CHAPTER XI.

LAHORE.

Crossing in a railway journey of an hour one of the most fertile districts of the Punjaub, I was struck with the resemblance of the country to South Australia: in each great sweeps of wheat-growing lands, with here and there an acacia or mimosa tree; in each a climate hot, but dry, and not unhealthy;--singularly hot here for a tract in the latitude of Vicksburg, near which the Mississippi is sometimes frozen.

Through groves of a yellow-blossomed, sweet-scented, weeping acacia, much like laburnum, in which the fortified railway station seems out of place, I reached the tomb-surrounded garden that is called Lahore--a city of pomegranates, oleanders, hollyhocks, and roses. The date-groves of Lahore are beautiful beyond description; especially so the one that hides the Agra Bank.

Lahore matches Umritsur in the purity of its Orientalism, Agra in the strength and grandeur of its walls: but it has no Tank Temple and no Taj; the Great Mosque is commonplace, Runjeet Singh‘s tomb is tawdry, and the far-famed Shalimar Gardens inferior to those of Pinjore. The strangest sight of Lahore is its new railway station--a fortress of red brick, one of many which are rising all over India. The fortification of the railway stations is decidedly the next best step to that of having no forts at all.

The city of Lahore is surrounded by a suburb of great tombs, in which Europeans have in many cases taken up their residence by permission of the owner, the mausoleums being, from the thickness of their walls, as cool as cellars. Sometimes, however, a fanatical relative of the man buried in the tomb will warn the European tenant that he will die within a year--a prophecy which poison has once or twice brought to its fulfillment in the neighborhood of Lahore and at Moultan.

Strolling in the direction of the Cabool Gate, I came on the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjaub, driving in an open carriage drawn by camels; and passing out on to the plain, I met all the officers in garrison returning on Persian ponies from a game at the Afghan sport of “hockey upon horseback,” while a little farther were some English ladies with hawks. Throughout the Northern Punjaub a certain settling down in comfort on the part of the English officials is to be remarked, and the adaptation of native habits to English uses, of which I had in one evening‘s walk the three examples which I have mentioned, is a sign of a tendency toward that making the best of things which in a newly-occupied country precedes the entrance upon a system of permanent abode. Lahore has been a British city for nineteen years, Bombay for two centuries and more; yet Lahore is far more English than Bombay.

Although there are as yet no signs of English settlement in the Punjaub, still the official community in many a Punjaub station is fast becoming colonial in its type, and Indian traditions are losing ground. English wives and sisters abound in Lahore, even the railway and canal officials having brought out their families; and during the cool weather race meetings, drag hunts, cricket matches, and croquet parties follow one another from day to day, and Lahore boasts a volunteer corps. When the hot season comes on, those who can escape to the hills, and the wives and children of those who cannot go, run to Dalhousie, as Londoners do to Eastbourne.

The healthy English tone of the European communities of Umritsur and Lahore is reflected in the newspapers of the Punjaub, which are the best in India, although the blunders of the native printers render the “betting news” unintelligible, and the “cricket scores” obscure. The columns of the Lahore papers present as singular a mixture of incongruous articles as even the Government _Gazette_ offers to its readers. An official notice that it will be impossible to allow more than 560 elephants to take part in the next Lucknow procession follows a report of the “ice meeting” of the community of Lahore, to arrange about the next supply; and side by side with this is an article on the Punjaub trade with Chinese Tartary, which recommends the government of India to conquer Afghanistan, and to reoccupy the valley of Cashmere. A paragraph notices the presentation by the Punjaub government to a native gentleman, who has built a serai at his own cost, of a valuable gift; another records a brush with the Wagheers. The only police case is the infliction on a sweeper of a fine of thirty rupees for letting his donkey run against a high-caste woman, whereby she was defiled; but a European magistrate reprimands a native pleader for appearing in court with his shoes on; and a notice from the Lieutenant-Governor gives a list of the holidays to be observed by the courts, in which the “Queen‘s Birthday” comes between “Bhudur Kalee” and “Oors data Gunjbuksh,” while “Christmas” follows “Shubberat,” and “Ash Wednesday” precedes “Holee.” As one of the holidays lasts a fortnight, and many more than a week, the total number of _dies non_ is considerable; but a postscript decrees that additional local holidays shall be granted for fairs and festivals, and for the solar and lunar eclipse, which brings the no-court days up to sixty or seventy, besides those in the Long Vacation. The Hindoos are in the happy position of having also six new-year‘s days in every twelvemonth; but the editor of one of the Lahore papers says that his Mohammedan compositors manifest a singular interest in Hindoo feasts, which shows a gratifying spread of toleration! An article on the “Queen‘s English in Hindostan,” in the _Punjaub Times_, gives, as a specimen of the poetry of Young Bengal, a serenade in which the skylark carols on the primrose bush. “Emerge, my love,” the poet cries

“The fragrant, dewy grove We‘ll wander through till gun-fire bids us part.”

But the final stanza is the best:

“Then, Leila, come! nor longer cogitate; Thy egress let no scruples dire retard; Contiguous to the portals of thy gate Suspensively I supplicate regard.”

The advertisements range from books on the languages of Dardistan to government contracts for elephant fodder, or price-lists of English beer; and an announcement of an Afghan history in the Urdu tongue is followed by a prospectus of Berkhamstead Grammar School. King Edward would rub his eyes were he to wake and find himself being advertised in Lahore.

The Punjaub Europeans, with their English newspapers and English ways, are strange governors for an empire conquered from the bravest of all Eastern races little more than eighteen years ago. One of them, taking up a town policeman‘s staff, said to me, one day, “Who could have thought in 1850 that in 1867 we should be ruling the Sikhs with this?”