XII.

Proves conclusively the Existence of the Dark Tower visited by Childe Rolande, and of “Bogey” who frightens Children.

THE Gamberi river—clear as a trout stream—runs through the waste round Chitor, and is spanned by an old bridge, very solid and massive, said to have been built before the sack of Ala-ud-din. The bridge is in the middle of the stream—the floods have raced round either end of it—and is reached by a steeply sloping stone causeway. From the bridge to the new town of Chitor, which lies at the foot of the hill, runs a straight and well-kept road, flanked on either side by the scattered remnants of old houses, and, here and there, fallen temples. The road, like the bridge, is no new thing, and is wide enough for twenty horsemen to ride abreast.

New Chitor is a very dirty, and apparently thriving, little town, full of grain-merchants and sellers of arms. The ways are barely wide enough for the elephant of dignity and the little brown babies of impudence. The Englishmanwent through, always on a slope painfully accentuated by Gerowlia who, with all possible respect to her years, must have been a baggage-animal and no true Sahib’s mount. Let the local Baedeker speak for a moment:—“The ascent to Chitor, which begins from within the south-east angle of the town, is nearly a mile to the upper gate, with a slope of about 1 in 15. There are two zig-zag bends, and on the three portions thus formed, are seven gates, of which one, however, has only the basement left.” This is the language of fact which, very properly, leaves out of all account the Genius of the Place who sits at the gate nearest the new city and is with the sightseer throughout. The first impression of repulsion and awe is given by a fragment of tumbled sculpture close to a red daubedlingam, near the Padal Pol or lowest gate. It is a piece of frieze, and the figures of the men are worn nearly smooth by time. What is visible is finely and frankly obscene to an English mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contains the History of the Bhumia of Jharwasa, and the Record of a Visit to the House of Strange Stories. Demonstrates the Felicity of Loaferdom, which is the veritable Companionship of the Indian Empire, and proposes a Scheme for the better Officering of two Departments.

COME away from the monstrous gloom of Chitor and escape northwards. The place is unclean and terrifying. Let us catch To-day by both hands and return to the Station-master—who is also booking-parcels and telegraph-clerk, and who never seems to go to bed—and to the comfortably wadded bunks of the Rajputana-Malwa line.

While the train is running, be pleased to listen to the perfectly true story of thebhumiaof Jharwasa, which is a story the sequel whereof has yet to be written. Once upon a time, a Rajput landholder, abhumia, and a Mahomedanjaghirdar, were next-door neighbours in Ajmir territory. They hated each other thoroughly for many reasons, all connected with land; andthejaghirdarwas the bigger man of the two. In those days, it was the law that victims of robbery or dacoity should be reimbursed by the owner of the lands on which the affair had taken place. The ordinance is now swept away as impracticable. There was a highway robbery on thebhumia’sholding; and he vowed that it had been “put up” by the Mahomedan who, he said, was an Ahab. The reive-gelt payable nearly ruined the Rajput, and he, labouring under a galling grievance or a groundless suspicion, fired thejaghirdar’scrops, was detected and brought up before the English Judge who gave him four years’ imprisonment. To the sentence was appended a recommendation that, on release, the Rajput should be put on heavy securities for good behaviour. “Otherwise,” wrote the Judge, who seems to have known the people he was dealing with, “he will certainly kill thejaghirdar.” Four years passed, and thejaghirdarobtained wealth and consideration, and was made, let us say, a Khan Bahadur, and an Honorary Magistrate; but thebhumiaremained in gaol and thought over the highway robbery. When the day of release came, a new Judge hunted up his predecessor’s finding and recommendation, and would have put thebhumiaon security. “Sahib,” said thebhumia, “I haveno people. I have been in gaol. What am I now? And who will find security for me? If you will send me back to gaol again I can do nothing, and I have no friends.” So they released him, and he went away into an outlying village and borrowed a sword from one house, and had it sharpened in another, for love. Two days later fell the birthday of the Khan Bahadur and the Honorary Magistrate, and his friends and servants and dependants made a little durbar and did him honour after the native custom. Thebhumiaalso attended the levee, but no one knew him, and he was stopped at the door of the courtyard by the servant. “Say that thebhumiaof Jharwasa has come to pay his salaams,” said he. They let him in, and in the heart of Ajmir City, in broad daylight, and before all thejaghirdar’shousehold, he smote off his enemy’s head so that it rolled upon the ground. Then he fled, and though they raised the country-side against him he was never caught, and went into Bikanir.

Five years later, word came to Ajmir that Chimbo Singh, thebhumiaof Jharwasa, had taken service under the Thakur Sahib of Palitana. The case was an old one, and the chances of identification musty, but the suspected was caught and brought in, and one of the leadingnative barristers of the Bombay Bar was retained to defend him. He said nothing and continued to say nothing, and the case fell through. He is believed to be “wanted” now for a fresh murder committed within the last few months, out Bikanir way.

And now that the train has reached Ajmir, the Crewe of Rajputana, whither shall a tramp turn his feet? The Englishman set his stick on end, and it fell with its point North-West as nearly as might be. This being translated, meant Jodhpur, which is the city of the Hounhnhyms and, that all may be in keeping, the occasional resting-place of fugitive Yahoos. If you would enjoy Jodhpur thoroughly, quit at Ajmir the decent conventionalities of “station” life, and make it your business to move among gentlemen—gentlemen in the Ordnance of the Commissariat, or, better still, gentlemen on the Railway. At Ajmir, gentlemen will tell you what manner of place Jodhpur is, and their accounts, though flavoured with crisp and curdling oaths, are amusing. In their eyes the desert that rings the city has no charms, and they discuss affairs of the State, as they understand them, in a manner that would curl the hair on a Political’s august head. Jodhpur has been, but things are rather better now, a much-favoured camping ground for the light-cavalry of the road—the loafers with a certain amount of brain and great assurance. The explanation is simple. There are more than four hundred horses in His Highness’s city stables alone; and where the Hounhnhym is, there also will be the Yahoo. This is sad but true.

Besides the Uhlans who come and go on Heaven knows what mysterious errands, there are bag-men travelling for the big English firms. Jodhpur is a good customer, and purchases all sorts of things, more or less useful, for the State or its friends. These are the gentlemen to know, if you would understand something of matters which are not written in reports.

The Englishman took a train from Ajmir to Marwar Junction, which is on the road to Mount Abu, westward from Ajmir, and at five in the morning, under pale moonlight, was uncarted at the beginning of the Jodhpur State Railway—one of the quaintest little lines that ever ran a locomotive. It is the Maharaja’s very own, and pays about ten per cent.; but its quaintness does not lie in these things. It is worked with rude economy, and started life by singularly and completely falsifying the Government estimates for its construction. An intelligent Bureau asserted that it could not be laid down for less than—but the error shall be glossed over. It was laid down for a little more than seventeen thousand rupees a mile, with the help of second-hand rails and sleepers; and it is currently asserted that the Station-masters are flagmen, pointsmen, ticket-collectors and everything else, except platforms and lamp-rooms. As only two trains are run in the twenty-four hours, this economy of staff does not matter in the least. The State line, with the comparatively new branch to the Pachbadra salt-pits, pays handsomely, and is exactly suited to the needs of its users. True, there is a certain haziness as to the hour of starting, but this allows laggards more time, and fills the packed carriages to overflowing.

From Marwar Junction to Jodhpur, the train leaves the Aravalis and goes northwards into “the region of death” that lies beyond the Luni River. Sand,akbushes, and sand-hills, varied with occasional patches of unthrifty cultivation, make up the scenery. Rain has been very scarce in Marwar this year, and the country, consequently, shows at its worst, for almost every square mile of the kingdom nearly as large as Scotland is dependent on the sky for its crops. In a good season, a large village can payfrom seven to nine thousand rupees revenue without blenching. In a bad one, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” may think themselves lucky if they raise “rupees fifteen only” from the same place. The fluctuation is startling.

From a country-side, which to the uninitiated seems about as valuable as a stretch of West African beach, the State gets a revenue of nearly forty lakhs; and men who know the country vow that it has not been one tithe exploited, and that there is more to be made from salt and the marble and—curious thing in this wilderness—good forest conservancy, than an open-handed Durbar dreams of. An amiable weakness for unthinkingly giving away villages where ready cash failed, has somewhat hampered the revenue in past years; but now—and for this the Maharaja deserves great credit—Jodhpur has a large and genuine surplus, and a very compact little scheme of railway extension. Before turning to a consideration of the City of Jodhpur, hear a true story in connection with the Hyderabad-Pachbadra project which those interested in the scheme may lay to heart.

His State line, his “ownest own,” as has been said, very much delighted the Maharaja who, in one or two points, is not unlike SirTheodore Hope of sainted memory. Pleased with the toy, he said effusively, in words which may or may not have reached the ears of the Hyderabad-Pachbadra people:—“This is a good business. If the Government will give me independent jurisdiction, I’ll make and open the line straightaway from Pachbadra to the end of my dominions,i.e., all but to Hyderabad.”

Then “up and spake an elder knight, sat at the King’s right knee,” who knew something about the railway map of India, and the Controlling Power of strategical lines:—“Maharaja Sahib—here is the Indus Valley State and here is the Bombay-Baroda. Where would you be?” “By Jove,” quoth the Maharaja, though he swore by quite another god: “I see!” and thus he abandoned the idea of a Hyderabad line, and turned his attention to an extension to Nagore, with a branch to the Makrana marble-quarries which are close to the Sambhar salt lake near Jeypore. And, in the fulness of time, that extension will be made and perhaps extended to Bahawalpur.

The Englishman came to Jodhpur at mid-day, in a hot, fierce sunshine that struck back from the sands and the ledges of red-rock, as though it were May instead of December. The linescorned such a thing as a regular ordained terminus. The single track gradually melted away into the sands. Close to the station was a grim stone dak-bungalow, and in the verandah stood a brisk, bag-and-flask-begirdled individual, cracking his joints with excess of irritation. He was also snorting like an impatient horse.

Nota Bene.—When one is on the road it is above all things necessary to “pass the time o’day” to fellow-wanderers. Failure to comply with this law implies that the offender is “too good for his company”; and this, on the road, is the unpardonable sin. The Englishman “passed the time o’day” in due and ample form. “Ha! Ha!” said the gentleman with the bag. “Isn’t this a sweet place? There ain’t no ticca-gharries, and there ain’t nothing to eat, if you haven’t brought your vittles, an’ they charge you three-eight for a bottle of whisky. An’ Encore at that! Oh! It’s a sweet place.” Here he skipped about the verandah and puffed. Then turning upon the Englishman, he said fiercely:—“What have you come here for?” Now this was rude, because the ordinary form of salutation on the road is usually:—“And what are you for?” meaning, “what House do you represent?” The Englishman answered dolefully that he was travelling for pleasure,which simple explanation offended the little man with the courier-bag. He snapped his joints more excruciatingly than ever:—“For pleasure! My God! For pleasure! Come here an’ wait five weeks for your money, an’ mark what I’m tellin’ you now, you don’t get it then! But per’aps your ideas of pleasure is different from most peoples’. For pleasure! Yah!” He skipped across the sand towards the station, for he was going back with the down train, and vanished in a whirlwind of luggage and the fluttering of female skirts: in Jodhpur women are baggage-coolies. A level, drawling voice spoke from an inner room:—“’E’s a bit upset. That’s what ’e is! I remember when I was at Gworlior"—the rest of the story was lost, and the Englishman set to work to discover the nakedness of the dak-bungalow. For reasons which do not concern the public, it is made as bitterly uncomfortable as possible. The food is infamous, and the charges seem to be wilfully pitched about eighty per cent. above the tariff, so that some portion of the bill, at least, may be paid without bloodshed, or the unseemly defilement of walls with the contents of drinking-glasses. This is short-sighted policy, and it would, perhaps, be better to lower the prices and hide the tariff, and put a guard about the house to preventjackal-molested donkeys from stampeding into the verandahs. But these be details. Jodhpur dak-bungalow is a merry, merry place, and any writer in search of new ground to locate a madly improbable story in, could not do better than study it diligently. In front lies sand, riddled with innumerable ant-holes, and, beyond the sand, the red sandstone wall of the city, and the Mahomedan burying-ground that fringes it. Fragments of sandstone set on end mark the resting places of the faithful who are of no great account here. Above everything, a mark for miles round, towers the dun-red piles of the Fort which is also a Palace. This is set upon sandstone rock whose sharper features have been worn smooth by the wash of the windblown sand. It is as monstrous as anything in Dore’s illustrations of theContes Drolatiquesand, wherever it wanders, the eye comes back at last to its fantastic bulk. There is no greenery on the rock, nothing but fierce sunlight or black shadow. A line of red hills forms the background of the city, and this is as bare as the picked bones of camels that lie bleaching on the sand below.

Wherever the eye falls, it sees a camel or a string of camels—lean, racer-builtsowarricamels, or heavy, black, shag-haired trading-ships bent on their way to the Railway Station. Through the night the air is alive with the bubbling and howling of the brutes, who assuredly must suffer from nightmare. In the morning the chorus round the station is deafening. A camel has as wide a range of speech as an elephant. The Englishman found a little one, crooning happily to itself, all alone on the sands. Its nose-string was smashed. Hence its joy. But a big man left the station and beat it on the neck with a seven-foot stick, and it rose up and sobbed.

Knowing what these camels meant, but trusting nevertheless that the road would not beverybad, the Englishman went into the city, left a well-kunkered road, turned through a sand-worn, red sandstone gate, and sunk ankle-deep in fine reddish white sand. This was the main thoroughfare of the city. Two tame lynxes shared it with a donkey; and the rest of the population seemed to have gone to bed. In the hot weather, between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon all Jodhpur stays at home for fear of death by sunstroke, and it is possible that the habit extends far into what is officially called the “cold weather”; or, perhaps, being brought up among sands, men do not care to tramp them for pleasure. The city internally is a walledand secret place; each courtyard being hidden from view by a red sandstone wall, except in a few streets where the shops are poor and mean.

In an old house now used for the storing of tents, Akbar’s mother lay two months, before the “Guardian of Mankind” was born, drawing breath for her flight to Umarkot across the desert. Seeing this place, the Englishman thought of many things not worth the putting down on paper, and went on till the sand grew deeper and deeper, and a great camel, heavily laden with stone, came round a corner and nearly stepped on him. As the evening drew on, the city woke up, and the goats and the camels and the kine came in by hundreds, and men said that wild pig, which are strictly preserved by the Princes for their own sport, were in the habit of wandering about the roads. Now if they do this in the capital, what damage must they not do to the crops in the district? Men said that they did a very great deal of damage, and it was hard to keep their noses out of anything they took a fancy to. On the evening of the Englishman’s visit, the Maharaja went out, as is his laudable custom, alone and unattended, to a road actuallyinthe city along which one specially big pig was in the habit of passing. His Highness got his game with a single shotbehind the shoulder, and in a few days it will be pickled and sent off to the Maharana of Udaipur, as a love-gift, on account of the latter’s investiture. There is great friendship between Jodhpur and Udaipur, and the idea of one King going abroad to shoot game for another has something very pretty and quaint in it.

Night fell and the Englishman became aware that the conservancy of Jodhpur might be vastly improved. Strong stenches, say the doctors, are of no importance; but there came upon every breath of heated air—and in Jodhpur City the air is warm in mid-winter—the faint, sweet, sickly, reek that one has always been taught to consider specially deadly. A few months ago there was an impressive outbreak of cholera in Jodhpur, and the Residency Doctor, who really hoped that the people would be brought to see sense, did his best to bring forward a general cleansing-scheme. But the city fathers would have none of it. Their fathers had been trying to poison themselves in well-defined ways for an indefinite number of years; and they were not going to have any of the Sahib’s “sweeper nonsense.”

To clinch everything, one travelled member of the community rose in his place and said:—“Why, I’ve been to Simla. Yes, to Simla! Andeven I don’t want it!” This compliment should be engrossed in the archives of the Simla Municipality. Sanitation on English lines is not yet acceptable to Jodhpur.

When the black dusk had shut down, the Englishman climbed up a little hill and saw the stars come out and shine over the desert. Very far away, some camel-drivers had lighted a fire and were singing as they sat by the side of their beasts. Sound travels as far over sand as over water, and their voices came into the city wall and beat against it in multiplied echoes.

Then he returned to the House of Strange Stories—the Dak-Bungalow—and passed the time o’day to the genial, light-hearted bagman—a Cockney, in whose heart there was no thought of India, though he had travelled for years throughout the length and breadth of the Empire and over New Burma as well. There was a fort in Jodhpur, but you see that was not in his line of business exactly, and there were stables, but “you may take my word for it, them who has much to do with horses is a bad lot. You get hold of the Maharaja’s coachman and he’ll drive you all round the shop. I’m only waiting here collecting money.” Jodhpur dak-bungalow seems to be full of men “waiting here.” They lie in long chairs in the verandahand tell each other interminable stories, or stare citywards and express their opinion of some dilatory debtor in language punctuated by free spitting. They are all waiting for something; and they vary the monotony of a life they make wilfully dull beyond words, by waging war with the dak-bungalow khansama. Then they return to their long chairs, or their couches, and sleep. Some of them, in old days, used to wait as long as six weeks—six weeks in May, when the sixty miles from Marwar Junction to Jodhpur was covered in three days by slow-pacing bullock carts! Some of them are bagmen, able to describe the demerits of every dak-bungalow from the Peshin to Pagan, and southward to Hyderabad—men of substance who have “The Trades” at their back. It is a terrible thing to be in “The Trades,” that great Doomsday Book of Calcutta, in whose pages are written the names of doubtful debtors. Let light-hearted purchasers take note.

And the others, who wait and swear and spit and exchange anecdotes—what are they? Bummers, land-sharks, skirmishers for their bread. It would be cruel in a fellow-tramp to call them loafers. Their lien upon the State may have its origin in horses, or anything else; for the State buys anything vendible, from Abdul Raymon’s most promising importations to—a patent, self-acting corkscrew. They are a mixed crew, but amusing and full of strange stories of adventure by land and by sea. And their ends are as curiously brutal as their lives. A wanderer was once swept into the great, still backwater that divides the loaferdom of Upper India—that is to say, Calcutta and Bombay—from the north-going current of Madras, where Nym and Pistol are highly finished articles with certificates. This backwater is a dangerous place to break down in, as the men on the road know well. “You can run Rajputana in a pair o’ sack breeches an’ an old hat, but go to Central Injia with pice,” says the wisdom of the road. So the waif died in the bazaar, and the Barrack-master Sahib gave orders for his burial. It might have been the bazaar sergeant, or it might have been an hireling who was charged with the disposal of the body. At any rate, it was an Irishman who said to the Barrack-master Sahib:—“Fwhat about that loafer?” “Well, what’s the matter?” “I’m considtherin whether I’m to mash in his thick head, or to break his long legs. He won’t fit the storecoffin anyways.”

Here the story ends. It may be an old one; but it struck the Englishman as being rather unsympathetic in its nature; and he has preservedit for this reason. Were the Englishman a mere Secretary of State instead of an enviable and unshackled vagabond, he would remodel that Philanthropic Institution for Teaching Young Subalterns how to Spell—variously called the Intelligence and the Political Department—and giving eachomedwarthe pair of sack breeches and old hat, above prescribed, would send him out for a twelvemonth on the road. Not that he might learn to swear Australian oaths (which are superior to any ones in the market) or to drink bazaar-drinks (which are very bad indeed), but in order that he might gain an insight into the tertiary politics of States—things less imposing than succession-cases and less wearisome than boundary disputes, but—here speaks Ferdinand Count Fathom, in an Intermediate compartment, very drunk and very happy—“Worth knowing a little—Oh no! Not at all.”

A small volume might be written of the ways and the tales of Indian loafers of the more brilliant order—such Chevaliers of the Order of Industry as would throw their glasses in your face did you call them loafers. They are a genial, blasphemous, blustering crew, and pre-eminent even in a land of liars.

A King’s House and Country. Further Consideration of the Hat-marked Caste.

THE hospitality that spreads tables in the wilderness, and shifts the stranger from the back of the hired camel into the two-horse victoria, must be experienced to be appreciated.

To those unacquainted with the peculiarities of the native-trained horse, this advice may be worth something. Sit as far back as ever you can, and, if Oriental courtesy have put an English bit and bridoon in a mouth by education intended for a spiked curb, leave the whole contraption alone. Once acquainted with the comparative smoothness of English ironmongery, your mount will grow frivolous. In which event a four-pound steeplechase saddle, accepted through sheer shame, offers the very smallest amount of purchase to untrained legs.

The Englishman rode up to the Fort, and by the way learnt all these things and many more. He was provided with a racking, female, horse who swept the gullies of the city by dancing sideways.

The road to the Fort which stands on the Hill of Strife, wound in and out of sixty-foot hills, with a skilful avoidance of all shade; and this was at high noon, when puffs of heated air blew from the rocks on all sides. “What must the heat be in May?” The Englishman’s companion was a cheery Brahmin, who wore the lightest of turbans and sat the smallest of neat little country-breds. “Awful!” said the Brahmin. “But not so bad as in the district. Look there!” and he pointed from the brow of a bad eminence, across the quivering heat-haze, to where the white sand faded into bleach blue sky, and the horizon was shaken and tremulous. “It’s very bad in summer. Would knock you—Oh yes—all to smash, but we are accustomed to it.” A rock-strewn hill, about half a mile, as the crow flies, from the Fort was pointed out as the place whence, at the beginning of this century, the Pretender Sowae besieged Raja Maun for five months, but could make no headway against his foe. One gun of the enemy’s batteries specially galled the Fort, and the Jodhpur King offered a village to any of his gunners who should dismount it. “It was smashed,” said the Brahmin. “Oh yes, all to pieces.” Practically, the city which lies below the Fort is indefensible, and during the many wars of Marwar hasgenerally been taken up by the assailants without resistance.

Entering the Fort by the Jeypore Gate, and studiously refraining from opening his umbrella, the Englishman found shadow and coolth, took off his hat to the tun-bellied, trunk-nosed God of Good-Luck who had been very kind to him in his wanderings, and sat down near half-a-dozen of the Maharaja’s guns bearing the mark, “A. Broome, Cossipore, 1857,” or “G. Hutchinson, Cossipore, 1838.” Now rock and masonry are so curiously blended in this great pile that he who walks through it loses sense of being among buildings. It is as though he walked through mountain-gorges. The stone-paved, inclined planes, and the tunnel-like passages driven under a hundred feet height of buildings, increase this impression. In many places the wall and rock runs up unbroken by any window for forty feet.

It would be a week’s work to pick out even roughly the names of the dead who have added to the buildings, or to describe the bewildering multiplicity of courts and ranges of rooms; and, in the end, the result would be as satisfactory as an attempt to describe a night-mare. It is said that the rock on which the Fort stands is four miles in circuit, but no man yet has dared toestimate the size of the city that they call the Palace, or the mileage of its ways. Ever since Ras Joda, four hundred years ago, listened to the voice of aFogiand leaving Mundore built his eyrie on the “Bird’s Nest,” as the Hill of Strife was called, the Palaces have grown and thickened. Even to-day the builders are still at work. Takht Singh, the present ruler’s predecessor, built royally. An incomplete bastion and a Hall of Flowers are among the works of his pleasure. Hidden away behind a mighty wing of carved red sandstone, lie rooms set apart for Viceroys, Durbar Halls, and dinner-rooms without end. A gentle gloom covers the evidences of the catholic taste of the State in articles of “bigotry and virtue”; but there is enough light to show theraison d’etreof the men who wait in the dak-bungalow. And, after all, what is the use of Royalty in these days if a man may not take delight in the pride of the eye? Kumbha Rana, the great man of Chitor, fought like a Rajput, but he had an instinct which made him build the Tower of Victory at, who knows, what cost of money and life. The fighting-instinct thrown back upon itself, must have some sort of outlet; and a merciful Providence wisely ordains that the Kings of the East in the nineteenth century shall take pleasure in“shopping” on an imperial scale. Dresden China snuff-boxes, mechanical engines, electro-plated fish-slicers, musical boxes, and gilt, blownglass, Christmas-Tree balls do not go well with the splendours of a Palace that might have been built by Titans and coloured by the morning sun. But there are excuses to be made for Kings who have no work to do—at least such work as their fathers understood best.

In one of the higher bastions stands a curious specimen of one of the earliestmitrailleuses—a cumbrous machine carrying twenty gun-barrels in two rows, which small-arm fire is flanked by two tiny cannon. As a muzzle-loading implement its value after the first discharge would be insignificant; but the soldiers lounging by assured the Englishman that it had done good service in its time: it was eaten with rust.

A man may spend a long hour in the upper tiers of the Palaces, but still far from the roof-tops, in looking out across the desert. There are Englishmen in these wastes, who say gravely that there is nothing so fascinating as the sand of Bikanir and Marwar. “You see,” explained an enthusiast of the Hat-marked Caste, “you are not shut in by roads, and you can go just as you please. And, somehow, it grows upon you as you get used to it, and you end, y’know, byfalling in love with the place.” Look steadily from the Palace westward where the city with its tanks and serais is spread at your feet, and you will, in a lame way, begin to understand the fascination of the desert which, by those who have felt it, is said to be even stronger than the fascination of the road. The city is of red-sandstone and dull and sombre to look at. Beyond it, where the white sand lies, the country is dotted with camels limping into the Ewigkeit or coming from the same place. Trees appear to be strictly confined to the suburbs of the city. Very good. If you look long enough across the sands, while a voice in your ear is telling you of half-buried cities, old as old Time and wholly unvisited by Sahibs, of districts where the white man is unknown, and of the wonders of far-way Jeysulmir ruled by a half distraught king, sand-locked and now smitten by a terrible food and water famine, you will, if it happen that you are of a sedentary and civilised nature, experience a new emotion—will be conscious of a great desire to take one of the lobbing camels and get away into the desert, away from the last touch of To-day, to meet the Past face to face. Some day a novelist will exploit the unknown land from the Rann, where the wild ass breeds, northward and eastward, till he comesto the Indus. That will be when Rider Haggard has used up Africa and a new “She” is needed.

But the officials of Marwar do not call their country a desert. On the contrary, they administer it very scientifically and raise, as has been said, about thirty-eight lakhs from it. To come back from the influence and the possible use of the desert to more prosaic facts. Read quickly a rough record of things in modern Marwar. The old is drawn in Tod, who speaks the truth. The Maharaja’s right-hand in the work of the State is Maharaj Sir Pertab Singh, Prime Minister, A.-D.-C. to the Prince of Wales, capable of managing the Marwari who intrigues like a—Marwari, equally capable, as has been seen, of moving in London Society, and Colonel of a newly-raised “crack” cavalry corps. The Englishman would have liked to have seen him, but he was away in the desert somewhere, either marking a boundary or looking after a succession case. Not very long ago, as the Setts of Ajmir knew well, there was a State debt of fifty lakhs. This has now been changed into a surplus of three lakhs, and the revenue is growing. Also, the simple Dacoit who used to enjoy himself very pleasantly, has been put into a department, and the Thug with him.

Consequently, for the department takes a genuine interest in this form ofshikar, and the gaol leg-irons are not too light, dacoities have been reduced to such an extent that men say “you may send a woman, with her ornaments upon her, from Sojat to Phalodi, and she will not lose a nose-ring.” Also, and this in a Rajput State is an important matter, the boundaries of nearly every village in Marwar have been demarcated, and boundaryrixes, in which both sides preferred small-arm fire to the regulationlathi, are unknown. The open-handed system of giving away villages had raised a large and unmannerly crop ofjaghirdars. These have been taken and brought in hand by Sir Pertab Singh, to the better order of the State.

A Punjabi Sirdar, Har Dyal Singh, has reformed, or made rather, Courts on the Civil and Criminal Side; and his hand is said to be found in a good many sweepings out of old corners. It must always be borne in mind that everything that has been done, was carried through over and under unlimited intrigue, for Jodhpur is a Native State. Intrigue must be met with intrigue by all except Gordons or demi-gods; and it is curious to hear how a reduction in tariff, or a smoothing out of some tangled Court, had to be worked by shift and by-way. Thetales are comic, but not for publication. Howbeit! Har Dyal Singh got his training in part under the Punjab Government, and in part in a little Native State far away in the Himalayas, where thegumnamehwas not altogether an unknown animal. To the credit of the “Pauper Province” be it said, it is not easy to circumvent a Punjabi. The details of his work would be dry reading. The result of it is good, and there is justice in Marwar, and order and firmness in its administration.

Naturally, the land-revenue is the most interesting thing in Marwar from an administrative point of view. The basis of it is a tank about the size of a swimming-bath, with a catchment of several hundred square yards, draining through leeped channels. When God sends the rain, the people of the village drink from the tank. When the rains fail, as they failed this year, they take to their wells, which are brackish and breed guinea-worm. For these reasons the revenue, like the Republic of San Domingo, is never alike for two years running. There are no canal questions to harry the authorities; but the fluctuations are enormous. Under the Aravalis the soil is good: further north they grow millet and pasture cattle, though, said a Revenue Officer cheerfully,—“God knows whatthe brutes find to eat.”Aproposof irrigation, the one canal deserves special mention, as showing how George Stephenson came to Jodhpur and astonished the inhabitants. Six miles from the city proper lies the Balsamand Sagar, a great tank. In the hot weather, when the city tanks ran out or stank, it was the pleasant duty of the women to tramp twelve miles at the end of the day’s work to fill their lotahs. In the hot weather Jodhpur is—let a simile suffice. Sukkur in June would be Simla to Jodhpur.

The State Engineer, who is also the Jodhpur State Line, for he has no European subordinates, conceived the idea of bringing the water from the Balsamand into the city. Was the city grateful? Not in the least. It said that the Sahib wanted the water to run uphill and was throwing money into the tank. Being true Marwaris, men betted on the subject. The canal—a built out one, for water must not touch earth in these parts—was made at a cost of something over a lakh, and the water came down because the tank was a trifle higher than the city. Now, in the hot weather, the women need not go for long walks, but the Marwari cannot understand how it was that the “waters came down to Jodhpur.” From the Marwari to money matters is an easy step. Formerly, thatis to say up to within a very short time, the Treasury of Jodhpur was conducted in a shiftless, happy-go-lucky sort of fashion not uncommon in Native States, whereby the Mahajuns “held the bag” and made unholy profits on discount and other things, to the confusion of the Durbar Funds and their own enrichment. There is now a Treasury modelled on English lines, and English in the important particular that money is not to be got from it for the asking, and the items of expenditure are strictly looked after.

In the middle of all this bustle of reform planned, achieved, frustrated and re-planned, and the never-ending underground warfare that surges in a Native State, moved the English officers—the irreducible minimum of exiles. As a caste, the working Englishmen in Native States are curiously interesting; and the traveller whose tact by this time has been Wilfred-blunted by tramping, sits in judgment upon them as he has seen them. In the first place, they are, they must be, the fittest who have survived; for though, here and there, you shall find one chafing bitterly against the burden of his life in the wilderness, one to be pitied more than any chained beast, the bulk of the caste are honestly and unaffectedly fond of theirwork, fond of the country around them, and fond of the people they deal with. In each State their answer to a certain question is the same. The men with whom they are in contact are “all right when you know them, but you’ve got to know them first” as the music-hall song says. Their hands are full of work; so full that, when the incult wanderer said—“What do you find to do?” they looked upon him with contempt and amazement—exactly as the wanderer himself had once looked upon a Globe-Trotter, who had put to him the same impertinent query. And—but here the Englishman may be wrong—it seemed to him that in one respect their lives were a good deal more restful and concentrated than those of their brethren under the British Government. There was no talk of shiftings and transfers and promotions, stretching across a Province and a half, and no man said anything about Simla. To one who has hitherto believed that Simla is the hub of the Empire, it is disconcerting to hear:—“O Simla! That’s where you Bengalis go. We haven’t anything to do with Simla down here.” And no more they have. Their talk and their interests run in the boundaries of the States they serve, and, most striking of all, the gossipy element seems to be cut out altogether. It is a backwater of the riverof Anglo-Indian life—or is it the main current, the broad stream that supplies the motive power, and is the other life only the noisy ripple on the surface? You who have lived, not merely looked at, both lives, decide. Much can be learnt from the talk of the caste—many curious, many amusing, and some startling things. One hears stories of men who take a poor, impoverished State as a man takes a wife, “for better or worse,” and, moved by some incomprehensible ideal of virtue, consecrate—that is not too big a word—consecrate their lives to that State in all single-heartedness and purity. Such men are few, but they exist to-day, and their names are great in lands where no Englishman travels. Again the listener hears tales of grizzled diplomats of Rajputana—Machiavellis who have hoisted a powerful intriguer with his own intrigue, and bested priestly cunning, and the guile of the Oswal, simply that the way might be clear for some scheme which should put money into a tottering Treasury, or lighten the taxation of a few hundred thousand men—or both; for this can be done. One tithe of that force spent on their own advancement would have carried such men very far.

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

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

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

After all, comparative civilisation has its advantages.

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