Chapter 2

The selective processes of the memory are very curious. It has been decreed that one of my most vivid recollections of Bombay should be that of the embarrassment and half-amused self-consciousness of an American business man on the platform of the railway station for Delhi. Having completed his negotiatory visit he was being speeded on his way by the native staff of the firm, who had hung him with garlands like a sacrificial bull. In the Crawford Market I had watched the florists at work tearing the blossoms from a kind of frangipani known as the Temple Flower, in order to string them tightly into chains; and now and again in the streets one came upon people wearing them; but to find a shrewd and portly commercial American thus bedecked was a shock. As it happened, he was to share my compartment, and on entering, just before the train started, he apologised very heartily for importing so much heavy perfume into the atmosphere, but begged to be excused because it was the custom of the country and he didn't like to hurt anyone's feelings. He then stood at the door, waving farewells, and directly the line took a bend flung the wreaths out of the window. I was glad of his company, for in addition to these floral offerings his Bombay associates had provided him with a barrel of the best oranges that ever were grown--sufficient for a battalion--and these we consumed at brief intervals all the way to Delhi.

DELHI

"If you can be in India only so short a time as seven weeks," said an artist friend of mine--and among his pictures is a sombre representation of the big sacred bull that grazes under the walls of Delhi Fort--"why not stay in Delhi all the while? You will then learn far more of India than by rushing about." I think he was right, although it was not feasible to accept the advice. For Delhi has so much; it has, first and foremost, the Fort; it has the Jama Masjid, that immense mosque where on Fridays at one o'clock may be seen Mohammedans of every age wearing every hue, thousands worshipping as one; it has the ancient capitals scattered about the country around it; it has signs and memories of the Mutiny; it has delectable English residences; and it has the Chadni Chauk, the long main street with all its curious buildings and crowds and countless tributary alleys, every one of which is the East crystallised, every one of which has its white walls, its decorative doorways, its loiterers, its beggars, its artificers, and its defiance of the bogey, Progress.

Another thing: in January, Delhi, before the sun is high and after he has sunk, is cool and bracing.

But, most of all, Delhi is interesting because it was the very centre of the Mogul dominance, and when one has become immersed in the story of the great rulers, from Babar to Aurungzebe, one thinks of most other history as insipid. Of Babar, who reigned from 1526 to 1530, I saw no trace in India; but his son Humayun (1530-1556) built Indrapat, which is just outside the walls of Delhi, and he lies close by in the beautiful mausoleum that bears his name. Humayun's son, Akbar (1556-1605), preferred Agra to Delhi; nor was Jahangir (1605-1627), who succeeded Akbar, a great builder hereabout; but with Shah Jahan (1627-1658), Jahangir's son, came the present Delhi's golden age. He it was who built the Jama Masjid, the great mosque set commandingly on a mound and gained by magnificent flights of steps. To the traveller approaching the city from any direction the two graceful minarets of the mosque stand for Delhi. It was Shah Jahan, price of Mogul builders, who decreed also the palace in the Fort, to say nothing (at the moment) of the Taj Mahal at Agra; while two of his daughters, Jahanara, and Roshanara, that naughty Begam, enriched Delhi too, the little pavilion in the Gardens that bear Roshanara's name being a gem. Wandering among these architectural delights, now empty and under alien protection, it is difficult to believe that their period was as recent as Cromwell and Milton. But in India the sense of chronology vanishes.

After Shah Jahan came his crafty son, Aurungzebe, who succeeded in keeping his empire together until 1707, and with him the grandeur of the Grand Moguls waned and after him ceased to be, although not until the Mutiny was their rule extinguished. As I have just said, in India the sense of chronology vanishes, or goes astray, and it is with a start that one is confronted, in the Museum in Delhi Fort, by a photograph of the last Mogul!

In Bombay, during my wakeful moments in the hottest part of the day, I had passed the time and imbibed instruction by reading the three delightful books of the late E. H. Aitken, who called himself "Eha"--"Behind the Bungalow," "The Tribes on My Frontier" and "A Naturalist on the Prowl." No more amusing and kindly studies of the fauna, flora and human inhabitants of a country can have ever been written than these; and I can suggest, to the domestically curious mind, no better preparation for a visit to India. But at Raisina, when the cool evenings set in and it was pleasant to get near the wood fire, I took to history and revelled in the story of the Moguls as told by many authorities, but most entertainingly perhaps by Tavernier, the French adventurer who took service under Aurungzebe. If any one wants to know what Delhi was like in the seventeenth century during Aurungzebe's long reign, and how the daily life in the Palace went, and would learn more of the power and autocracy and splendour and cruelty of the Grand Moguls, let him get Tavernier's record. If once I began to quote from it I should never stop; and therefore I pass on, merely remarking that when you have finished the travels of M. Tavernier, the travels of M. Bernier, another contemporary French observer, await you. And I hold you to be envied.

The Palace in the Fort is now but a fraction of what it was in the time of Aurungzebe and his father, but enough remains to enable the imaginative mind to reconstruct the past, especially if one has read my two annalists. One of Bernier's most vivid passages describes the Diwan-i-Am, or Hall of Public Audience, the building to which, after leaving the modern military part of the Fort, one first comes, where the Moguls sat in state during a durbar, and painted and gilded elephants, richly draped, took part in the obeisances. Next comes the Hall of Private Audiences, where the Peacock Throne once stood. It has now vanished, but in its day it was one of the wonders of the world, the tails of the two guardian peacocks being composed of precious stones and the throne itself being of jewelled gold. It was for this that one of Shah Jahan's poets wrote an inscription in which we find such lines as--

By the order of the Emperor the azure of Heaven was exhausted on its decoration....

The world had become so short of gold on account of its use in the throne that the purse of the Earth was empty of treasure....

On a dark night, by the lustre of its rubies and pearls it can lend stars to a hundred skies....

That was right enough, no doubt, but when our poet went on to say,

As long as a trace remains of existence and space Shah Jahan shall continue to sit on this throne,

we feel that he was unwise. Such pronouncements can be tested. As it happened, Shah Jahan was destined, very shortly after the poem was written, to be removed into captivity by his son, and the rest of his unhappy life was spent in a prison at Agra. On each end wall of the Hall of Private Audience is the famous couplet,--

If there is a Paradise on the face of the earth, It is this, Oh! it is this, Oh! it is this.

I think of the garden and palace of Delhi Fort as the loveliest spot in India. Not the most beautiful, not the most impressive; but the loveliest. The Taj Mahal has a greater beauty; the ruined city of Fatehpur-Sikri has a greater dignity; but for the perfection of domestic regality in design and material and workmanship, this marble home and mosque and accompanying garden and terrace could not be excelled. After the Halls of Audience we come to the seraglio and accompanying buildings, where everything is perfect and nothing is on the grand scale. The Pearl Mosque could hardly be smaller; and it is as pure and fresh as a lotus. There is a series of apartments all in white marble (with inlayings of gold and the most delicately pierced marble gratings) through which a stream of water used to run (and it ran again at the Coronation Durbar in 1911, when the Royal Baths were again made to "function") that must be one of the most magical of the works of man. Every inch is charming and distinguished. All these rooms are built along the high wall which in the time of Shah Jahan and his many lady loves was washed by the Jumna. But to-day the river has receded and a broad strip of grass intervenes.

A DAY'S HAWKING

One of my best Indian days was that on which Colonel Sir Umar Hayat Khan took us out a-hawking. Sir Umar is himself something of a hawk--an impressive figure in his great turban with long streamers, his keen aquiline features and blackest of hair. All sport comes naturally to him, whether hunting or shooting, pig-sticking, coursing or falconry; and the Great War found him with a sportsman's eagerness to rush into the fray, where he distinguished himself notably.

We found this gallant chieftain in the midst of his retainers on the further bank of the Jumna, at the end of the long bridge. Here the plains begin--miles of fields of stubble, with here and there a tree and here and there a pool or marsh, as far as eye can reach, an ancient walled city in the near distance being almost the only excrescence. Between the river and this city was our hunting ground.

With the exception of Sir Umar, two of his friends and ourselves, the company was on foot; and nothing more like the middle ages did I ever see. The retainers were in every kind of costume, one having an old pink coat and one a green; one leading a couple of greyhounds in case we put up a hare; others carrying guns (for we were prepared for all); while the chief falconer and his assistants had their hawks on their wrists, and one odd old fellow was provided with a net, in which a captive live hawk was to flutter and struggle to attract his hereditary foes, the little birds, who, deeming him unable to hit back, were to swarm down to deride and defy and be caught in the meshes.

I may say at once that hawking, particularly in this form, does not give me much pleasure. There is something magnificent in the flight of the falcon when it is released and flung towards its prey, but the odds are too heavy in its favour and the whimperings of the doomed quarry strike a chill in the heart. We flew our hawks at duck and plovers, and missed none. Often the first swoop failed, but the deadly implacable pursuer was instantly ready to swoop again, and rarely was a third manoeuvre necessary. Man, under the influence of the excitement of the chase, is the same all the world over, and there was no difference between these Indians moving swiftly to intervene between the hawk and its stricken prey and an English boy running to retrieve his rabbit. Their animation and triumph--even their shouts and cries--were alike.

And so we crossed field after field on our gentle steeds--and no one admires gentleness in a horse more than I--stopping only to watch another tragedy of the air, or to look across the river to Delhi and see the Fort under new conditions. All this country I had so often looked down upon from those high massive walls, standing in one of the lovely windows of Shah Jahan's earthly paradise; and now the scene was reversed, and I began to take more delight in it than in the sport. But at a pond to which we next came there was enacted a drama so absorbing that everything else was forgotten, even the heat of the sun.

Upon this pond were three wild-duck at which a falcon was instantly flown. For a while, however, they kept their presence of mind and refused to leave the water--diving beneath the surface at the moment that the enemy was within a foot of them. On went the hawk, in its terrible, cruel onset, and up came the ducks, all ready to repeat these tactics when it turned and attacked again. But on one of the party (I swear it was not I), in order to assist the hawk, firing his gun, two of the ducks became panic-stricken and left the water, only of course to be quickly destroyed. It was on the hawk's return journey to the pond to make sure of the third duck that I saw for the first time in my life--and I hope the last--the expression on the countenance of these terrible birds in the execution of their duty: more than the mere execution of duty, the determination to have no more nonsense, to put an end to anything so monstrous as self-protection in others; for my horse being directly in the way, he flew under its neck and for a moment I thought that he was confusing me with the desired mallard. Nothing more merciless or purposeful did I ever see.

Then began a really heroic struggle on the part of the victim. He timed his dives to perfection, and escaped so often that the spirit of chivalry would have decreed a truce. But blood had been tasted, and, the desire being for more, the guns were again discharged. Not even they, however, could divert the duck from his intention of saving his life, and he dived away from the shot, too.

It was at this moment that assistance to the gallant little bird arrived--not from man, who was past all decency, but from brother feathers. Out of a clear sky suddenly appeared two tern, dazzling in their whiteness, and these did all in their power to infuriate the hawk and lure him from the water. They flew round him and over him; they called him names; they said he was a bully and that all of us (which was true) ought to be ashamed of ourselves; they daunted and challenged and attacked. But the enemy was too strong for them. A fusillade drove them off, and once again we were free to consider the case of the duck, who was still swimming anxiously about, hoping against hope. More shots were fired, one of the boys waded in with a stick, and the dogs were added to the assault; and in the face of so determined a bombardment the poor little creature at last flew up, to be struck down within a few seconds by the insatiable avenger.

That was the crowning event of the afternoon. Thereafter we had only small successes, and some very pronounced failures when, as happened several times, a bird flew for safety through a tree, and the hawk, following, was held up amid the branches. One of the birds thus to escape was a blue jay of brilliant beauty. We also got some hares. And then we loitered back under the yellowing sky, and Sir Umar Hayat Khan ceased suddenly to be a foe of fur and feathers and became a poet, talking of sunsets in India and in England as though the appreciation of tender beauty were his only delight.

NEW, OR IMPERIAL, DELHI

There have been seven Delhis; and it required no little courage to establish a new one--the Imperial capital--actually within sight of most of them; but the courage was forthcoming. Originally the position was to be to the north of the present city, where the Coronation Durbar spread its canvas, but Raisina was found to be healthier, and it is there, some five miles to the south-west, that the new palaces are rising from the rock. Fatehpur-Sikri is the only city with which the New Delhi can be compared; but not Akbar himself could devise it on a nobler scale. Akbar's centralising gift and Napoleon's spacious views may be said to combine here, the long avenues having kinship with the Champs Elysées, and Government House and the Secretariat on the great rocky plateau at Raisina corresponding to the palace on Fatehpur-Sikri's highest point. The splendour and the imagination which designed the lay-out of Imperial Delhi cannot be over-praised, and under the hands of Sir Edwin Lutyens and Mr. Herbert Baker some wonderful buildings are coming to life. The city, since it is several square miles in extent, cannot be finished for some years, but it may be ready to be the seat of Government as soon as 1924.

As I have said, the old Delhis are all about the new one. On the Grand Trunk road out of Delhi proper, which goes to Muttra and Agra, you pass, very quickly, on the left, the remains of Firozabad, the capital of Firoz Shah in the later thirteenth century. Two or three miles further on is Indrapat on its hill overlooking the Jumna, surrounded by lofty walls. It is as modern as the sixteenth century, but is now in ruins. At Indrapat reigned Humayun, the son of the mighty Babar (who on his conquering way to Delhi had swum every river in advance of his army) and the father of the mighty Akbar. I loitered long within Indrapat's massive walls, which are now given up to a few attendants and an occasional visitor, and like all the monuments around Delhi are most carefully conserved under the Act for that purpose, which was not the least of Lord Curzon's Viceregal achievements. Among the buildings which still stand, rising from the turf, is Humayun's library. It was here that he met his end--one tradition relating that he fell in the dark on his way to fetch a book, and another that his purpose had been less intellectually amatory.

Another mile and we come, still just beside the Grand Trunk road, to Humayun's Tomb, which stands in a vast garden where green parrots continually chatter and pursue each other. There is something very charming--a touch of the truest civilisation, if civilisation means the art of living graciously--in the practice of the old Emperors and rulers, of building their mausoleums during their lifetime and using them, until their ultimate destiny was fulfilled, as pleasure resorts. To this enchanting spot came Humayun and his ladies full of life, to be insouciant and gay. Then, his hour striking, Humayun's happy retreat became Humayun's Tomb. He died in 1556, when Queen Mary, in England, was persecuting Protestants. The Tomb is in good repair and to the stranger to the East who has not yet visited Agra and seen the Taj Mahal (which has a similar ground plan), it is as beautiful as need be. Humayun's cenotaph, in plain white marble, is in the very centre. Below, in the vault immediately beneath it, are his remains. Other illustrious dust is here, too; and some less illustrious, such as that of Humayun's barber, which reposes beneath a dome of burning-blue tiles in a corner of the garden.

From the upper galleries of the Emperor's mausoleum the eye enjoys various rich prospects--the valley of the Jumna pulsating in the heat, the walls of the New Delhi at Raisina almost visibly growing, and, to the north, Delhi itself, with the twin towers of the great mosque over all. Down the Grand Trunk road, immediately below, are bullock wagons and wayfarers, and here and there is a loaded camel. Across the road is a curious little group of sacred buildings whither some of the wayfarers no doubt are bent on a pilgrimage; for here is the shrine of the Saint Nizam-ud-din Aulia, who worked miracles during his life and died during the reign of our Edward II--in 1324.

On visiting his shrine (which involved the usual assumption of overshoes to prevent our infidel leather from contaminating the floor), we fell, after evading countless beggars and would-be guides, into the hands of a kindly old man who pressed handfuls of little white nuts upon us and who remains in my memory as the only independent Mussulman priest in India, for he refused a tip. In this respect nothing could be more widely separated than his conduct and that of the three priests of the Jama Masjid in Delhi, who, discovering us on the wall, just before the Friday service began, held up the service for several minutes while they explained their schedule of gratuities--beginning with ten rupees for the High Priest--and this after we had already provided for the attendant who had supplied the overshoes and had led us to the point of vantage! I thought how amusing it would be if a visitor to an English cathedral--where money usually has to pass, as it is--were surrounded by the Dean, Archdeacon, Canons and Minor Canons, with outstretched hands, and had to buy his way to a sight of the altar, according to the status of each. The spectacle would be as odd to us, as it must be to the French or Italians--and even perhaps Americans--to see a demand for an entrance fee on the Canterbury portals.

Were we to continue on the Grand Trunk road for a few miles, first crossing a noble Mogul bridge, we should come to a little walled city, Badapur, where a turning due west leads to another Delhi of the past, Tughlakabad, and on to yet another, the remains of Lal Kot, where the famous Minar soars to the sky.

One of the most pleasing effects of the New Delhi is the series of vistas which the lay-out provides. It has been so arranged that many of the avenues radiating from the central rock on which Government House and the Secretariat are being set are closed at their distant ends by historic buildings. Standing on the temporary tower which marks this centre one is able to see in a few moments all the ruined cities that I have mentioned. The Kutb Minar is the most important landmark in the far south, although the eye rests most lovingly on the red and white comeliness of the tomb of Safdar Jang in the middle distance--which, with Humayun's Tomb, makes a triangle with the new Government House. Within that triangle are the Lodi tombs, marking yet another period in the history of Delhi, the Lodis being the rulers who early in the fifteenth century were defeated by Babar.

The Kutb Minar enclosure, which is a large garden, where beautiful masonry, flowers, trees and birds equally flourish, commemorates the capture of Delhi by Muhammad bin Sam in 1193, the battle being directed by his lieutenant, Kutb-ud-din. From that time until the Mutiny in 1857 Delhi was under Mohammedan rule. One of the first acts of the conqueror was to destroy the Hindu temple that stood here and erect the mosque that now takes its place, and he then built the great tower known as the Kutb Minar, or Tower of Victory, which ascends in diminishing red and white storeys to a height of 235 feet, involving the inquisitive view-finder in a climb of 379 steps. On the other side of the mosque are the beginnings of a second tower, which, judging by the size of the base, was to have risen to a still greater height, but it was abandoned after 150 feet. Its purpose was to celebrate for ever the glory of the Emperor Ala-ud-din (1296-1316).

In front of the mosque is the Iron Pillar which has been the cause of so much perplexity both to antiquaries and chemists, and meat and drink to Sanscrit scholars. The pillar has an inscription commemorating an early monarch named Chandra who conquered Bengal in the fifth century, and it must have been brought to this spot for re-erection. But its refusal to rust, and the purity of its constituents, are its special merits. To me the mysteries of iron pillars are without interest, and what I chiefly remember of this remarkable pleasaunce is the exquisite stone carvings of the ruined cloisters and the green parrots that play among the trees.

THE DIVERS