XVIII.

Shows that there may be Poetry in a Bank, and attempts to show the Wonders of the Palace of Boondi.

“THIS is a devil’s place you have come to, Sahib. No grass for the horses, and the people don’t understand anything, and their dirty pice are no good in Nasirabad. Look here!” And Ram Baksh wrathfully exhibited a handful of lumps of copper. The nuisance of taking a native out of his own beat is that he forthwith regards you not only as the author of his being, but of all his misfortunes as well. He is as hampering as a frightened child and as irritating as a man. “Padre Martum Sahibnever came here,” said Ram Baksh, with the air of one who had been led against his will into bad company.

A story about a rat that found a piece of turmeric and set up a bunnia’s shop had sent the one-eyed munshi away, but a company of lesser munshis, runners and the like, were in attendance, and they said that money might be changed at the Treasury, which was in thePalace. It was quite impossible to change it anywhere else—there was nohookum. From the Sukh Mahal to the Palace the road ran through the heart of the city, and by reason of the continual shouting of the munshis, not more than ten thousand of the fifty thousand people of Boondi knew for what purpose the Sahib was journeying through their midst. Cataract was the most prevalent affliction, cataract in its worst forms, and it was, therefore, necessary that men should come very close to look at the stranger. They were in no sense rude, but they stared devoutly. “He has not come forshikar, and he will not take petitions. He has come to see the place, and God knows what he is.” The description was quite correct, as far as it went; but, somehow or another, when shouted out at four cross-ways in the midst of a very pleasant little gathering it did not seem to add to dignity or command respect.

It has been written “thecoup d’oeilof the castellated Palace of Boondi, from whichever side you approach it, is perhaps the most striking in India. Whoever has seen the Palace of Boondi can easily picture to himself the hanging gardens of Semiramis.” This is true—and more too. To give on paper any adequate idea of the Boondi-ki-Mahal is impossible. JeyporePalace may be called the Versailles of India; Udaipur’s House of State is dwarfed by the hills round it and the spread of the Pichola lake; Jodhpur’s House of Strife, grey towers on red rock, is the work of giants; but the Palace of Boondi, even in broad day-light, is such a Palace as men build for themselves in uneasy dreams—the work of goblins more than the work of men. It is built into and out of hill side, in gigantic terrace on terrace, and dominates the whole of the city. But a detailed description of it were useless. Owing to the dip of the valley in which the city stands, it can only be well seen from one place, the main road of the city; and from that point seems like an avalanche of masonry ready to rush down and whelm the gorge. Like all the other Palaces of Rajputana, it is the work of many hands, and the present Raja has thrown out a bastion of no small size on one of the lower levels, which has been four or five years in the building. Only by scaling this annex, and, from the other side of the valley, seeing how insignificant is its great bulk in the entire scheme, is it possible to get some idea of the stupendous size of the Palace. No one knows where the hill begins and where the Palace ends. Men say that there are subterranean chambers leading into the heart of thehills, and passages communicating with the extreme limits of Taragarh, the giant fortress that crowns the hill and flanks the whole of the valley on the Palace side. They say that there is as much room under as above ground, and that none know the whole extent of the Palace. Looking at it from below, the Englishman could readily believe that nothing was impossible for those who had built it. The dominant impression was of height—height that heaved itself out of the hillside and weighed upon the eyelids of the beholder. The steep slope of the land had helped the builders in securing this effect. From the main road of the city a steep stone-paved ascent led to the first gate—name not communicated by the zealous following. Two gaudily painted fishes faced each other over the arch, and there was little except glaring colour ornamentation visible. This gate gave into what they called thechowkof the Palace, and one had need to look twice ere realising that this open space, crammed with human life, was a spur of the hill on which the Palace stood, paved and built over. There had been little attempt at levelling the ground. The foot-worn stones followed the contour of the ground, and ran up to the walls of the Palace smooth as glass. Immediately facing the Gate of the Fish was theQuarter-Guard barracks, a dark and dirty room, and here, in a chamber hollowed out in a wall, were stored the big drums of State, thenakarras. The appearance of the Englishman seemed to be the signal for smiting the biggest of all the drums, and the dull thunder rolled up the Palacechowk, and came back from the unpierced Palace walls in hollow groaning. It was an eerie welcome—this single, sullen boom. In this enclosure, four hundred years ago, if the legend be true, a son of the great Rao Bando, who dreamed a dream as Pharaoh did and saved Boondi from famine, left a little band of Haras to wait his bidding while he went up into the Palace and slew his two uncles who had usurped the throne and abandoned the faith of their fathers. When he had pierced one and hacked the other, as they sat alone and unattended, he called out to his followers, who made a slaughter-house of the enclosure and cut up the usurpers’ adherents. At the best of times men slip on these smooth stones; and when the place was swimming in blood, foothold must have been treacherous indeed.

An inquiry for the place of the murder of the uncles—it is marked by a staircase slab, or Tod, the accurate, is at fault—was met by the answer that the Treasury was close at hand. Theyspeak a pagan tongue in Boondi, swallow half their words, and adulterate the remainder with localpatois. What can be extracted from a people who call four miles variouslydo kosh,do kush,dhi khas,doo-a koth, anddiakast, all one word? The country-folk are quite unintelligible; which simplifies matters. It is the catching of a shadow of a meaning here and there, the hunting for directions cloaked in dialect, that is annoying. Foregoing his archæological researches, the Englishman sought the Treasury. He took careful notes; he even made a very bad drawing, but the Treasury of Boondi defied pinning down before the public. There was a gash in the brown flank of the Palace—and this gash was filled with people. A broken bees’ comb with the whole hive busily at work on repairs, will give a very fair idea of this extraordinary place—the Heart of Boondi. The sunlight was very vivid without and the shadows were heavy within, so that little could be seen except this clinging mass of humanity huggling like maggots in a carcase. A stone staircase ran up to a rough verandah built out of the wall, and in the wall was a cave-like room, the guardian of whose snowy-carpeted depths was one of the refined financial classes, a man with very small hands and soft, low voice. He was girt with a sword,and held authority over the Durbar funds. He referred the Englishman courteously to another branch of the department, to find which necessitated a blundering progress up another narrow staircase crowded with loungers of all kinds. Here everything shone from constant contact of bare feet and hurrying bare shoulders. The staircase was the thing that, seen from without, had produced the bees’ comb impression. At the top was a long verandah shaded from the sun, and here the Boondi Treasury worked, under the guidance of a grey-haired old man, whose sword lay by the side of his comfortably wadded cushion. He controlled twenty or thirty writers, each wrapped round a huge, country paper account-book, and each far too busy to raise his eyes.

The babble on the staircase might have been the noise of the sea so far as these men were concerned. It ebbed and flowed in regular beats, and spread out far into the courtyard below. Now and again theclick-click-clickof a scabbard tip being dragged against the wall, cut the dead sound of trampling naked feet, and a soldier would stumble up the narrow way into the sun-light. He was received, and sent back or forward by a knot of keen-eyed loungers, who seemed to act as a buffer between the peace ofthe Secretariat and the pandemonium of the Administrative. Saises and grass-cutters, mahouts of elephants, brokers, mahajuns, villagers from the district, and here and there a shock-headed aborigine, swelled the mob on and at the foot of the stairs. As they came up, they met the buffer-men who spoke in low voices, and appeared to filter them according to their merits. Some were sent to the far end of the verandah, where everything melted away in a fresh crowd of dark faces. Others were sent back, and joined the detachment shuffling for shoes in thechowk. One servant of the Palace withdrew himself to the open, underneath the verandah, and there sat yapping from time to time like a hungry dog:—“The grass! The grass! The grass!” But the men with the account-books never stirred. Other men knelt down in front of them and whispered. And they bowed their heads gravely and made entry or erasure, turning back the rustling leaves. Not often does a reach of the River of Life so present itself that it can without alteration be transferred to canvas. But the Treasury of Boondi, the view up the long verandah, stood complete and ready for any artist who cared to make it his own. And by that lighter and less malicious irony of the Fate, who is always giving nuts to those who have no teeth,the picture was clinched and brought together by a winking, brass hookah-bowl of quaint design, pitched carelessly upon a roll of dull-red cloth full in the foreground. The faces of the accountants were of pale gold, for they were an untanned breed, and the face of the old man their controller was like frosted silver.

It was a strange Treasury, but no other could have suited the Palace. The Englishman watched open-mouthed, blaming himself because he could not catch the meaning of the orders given to the flying chaprassies, nor make anything of the hum in the verandah and the tumult on the stairs. The old man took the commonplace Currency Note and announced his willingness to give change in silver. “We have no small notes here,” he said. “They are not wanted. In a little while, when you next bring the Honour of your Presence this way, you shall find the silver.”

The Englishman was taken down the steps and fell into the arms of a bristled giant who had left his horse in the courtyard, and the giant spoke at length, waving his arms in the air, but the Englishman could not understand him and dropped into the hub-bub at the Palace foot. Except the main lines of the building there is nothing strange or angular about it.The rush of people seems to have rounded and softened every corner, as a river grinds down boulders. From the lowest tier, two zigzags, all of rounded stones sunk in mortar, took the Englishman to a gate where two carved elephants were thrusting at each other over the arch; and, because neither he nor any one round him could give the gate a name, he called it the “Gate of the Elephants.” Here the noise from the Treasury was softened, and entry through the gate brought him into a well-known world, the drowsy peace of a King’s Palace. There was a court-yard surrounded by stables, in which were kept chosen horses, and two or threesaiseswere sleeping in the sun. There was no other life except the whirr and coo of the pigeons. In time—though really there is no such a thing as time off the line of railway—an official appeared begirt with the skewer-like keys that open the native bayonet-locks each from six inches to a foot long. Where was the Raj Mahal in which, sixty-six years ago, Tod formally installed Ram Singh, “who is now in his eleventh year, fair and with a lively intelligent cast of face”? The warden made no answer, but led to a room, overlooking the court-yard, in which two armed men stood before an empty throne of white marble. They motionedsilently that none must pass immediately before thetakhtof the King, but go round, keeping to the far side of the double row of pillars. Near the walls were stone slabs pierced to take the butts of long, venomous, black bamboo lances; rude coffers were disposed about the room, and ruder sketches of Ganesh adorned the walls. “The men,” said the warden, “watch here day and night because this place is the Rutton Daulat.” That, you will concede, is lucid enough. He who does not understand it, may go to for a thick-headed barbarian.

From the Rutton Daulat the warden unlocked doors that led into a hall of audience—the Chutter Mahal—built by Raja Chutter Lal, who was killed more than two hundred years ago in the latter days of Shah Jehan for whom he fought. Two rooms, each supported on double rows of pillars, flank the open space, in the centre of which is a marble reservoir. Here the Englishman looked anxiously for some of the atrocities of the West, and was pleased to find that, with the exception of a vase of artificial flowers and a clock, both hid inmihrabs, there was nothing that jarred with the exquisite pillars, and the raw blaze of colour in the roofs of the rooms. In the middle of these impertinent observations, something sighed—sighed like a distressedghost. Unaccountable voices are at all times unpleasant, especially when the hearer is some hundred feet or so above ground in an unknown Palace in an unknown land. A gust of wind had found its way through one of the latticed balconies, and had breathed upon a thin plate of metal, some astrological instrument, slung gong-wise on a tripod. The tone was as soft as that of an Aeolian harp, and, because of the surroundings, infinitely more plaintive.

There was an inlaid ivory door, set in lintel and posts crusted with looking-glass—all apparently old work. This opened into a darkened room where there were gilt and silver charpoys, and portraits, in the native fashion, of the illustrious dead of Boondi. Beyond the darkness was a balcony clinging to the sheer side of the Palace, and it was then that the Englishman realised to what a height he had climbed without knowing it. He looked down upon the bustle of the Treasury and the stream of life flowing into and out of the Gate of the Fishes where the bignakarraslie. Lifting his eyes, he saw how Boondi City had built itself, spreading from west to east as the confined valley became too narrow and the years more peaceable. The Boondi hills are the barrier that separates the stony, uneven ground near Deoli from theflats of Kotah, twenty miles away. From the Palace balcony the road to the eye is clear to the banks of the Chumbul river, which was the Debatable Ford in times gone by and was leaped as all rivers with any pretensions to a pedigree have been, by more than one magic horse. Northward and easterly the hills run out to Indurgarh, and southward and westerly to territory marked “disputed” on the map in the present year of grace. From this balcony the Raja can see to the limit of his territory eastward, like the good King of Yves his empire is all under his hand. He is, or the politicals err, that same Ram Singh who was installed by Tod in 1821, and for whose success in killing his first deer, Tod was, by the Queen-Mother of Boondi, bidden to rejoice. To-day the people of Boondi say:—“This Durbar is very old, so old that few men remember its beginning, for they were in our father’s time.” It is related also of Boondi that, on the occasion of the Queen’s Jubilee, they said proudly that their ruler had reigned for sixty years, and he was a man. They saw nothing astonishing in the fact of a woman having reigned for fifty. History does not say whether they jubilated; for there are no Englishmen in Boondi to write accounts of demonstrations and foundation-stones laying to thedaily newspapers, and then Boondi is very, very small. In the early morning you may see a man being pantingly chased out of the city by another man with a naked sword. This is the dak and the dak guard; and the effect is as though runner and swordsman lay under a doom—the one to fly with the fear of death always before him, as men fly in dreams, and the other to perpetually fail of his revenge. But this leaves us still in the swallow nest balcony.

The warden unlocked more doors and led the Englishman still higher, but into a garden—a heavily timbered garden with a tank for gold fish in the midst! For once the impassive following smiled when they saw that the Englishman was impressed. “This,” said they, “is the Rang Bilas.” “But who made it?” “Who knows? It was made long ago.” The Englishman looked over the garden-wall, a foot high parapet, and shuddered. There was only the flat side of the Palace, and a drop on to the stones of the zigzags scores of feet below. Above him was the riven hillside and the decaying wall of Taragarh, and behind him this fair garden, hung like Mahomet’s coffin, full of the noise of birds and the talking of the wind in the branches. The warden entered into a lengthy explanation of the nature of the delusion, showing how—but he was stopped before he had finished. His listener did not want to know “how the trick was done.” Here was the garden, and there were three or four storeys climbed to reach to it.Bus.At one end of the garden was a small room, under treatment by native artists who were painting the panels with historical pictures, in distemper. Theirs was florid polychromatic art, but skirting the floor was a series of frescoes in red, black and white, of combats with elephants, bold and temperate as good German work. They were worn and defaced in places; but the hand of some bye-gone limner, who did not know how to waste a line, showed under the bruises and scratches, and put the newer work to shame.

Here the tour of the Palace ended; and it must be remembered that the Englishman had not gone the depth of three rooms into one flank. Acres of building lay to the right of him, and above the lines of the terraces he could see the tops of green trees. “Who knew how many gardens, such as the Rang Bilas, were to be found in the Palace?” No one answered directly, but all said that there were many. The warden gathered up his keys, and locking each door behind him as he passed, led the way down to earth. But before he had crossed the garden,the Englishman heard, deep down in the bowels of the Palace, a woman’s voice singing, and the voice rang as do voices in caves. All Palaces in India excepting dead ones, such as that of Amber, are full of eyes. In some, as has been said, the idea of being watched is stronger than in others. In Boondi Palace it was overpowering—being far worse than in the green shuttered corridors of Jodhpur. There were trap-doors on the tops of terraces, and windows veiled in foliage, and bull’s eyes set low in unexpected walls, and many other peep-holes and places of vantage. In the end, the Englishman looked devoutly at the floor, but when the voice of the woman came up from under his feet, he felt that there was nothing left for him but to go. Yet, excepting only this voice, there was deep silence everywhere, and nothing could be seen.

The warden returned to the Chutter Mahal to pick up a lost key. The brass table of the planets was sighing softly to itself as it swung to and fro in the wind. That was the last view of the interior of the Palace, the empty court, and the swinging sighingjantar.

About two hours afterwards, when he had reached the other side of the valley and seen the full extent of the buildings, the Englishman began to realise first that he had not been takenthrough one-tenth of the Palace; and secondly, that he would do well to measure its extent by acres, in preference to meaner measures. But what made him blush hotly, all alone among the tombs on the hill side, was the idea that he with his ridiculous demands for eggs, firewood, and sweet drinking water, should have clattered and chattered through any part of it at all.

He began to understand why Boondi does not encourage Englishmen.

Of the Uncivilised Night and the Departure to Things Civilised. Showing how a Friend may keep an Appointment too well.

“LET us go hence, my songs, she will not hear. Let us go hence together without fear!” But Ram Baksh the irrepressible sang it in altogether a baser key. He came by night to the pavilion on the lake, while the sepoys were cooking their fish, and reiterated his whine about the devildom of the country into which the Englishman had dragged him.Padre Martum Sahibwould never have thus treated the owner of sixteen horses, all fast and big ones, and eight superior “shutin tongas.” “Let us get away,” said Ram Baksh. “You are not here forshikar, and the water is very bad.” It was indeed, except when taken from the lake, and then it only tasted fishy. “We will go, Ram Baksh,” said the Englishman. “We will go in the very early morning, and in the meantime here is fish to stay your stomach with.”

When a transparentkanat, which fails bythree feet to reach ceiling or floor, is the only bar between the East and the West, he would be a churl indeed who stood upon “invidious race distinctions.” The Englishman went out and fraternised with the Military—the four-rupee soldiers of Boondi who guarded him. They were armed, one with an old Tower musket crazy as to nipple and hammer, one with a native-made smooth-bore, and one with a composite contrivance—English sporting muzzle-loader stock with a compartment for a jointed cleaning-rod, and hammered octagonal native barrel, wire-fastened, with a tuft of cotton on the foresight. All three guns were loaded, and the owners were very proud of them. They were simple folk, these men at arms, with an inordinate appetite for broiled fish. They were notalwayssoldiers they explained. They cultivated their crops until wanted for any duty that might turn up. They were paid, now and again, at intervals, but they were paid in coin and not in kind.

Themunshisand the vakils and the runners had departed after seeing that the Englishman was safe for the night, so the freedom of the little gathering on the bund was unrestrained. Thechowkidarcame out of his cave into the firelight. Warm wood ashes, by the way, likeEpp’s cocoa, are “grateful and comforting” to cold toes. He took a fish and incontinently choked, for he was a feeble old man. Set right again, he launched into a very long and quite unintelligible story while the sepoys said reverently:—“He is an old man and remembers many things.” As he babbled, the night shut in upon the lake and the valley of Boondi. The last cows were driven into the water for their evening drink, the waterfowl and the monkeys went to bed, and the stars came out and made a new firmament in the untroubled bosom of the lake. The light of the fire showed the ruled line of the bund springing out of the soft darkness of the wooded hill on the left and disappearing into the solid darkness of the bare hill on the right. Below the bund a man cried aloud to keep wandering pigs from the gardens whose tree-tops rose to a level with the bund-edge. Beyond the trees all was swaddled in gloom. When the gentle buzz of the unseen city died out, it seemed as though the bund were the very Swordwide Bridge that runs, as every one knows, between this world and the next. The water lapped and muttered, and now and again a fish jumped, with the shatter of broken glass, blurring the peace of the reflected heavens.

“And duller should I be than some fat weedThat rots itself at ease on Lethe’s wharf.”

The poet who wrote those lines knew nothing whatever of Lethe’s wharf. The Englishman had found it, and it seemed to him, at that hour and in that place, that it would be good and desirable never to return to the Commissioners and the Deputy Commissioners any more, but to lie at ease on the warm sunlit bund by day, and, at night, near a shadow-breeding fire, to listen for the strangled voices and whispers of the darkness in the hills; thus after as long a life as thechowkidar’s, dying easily and pleasantly, and being buried in a red tomb on the borders of the lake. Surely no one would come to reclaim him, across those weary, weary miles of rock-strewn road.... “And this,” said thechowkidar, raising his voice to enforce attention, “is true talk. Everybody knows it, and now the Sahib knows it. I am an old man.” He fell asleep at once, with his hand on thechillamthat was doing duty for a wholehukkaamong the company. He had been talking for nearly a quarter of an hour.

See how great a man is the true novelist! Six or seven thousand miles away, Walter Besant of the Golden Pen had created Mr. Maliphant—the ancient of figureheads, inAll Sorts andConditions of Men, and here, in Boondi, the Englishman had found Mr. Maliphant in the withered flesh. So he drank Walter Besant’s health in the water of the Burra Talao. One of the sepoys turned himself round, with a clatter of accoutrements, shifted his blanket under his elbow, and told a tale. It had something to do with hiskhet, and agunnawhich certainly was not sugar-cane. It was elusive. At times it seemed that it was a woman, then changed to a right of way, and lastly appeared to be a tax; but the more he attempted to get at its meaning through the curious patois in which its doings or its merits were enveloped, the more dazed the Englishman became. None the less the story was a fine one, embellished with much dramatic gesture which told powerfully against the firelight. Then the second sepoy, who had been enjoying thechillamall the time, told a tale, the purport of which was that the dead in the tombs round the lake were wont to get up of nights andshikar. This was a fine and ghostly story; and its dismal effect was much heightened by some clamour of the night far up the lake beyond the floor of stars.

The third sepoy said nothing. He had eaten too much fish and was fast asleep by the side of thechowkidar.

Page 234—“This was a fine and ghostly story.”

They were all Mahomedans, and consequently all easy to deal with. A Hindu is an excellent person, but ... but ... there is no knowing what is in his heart, and he is hedged about with so many strange observances.

The Hindu or Mahomedan bent, which each Englishman’s mind must take before he has been three years in the country is, of course, influenced by Province or Presidency. In Rajputana generally, the Political swears by the Hindu, and holds that the Mahomedan is untrustworthy. But a man who will eat with you and take your tobacco, sinking the fiction that it has been doctored withshrab, cannot be very bad after all.

That night when the tales were all told and the guard, bless them, were snoring peaceably in the starlight, a man came stealthily into the enclosure ofkanatsand woke the Englishman by mutteringSahib,Sahibin his ear. It was no robber but some poor devil with a petition—a grimy, welted paper. He was absolutely unintelligible, and additionally so in that he stammered almost to dumbness. He stood by the bed, alternately bowing to the earth and standing erect, his arms spread aloft, and his whole body working as he tried to force out some rebellious word in a key that should not wake themen without. What could the Englishman do? He was no Government servant, and had no concern withurzis. It was laughable to lie in a warm bed and watch this unfortunate heathen, clicking and choking and gasping in his desperate desire to make theSahibunderstand. It was also unpleasantly pathetic, and the listener found himself as blindly striving to catch the meaning as the pleader to make himself comprehended. But it was no use; and in the end the man departed as he had come—bowed, abject, and unintelligible.

Let every word written against Ganesh be rescinded. It was by his ordering that the Englishman saw such a dawn on the Burra Talao as he had never before set eyes on. Every fair morning is a reprint, blurred perhaps, of the opening of the First Day; but this splendour was a thing to be put aside from all other days and remembered. The stars had no fire in them and the fish had stopped jumping, when the black water of the lake paled and grew grey. While he watched, it seemed to the Englishman that some voice on the hills were intoning the first verses of Genesis. The grey light moved on the face of the waters till, with no interval, a blood-red glare shot up from the horizon and, inky black against the intense red, a giant cranefloated out towards the sun. In the still shadowed city the great Palace drum boomed and throbbed to show that the gates were open, while the dawn swept up the valley and made all things clear. The blind man who said:—“The blast of a trumpet is red” spoke only the truth. The breaking of the red dawn is like the blast of a trumpet.

“What,” said thechowkidar, picking the ashes of the overnight fire out of his beard, “what, I say, are five eggs or twelve eggs to such a Raj as ours? What also are fowls—what are"—.... “There was no talk of fowls. Where is the fowl-man from whom you got the eggs?” “He is here. No, he is there. I do not know. I am an old man, and I and the Raj supply everything without price. Themurghiwallawill be paid by the State—liberally paid. Let theSahibbe happy!Wah!Wah!”

Experience ofbeegarin Himalayan villages had made the Englishman very tender in raising supplies that were givengratis; but themurghiwallacould not be found, and the value of his wares was, later, paid to Ganesh—Ganesh of Situr, for that is the name of the village full of priests, through which the Englishman had passed in ignorance two days before. A double handful of sweet smelling flowers made the receipt.

Boondi was wide awake before half-past seven in the morning. Her hunters, on foot and on horse, were filing towards the Deoli Gate to goshikarring. They would hunt tiger and deer they said, even with matchlocks and muzzle-loaders as uncouth as those theSahibsaw. They were a merry company and chaffed the Quarter-Guard at the gate unmercifully when a bullock-cart, laden with the cases of the “Batoum Naphtha and Oil Company” blocked the road. One of them had been a soldier of the Queen, and, excited by the appearance of aSahib, did so rebuke and badger the Quarter-Guard for their slovenliness that they threatened to come out of the barracks and destroy him.

So, after one last look at the Palace high up the hill side, the Englishman was borne away along the Deoli road. The peculiarity of Boondi is the peculiarity of the covered pitfall. One does not see it till one falls into it. A quarter of a mile from the gate, it and its Palace were invisible. The runners who had chivalrously volunteered to protect the wanderer against possible dacoits had been satisfactorily disposed of, and all was peace and unruffled loaferdom. But the Englishman was grieved at heart. He had fallen in love with Boondi the beautiful, and believed that he would never again see anythinghalf so fair. The utter untouchedness of the town was one-half the charm and its associations the other. Read Tod, who is far too good to be chipped or sampled, read Tod luxuriously on the bund of the Burra Talao, and the spirit of the place will enter into you and you will be happy.

To enjoy life thoroughly, haste and bustle must be abandoned. Ram Baksh has said that Englishmen are alwaysdikkingto go forward, and for this reason, though beyond doubt they pay well and readily, are not wise men. He gave utterance to this philosophy after he had mistaken his road and pulled up in what must have been a disused quarry hard by a cane-field. There were patches and pockets of cultivation along the rocky road, where men grew cotton,til, chillies, tobacco, and sugar-cane. “I will get you sugar-cane,” said Ram Baksh. “Then we will go forward, and perhaps some of these jungly fools will tell us where the road is.” A “jungly fool,” a tender of goats, did in time appear, but there was no hurry; the sugar-cane was sweet and purple and the sun warm.

The Englishman lay out at high noon on the crest of a rolling upland crowned with rock, and heard, as a loafer had told him he would hear, the “set of the day,” which is as easily discernible as the change of tone between the rising and the falling tide. At a certain hour the impetus of the morning dies out, and all things, living and inanimate, turn their thoughts to the prophecy of the coming night. The little wandering breezes drop for a time, and, when they blow afresh, bring the message. The “set of the day” as the loafer said, has changed, the machinery is beginning to run down, the unseen tides of the air are falling. The moment of the change can only be felt in the open and in touch with the earth, and once discovered, seem to place the finder in deep accord and fellowship with all things on the earth. Perhaps this is why the genuine loafer, though “frequently drunk,” is “always polite to the stranger,” and shows such a genial tolerance towards the weaknesses of mankind, black, white, or brown.

In the evening when the jackals were scuttling across the roads and the cranes had gone to roost, came Deoli the desolate, and an unpleasant meeting. Six days away from his kind had bred in a Cockney heart a great desire to see an Englishman again. An elaborate loaf through the cantonment—fifteen minutes’ walk from end to end—showed only one distant dog-cart and a small English child with an ayah. There was grass in the soldierly-straight roads, andsome of the cross-cuts had never been used at all from the days when the cantonment had been first laid out. In the western corner lay the cemetery—the only carefully-tended and newly-whitewashed thing in this God-forgotten place. Some years ago a man had said good-bye to the Englishman; adding cheerily:—“We shall meet again. The world’s a very little place y’know.” His prophecy was a true one, for the two met indeed, but the prophet was lying in Deoli Cemetery near the well, which is decorated so ecclesiastically with funeral urns. Truly the world is averylittle place that a man should so stumble upon dead acquaintances when he goes abroad.

Comes back to the Railway, after Reflections on the Management of the Empire; and so Home again, with apology to all who have read thus far.

IN the morning the tonga rattled past Deoli Cemetery into the open, where the Deoli Irregulars were drilling. They marked the beginning of civilisation and white shirts; for which reason they seemed altogether detestable. Yet another day’s jolting, enlivened by the philosophy of Ram Baksh, and then came Nasirabad. The last pair of ponies suggested serious thought. They had covered eighteen miles at an average speed of eight miles an hour, and were well conditioned little rats. “A Colonel Sahib gave me this one forbakshish,” said Ram Baksh, flicking the near one. “It was hisbaba’spony. Thebabawas five years old. When he went away, the Colonel Sahib said:—‘Ram Baksh, you are a good man. Never have I seen such a good man. This horse is yours.’”Ram Baksh was getting a horse’s work out of a child’s pony. Surely we in India work the land muchas the Colonel Sahib worked his son’s mount; making it do child’s work when so much more can be screwed out of it. A native and a native State deals otherwise with horse and holding. Perhaps our extreme scrupulousness in handling may be Statecraft, but, after even a short sojourn in places which are dealt with not so tenderly, it seems absurd. There are States where things are done, and done without protest, that would make the hair of the educated native stand on end with horror. These things are of course not expedient to write; because their publication would give a great deal of unnecessary pain and heart-searching to estimable native administrators who have the hope of a Star before their eyes, and would not better matters in the least.

Note this fact though. With the exception of such journals as, occupying a central position in British territory, levy blackmail from the neighbouring States, there are no independent papers in Rajputana. A King may start a weekly, to encourage a taste for Sanskrit and high Hindi, or a Prince may create a Court Chronicle; but that is all. A “free press” is not allowed, and this the native journalist knows. With good management he can, keeping under the shadow of our flag, raise two hundred rupeesfrom a big man here, and five hundred from a rich man there, but he does not establish himself across the Border. To one who has reason to hold a stubborn disbelief in even the elementary morality of the native press, this bashfulness and lack of enterprise is amusing. But to return to the over-the-way administrations. There is nothing exactly wrong in the methods of government that are overlaid with English terms and forms. They are vigorous, in certain points, and where they are not vigorous, there is a cheery happy-go-luckiness about the arrangement that must be seen to be understood. The shift and play of a man’s fortune across the Border is as sudden as anything in the days of Haroun-al-Raschid of blessed memory, and there are stories, to be got for the unearthing, as wild and as improbable as those in theThousand and One Nights. Most impressive of all is the way in which the country is “used,” and its elasticity under pressure. In the good old days the Durbar raised everything it could from the people, and the King spent as much as ever he could on his personal pleasures. Now the institution of the Political has stopped the grabbing, for which, by the way, some of the monarchs are not in the least grateful—and smoothed the outward face of things. But there is still a difference, and such a difference, between our ways and the ways of the other places. A year spent among native States ought to send a man back to the Decencies and the Law Courts and the Rights of the Subject with a supreme contempt for those who rave about the oppressions of the brutal bureaucrat. One month nearly taught an average Englishman that it was the proper thing to smite anybody of mean aspect and obstructive tendencies on the mouth with a shoe. Hear what an intelligent loafer said. His words are at least as valuable as these babblings. He was, as usual, wonderfully drunk, and the gift of speech came down upon him. The conversation—he was a great politician this loafer—had turned on the poverty of India:—“Poor!” said he. “Of course it’s poor. Oh yes! D—d poor! And I’m poor, an’ you’re poor, altogether. Do you expect people will give you money without you ask ’em? No. I tell you, Sir, there’s enough money in India to paveHellwith if you could only get at it. I’ve kep’ servants in my day. Did they ever leave me without a hundred or a hundred and fifty put by—and never touched?You mark that.Does any black man who has been in Guv’ment service go away without hundreds an’ hundreds put by—and never touched? You mark that. Money! The place stinkso’ money—just kept out o’ sight. Do you ever know a native that didn’t sayGarib admi? They’ve been sayin’Garib admiso long that the Guv’ment learns to believe ’em, and now they’re all bein’ treated as though they was paupers. I’m a pauper, an’ you’re a pauper—we ’aven’t got anything hid in the ground—an’ so’s every white man in this forsaken country. But the Injian he’s a rich man. How do I know? Because I’ve tramped on foot, or warrant pretty well from one end of the place to the other, an’ I know what I’m talkin’ about, and this ere Guv’ment goes peckin’ an’ fiddlin’ over its tuppenny-ha’penny little taxes as if it was afraid. Which it is. You see how they do things in ——. It’s six sowars here, and ten sowars there, and—‘Pay up, you brutes, or we’ll pull your ears over your head.’ And when they’ve taken all they can get, the headman, he says:—‘This is a dashed poor yield. I’ll come again.’Of coursethe people digs up something out of the ground, and they pay. I know the way it’s done, and that’s the way to do it. You can’t go to an Injian an’ say:—‘Look here. Can you pay me five rupees?’ He says:—‘Garib admi,’ of course, an’ would say it if he was as rich as a banker. But if you send half a dozen sowars at him and shift the thatch off ofhis roof, he’ll pay. Guv’ment can’t do that. I don’t suppose it could. There is no reason why it shouldn’t. But it might do something like it, to show that it wasn’t going to have no nonsense. Why, I’d undertake to raise a hundred million—what am I talking of?—a hundred and fifty million pounds from this countryper annum, and it wouldn’t be strainedthen. One hundred and fifty millions you could raise as easy as paint, if you just made these ere Injians understand that they had to pay an’ make no bones about it. It’s enough to make a man sick to go in over yonder to —— and see what they do; and then come back an’ see what we do. Perfectly sickenin’ it is. Borrer money! Why the country could pay herself an’ everything she wants, if she was only made to do it. It’s this bloomin’Garib admiswindle that’s been going on all these years, that has made fools o’ the Guv’ment.” Then he became egoistical, this ragged ruffian who conceived that he knew the road to illimitable wealth, and told the story of his life, interspersed with anecdotes that would blister the paper they were written on. But through all his ravings, he stuck to his hundred-and-fifty-million-theory, and though the listener dissented from him and the brutal cruelty with which his views were stated, an unscientific impression remained and was not to be shaken off. Across the Border one feels that the country is being used, exploited, “made to sit up,” so to speak. In our territories the feeling is equally strong of wealth “just round the corner,” as the loafer said, and a people wrapped up in cotton wool and ungetatable. Will any man, who really knows something of a little piece of India and has not the fear of running counter to custom before his eyes, explain how this impression is produced, and why it is an erroneous one? This digression has taken us far from the child’s pony of Ram Baksh.

Nasirabad marked the end of the Englishman’s holiday, and there was sorrow in his heart. “Come back again,” said Ram Baksh cheerfully, “and bring a gun with you. Then I’ll take you to Gungra, and I’ll drive you myself. Drive you just as well as I’ve driven these four days past.” An amicable open-minded soul was Ram Baksh. May his tongas never grow less.

“This ’ere Burma fever is a bad thing to have. It’s pulled me down awful; an’ now I am going to Peshawar.Areyou the Station-Master?” It was Thomas—white cheeked, sunken-eyed, drawn-mouthed Thomas—travelling from Nasirabad to Peshawar on pass; and with him was a Corporal new to his stripes and doingstation duty. Every Thomas is interesting, except when he is too drunk to speak. This Thomas was an enthusiast. He had volunteered, from a Home-going regiment shattered by Burma fever, into a regiment at Peshawar, had broken down at Nasirabad on his way up with his draft, and was now journeying into the unknown to pick up another medal. “There’s sure to be something on the Frontier,” said this gaunt, haggard boy—he was little more, though he reckoned four years’ service and considered himself somebody. “When there’s anything going, Peshawar’s the place to be in, they tell me; but I hear we shall have to march down to Calcutta in no time.” The Corporal was a little man and showed his friend off with great pride:—“Ah, you should have come to us,” said he; “we’re the regiment, we are.” “Well, I went with the rest of our men,” said Thomas. “There’s three hundred of us volunteered to stay on, and we all went for the same regiment. Not but what I’m saying yours is a good regiment,” he added with grave courtesy. This loosed the Corporal’s tongue, and he discanted on the virtues of the regiment and the merits of the officers. It has been written that Thomas is devoid ofesprit de corps, because of the jerkiness of the arrangements under which he nowserves. If this be true, he manages to conceal his feelings very well; for he speaks most fluently in praise of his own regiment; and, for all his youth, has a keen appreciation of the merits of his officers. Go to him when his heart is opened, and hear him going through the roll of the subalterns, by a grading totally unknown in theArmy List, and you will pick up something worth the hearing. Thomas, with the Burma fever on him, tried to cut in, from time to time, with stories of his officers and what they had done “when we was marchin’ all up and down Burma,” but the little Corporal went on gaily.

They made a curious contrast—these two types. The lathy, town-bred Thomas with hock-bottle shoulders, a little education, and a keen desire to get more medals and stripes; and the little, deep-chested, bull-necked Corporal brimming over with vitality and devoid of any ideas beyond the “regiment.” And the end of both lives, in all likelihood, would be a nameless grave in some cantonment burying-ground, with, if the case were specially interesting and the Regimental Doctor had a turn for the pen, an obituary notice in theIndian Medical Journal. It was an unpleasant thought.

From the Army to the Navy is a perfectly natural transition, but one hardly to be expectedin the heart of India. Dawn showed the railway carriage full of riotous boys, for the Agra and Mount Abu schools had broken up for holidays. Surely it was natural enough to ask a child—not a boy, but a child—whether he was going home for the holidays; and surely it was a crushing, a petrifying thing, to hear in a clear treble, tinged with icyhauteur:—“No! I’m on leave. I’m a midshipman.” Two “officers of Her Majesty’s Navy"—mids of a man-o’-war in Bombay —— were going Up-country on ten days’ leave! They had not travelled much more than twice round the world; but they should have printed the fact on a label. They chattered like daws, and their talk was as a whiff of fresh air from the open sea, while the train ran eastward under the Aravalis. At that hour their lives were bound up in and made glorious by the hope of riding a horse when they reached their journey’s end. Much had they seen “cities and men,” and the artless way in which they interlarded their conversation with allusions to “one of these shore-going chaps you see” was delicious. They had no cares, no fears, no servants, and an unlimited stock of wonder and admiration for everything they saw, from the “cute little well-scoops” to a herd of deer grazing on the horizon. It was not until they hadopened their young hearts with infantine abandon that the listener could guess from the incidentalargotwhere these pocket-Ulysseses had travelled. South African, Norwegian, and Arabian words were used to help out the slang of Haslar, and a copious vocabulary of shipboard terms, complicated with modern Greek. As free from self-consciousness as children, as ignorant as beings from another planet of the Anglo-Indian life into which they were going to dip for a few days, shrewd and observant as befits men of the world who have authority, and neat-handed and resourceful as—blue-jackets, they were a delightful study, and accepted freely and frankly the elaborate apologies tendered to them for the unfortunate mistake about the “holidays.” The roads divided and they went their way; and there was a shadow after they had gone, for the Globe-Trotter said to his wife:—“What I like about Jeypore"—accent on the first syllable, if you please—“is its characteristic easternness.” And the Globe-Trotter’s wife said, “Yes! It is purely Oriental.”

This was Jeypore with the gas-jets and the water-pipes as was shown at the beginning of these trivial letters; and the Globe-Trotter and his wife had not been to Amber. Joyful thought! They had not seen the soft splendour of Udaipur, the night-mare of Chitor, the grim power of Jodhpur and the virgin beauty of Boondi—fairest of all places that the Englishman had set eyes on. The Globe-Trotter was great in the matter of hotels and food, but he had not lain under the shadow of a tonga in soft warm sand, eating cold pork with a pocket-knife and thanking Providence who put sweet-water streams where wayfarers wanted them. He had not drunk out the brilliant cold-weather night in the company of a King of loafers, a grimy scallawag with a six days’ beard and an unholy knowledge of native States. He had attended service in cantonment churches; but he had not known what it was to witness the simple solemn ceremonial in the dining-room of a far away Residency, when all the English folk within a hundred-mile circuit bowed their heads before the God of the Christians. He had blundered about temples of strange deities with a guide at his elbow; but he had not known what it was to attempt conversation with a temple dancing-girl (notsuch an one as Edwin Arnold invented), and to be rewarded for a misturned compliment with a deftly heaved bunch of marigold buds on his respectable bosom. Yes, he had undoubtedly lost much, and the measure of hisloss was proven in his estimate of the Orientalism of Jeypore.

But what had he who sat in judgment upon him gained? One perfect month of loaferdom, to be remembered above all others, and the night of the visit to Chitor, to be remembered even when the month is forgotten. Also the sad knowledge that of all the fair things seen, the inept pen gives but a feeble and blurred picture.

Let those who have read to the end, pardon a hundred blemishes.

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