Up the Country

G. and I took a drive in the evening all round the cantonments, and there is really some pretty scenery about Delhi, and great masses of stone lying about, which looks well after those eternal sands.

In the afternoon we all (except G., who could not go, from some point of etiquette) went to see the palace. It is a melancholy sight – so magnificent originally, and so poverty-stricken now. The marble hall where the king sits is still very beautiful, all inlaid with garlands and birds of precious stones, and the inscription on the cornice is what Moore would like to see in the original: ‘If there be an Elysium on earth, it is this, it is this!’

The lattices look out on a garden which leads down to the Jumna, and the old king was sitting in the garden with a chowrybadar waving the flies from him; but the garden is all gone to decay too, and ‘the Light of the World’ had a forlorn and darkened look. All our servants were in a state of profound veneration; the natives all look upon the King of Delhi as their rightful lord, and so he is, I suppose. In some of the pavilions belonging to the princes there were such beautiful inlaid floors, any square of which would have made an enviable table for a palace in London, but the stones are constantly stolen; and in some of the finest baths there were dirty charpoys spread, with dirtier guards sleeping on them. In short, Delhi is a very suggestive and moralising place – such stupendous remains of power and wealth passed and passing away – and somehow I feel that we horrid English have just ‘gone and done it,’ merchandised it, revenued it, and spoiled it all. I am not very fond of Englishmen out of their own country. And Englishwomen did not look pretty at the ball in the evening, and it did not tell well for the beauty of Delhi that the painted ladies of one regiment, who are generally called ‘the little corpses’ (and very hard it is too upon most corpses) were much the prettiest people there, and were besieged with partners.

CHAPTER XIII

The Kootûb, Wednesday, Feb. 23, 1838.

WELL, of all the things I ever saw, I think this is the finest. Did we know about it in England? I mean, did you and I, in our old ancient Briton state, know? Do you know now, without my telling you, what the Kootûb is? Don’t be ashamed, there is no harm in not knowing, only I do say it is rather a pity we were so ill taught. I have had so many odd names dinned into me during the countless years I seem to have passed in this country, that I cannot remember the exact degree of purity of mind (which enemies may term ignorance) with which I left home; but after all that had been said, I expected the Kootûb would have been rather inferior to the Monument. One has those little prejudices. It happens to be the Monument put at the top of the column in the Place Vendôme, and that again placed on a still grander base. It is built of beautiful red granite, is 240 feet high and 50 feet in diameter, and carved all over with sentences from the Koran, each letter a yard high, and the letter again interlaced and ornamented with carved flowers and garlands; it is between six and seven hundred years old, and looks as if it were finished yesterday, and it stands in a wilderness of ruins, carved gateways, and marble tombs, one more beautiful than the other.

They say that the man who built it meant it for one minaret of a mosque – a mosque, you are to understand, always possessing two minarets and three domes. But as some say Kootûb himself built this, and others say that a particular Emperor called Alexander II. has the merit of it, and as nobody knows whether there ever were a Kootûb or an Alexander II., I think it is just possible that we do not know what a man who never was born meant to make of a building that never was built. As it stands it is perfect. We went at six this morning to see a well into which divers are so good as to jump from the height of sixty feet. They seem to fly almost in the air, till they nearly reach the water, and then they join their feet together and go down straight, and the water closes over them. But they come up again, do not be afraid.

We had dispatched all our sights before seven, and had two hours’ good sketching before breakfast, and now it is as hot as ever I felt it in Bengal.

Delhi, Friday, Feb. 25.

Yesterday morning we found there was so much to do and to finish, that we settled to stay on here till Saturday, and to commit the sin for the first time of marching on Sunday, as we have not a day to spare. The heir-apparent of Delhi has been coaxed or threatened into waiting on G., so there was a second durbar to be held to-day, and when it came to the time, the prince had taken to his bed, and had sent for thirteen doctors to say he was too ill to come. However, he changed his mind again and came, and in the meanwhile, half our troops who were out for the durbar were fainting away from the heat. In the afternoon G. had to go and return the visits of the rajahs in the neighbourhood, and we went to see Humayun’s tomb, about six miles off, where we meant to sketch till G. came, but it turned out a failure after all we had heard of it.

However, there were some beautiful white marble tombs in the neighbourhood, carved like lace; and then we went to another well, or rather tank, entirely surrounded by mosques and buildings, on the roofs of which divers were all waiting to jump. We implored and begged they would not take us for the Lord Sahib, and take the fatal plunge in our honour, and the guards went and pushed the crowds off, and declared the Lord Sahib was coming, and we sat down and sketched, and at last, just as we were giving him up, he and all his people arrived, and the divers all bounded off. Some of them jumped from a height of eighty feet, clearing several buildings in their way. It is much the most curious sight I have seen, and I now cannot guess why they did not tumble head over heels twenty times before they reached the water. In the evening we went to a nautch at Colonel Skinner’s. His house is fitted up in the native fashion, and he had all the best singers and dancers in Delhi, and they acted passages out of Vishnu and Brahma’s lives, and sang Persian songs which I thought made a very ugly noise; but Mr. B., who speaks Persian as fluently as English, kept saying, ‘Well, this is really delightful – this I think is equal to any European singing – in fact, there is nothing like it.’

There is nothing like it that I ever heard before, but certainly the words, as he translated them, were very pretty. One little fat nautch girl sang a sort of passionate song to G. with little meaning smiles, which I think rather attracted his lordship, and I thought it might be too much for him if I forwarded to him Mr. B.’s translation. ‘I am the body, you are the soul: we may be parted here, but let no one say we shall be separated hereafter. My father has deserted me; my mother is dead; I have no friends. My grave is open, and I look into it; but do you care for me?’ The dancing is very slow and very dull, but the dresses and ornaments are beautiful.

Saturday, Feb. 26.

We had a melancholy catastrophe last night. There has been a great deal of pilfering in the camp the two last days, which has been the case with every great camp near Delhi, and our people were unluckily more awake than usual. A thief was seen running off with one of the servants’ cooking pots, and pursued. A syce of Mr. T. caught hold of him. The thief turned round and stuck his knife into the man and killed him on the spot. He was dead before they could even fetch Dr. D. The thief is taken, but nobody is ever hanged in this country. Mr. T., who has been agent here for twenty-two years, takes it as a personal affront that we should have been robbed in his district, though I should have thought the affront lay the other way.

Paniput, Feb. 28.

Delhi turned out a very unwholesome place. All the servants have been taken with attacks of fever and sickness; the sudden hot days after the cold weather disagree with them. Our camp has grown much larger. There are more hangers-on. Mrs. – has taken charge of a little niece and two nephews who lost their mother suddenly, and she is taking them up to the hills – I never saw such sickly little things. I see another little European girl every morning on the line of march, who has evidently nobody but bearers to take charge of her, probably going up to a school at Mussoorie, where parents who are too poor to send children home now send them. I forget whether I told you a story Mr. T. told me about the way in which children travel here, and which strikes me as very shocking, and would probably strike you more. I believe I have told it to you twice already in hopes of making your motherly hair stand on end. He said a palanquin was brought to his house containing three little children – a little girl nine years old and two smaller brothers. They were going up to Mussoorie, had been travelling three days, and had about a week’s more journey. They had not even their names written on a piece of paper, or a note to the magistrates of the district, but were just passed on from one set of bearers to the other. You know the bearers are changed every eight miles like so many post horses, and it constantly happens on a dâk journey that the bearers get tired, or the fresh set are not at their posts, and the palanquin is put down on the road and the traveller left to help himself. The bearers who brought these children to Mr. T.’s, said they thought the children were tired, and so they had brought them to an European house for a rest. Mr. T. had them washed and dressed, and fed them and kept them half a day, when he was obliged to send them away for fear they should lose their dâk. He said they were very shy, and would hardly speak, but he made out their names and gave them notes to other magistrates, and some months afterwards he saw them at school at Mussoorie; but it is an odd way of sending children to school. I should like to see you packing off your three youngest boys for the chances of these naked half savages taking them and feeding them and looking after them on the road, without even a servant to attend to them.

When we came into camp this morning we found Mr. – , whose turn it had been to come on with the guard of honour, perfectly desperate. His tent had been entirely stripped in the night, he and his bearers remaining in a profound sleep while the thieves cut entirely away one side of the tent, and carried off over his head a large camel-trunk and all his other boxes, with his sword, gun, and pistols. It was a sad loss for a poor lieutenant in the army, but luckily the police recovered most of his things in the course of the day, except, as he says with a most sentimental sigh, ‘a few rings of no value in themselves, but of value to me, and a few chits.’ The magistrate, Mr. – , treats with the greatest contempt the idea of recovering any sentimental goods. ‘I assure you,’ he says, ‘the dacoits at Pannyput have no idea of sentiment.’ Probably not – but that does not console Lieut. – for the loss of his chits.

Kurnaul, March 2.

We arrived here yesterday; a great ugly scattered cantonment, all barracks, and dust, and guns, and soldiers; and G. had a levée in the morning, and we were ‘at home’ in the evening; and the officers of four regiments, with their wives and daughters, all came and danced. The fashions are even again behind those of Delhi. Mrs. V. appeared in a turban made I think of stamped tin moulded into two fans, from which descended a long pleureuse feather floating over some very full sleeves. Mrs. Z. did not aspire to anything fanciful, but was simply attired in a plain coloured gown made of a very few yards of sarcenet. We are going to dine with the General to-day – a dinner of sixty people.

Yesterday as we were stepping over the street to luncheon, there appeared an interesting procession of tired coolies carrying boxes – our English boxes that had come plodding after us from Allahabad. I was in hopes Mr. D.’s bonnets would have come out of one of them, but we heard in the evening that they are at least a month off, and in the meantime the unpacking of these was immense fun. There were two boxes of books, and I had just come to an end of the last set, and now there is Mrs. Gore’s ‘Stokeshill Park,’ and ‘My Aunt Dorothy,’ and some French novels, and, above all, dear Charles Lamb’s Letters, which I have been sighing for and have begun upon instantly. I cannot imagine what number of hill-bearers will take our goods up to Simla. Major J. has written for 1,500, and they are already at work taking the first division of goods up. Our camp will break up almost entirely in a few days. We three, with two aides-de-camp, the doctor, and one secretary, are going through the Dhoon, a sort of route that will not admit of a large party. It is a very pretty road, and likely to be cooler than the actual plains.

The rest of the camp and most of the servants will pursue the straight road. I long to get into the hills more than ever. It is grown so very hot now, quite as bad as Calcutta in May. I believe we shall not be able to take Wright and Jones this route, which will make them very unhappy. St. Cloup told me yesterday that he had at last had a letter from Madame St. Cloup, which had made him very happy, and that she was in an excellent place with a relation of ours. Poor woman! she little knows what a faithless man he is. However, he bought her a beautiful gold chain at Delhi, and he said that now he had had this letter, he had ‘quelque envie de lui acheter des boucles d’oreilles,’ but that he thought it would be better to take them home. It would make her more glad to see him.

CHAPTER XIV

Camp, Kurnaul, March 5, 1838.

IT goes much against the grain with me to begin a fresh Journal on half a sheet, but it is an odd time for writing, so I must take what I can get and be thankful. The things are all put away for the night under the sentries. G. is sitting down to a dinner of forty men in red coats, ‘fathers and mothers unknown.’ F., W., and I have devoured such small cheer as St. Cloup would allow the kitmutgar to pick up from the outside of the kitchen at an early hour. W. O. is this moment gone off for his three weeks’ tiger-shooting; and now there is just one hour before I need dress for the station ball, so that I devote to writing to you. We could not help laughing at our private dinner, considering what people say of the luxuries of the East, and of the state in which the Governor-General lives. The dinner was very good, thanks to its being stolen from St. Cloup’s best company preparations; but we were in a small empty tent, lighted up by two candles and one night-lamp. The whole number of leaves of the dining-table were apparently wanted in the large tent, for they had given us a borrowed camp-table, two very dirty deal boards, covered with the marks of old slops, and of the rounds of glasses. I am sure at any of the London gin-palaces the scavengers would have grumbled at the look of it; and our three coffee-cups, with a plate of biscuits for Chance in the centre, did not look handsome. The purdahs were all up, as the evening is hot, so outside we had a good view of the kettle boiling for tea on some sticks of charcoal, and the bearers washing up the dirty plates and keeping the pariah dogs from helping themselves. W.’s dhoolie, a sort of bed on poles, was waiting for him in the distance, with two irregular horsemen for an escort. Altogether, I think a Blackheath gipsy would have sneered at us; but otherwise, nothing was absolutely wanting. I came back to my tent meaning to write to you, but found, as I told you, everything whisked off, except one table and my sofa; and that has now been carried away to serve as a bed for a Mr. – , who has come dâk sixty miles on some business with G.

I can hardly write because I am in the middle of ‘Lamb’s Life and Letters’ – such a nice book! I quite dread going on with it for fear of finishing it. It sometimes does almost as well as you to talk with for five minutes. I like the way in which he goes on revelling in a bad joke, making nonsense by the piece; and there are such good little bits of real feeling. ‘All about you is a threadbare topic. I have worn it out with thinking; it has come to me when I have been dull with anything, till my sadness has seemed more to have come from it, than to have introduced it. I want you, you don’t know how much.’ Such a jewel of a man to have put that into words, and it is so true! I often find myself saucing up my distaste for the present with regret for the past, and so disguising a little discontent with a great deal of sentiment; but yet that is rather unfair too, for I really should not mind India if you and three or four others were here. The discontent with it arises a great deal from want of the old familiar friends. However, we have at last done two years of it. I believe it has taken us forty English years to do these two Indian ones; but still it shows what time and longevity will effect. Mr. Y. brought rather an interesting individual to my tent this morning, a Christianised Indian; he has been a strict Christian for nearly twenty-three years, and last year the Bishop ordained him. He was a Brahmin of the highest class, and is a very learned man. I asked him how his conversion began, whether from discontent with his own belief, or from the persuasions of others; and he said he was dissatisfied with his own superstitions, and got a copy of Henry Martyn’s translation of St. John, and then of the Acts, and then went back to the rest of the Bible. Mrs. Sherwood, who lived at Meerut, was afterwards his chief instructress, and he speaks of her with the greatest gratitude. He keeps a school now, which is attended by about forty children, but he does not think he has made any real converts. I wish he could have spoken English: I wanted to know more about it all. He was here a long time, and I did rather a highly-finished picture of him, thinking the old Bishop would like it. He is rather like Sidney Smith blackened, and laughed about as heartily as Sidney would have done at his own picture.

Tuesday, March 6.

We went to our ball last night – it was pretty; the room was hung round with such profusion of garlands and a sort of stage, on which there were green arches decked out with flowers; but what particularly took my fancy was a set of European soldiers dressed up for the night as footmen, real red plush trousers, with blue coats and red collars, and white cotton stockings, and powdered heads, and they carried about trays of tea and ices. After the turbaned heads and ‘the trash and tiffany,’ as Hook says, with which we are surrounded, you cannot conceive what a pleasant English look this gave to the room. Such fat, rosy English footmen! It is very odd how sometimes the sudden recurrence of some common English custom shows the unnatural state of things in which we live – that red plush! it was just like Rousseau’s ‘Voilà de la pervenche,’ only not quite so romantic. To-day, before I was dressed, Rosina said that G.’s nazir wanted to speak to me, and I found him in my tent at the head of at least a hundred yards of ‘trash and tiffany,’ come to hope I would ask my lord to stay another day, as to-morrow is the great Mussulman holiday – they call it their Buckra Eed, or sounds to that effect; and it is, in fact, a commemoration of Abraham offering up Isaac, only they do it in honour of Ishmael. Nothing can be more inconvenient, but I never can refuse the nazir anything, he looks so timid and gentlemanlike; so I went to G. with the deputation, and we have altered all our plans, and may have to march on Sunday to make up for it. A shocking sacrifice of Christianity to Mahomedanism! only, as I said before, I cannot refuse the nazir; and also, the servants have in general borne the march very well, and deserve some consideration. We have written now to revive a play the privates of the Artillery had wanted to act, and which we had declined for want of time to go and see it.

Camp, one march from Kurnaul, Thursday, March 8.

I took Mrs. A. out in the carriage on Tuesday evening, and after I had taken her home, I was caught in a regular storm of dust, what they call a dry storm here, much worse than a thick London fog. The syces walked before the horses feeling their way, and hallooing because the postilions could not see them; and as it was, I came in at the wrong end of the camp with the syces missing. W. tried to go out to dinner, but could not find his way.

We went to the play last night, ‘Tekeli,’ and it really was wonderfully well acted. They did much better than the gentlemen amateurs at Meerut, and, except that the heroines were six feet high and their pink petticoats had not more than three breadths in them, the whole thing was well done: the scenery and decorations were excellent, and all got up by the privates. There was one man who sang comic songs in a quiet, dawdling way that Matthews could not have surpassed. It was all over by nine o’clock. We marched very early this morning, as it was a sixteen miles’ march, which is always a trial to the servants and to the regiment, the sun is so hot now after eight. The sergeant who sends back reports of the road the evening before, always writes them in rather a grand style, and he put down to-day: ‘First and second mile good; at the third mile, bridge over the canal which requires the greatest precaution – the roaring sluices may alarm the horses.’ I wish you had seen the ‘roaring sluices,’ something like the cascades we used to build when we were children in the ditch at Elmer’s End, but hardly so imposing. Sergeant – is so unused to the slightest inequality either of land or water, that it astounds him. The servants enjoyed their holiday thoroughly. They all put off their liveries and went round the camp to make their little compliments, which they do in very good taste, and the old khansamah made a sort of chapel of the hangings of tents, and there was one of their priests in the centre reading the Koran, and between four and five hundred of them kneeling round, all looking so white and clean in their muslin dresses. I really think they are very good people, they are so very particular about their prayers.

Friday, March 9.

We had our overland packet of December 27 yesterday. There never was anything so praiseworthy as the regularity of that Overland Mail lately, but where are your letters? You must send them to China with directions to climb over the wall and post on to Simla, or to ‘try New South Wales, or Tartary.’ I heard from R. and M. and L. all up to Christmas, and you are still at August 5th. It is very odd, because I am confident you write, but I should like to know what you write. We have heard from Mr. D. much later than from you.

CHAPTER XV

Saharunpore, Sunday, March 11, 1838.

THIS is a small station, only two ladies, one of whom is Miss T.; she came out last year to join a brother here, who is quite delighted to have her, and she seems very contented with her quiet life; but everybody is contented with their stations at the foot of the hills. They stay the cold season here, and go in twelve hours up to Mussoorie, where most of them have their regular established homes, so they escape all hot weather. Miss T. and her brother and the other Saharunpore gentlemen came out to meet us, and G. and I stopped at Captain C.’s to see an immense collection of fossils, all proving that our elephants of the present day were ‘little Chances’ of the olden time. G. had a durbar, and in the afternoon we went to the Botanical Gardens, which are very shady and nice; and we sent the band there, as the Saharunporites do not often hear music. It is a pretty little station.

Kerni, March 15.

G. has been out tiger-hunting from the two last stations. They never had a glimpse of a tiger, though here and there they saw the footprints of one. One of the days the thermometer was at 90° in our tents, but G. stayed out the whole day, and said he did not feel the heat.

Mussoorie, Sunday, March 18.

On Thursday evening we went on to Deyrah, too late to see anything, but Friday morning the beauty of the Himalayas burst upon us. We were encamped just under the mountains – too much under them to see the snowy range, but still nothing could be more beautiful than the first view of the range, and no wonder one hates plains. Colonel Y. had us out early in the morning to see his little Ghoorka regiment manœuvre. Most of the men are about five feet six, with little hands and feet in proportion. All the mountaineers are very small creatures, but they make excellent little soldiers; and the Ghoorkas beat our troops at this spot twenty-five years ago, and killed almost all the officers sent against them. Now they are our subjects they fight equally well for us, and were heard to say at Bhurtpore that they really thought some of our soldiers were nearly equal to themselves. They look like little black dolls. They are quite unlike natives. There is a regular fool attached to the regiment, who had stuck a quantity of wild flowers in his helmet, and came up and saluted G. with a large drawn sword in a most ridiculous manner. After that we went to see a Sikh temple, where there was a great festival, and about a hundred fakeers, the most horrid-looking monsters it is possible to see. They never wear any clothes, but powder themselves all over with white or yellow powder, and put red streaks over their faces. They look like the raw material of so many Grimaldis. At eleven, the two ladies and five gentlemen of the station came to visit us; and at four, G. and I set off, under Colonel Y.’s auspices, to see a cavern that has just been discovered about four miles from this, and which was found out in a very odd way. One of the soldiers had murdered his havildar out of jealousy, and escaped, and was taken, after a fortnight’s search, in this cave, nearly starved to death. It is just the place where Balfour of Burley would have hid himself. I have not enjoyed a drive so much for ages, and it was through such a beautiful country – such hills and valleys! I wish we might settle at Deyrah for the rest of the term of our transportation. One of the worst parts of this journey is that we never can go even two yards from the camp without an officer with G. on account of the petitioners. When we got near the cave we found Colonel Y., Dr. G., and Captain M. at the entrance of a dark grotto, through which a stream was running. ‘Nothing to walk through,’ Colonel Y. said, ‘not more than two feet deep, or two feet and a half at most,’ and so in they all went; but my bearers luckily declared they could carry the tonjaun through, and they contrived it, though sometimes one tumbled down, and then another, and I had once to sit at the bottom of it to prevent my head being knocked off by the rocks. It was a beautiful cavern about 500 yards long, and at the other end there was a tent, where G. and Colonel Y. had wisely established dry clothes, but the others who had not taken this precaution were glad to gallop home as fast as they could.