion of flowers, the soft air, and the unclouded loveliness of this climate ! It is amusing to see how anxious many of my friends are that I should realize how very un- comfortable they are in the hot w^eather. Certainly Calcutta must be bad enough, and such a place as Agra terrible. A visit to the Presidency College, to the Medical College, and the great hospital attached to it, as well as to the Pree Church College, all admirable l76 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. institutions of tlieir kind, have been other incidents of the last few days. I was present, too, at the reception of the Maharajah of Travancore by the Lieutenant- Governor, as I was last week at his reception by the Viceroy, and I have since had some conversa- tion both with him and his prime minister, the successor of Sir Madhava Kao. One of our rides took us along a road which runs towards Diamond Harbour, and impressed me much with the extraordinary wealth of Bengal. The country was one great tangle of cocoa-nut, mango, the PhcBiiix sylvestr'is, the plantain, the moringa, the bamboo, and other trees, every one of them extremely useful for the purposes of life. It would have looked at a distance a mere jungle, but was densely inhabited ; the road and the huts along it literally swarming with people. Another took us past the property of the King of Oudh, who has contrived to call into existence around him a highly characteristic village, like one of the worst bits of Lucknow. I visited the new market last Friday with Sir Kichard Temple, and Dr. King sent me on Monday a complete set of all the fruits and vegetables now exposed for sale. ****** I must not omit a charming drive in the early morning from Barrackpore to the pretty park of Ishapore, where the mango was just coming into flower, nor several cruises in the Lieutenant- CONVERSATIONS. 177 Governor's yacht, whicli is really a movable house, by means of which he can penetrate and carry on business in the wonderful network of water-courses which forms so large a part of his gigantic realm. As I said before, however, conversations with all manner of people occupied the greater part of my time, as was but natural when I was at the centre of Indian affairs. I note some of the principal subjects over which these ranged : — The state of British Burmah ; the Bhamo Boute, Yarkand, and Kashgar; Pamere, lessons of the famine ; passes and trade routes from the Punjab to the northward; primary and higher education in Bengal ; inexpedient revival of the controversy about the permanent settlement by a recent pamphlet ; the Zemindars and their good points ; science and art in Bengal ; our opium revenue ; salt ; excise ; statistics of river traffic ; difficulties in the way of an English lawyer when he first joins the High Court ; fixed or floating bridge on the Hooghly, pi^os and cons ; character of native officials in Bengal and the North-west; Central Asia ; Persia ; the Mahometans of Eastern India and their social state ; the Sivaites and Vishnuvites, the root differences in their theology ; preventive measures against famine; artistic deficiencies of the Indian coinage ; the Bombay revenue system ; the Madras army ; the fort of Govindghur ; Orissa ; best modes of borrowing ; loss by exchange ; gold N 378 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. currency ; the native army ; Indian chaplains ; the guaranteed railways ; prospects of jute and tea; the gauge question ; Afghanistan ; results of the Looshai expedition ; gradual breaking down, but only gradual breaking down, of caste prejudices against visiting England ; the native press ; real opinion of people about British rule ; value of native States ; the income tax ; Assam ; the Mahrattas ; native manufactures ; Thibet and Nepaul ; drainage of Calcutta, and its bearing on disease ; the supply of horses in Eastern and Western India ; aptitude of natives for the judicial career ; character of the people of Travancore ; Chittagong. So, you see, I am not able to say with Chamfort, " Tons les jours j'accrois la liste des clioses dont je ne parle plus," however true it may be that "le plus philosophe est celui dont la liste est la plus longue." Feb. 12th. — But time is inexorable, and Aranjuez is with the past. The Ilongolia threw off from Garden Heach about noon yesterday, glided past the Botanical Gardens, slipped over the terrible quicksands of the James and Mary without adventure or sensa- tion, and w^as five miles below Diamond Harbour when the hour arrived *' clie volcre il disio Ai Daviganti e iutenerisce il cuore Lo di c'lian detto ai dolci amici Addio." Here for some mysterious reason we lay till nearly one o'clock this afternoon, grumbling over CHRISTIANITY AND HINDUISM. 179 the precious hours which we were losing, for nothing, so far as I can see, would have heen easier than to have run down from Calcutta and picked up the 3Iongolia this morning, if we had only known the delay which was in store for us. Feb. 12th. — We are now getting near the Sand- heads. I have observed nothing of that fever- stricken and tigerish look usually described by travellers who pass this way, probably because we have kept pretty far from either bank. To me the mouth of the Hooghly has looked to-day, allowing for the very different sky, much like the mouth of the Elbe. I have been finishing Christicmity in its Melations to Hmclidsm, a most instructive little book by Mr. Robson, a Scotch clergyman, lately a missionary at Ajmere. Nothing can be more manifest, or more admirable, than the way in which the writer tries to do full justice to a system with which he has been ens^aojed in the most bitter strife. The following passage is in accordance with much that I have heard of late from native gentlemen: — '' It was hoped some time ago that railway travelling, and the facilities that now exist for visiting Europe, would soon put an end to caste ; but a system so deeply rooted does not die so quickly or so easily. There did seem not long ago to be a movement against it, but there is now a decided reaction, and caste seems again to be reasserting its superiority. One respectable Babu ia Bengal, a pleader in the High Court, who had been trying for some time to fight against caste, and to promote intermarriages, has found the fight too hard, has undergone expiation, and re- entered into caste. The expense of the ceremony was five thousand rupees (£500), and he had to spend a similar amount in erecting N 2 180 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. a temple of Siva, and feeding the Brahmans, In Bombay, a most respectable native judge, whose son had visited England, was asked by the Bombay Government to go to England at public expense, to give evidence before the Indian Finance Committee of the House of Commons. He, however, declined, assigning as a reason the persecution to which he was subjected by the Brahmans for having received his son into his house on his return from England, and his inability to obtain the sanction of his caste- fellows to his visiting that country. He adds — " ' I therefore think that it would be a farce for me to appear as a witness, and at the expense of the public, when a consider- able and intelligent portion of that public not only disapproves of my doing so, but is sure to persecute me by excommunication, against which no human ingenuity in India has yet devised a remedy, and no law of the land or earthly power can give any protection.' ****** " One other effect of caste I would notice — the gap that it has kept up between the English and the Hindus. Englishmen in this country often reproach their countrymen in India with the antago- nism, the enmity, the total want of sympathy, that seems to exist between them and the natives. It is a sad fact that such a feel- ing does exist, but it is the natives who are responsible for it. It is they who have made friendly social intercourse between the rulers and ruled impossible. Governed as they are by the English, owning their sway, and acknowledging that it is a just one, they yet look down on them as unclean. It is the Hindu who looks on himself as polluted by the touch of an Englishman, who will throw away his food, as unfit for being eaten, if an Englishman comes within a few feet of it while it is being cooked — not the Englishman who looks upon himself as polluted by the touch of a Hindu. This has, no doubt, reacted on the English, and produced in their mind a feeling of dislike and antagonism to the Hindus, but the original blame lies with the latter." Tliere are many pages in the book quite as interesting as the above ; as, for instance — " I have mentioned that a tenth incarnation is looked for, called, in the Puranns, Kalkin. "Who or what this is to be, is not very HINDU TRADITIONS. 181 clearly decided. I would merely notice an idea that seems to have some adherents in India, that the English are this tenth in- carnation of Vishnu.^ I once found this expressed in a part of India where, I believe, no missionary had gone before. "When I was remonstrating with some Hindus on their worshipping a being who had been guilty of such acts as Krishna, one man replied very warmly, * Why, these were but his sports. You English have your sports. You have the railway, and the steamboat, and the tele- graph ; and no one blames you. Why should you blame Krishna for sporting in his way 1 ' " That this idea is held not merely amongst the illiterate, the following quotation from a work by a Hindu, a native of Bombay, will show : — " ' There are traditions in this land which perhaps none has yet attended to with due concern — that the East will be completely changed by a nation from the West ; and the tenth avatar of Vishnu, a man on a white horse, so current among the prophecies of the sacred Brahmanical writings, must be looked on to typify the advent of the English in India. Statesmen vainly look upon the Anglo-Indian empire as an accident — something that will not last long ; and, though events like the mutiny of 1857 frequently give to that expression a significance it can never otherwise bear, the prophecy of the West, '* Japheth shall dwell in the tents of Shem," and the prophecy of the East relating to the tenth incar- nation of Vishnu — a man on a white horse, coming from the West, and destroying everything Brahmanical — render it imperative on. us to accept, however reluctantly, that European supremacy in Asia is one of the permanent conditions of the world.' " Feb. ISth. — Once more in blue water, which I have not seen since the 27th of Novemher, " mais malheureusement les jours se suivent et ne se ressemhlent pas." I have been reading two books on the Durga 1 " But some consider, too, that the English are afraid of this tenth avatar. When vaccination was introduced into the Ajmere district, the report spread that it was a device of the English to discover a new incar- nation of Vishnu, who was to have white blood, and who they feared was to extirpate them from India." 182 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. Puja, tlie cliief national festival of tlie Hindus of Bengal. Here is a portion — not an exceptional portion — of the liturgy used by many millions of our fellow- subjects upon that occasion : — " Am to the forehead, Am to the mouth, Im to the right eye, Im to the left eye, Um to the right ear, Um to the left ear, Em to the right nose, Eni to the left nose, Im to the right cheek, Im to the left cheek, Em to the upper lip. Aim to the lower lip, Om to the upper teeth, Aum to the lower teeth, Am to the cerebrum, Ah to the right shoulder-blade, Kam to the elbow, Kam to the wrist. Gam to the roots of the phalanges, Gham to the phalanges, !N"am to the nails, Cham to the left shoulder- blade, Chham to the left elbow, Jam to the left wrist, Jham to the roots of the left phalanges. Nam to the left nails, Tam to the right heels, Tham to the right kneebone, Dam to the right ankle, Dham to the roots of the phalanges. Lam to the tarsals. Similarly Tam, Tham, Dam, Dham, and Nam to the several parts of the left leg." The author of the two books, who has most learnedly annotated the liturgy from which the above extract is taken, and has written an admir- able essay on the origin of the festival, is a reader of Professor Max Mliller's books, and a B.A. Nothing is stranger in this strange country, and in our relations to it, than the way in which the results of high education and the most abject ignorance lie side by side. I have been looking at the list of books published in Calcutta during the last quarter, as given in the Gazette. Here are a few specimens : — A Brief History of British India. Bengali. — CALCUTTA PUBLICATIONS. 183 India from the advent of the English to the Government of Lord Canning : with a supplement on the financial and judicial administration of tlie country. Bldyd-Bidyd-Biro dhlni ; or, Scie?ice Opposed to Science. Bengali. — Advice to learn one's native language first. The English is considered a very- unsettled tongue. Niradd TJpdkhjdn ; or, A Tale of Niradd. Bengali, — A tale relating to Nirada, the niece of a Bajali in Burrisdl, who sought for her hridegroom a Kulin Brnhmin. In the meanwhile this girl eloped with her lover for Dacca. This tale is intended to induce parents to continue the prac- tice of early marriages. Auguste Comte, the Positivist. Bengali. — Trans- lation of a lecture delivered hy the Hev. K. S. Macdonald at the Canning Institute on the life of Auguste Comte. Artha Byahahar Praslmottar ; or, Questio7is and Answers on the Use of Wealth. Bengali. — On the use of money and wealth ; on exchange, value, capital, and labour ; rich and poor, the extension of wealth ; rent, wages, revenue ; on labourers' co- operation and strikes. Jdnaki Brasanga ; or. Address of Jdnakl or Slid. Bengali. — The reply of Sitd, after rescue from the giant Uawan, to the inquiries made of her by XJrmila, the wife of Lakshman, as to all the circumstances relative to Ceylon and the giant. Christian Hymns. Urdu. 184 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. Madhupo Choutrisd ; or, The Thirty-four Poems of the Black Bee. TJriyd,. — Krislina is compared to tlie black bee ; and bis doings during the Madhu- Jdtrd, are berein cbronicled in verse. The Blays and Foems of William Shakespeare. Vol. I. No. 6 : Comedies. English. Sarhhagydn Ma7ijari ; or, The Blossom of all Knowledge. Bengali and Sanskrit. — The Hanumd,n Charita, the Kak Charita, and the Span dan Charita ; presaging events in life by figures drawn and touched, by the noise of crows, and by the moving and twitching of the facial and other nerves. Feb. Xhth. — It has been, except for the loss of time on the Hooghly, a quite perfect voyage : the sea calm, the weather cool, and the pace excellent. By noon yesterday we were in lat. 15°44', rather south of Masulipatam, but of course far out at sea. When I came up from breakfast this morning, the land was quite close — a long line of wood continued by a long line of white houses, both seen over a sea which had lost its blue tint. Some sixty or seventy ships lay in the oflS.ng, gently heaving in the swell. I thought of Faber's sonnet — *' And marvel not, in these loose drifting times, If anchored spirits, in their blithest motion, Dip to their anchors veiled within the ocean, Catching too staid a measure for their rhymes." Soon the Massullah boats, of which you have read descriptions, were all around us, and the *' FROM SEPOY TO SUBADAR." 185 bronze-coloured natives came climbing up the ship's sides like cats, only to be driven down again by the watchful quartermasters. Now, too, appeared the quaint catamarans, worked through the water at a tremendous rate. I remember reading a whole book upon this part of India, which contained from beginning to end only one thing of the smallest interest — a quotation, namely, from some old writer who mentions having seen distinctly through a glass tAVo black devils playing at single-stick off Madras. What he had really seen was one of these most remarkable of all vessels. By ten we were on shore, where I am now writing. There was so little sea on, that we were able to land from the Master- Attendant's boat at the pier, and did not cross the surf at al], of which, for that matter, there was very little. I got through a good deal of reading on board. Nothing interested me more than a pamphlet given me by General B which I have been keeping against a quiet hour. It is entitled. From Sepoy to Subadar, and is a translation by Colonel Nor- gate, whom we saw at Sealkcte, of the autobio- graphy of a Sepoy belonging to the Bengal army. If any of you had a special interest in India, I would most strongly advise you to read it, for it bristles with curious and instructive passages. As things are, I will only quote two, the one of a comic, and the other of a terribly tragic character. The first is a description of the author's first 186 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. visit to his future commanding officer wlien he came to camp as a lad from his village in Oudh with his uncle, an old Sepoy : — *' After bathing, and eating the morning meal, he dressed in his full regimentals, and went to pay his respects to the Adjutant Saheb, and commanding officer. He took me with him. I rather dreaded this, as I had never yet seen a saheb, and imagined they were terrible to look on, and of great stature. I thought, at least, seven feet high. In those days there were but few sahebs in Oude ; only one or two as saheb residents in. Lucknow, where I had never been. In the villages in my country, most curious ideas existed about them ; any one who had chanced to see a saheb told the most absurd stories of them. In fact, nothing then could be said that would not have been believed. It was reported that they were born from an egg which grew on a tree. This idea still exists in remote villages. Had a mem saheb ^ come suddenly into some of our villages, if she was young and handsome she would have been considered as a kind of fairy, and probably have been worshipped ; but should the mem saheb have been old and ugly, the whole village would have run away, and have hid in the jungle, considering the apparition as a yaddo gurin (a witch). Therefore, my dread of seeing a saheb for the first time in my life is not to be wondered at. I remember, when I was at a mela (fair) at the Taj Mahal, at Agra, hearing the opinion of some country people, who had come from afar off to see the Taj, about the saheb log. An old woman said she had always been told they were born from eggs, which came on a tree, in a far-off island, but that morning she had seen a saheb with a 2>uri by his side, who, she declared, was covered with feathers of the most beautiful colours ; that her face was as white as milk, and that the saheb had to keep his hand on her shoulders to prevent her flying away ! This she had seen with her own eyes, and it was all true. I am not so ignorant as all this now, but at the time I first came to Agra I should have believed it. I afterwards ' frequently saw this saheb driving his lady about, and she wore a tippet made of peacock's feathers, which the old woman thought were wings.' " ^ English lady. AN EPISODE OF THE MUTINY. 187 The other is an episode of the mutiny : — " One day, in one of the inclosed buildings near Lucknow, a great number of prisoners were taken, nearly all Sepoys. After the fight, they were all brought in to the oificer commanding my regiment, and in the morning the order came that they should all be shot. It chanced that it was my turn to command the firing- party. I asked the prisoners their names and regiment. After hearing some five or six, one Sepoy said he belonged to the regiment, which was that my son had been in. I of course asked him if he had known my son, Anuntee Earn, of the Light Com- pany. He answered that that was his own name ; but this being a very common name, and having always imagined that my son, as I had never heard from him, must have died of the Scinde fever, it did not at first strike me; but when he informed me he came from Tillowee, my- heart leapt in my mouth. Could he be my son 1 There was no doubt of it, for he gave my name as his father, and he fell down at my feet, imploring my pardon. He, with all the other men in the regiment, had mutinied, and had gone to Lucknow, Once the deed was done, what was he to do ? Where was he to go, if he had ever been inclined to escape ? At four o'clock in the day the prisoners were all to be shot, and I must be my son's executioner ! Such is fate ! I went to the Major Saheb, and requested I might be relieved from this duty as a very great favour ; but he was very angry, and said he should bring me to a court-martial for trying to shirk my duty ; he would not believe I was a faithful servant of the English Government — he was sure my heart was in reality with the mutineers — he would hear me no longer. At last my feelings as a father got the better of me, and I burst into a flood of tears. I told him I would shoot every one of the prisoners with my own hands if he ordered me, but I confessed that one of them was my son. The major declared what I urged was only an excuse to get off shooting my own brotherhood. But at last his heart seemed touched, and he ordered my unhappy son to be brought before him, and ques- tioned him very strictly. I shall never forget this terrible scene ; for one moment I never thought of asking his life to be spared — that he did not deserve. He became convinced of the truth of my statement, and ordered me to be relieved from this duty. I went to my tent, bowed down with grief, made worse by the gibes 188 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. and taunts poured on me by the Sikhs, wlio declared I was a renegade. In a short time I heard the deadly volley. My son had received the reward of mutiny ! He showed no fear, but I would rather he had been killed in fight. Through the kindness of the major I was allowed to perform the funeral rite over my misguided son — the only one of the prisoners over whom it was performed, for the remaining bodies were all thrown to the jackals and vultures. I had not heard from my son since just after my return from slavery. I had not seen him since I went to Cabool, and thus I met him again, untrue to his salt, in open rebellion against the master who had fed his father and himself Bat enough — more is unnecessary. He was not the only one who mutinied [literally he was not alone when he mutinied]. The major told me afterwards that he was much blamed by the other officers for allowing the funeral rite to be performed on a rebel. But if good deeds wipe away sins — which I have heard some Sahebs believe as well as we do — his sins will be very white. Bad fortune never attends on the merciful. May my major soon be- come a general ! " Our steamer was some hours before its time, but one of Lord Hobart's aides-de-camp soon appeared, and we drove off to Guindy, which is some nine miles from the landing-place. Our way lay first along the shore, and made me think of the very sensible answer made to me by P , when I was talking about going to India. " Go," he said, " for God's sake. If you only spend twelve hours on the beach at Madras, it will be a great deal better than nothing." Thence we drove on, passing Port St. George, the cathedral, and other buildings, observing the huge " Compounds " which make the distances of Madras more tremendous even than those of other Indian cities, admiring the brilliant yellow flowers MADRAS. 189 of the Thespesia populnea^ which is planted in avenues, and crossing two rivers — one of which, the Adiar, is rather pretty. Arrived at Guindy, I found many familiar faces gathered in the bright airy rooms, and had many questions to answer about some of you. Here, in India, for the first time since I left Parell, do I see the Punkah at work. It is the " cool season," but the sun does not leave us in any doubt as to whether we are in the Tropics. Life, I can see at a glance, is arranged in every way much more for a hot climate than in Calcutta. It was the Mohurrum festival, and we drove into the town this evening to see some masquing at the quarters of the body-guard. There was dancing, and sword-play, and music intermingled with songs, in honour of Hassan and Hoossein, the heroes of the day. Very striking was the scene, as we looked out from the brilliantly- lighted tent, past the long lines of gaily-dressed actors or spectators, into the purple darkness. * * « « * The drive back was charmingly cool, and the trees by the wayside were full of fireflies. I did not meet with these from the time I left Matheran till I saw them floating about like flakes of light in the pleasant garden of Belvedere, but they were to-night to be counted by thousands, and seemed to prefer the topmost twigs, round which they hovered in a dazzling cloud. 190 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. Late at night, after the guests had departed, I walked about on the terrace. The Southern Cross was just coming up above the horizon, and the far more beautiful Palse Cross was high in heaven. There was a very fair telescope on the steps which lead down to the garden, through which I saw, for the first time, Jupiter's satellites. Feb. Wth. — We drove in the morning to St. Thomas's Mount, where my grandfather lived long. I am glad, by the way, to observe that the Materia Indica keeps its place, in spite of all changes. Colonel Drury quotes it at almost every second page. The Mount is a rising ground, said, I see in Murray's handbook, to be composed of green- stone and syenite. Its elevation is very small, but springing out of the dead level plain it looks more considerable than it is. A flight of steps — once, I suppose, a Yia Crucis — leads to a little chapel at the top, which belongs, I am told, to that strange link between the East and West, the Catholic Armenians. I observed the tomb of a lady born at Julfa, near Ispahan. Here I took an opportunity of going over one of the much-talked-of double- storey ed barracks, and of comparing it with the single- storeyed barracks which some persons prefer. I walked, too, through the artillery lines and batteries, seeing all their arrangements, under the guidance of a most intelligent officer. In the afternoon, I went to visit the Agri- THE AGRI-HORTICULTURAL GARDENS. 191 Horticultural Gardens, where I came to know the Parkia, a beautiful American tree of the acacia family ; saw far tlie finest baobab I have yet seen ; met again with the curious Crescentia cujete^ the calabash tree, which I had learned to distinguish at Barrackpore ; came to know the Nux vomica, and learned that odd habit of the sandalwood, which makes it delight to grow up from a seedling in the midst of another tree. The director of the museum, into which we had meant to look, was not at home, so we drove on to the observatory, where I made the acquaintance of Mr. Pogson, who, long known in the scientific world, became famous far beyond its bounds by the accident of an astronomer in Gottingen having telegraphed to him a year or two ago to look for a missing comet in a particular portion of the heavens, which led to his discovering the wanderer. Mr. Pogson presented me to his daughter, one of the few ladies, I suppose, in the world who are employed in a high scientific capacity by any government, and conducted me over a large part of his dominions, explaining requirements and other matters of business, besides showing me much that was scientifically interesting. Then we went upstairs, and I saw, at length, the moon through a powerful telescope, learning thereby to appreciate the excellence of Mr. Nasmyth's photographs. I saw, too, the Nebula in Orion, and Sirius, called by the wise Alph Can Maj ! 192 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. My friend of the Ued Sea, Canopus, was in great beauty, and fj, Argi was pointed out to me, whicli offers to the observer the strange spectacle of a world on fire. Feb. 17th. — Hours are early in this climate, and by half-past six this morning I was with Z in the gardens, which are far the most extensive I have seen in India. A soft mist lay over the whole country, and every leaf was glistening with water-drops. In the course of a long and pleasant wandering, I saw the bread-fruit tree, the Dillenia speciosa, the Cerhera Odollam, the Tetrcea^ and several other plants. The Beaumontia was in great splendour, and here I saw, for the first time, the beautiful little honey- bird, who was basily engaged in having his break- fast. These exquisite creatures are very easily tamed, and are kept as pets. When I had seen enough of the gardens, Z drove me round the park, which is curiously like the Chace at Aldermaston — the banian, very numerous here, doing duty for the oak. The park is almost six miles round, and has many pretty retired nooks, with water lying amidst tangled thickets. The antelopes allowed the pony- carriage to come quite close, and then bounded off, rather to display their agility, I think, than from any feeling of fear. After breakfast came a morning of visits and conversations, with the Chief Justice, the members AN INDIAN FLOWER SHOW. 193 of Council, and some native gentlemen, all agree- able and instructive. In the afternoon Ave drove into Madras, walked over Government House, saw the fort, the site of the 2^roposed harbour, the arsenal, with the keys of Pondicherry, and many other things. The same light airs continue, and there was no surf to speak of. At night there Avas a large gathering of natives, with most of whom I had some talk. Feb. l^th. — I spent the hours from half-past six to half-past nine in the Agri-Horticultural Gardens, where there was a flower-show, and to-day, at last, I saw the Butea frondosa^ covered with its scarlet flowers. The show would have been, taken as a whole, good in most English towns, and the foliage plants would have been thought excellent, as I conceive, anywhere. The first prize for these was gained by a native of rank, who had gone to great expense, and taken an immense amount of personal trouble, in forming and superintending his collection. I Avas naturally most interested by the ordinary produce of the country, by the various grains grown on the Government farm at Sydapet, by the tea from the Neilgherries, by the dyes and gums, fruits and vegetables. I tasted the rose-apple, Jamhosa vulgaris, which I liked extremely, and which seems peculiarly well adapted for being pre- served as they preserve fruits in the south of Prance. The Sapota I thought admirable, like a glorified medlar. 19Ji NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. I should like to have seen a little more of Madras, but my days in India are numbered. As it was, however, I met all the people at the head of the Government except the Commander-in- Chief, who is away in Burmah, and the quiet of Guindy ^ afforded ample opportunity for long talks. Feb. 19th. — I started yesterday evening, and found myself at Erode early this morning. The last place I observed was the station for Arcot, famous in the chequered history of Sepoy fidelity, and once or twice in the night a bright moon showed me that I was running through a picturesque and mountainous country. From Erode I went in about six hours to Tanjore, passing through a great plain in which rice is largely cultivated, and where the aloe and the prickly-pear — both, I presume, Portuguese intro- ductions — give a quite 23eculiar character to the landscape. Most of the rice, unbappily, has been ^ Six months have not passed away, and all the company of friends who made Guindy so pleasant to me are scattered to the winds. Lord Hobart has gone, leaving behind him the reputation of a Governor, who, at first unpopular, gradually won the esteem of all whose esteem was worth having, by steady devotion to the best interests of the millions over whom he was set to rule, as he understood those interests. I had known him for many years before his appointment, by the Duke of Argyll, to the Governorship of Madras, brought us into official relations, and no one could know him for many years without being struck by the solidity of bis character, and by the fact that he brought to the management of public affairs a far more abiding sense of duty, and a mind far less easily satisfied wdth plausibilities, than many men who impress their acquaintance and the public far more deeply. His brother, Frederick Hobart, whose worth I had learned to know at the India Office, and who was staying at Guindy in bad health when I was there, lived to come home, but is also now no more. "In pace requiescant." — Hampden, August 9, 1875. TANJORE AND ITS MANUFACTURES. 1V)5 lately reaped, but there is a good deal of a second crop upon the ground, and this is enchantingly green. The temperature is very high, and it well may be, considering we are already far on in Eebruary, and within eleven degrees of the equator. I reached Tanjore soon after twelve o'clock, and had a most friendly reception on the part as well of the princess and her family, as of our own officials. The afternoon passed in conversing with our host, Mr. Thomas, the collector, well known not only as a man of business, but as a naturalist and sportsman, who told me a great deal that was novel and valuable. We spent a good deal of time also in looking over some of the manufactures of Tanjore and Madura. I could see no good pottery, and no good carpets, though I have reason to believe that excellent specimens of both are produced in this neighbourhood. The Madura copper-work, inlaid with silver, is handsome, but to my eye not .very attractive. The silk fabrics, on the other hand, pleased me extremely, and I bought several specimens. AVhen it began to get a little cool, we drove to the Great Temple, which is really a noble thing. You will find it figured and described in Fergus- son ; so it will probably be enough if I say that the general efi'ect is not less imposing, though very different from that of Edfou or Denderah. The o 2 196 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. temples of Benares filled me with something nearly akin to disgust, but this is very different. The famous black bull is a grand beast, of Egyptian proportions and benignity. If only they did not think it necessary to propitiate him with oil ! Still, after the horrors of the holy city on the Ganges, everything here looked comparatively clean and dignified. We lingered long amongst the courts of this splendid temple, learning the uses of its differ- ent parts, and strolled a little in the till lately neglected garden, which is gradually being put into order by the local British providence. The lovely Clltorea teniata was growing wild, as mercury might be doing in such a place at home. From the temple we drove through the town, which was full of richly carved idol cars, and went out to a picturesque bridge over the Cauvery. The country through which we passed was well wooded, but a little way off the wood ceases, and there is one unbroken rice- field down to the sea. It is this vast breadth of irrigated land which makes the Tanjore district one of the most fertile and valuable in India. I was pleased to hear that some of the natives here have lately applied to the Sydapet farm for the assistance of a trained agri- culturist, which will, I hope, soon be given them. Amongst others whom I met at dinner to-night was the distinguished scholar, Dr. Burnell, who is judge here, and who told me an infinity of in- teresting things. TRICHINOPOLY. 197 After dinner the princess had arranged a nautch for us, and some very good fireworks, but they were not different from those I have described elsewhere. Feb. 20th. — This morning we walked over the palace, visited the senior widow of the late prince, and then went to pay our respects to the princess, with whom we conversed through the silken purdah, or curtain, and whose very pleasant voice made us wish that that silly piece of etiquette might be abandoned. The palace is large, with some fine features, and commands a good view over the city, whose roofs, unlike those we had become familiar with in northern India, were not flat, but pointed. There were an arsenal now empty of weapons, many rich dresses, a most valuable Sanskrit library, and not a few creatures in the nature of pets, to be inspected. Amongst these last I observed parti- cularly the Indian fox, a lovely little animal, so fleet that foxhounds have no chance with it. Trichinopoly, Feb. 20th. — We left Tanjore about eleven o'clock, and came to this famous spot, where we are staying with the judge, Mr. Webster, who has just been showing us the Great Temple of Seringham, an enormous place, much larger than that of Tanjore, and affording within its huge precincts accommodation to a perfect host of Brahmans, and others more or less closely con- nected with the sanctuary — by no means to the advantage of its beauty or impressiveness. We 198 NOTES OF AN INDIAN J0U31NEY. wandered about it in all directions, accompanied by the managers, over roofs, through courts, and right up to the top of one of the gopuras or gate- ways (turn to Fergusson), from which there was a quite admirable view, nortlnvards toward the mountains which bound the plain of Trichinopoly, eastward along the great irrigated level, and west- ward to the source of all its prosperity, the huge irrigation dam on the Cauvery. You should have seen us sitting in a bower wholly woven out of white oleander and jasmine, inspecting the trea- sares of the temple — pearl and ruby, diamond and emerald, worked into many hideous shapes, while a nautcli of the usual dreary kind droned its slow length along, and half the population surged round in a noisy, more than half-naked crowd. I have rarely assisted at so strange a perform- ance. The great Hindu sect of the Vishnuvites is, in this part of India, divided into two parties — " the men of the south" and "the men of the north." The " men of the south " wear the symbolical trident on their foreheads, but they produce the end of it to a point about half-way down the nose, while the "men of the north " cut it short between the eye- brows. The Great Temple of Serin gh am is in the hands of the " men of the south," but the " northerners " have the right of worshipping there in a quiet way — though they must by no means carry about the objects of their worship in proces- sion. Tlie great majority of the croAvd accordingly AN INDIAN BATTLE-FIELD. 199 had the trident far down the nose, but here and there appeared some heterodox person who was so much left to himself as to omit the last inch. Those who have sailed, as you have, between Tentyra and Ombos,^ will not be surprised to learn that a serious riot amongst these religionists is one of the agreeable possibilities which is always im- pending over Trichinopoly. Feb. 22nd. — I continue my diary, which I left off in burning Trichinopoly, by a good fire some 7,500 feet above the sea-level, in Ootacamund, which we reached an hour or two ago. Before leaving Trichinopoly we climbed its historic rock, and looked down on those fields where the question of French or English supremacy in the Grandes Indes was so fiercely debated. Clive's house still stands much as it did in his day, but the walls of the town, and most of the fort, are entirely destroyed. On the way down there were pagodas to visit, and a chapel under the manage- ment of a Sudra, or low- caste priest, of great sanctity, prodigiously long hair, and unusual clean- liness. We* turned aside to see some relatives of the Sankara Acharya designate, the representative of the great philosopher and religious teacher of that name, and a personage so holy that, as I have been told, some of the greatest of Indian princes would not think of sitting down in his presence — a sort of small pope in fact, who has been lording it in this planet for a great many hundred years, ' Juv. Sat. x\ . 200 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. although few persons in England have ever heard his name. It was in this circle, and only here, that I heard Teloogoo spoken ; a pleasant-sounding language, much more agreeahle to the ear than Tamil, which is the speech of this neighhourhood, as Teloogoo is in the north-east of the Presidency. Both of them belong to the Dravidian group of tongues. I must not leave the E.ock of Trichinopoly with- out chronicling my having half-way up it made the acquaintance of the Giiettarcla speciosa, one of the most delicious of perfume plants. Near the top of it, too, I met with another natural product Avliich filled me with astonishment — a deep chasm, exactly like those which one sees by the dozen along the Banffshire coast. I can hardly doubt that, at a geological period comparatively recent, a furious sea beat from the westward upon this hoary rock, which has had time since that to become the Acro-Corinth of this corner of the universe. Some hideous jewellery was brought us to in- spect, as unlike as possible to the lovely Trichin- opoly work of two generations back, but not a single specimen of the inlaid copper, nor of the silks, both said to be good, could be discovered. It was the old story— they could be made to order, but were not kept in stock. There was little to interest between Trichinopoly and Pothanoor, from which place to Coimbatore I had the society of Mr. and Mrs. G , who had kindly come over to meet me. Thence we pushed COONOOR. 201 on to Metapolliam, Avheiice we crossed the danger- ous but beautiful jungle which extends to the foot of the Neilgherries or Blue Mountains. It was one great thicket of cocoa palms, plantain, bamboo, and Biitea frondosa^ attended by numbers of low- growing plants, and matted together in many- places by creepers, yellow and red, blue and purple. After six miles we came to the foot of the pass, where we mounted our ponies, and by nine miles of riding reached Coonoor. The vicAVs looking back over the plains were delightful, the noise of running water in the fierce heat was most sooth- ing, and the wdiole road was one long botanical debauch. Arrived at Coonoor, about 6,000 feet above the sea, we were met by the acting Commissioner, and an officer of Engineers who has lately been making a plan for a railway up these hills, both of whom told us much as we rambled about along hedges of heliotrope growing six feet high. At Coonoor we exchanged our ponies for carriages, and came on twelve miles to this place, along a road of which three Australian trees, Acacia rohusta, Acacia dealbata, and Eucalyptus globulus, have taken complete possession. Near Coonoor, European forms began to meet the eye, a lluhus, either the same as or close to Fruticosus, Berberis Aslatica, very near that of the Alps, and the common bracken (Fteris aquilina). To-day too, in addition to the coffee, which I never before saw, except at Kew, and a tree-fern, I 202 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOTJRNEY. gathered Acacia cinerea, Acacia speclosa, Stro- hilanthus Neilgiriensis, Indigofera ccerulea, Hyperi- cum Hooker ianum, Sida Indica, Lobelia excelsa, Clematis Wightlana, Osbeckia Wightiana, Indigo- fera pulcherrima, Senecio TVightiana, Strobilanthiis Wiglitianus, Lantana grandiflora, &c., &c. Some people have imagined that the hlue flowers of the Strobilanthus gave to the hills on which they grow so abundantly the name which distinguishes them ; hut this is a mere latter day refinement. Feb. 23rd — This morning, under the influence of our evil star, we determined to go to Marcoorti peak, which lies about seventeen miles oflp, and is 8,400 feet high. We ordered our horses for half- past six; but, alas! fate was against us. One thing after another went wrong, and we did not get off till nearly nine. At length we did start, and rode across a country which was as bare as the Wiltshire Downs near Glory Ann and Marlborough. Here and there in the hollows Avere little jungles, Sholas as they are called, which look at a distance exactly like Velvet Lawn seen from above, only instead of the twenty feet boxes you have here the tree rhododendron, the Rhodomyrtus, an arborescent Vaccinium, a most lovely Mahonia, a Hedyotis, and other out- landish plants. After some hours the path got too rugged. We tied our horses to trees till their grooms should arrive, and struggled up to the Horn as it would be called in Switzerland. MARCOORTI PEAK. 203 Here is, according to Murray, what we ought to have seen : — " The -west side of the mountain is a terrific and perfectly- perpendicular precipice of at least ^ 7,000 feet. The mountain seems to have been cut sheer through the centre, leaving not the sliglitest shelf or ledge between the pinnacle on which the travel- ler stands and the level of the plains below. To add to the terror of this sublime view, the spot on which the gazer places his feet is a mouldering precipice, the ground being so unstable that, with a touch, large masses are hurled doAvn the prodigious height into the barrier forest at the foot of the hills, which looks at a distance like mo.os." What we did see was a mass of clouds which blew over the lip of the mountains in a fine mist. Now and then it lifted just enough to let us look a few hundred feet down, but that was all. I need not say that the fall is not perpendicular. Per- pendicular precipices of the height mentioned in the above quotation are very rare things, if in- deed they exist. In the whole range of the Alps, Mrs. Somerville says, there is not one above 1,600 feet. I should fancy that this precipice might be about as steep as the fall of Croghan on the outside of Achill towards the Atlantic, and should like much to have had it as a companion picture to that very memorable view. I found the tree rhododendron growing quite close to the top. A bright yellow AnapliaUs waved in the wind just over the brink, and might well have tempted an incautious botanist to break his neck. 1 Qy. 4,000 ? — " Make it less, gossip, and you shall have the grey- hound," as the Spaniard says. 204i NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. We waited to give the weatlier time to reconsider itself, but in vain, and then slowly descended, mourning, as we went, over the loss of some very precious hours, and crossing great tracts of hill- side over which a fire had just passed — the wasteful custom of burning the surface with a view to ob- tain a good bite of grass being in full force here. At the half-way house a number of Todas-men, women, and children — were drawn up for our inspection, and we met many more in the course of the day. I quite understand what people mean when they fancy they see traces of Homan or Jewish origin in these people. A fine Koman, rather Antoninic type is not uncommon among them. One decidedly handsome girl was unlike any one I ever saw, with long black straight hair, grave regular features, and splendidly white teeth. I suppose there are such faces in Italy, but I do not remember any. Prom the half-way house I rode home with a forest ofiicer, a cheery, pleasant companion, and the sun had hardly set when we were once more among the Scotch whins and Prench immortelles which, having run wild, form such conspicuous features in the scenery of Ootacamund at this season. Feb. 24rove ivhether this liberal experiment on the x>o.rt of the authorities of the East India Company will he attended with any lasting good effect to the governor or to the governed" I shall supplement this by some extracts from a very remarkable article called " Satara and British Connection therewith," which appeared in the Cal- cutta Review just thirty years ago : — "When Grant Duff assumed the government of the districts which were to form the future kingdom of Satara, ever;ything was in disorder, and many important branches of the administration had not so much to be re-modelled as created. Where former precedents might be safely followed, he seems to have set before himself the practice of the best rulers in the best times, and 224 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. steadily to have worked on this model, regardless alike of more faultless theories or the vicious customs of later years. Where the altered state of affairs rendered it necessary to lay down new rules, he legislated with the enlightened views of a statesman, who, with his eyes fixed on some lofty object of distant attainment, never forgot the nature and characteristic defects of the instruments with which it was to be acquired. " He had to organise the Durbar of a prince nursed in ideas of his own importance as extravagant as those of an emperor at Pekin, and used to means and powers as narrow as those of a king of strolling players. The great nobles were used to none but nominal and theoretical fealty : those of inferior rank were some of them rustic mountain chiefs, and others broken down denizens of the dissipated courts at Poona or Gwalior ; while the few who had been faithful adherents of the royal family in its de- basement, were ill fitted by early training to fill their old places about their prince when trusted with real powers and responsi- bilities. "To introduce due subordination among such discordant ele- ments — to assign to each his appropriate place, and to enforce the performance of duties under an entirely new regime — would of themselves have demanded a rare union of personal weight of character with the power of appreciating and attending to petty and apparently nnimportant details. Many men would have con- sidered the subject as either beneath their notice, or as likely to be best arranged if left entirely to the Eaja and his courtiers ; but Grant Duff judged otherwise ; and to this day the organis^ation of the court, the laws of precedence, the duties of the various officers, the amount and mode of disbursing and checking every branch of the expenses of the Eaja's household, down to the minu- test item, are regulated on the rules he laid down ; and the judgment with which this was done is shown by the result. The Durbar has always been reckoned, by competent judges, one of the most orderly native courts in India, and one of the very few which, for thirty years, have never been involved in any pecuniary difficulties, either as regarded the public or private treasury of the sovereign, and we have been assured that the order and regularity of all disbursements of the household more resembled that of an English nobleman than of a Mahratta Eaja. " There is probably no other portion of the teri-itory conquered LAND TENURES. 225 from the Peisliwa, except Satara, in which the revenue settle- ment made at the first conquest is still unchanged, or free from glaring defects which call loudly for reform, In all this portion of Grant Duff's arrangements, we trace the same proof of practical shrewdness and sagacity, and of power to adapt his measures to the cu'cumstances with which he had to deal, which distinguished his proceedings in other branches of administration. "His antiquarian researches might well have tempted him, as they have so often tempted others, to recall land tenures to what he might imagine them to have been in the time of Manu. Or eco- nomical theories, true enough on the banks of the Thames or the Forth, might have led him astray with a still larger section of our Indian administrators into hasty perpetual settlements, attempts to create a race of landlords, or other fiscal experiments, captivating in theory, but as little adapted to the tenures and customs of the country as an English farmer's top-boots and great-coat are to the person of the Dekhan Eyot. And there was yet a third and still more dangerous error, of which many instances might be cited elsewhere, that of continuing, as sanctioned by the custom of the country, the system of universal farming to the highest bidder, and consequently of equally universal rack-renting, oppression and misery, which had long prevailed everywhere under the Peishwa's government, "Into none of these errors did Grant Duff fall. He appears to have diligently inquired into the characteristics of the land revenue settlements in the best times within the memory of man ; to have discovered where, and when, and why the Eyots ^were most prosperous, and the revenue most flourishing ; and wherever he discovered the traces of a tenure sanctioned by both the usage of the country and the practice of the best native rulers, he did his best to restore, define, and render it as permanent as detailed records could make it. " Here, as in almost every other portion of the Peishwa's dominions, the necessity of a systematic survey was early appa- rent ; and survey operations were commenced almost as soon as the permanent tranquillity of the country was secured, and a regular scheme of government organised. In almost every other district of our acquisitions from the Mahrattas, these early sur- veys have proved useless, or worse than useless. In Satara alone, the survey conducted by Captain Adams, of the Bombay Q 226 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. army, under the instructions of Grant Daif, is still the standard authority on all pjints to which it was originally intended that it should apply. ******* "In Satara alone, the practical good sen?e of Grant Duff saved the survey from such a lamentable failure. He saw that no practical good was likely to result from the attempt to enforce uniformity of system where custom had sanctioned differences of tenure, or where local peculiarities were observable in the charac- ter of the country or its population. He knew that it was vain to attempt regulating the demand of a landlord (which was the position in which Government stood throughout the Mahratta territory) by any invariable standard, applicable alike to the fertile or the barren district — to a population of cultivators, wealthy, in- dustrious, and intelligent, and to one poor, apathetic, and ignorant. He saw that almost the only pressing practical want which a sur- vey could at that period supply was the deficiency or incomplete- ness of records of measurement, and other tangible elements of forming a settlement ; and he consequently directed the chief atten- tion of his survey officers to these objects. Boundaries of villages and fields were ascertained and marked : the superficial extent of lands, especially those which claimed to be rent-free, was measured ; and of all these particulars careful and intelligible records were preserved. " In forming his assessments, instead of nice estimates of gross and net produce, grounded on elements so varying and uncertain as almost to defy calculation, Grant Dufi" proceeded much as any practical and humane man would on succeeding to an estate of whose resources he had little certain knowledge and few trust- worthy records. He ascertained, as nearly as he could, what his tenants had actually paid in former years; he judged for himself, from the appearance of the people, their villages and lands, facility and uniformity of collections, and other obvious marks of pros- perity or poverty, whether the demand had borne hard on them or otherwise — whether he should listen to the clamour of the cultivators for abatement, or to the invariable advice of his native subordinates to enhance his assessments ; and having thus settled, on plain common-sense data, what he thought the cultivators could afford to pay, and yet thrive on the remainder, he troubled himself little with inquiring whether the Institutes of Manu sanctioned INDIAN POLICE. 227 a tax of the fifth or a tenth of the produce, or with calculations as to whether his demand were one-third of the gross, or half of the net produce of the soil. If he found that the assessments thus settled were paid in an ordinary season without difficulty, he fixed them permanently as the extreme limit of the Government demand. If otherwise, he reduced them, acting invariably on the golden rule that, where perfect accuracy is unattainable, it is best to err on the side of moderation. "The surveys conducted by Grant Duff in Satara have no pre- tensions to the completeness of these later operations in any one particular, but they still preserve their original character of perfect practical adaptation to the purpose to which they were designed ; and an appeal to ' Adams Sahib's survey,' or * Grant Sahib's settle- ments,' is, to this day, ' an end of all strife ' on any point to which they relate. "Similar principles seem to have guided, and equal success attended, the arrangements made by Grant Duff for the police of this tract of country. In the report on the territories conquered from the Peishwa, by the Honourable Mountstuart Elphinstone, will be found a graphic sketch of the Mahratta system of police, as he found it on the conquest of the country. He points out its excellences and defects, and indicates, in almost prophetic terms, the points in which any system we might introduce would be likely to fail. Our limits forbid our making any extract ; but we would recommend to any devoted admirer of the superior excellence of our own police,^ and to any one who is puzzled to account for the continued prevalence of violent crime in our oldest settled district^, a perusal of Mr. Elphinstone's pregnant remarks on the subjrct, which, like all he wrote, had an application far more extended than the particular case under discussion. " It is sufficient to say of the system of police established by Grant Duff, and maintained to the present day, that, whilst most of the faults of the old Mahratta administration were lessened, if not entirely removed, its characteristic excellences were preserved. This is not the place for entering into lengthened details ; but to those who have seen the native system in operation in a well- governed native State, much will be conveyed in the remark, that ^ As it was in 184.5. Q, 2 228 NOTES OE AN INDIAN JOURNEY. Satara is probably the only part of tbe Dekban where the ancient village police, with its powers and responsibilities, has been kept lip unimpaired. "The result justifies the opinion of IMr. Elphinstone and the measures of his assistant. Notwithstanding the local difficulties arising from the strength of the country and the existence of large communities of Eamusis and other semi-barbarous and predatory tribes — difficulties greater, probably, than in any part of the Peishwa's dominions, Candeish excepted — there is no portion of those dominions which has enjoyed such complete immunity from anything approaching systematic resistance to government, or where person and property are so secure from violent crime. Eebellion has been raging on the very border, in Kolapur, Sawunt Warri, and the Southern Mahratta country to the south ; and something closely approaching rebellion has been repeatedly experienced in the presence of organised bands of plunderers under Yomaji, Ea- goji Bangria, and other robber-chiefs of local fame in the Puna and Nuggur districts to the north, where, sometimes for months to- gether, they have levied black mail unresisted by the inhabitants, and successfully eluded a large police force and considerable bodies of troops of the line. But the Satara districts have for thirty years enjoyed the most perfect immunity from disturbance of any kind ; and in no case has any rebel or freebooter been fairly proved to have taken refuge in the Satara territory without the certainty of his being speedily seized and surrendered to his own Govern- ment for punishment. " Our remarks on the system of revenue and police administra- tion adopted by Grant Duff have detained us so long that we have no time to describe the courts of civil and criminal justice which he organised, or the simple and comprehensive regulations which he drew up to guide judicial officers in the administration of jus- tice. Neither have we space to enumerate the internal improve- ments — the roads and bridges, the aqueducts, and other public works, which he either executed, or planned and left to be com- pleted by the Eaja under the advice of his active and public- spirited successor. Still less can we detail his judicious measures to rescue the finest of the ancient buildings at Bijapur from in- evitable destruction, or his antiquarian and historical researches of which he has left an ample and enduring monument in his admir- able ' History of the Mahrattas.' But the immediate object of SATARA. 229 the present article requires that we shouLl not altogether pass over in silence the constant attention he paid to the training of his royal pupil. It was his constant practice while he held the reins of government to associate the Eaja and his brothers with him in the transaction of all public business, pointing out to them the reason of all that was done, and explaining to them and interesting them in all his plans of public improvement, in this, as in all other matters, sparing no pains, and omitting no personal sacri- fice by which he might ensure the future good government of the country when he himself should be far from the scene of his labours. " Such, in brief outline, was the admirable system of govern- ment planned and matured by Grant Duff. Having entrusted his royal pupil with the direct management of the country in 1822, he returned to his native land in the early part of the following year, A quarter of a century has since passed away, but the name of Grant Sahib is still familiar as a household word in every hut and hamlet of the country." This is a long extract, but it will be interesting to you for obvious reasons, and I dare say it might interest many people who never heard my father's name or mine, because he was only one of many, and much the same story might be told of others. During his five years at Satara he not only did what I have related, but likewise collected the materials for, and wrote much of, liis " History of the 3Ialirattas ;^^ but that kind of high pressure defeats itself; and in the beginning of January, 1823, he left India with his health utterly shat- tered ; nor, though he lived to be an old man, was he ever afterwards other than an invalid. I should like to have seen what traditions, if any, about him linger in the country now that the quar- ter of a century of which the reviewer speaks has 230 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. turned into fifty-five years, and since the Satara Raj has been swept into the same nothingness as that of the PeisliAva. Our friendly host, however, held an acting appointment, and had only been at Satara itself for about a fortnight, — his experience which is very large, having been gathered in other parts of the Presidency. I slept little, but there was no time to be lost, and a hot climb soon took us to the top of the Eort of Satara. I had with me a sketch map made the day after it surrendered to the British arms in Fe- bruary, 1818, which enabled me to see the changes of recent times, and likewise to identify the spot where Aurungzebe's great assault was made. He lost 2,000 men by the faulty construction of a single mine. Below the ascent lies the town, chiefly of grey one-storeyed houses. Huge masses of black rock hang on the declivity, some of them perhaps the very blocks which were hurled down on the advan- cing legions of the Mogul. It is the hot season here (March and April being about the warmest months in this part of the Deccan), and almost everything was burnt up, but they tell me that in the rains, and just after them, the ferns are particularly beautiful. One of the few flowering plants which caught my eye, as I ascended, was an orange- coloured Lcmtana. From the summit one has the usual Mahrattaview — long lines of flat- topped hills, with here and there a higher l)it, the suggestion of a hill fort. Close to Satara is another of these SATARA. 231 eyries called Yutesliwur, an ugly place to tackle, but whose fame has been eclipsed by its mighty neighbour. In the course of the day Bhowanee (Sivajee's sword) came to visit me. She is a fine Genoa blade of great length and fine temper. I say slie, for to this day she is treated in all respects, not as a thing but as a goddess, and receives adoration. With her came other interesting objects, among them the two Wagnucks which her illustrious owner used on a critical occasion. My father makes him use only one, plus a crooked dagger, but Bhowanee' s guardians say he used two, which is improbable. Of these two, one is a facsimile of that in my possession; but the other is smaller and more manageable, with only three claws — a very sweet thing of its kind. When it grew cool, we drove out to look at the town and neighbourhood, but without seeing much to interest, except the cavalcade which accompanied the representative of a once famous personage, the Prithee Needee. I may be generalising hastily, but I confess I did not much like the look of things either at Satara or Poena, especially at the first of these places. The people seem to cherish the recol- lections of old times quite as much as is desirable, and while they are peculiarly attentive to the representative of the Satara family, they rather fail in the respect usually paid throughout the empire to the local British authority. Such 232 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. symptoms should be well watclied. Satara was within an ace of giving trouble in 1857, and although nothing of real importance could ever happen there, enough might happen to involve all the odious necessities of retribution. The more emphatically therefore it is affirmed that what was done twenty years ago is irrevocable and final, the better it will be for all concerned. March 3rd — We were well away from Satara before the morning broke, and drove for miles and miles through a valley bordered by hills, formed, of course, of trap, but in height and uniformity of contour very much like the limestone arms which embrace Upper Egypt. Various species of Flcus, among which the Peepul and the Eanian were far the commonest, and the omnipresent mango, lined the whole road till we got to the bottom of the pass which leads up from the Deccan to the Mahabuleshwur Plateau, the Deccan itself being, as it were, the first landing on the flight of stairs leading from the sea. The little ponies of the country are not fit for such work, and so our carriage was pulled up by five-and- twenty men. Arrived at the top, we found ourselves once more amidst the vegetation of Matheran, which I de- scribed to you in the beginning of December, and recognized again the red dust of the crumbling later ite. Soon we reached the hospitable house of Mr. Daniell, where we spent some twenty most agreeable hours, seeing the temple whence flows the MOUNTAINS. 233 hallowed Kistna (more properly Krishna) and other sacred streams less known to fame, seeing too the fortress of Pertabgurh, which Sivajee loved so well, and the grand view from Arthur's Seat. The little summer house or shelter for travellers, so called, stands in the midst of a thick jungle, to which the tiger is by no means a stranger, on the edge of one of the most tremendous precipices I ever beheld. My father speaks of the western side of Pertabgurh as going down 4,000 feet, but we, as it happened, saw all its sides but that. Looking westward from Arthur's Seat, I counted eight ranges of hills in sight at once, exactly the number I once counted from the Frogner Soeter, near Christiania, to which this place has a certain resemblance. Ear off, I caught the '* tremolar della marina,^^ and saw a ship at a great distance, like a black sj)eck on a stream of gold. I should much like to have gone to the point which my old friend General Lodwick reached, when, as resident of Satara, he first explored Mahabu- leshwur. It has been hitherto called Sidney Point, but is henceforward to bear the name of the man who, by discovering this great sanitarium, con- ferred such a benefit on the Bombay Presidency. Prom Mahabuleshwur we descended on Waee, a very sacred spot, which travellers who pass it at the season of verdure find lovely. At this time of the years it is dusty and dry. Soon after nightfall, on the 4th of March, I was 231 NOTES OE AN INDIAN JOURNEY. back in Poena, inspecting a most interesting collec- tion of Brahminical sacred vessels which Professor Kielhorn, the great Sanscritist, whose acquaintance I made as I passed through, had procured for me during our absence. I don't think I mentioned that when I was at Poena, the other day, I received a visit from a very aged Parsee gentleman who had been wounded at Kerygaom on New- Year's Day, 1818, had after- wards commanded with much credit a troop of horse under my father, and had still later been a most efficient judge in our service. " Wounded at Korijgaom.'' I doubt whether all even of you, and still more whether many to whom you are likely to show these notes, ever heard of Korygaom. And yet it was one of the most desperate struggles which ever took place, even in this country. I wish some one would write a book of golden deeds for India, keeping severely to facts, and avoiding sermonizing. March hth. — We left Poona long before\laylight, and reached Kdrli soon after sunrise. The country in the neighbourhood of Tullygaom, itself the scene of a battle, made me think of the hills which bound the Deveron on its left bank above the bridge of Alvah, and I recognised the justice of a remark which my father made to me one day, when, pointing across the river, he said, " That's just like a bit of the Deccan ; I can quite imagine a body of Mahratta horse coming down on us through that hollow." When Orlicb, who ha^. THE CAVE OF KARLI. 235 written much on the wars of the Great Frederick, saw the same bit of Scotland, he said to me, " What a country to fight over ! " Kilrli Avas the place where Captain Stewart was killed, who was long known amongst the Mahrattas as Stewart Phakray, or " the hero." It is now peaceful enough, and very pleasant was our stroll, partly on foot, partly on horseback, across the little bit of plain and the steep slope which separated us from the famous cave, which we soon reached. A very remarkable spot it is. Fergusson thus describes it : — *' The great cave of Karli is, without exception, the largest and finest chaitya cave in India, and is, fortunately, the best preserved. Its interior dimensions are 102 feet 3 inches in total length, 81 feet 3 inches length of nave. Its breadth, from wall to wall, is 45 feet 7 inches, while the width of the nave is 25 feet 7 inches. The nave is separated from the side aisles by fifteen columns on each side, of good design and workmanship. On the abacus which crowns the capital of each of these are two kneeling elephants, and on each elephant are two seated figures, generally a male and female, with their arms over each other's shoulders, but sometimes two female figures in the same attitude. The sculpture of these is very good, and the effect particularly rich and pleasing. Behind the chaitya are seven plain octagonal piers without sculpture, making thus thirty-seven pillars altogether. The chaitya is plain and very similar to that in the large cave at Ajayanti (Ajunta) ; but here, fortunately, a part of the wooden umbrella which sur- mounted it remains. The wooden ribs of the roof, too, remain nearly entire ; and the framed screen, filling up a portion of the great arch of a bridge (which it much resembles), still retains the place in which it was originally placed. At some distance in advance of the arched front of this cave is placed a second screen which exists only here and at the great cave at Salsette, though it might have existed in front of the oldest chaitya caves at Ajayanti (Ajunta). In consists of two plain octagonal columns with pilas- 236 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. ters. Over these is a deep plain mass of wall occupying the place of an entablature, and over this again a superstructure of four dwarf pillars. ******* " It would be of great importance if the age of this cave could be positively fixed ; but though that cannot quite be done, it is probably antecedent to the Christian era ; and, at the same time, it cannot possibly have been excavated more than two hundred years before that era." The great cave of Kaiii is now in far better order than when Mr. Eergusson wrote. The vendors of sweetmeats have been got rid of, and all is kept in a clean and respectable state — all, includ- ing the monastic cells of the old Buddhists in the adjoining rock. The place, and the approach to it, made me often think of Beni Hassan, on the Nile, but, compared to that, Kdrli is a creation of yesterday. We descended the hill in the pleasant morning air, and I plucked, for the last time in India, a sjirig of white jasmine, that fortunate genus Avhich, after having occupied so prominent a place in Eastern poetry, was to become not less famous far away under the Western Star. The variety of the white jasmine which grows in Erench and English gardens, is, however, not often met with in India. I think I only gathered it once — at Hassoon Abdool. We stopped in the village of K^rli to see the village officers, to inspect the maps, and examine the village books. The progress of society has swept away many of the officers who existed in "MICHELIA CHAMPACA." 237 tlie original village, as described in tlie introductory chapter of the History of the Malirattas ; but the Patel and the Koolkurnee still remain, as does the village watchman, and one or two more. An official, not thought of in old days, has been added, to the sorrow of Mahratta youth, in the shape of the inevitable schoolmaster, into whose domains we penetrated before we turned away. It was on this excursion that I first identified a tree, Avhich I had frequently seen during the last few days, as no other than the MicJielia champ aca, of Shelleyan^ renown, and I must admit, to my shame, that it was likewise only to-day that, in crossing a field sown with the plant, I learned from the officer who accompanied me the odd resemblance in its seed to a ram's head, which gives the Clcer arietinum its specific name. After a short interval (which T employed largely in looking at the ballasting of the line, for I never before saw a line ballasted with agate rock-crystal and cornelian, as the Great Indian Peninsula here- abouts most certainly is), the train from Poona came in sight, and, picking us up by the courteous arrangement of the authorities, carried us down through the magnificent pass known as the Bhore Ghaut, to the lowlands near Bombay. The line is a noble piece of engineering, and the scenery is even more striking than that along the Nervion, ^ " The wanderiuf? airs they faint On the dark, the silent stream ; The Champak odours fail Like sweet thoughts in a dream." 238 NOTES or an Indian journey. between Miranda and Bilbao, whicb it frequently recalls. The breeze blew fresh from the sea as we crossed Salsette, and ere long we were once more at the starting-place of our three months' wanderings, under the hospitable roof of Sir Philip Wodehouse. Pahell, March 1th. — It is very hot — the thermo- meter about 90° in the shade, but there is a delicious breeze. The only really bad time here is the month of May, when the breeze fails. The garden is looking lovely — two huge white triumphal arches of the imperial Beaumontia being its chief feature. The Parell mangoes, the best in India, are in full flower. In the evening I went to the cathedral, and saw the admirable recumbent statue of J-— — 's excellent friend. Bishop Carr, which I had missed last De- cember, though I sat close to it. On the way back I observed, for the first time, the zodiacal light, which I have looked for in vain so often. March Sth. — I rose early, and wandered down to the sea across the Malum palm groves. The cocoa-nut is the prevailing tree, though I saw some of the Borassus, and a few of the Areca. The coast of Ceylon, they tell me, is bordered by just such woods as these for hundreds of miles. The whole scene was thoroughly tropical, a single leaf sometimes stretching over a road where two car- riages could pass each other, and the little huts looking like vignettes to Paul et Virginie. At THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CATHEDRAL. 239 leni?th I reached the shore. The tide was far out, hut there were few shells, and none at all attrac- tive — a great contrast this to the last heaches we explored together near Suez, and at Ramleh. To the left stretched a salt marsh, covered with shruhs, none of which I kncAV. One, with a prickly leaf, might easily have heen mistaken for a holly. I crossed the marsh hy a causeway, and climhing up a slight eminence, skirted hy the Erijthrina Lidica, all blazing with its scarlet flowers, came on the open sea, which we shall soon he traversing. The horizon was dotted with fishing hoats, as I have often seen the Bay of Banff on a summer evening ; only here the sails were dazzlingly white. As I walked hack to Government House, I lost myself in the mazes of vegetation, and came sud- denly upon a huilding surmounted by a cross. It Avas the Boman Catholic Cathedral, as it is called, in reality a very humble little chapel. Some twenty native women, in w^hite veils, were kneel- ing near the altar. Hardly any one else was there. All the epitaphs I chanced to see were in Portuguese. Later in the day I Avas present at the reception of the Chief of Palitana by the Governor. He is lord of the sacred hill of the Jains, which I would fain haA^e gone to see when I Avas near the Kattia- AA^ar border in December, but that, like a visit to Bindrabun, the corresponding centre of Vishnuvite devotion, had to remain, as the Germans sav, " ci pious ivish.^' 240 NOTES OF AN INDIAN JOURNEY. They brought us the unripe mango to examine and to taste. The turpentine flavour, of which some com- plain even in the ripe fruit, was very marked indeed. In the afternoon I strolled into the garden, and sat long on the terrace, gay with the brilliant Bougainville a, which will always remain to me associated with pleasant Indian memories. I observed, as I passed, the very plant of Vitis qiiadrangularis which so puzzled me when I first saw it three months ago hanging from the branches, of a tree. I took it, small blame to me, for some strange kind of cactus. This set me thinking how far I had carried into effect my inteotions as far as plants are concerned, and 1 don't think I have much with which to reproach myself. True it is that I have merely scratched the sur- face of Indian botany. True it is that my eye still continually falls on altogether new objects ; but, nevertheless, I can put the people and the scenes I care about in India in their appropriate setting of trees and flowers. I bave come to know many of the plants which have poetical or religious associations, and I have seen a very large number of those which are economically and commercially im- portant. This in a run of little more than a quarter of a year, a very large part of which has been spent in rapid locomotion by rail, by road, or by sea, and the main objects of which have been political, does not appear to me altogether bad. I have had various conversations of interest DEPARTURE. 241 wliile here, though fewer than when I was last in Bombay. The Baroda affair is, of course, upper- most in the thoughts of most of the people I have seen. At length the last of many notes, letters, and small bits of business was got through, the parting words w^ere said to our kind entertainer at Govern- ment House, and wa drove to the Apollo Bunder, whither Dr. Wilson and some others had come to say good-bye. A steam launch carried us rapidly over the dancing ripples of the harbour to the Venetla^ which was getting ready for sea. The sunset-red faded out; the lamps were lit in the town, and grew gradually fainter as we steamed away. At length there was no more to be seen but the far-off flashing of the same light which had told me early on the 28th November that I was at last in Indian waters. Pour most memorable and delightful months lived only in recollection — encore un rSve de la vie jini. R INDIA: POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. When you asked me to supplement, by a political paper, the studiously ?Aavagr llOSANGi \smm ^■ ^WEUNIVERiZ/v v^lOSANCElfj-^ o ■^/^a^AiNn-Jwv III 1 1 II II II 11 III III II III! mil L 006 672 665 4 Frf -^^■UBRARYQ^^ ^MIBRARYO^ «\\\EUNIVER% UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILIT jjiivjjo'^^ ^.!fojnv>jo^ -s\mim aa ooii40 039 7 I^OFCAUFOff^ ^OFCAllFOff,^ ,^\\EUNIVER% ^lOSANCElfj^^ ^^: . 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