Chapter XII: The House of Dream

I lay quite motionless on my back upon the little stone platform that faces the south-west window--lay quite still and listened. In the intense noonday silence I could not hear even the chirp of a cricket. Often had Akhbar the Great reclined upon this stone bed of the place called Khawbgah, the House of Dream, and mused with roaming mind on government and power, the jealousies of sects and ministers, the ingratitude of dissolute sons, the tale of all the littleness of men and on his own ambition to build up a better and more perfect state.

Here had he mused and here had slept--but now in what strange contrast to the suspended consciousness of sleep is that deep soundless vacancy within the channels of the dead man's brain! Akhbar's decaying bones within stone slabs lie at Sikandra, but his great idea of universal toleration did not die with him.

Immediately above in the roof was a carved medallion, and a little blue pigment still remained upon the red sandstone. My head was {182} towards the north and my feet towards the south: there are four openings in the walls, and when I looked towards the north I could see across the women's court to the Diwan-i-khas, the private audience-hall, and when I looked to the south I could see the low-pillared Record Office. The pilasters of the chamber are carved with grapes and pomegranates, and on the red walls fragments of painting are still visible. I made out on the north a Buddha, on the east a winged angel and two women, and on the south a god with a large tail. On the dado I made out a man dancing, a boat with six people in it and one boy climbing up the mast, and a walled city behind a Hindoo temple.

Over the doorways there are Persian verses in golden letters, and one, Riaz Ahmad, translated these for me during the afternoon, as follows.

Over the south door is written:--"The Imperial Palace is beautiful, pleasant and elegant, it is made to represent Paradise."

Over the east door is written:--"May the floor of thy house become the mirror for the eyes of the Janitor of Paradise, and may the dust of thy threshold become the black powder for the eyes of heavenly houris."

Over the north door:--"The foreheads of those who bow down in adoration and touch the dust of thy house will shine like a Zohra." {183} "Zohra," said the kindly Mohammedan, whose patience I tried hard, "is Venus, the name of a very shining planet."

Over the western door is written:--"The Imperial Palace is more beautiful than heaven because of its gates. There is no doubt in this matter that it is Paradise itself."

The room below was painted all over, walls and ceiling, by Chinese artists with flowers--almond blossom, lotus, tulips, lilies and roses.

This House of Dream is but one among the buildings of the royal city of Fatehpur-Sikri, which was built by Akhbar towards the end of the sixteenth century, and after some years' occupation was abandoned through the continued difficulty of obtaining a good water supply. It has never since been occupied and consequently remains to-day almost exactly as it was when lived in by Akhbar and his court.

I had driven the twenty-two miles from Agra in a decrepit gharry, which turned over on one side on the way back. There was a wealth of bird-life along the roadside in the early morning--large storks, king-fishers, hoopoes, the ubiquitous minah, crows, kites and little green birds with one of the tail feathers twice the length of the others. Then there was a delightful bird about the size of a chaffinch, with black back and wings but golden-red breast and tail, doves such as Jemshid watched with his princess, {184} white vultures, wagtails and plenty of green parrots.

We changed horses half-way near Mowgwa, a grey village on a low grey hill, where I watched a squirrel collecting material for his big nest hanging high up in a tree.

Rather over twelve miles from Agra there is an old isolated gateway of red sandstone which my driver (for whose accuracy I cannot vouch) declared "is a city gate of Agra brought here broken."

Among mango trees Naggra, another village, nestled on the left and then one called Kirowdi on the right, and all this road was bordered with beautiful shade-giving trees. At last I could distinguish a long line of crenelated wall, and we reached a gateway choked with a crowd of donkeys laden with dung-cake fuel. Within, roads diverged and we followed one that led direct to a second gate called Naubathkana, the musician gate, where drums were always beaten in token of respect whenever the king entered the palace precincts. Here I left the gharry and walked into the open quadrangle in front of the Diwan-i-Am, the great court of public audience. From the cloisters along the wall projects the king's place of judgment, a building with five open arches on a highly-raised basement and a hand-rail over low stone-carved screens. At my feet as I stood on the other side of the quad a {185} stone was bedded deep in the ground with a circular hole cut through it, which everyone is told was the elephant ring to which the four-footed executioner was fastened conveniently for trampling condemned prisoners.

More celebrated is the Diwan-i-Khas, the private audience-hall, square in plan with stairs in the walls leading to galleries which cross the building at the second floor level to the capital (elaborately bracketed) of a central column. Cut on the floor of one of these galleries I noticed a stone-mason's mark, in the form of a bow and arrow, the arrow being fitted in place across the strung bow. The huge head of the centre column is a very king of capitals, and although it appears much out of proportion if considered solely in relation to the column, it does not seem so when properly regarded as part of the whole conception of this curious hall.

The short massive crossing arms of the gallery, which the column supports, give the feeling that they themselves help to hold up that huge cluster of stone brackets below them, and our eyes are affected as if its weight were partly borne by the shaft beneath it and partly by the crossing bars above.

It is in that central space at the crossing of the galleries that Akhbar is reputed to have sat discussing religions and philosophies, and nothing I have heard more convinced me of his {186} tolerant disposition than the choice of such a very restricted space for argument.

Another privileged seat was that called the Grukimundi, under a small stone canopy outside one corner of a building known as the Ankh Michauli. This seat was allotted to a Hindoo teacher who, said Riaz Ahmad, instructed Akhbar in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. Then there was the pachisi-board in large squares on which girls stood as pawns in the game played from a blue stone cross on the centre of the pavement. I was indeed shown by the assiduous Riaz Ahmad all the many sights of this dead city of Akhbar's court--House of Miriam with its garden and its bath--Palace of Birbal with its rich intricate and elaborate carving--Palace of Jodh Bai with an exquisitely latticed room projecting over Miriam's garden, and the Panch Mahal with its five colonnaded storeys on the first floor of which there are fifty-six pillars, each differently carved.

The court ladies used the Panch Mahal as a kind of playground, and I walked along part of a covered passage way which led thence to the Khawbgah. Then there was the great mosque, very lofty, and the Dargah Mosque with the tomb of Salim Chisti exquisitely beautiful with white marble screens of the most delicate fretted tracery, shutting in the tomb itself under a domed roof.

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Salim Chisti himself was the hermit saint whose prophecies led Akhbar to build a city in that very arid neighbourhood, and Riaz Ahmad was of his family.

When I had looked long at the lovely tints of worn decoration and the rosy colour of the red sandstone, we left the blue carpets and polished marble floor of the mosque and sat for a while under the shade of some trees in an enclosure at the back.

I have heard of people being much pestered at Fateh-pur-Sikri by would-be "guides," but not only did I escape any such experience there, but Riaz Ahmad, whom I engaged as cicerone for the day, proved a very agreeable companion, not at first over-communicative but as the hours wore on becoming more so.

Under a little astambole tree near us, as we sat resting, were two tombs, one under a small pillared canopy and the other by its side without any covering. Both were small and one was exceedingly tiny, so that it was not large enough to contain more than a kitten or a very small doll. It is probable that confirmed information is obtainable about both, but there was a certain naïveté about Riaz' talk which pleased me, and it seemed more illuminating than a mere repetition of authenticated fact.

"The small tomb," said Riaz, "is that of the infant son of Salim Chisti, of whose family I am. {188} The child died at six months by the power of his own mind, just to show a miracle, and the very small tomb close beside it is that of a tooth. Akhbar, childless, came to Salim Chisti and some say that to give Akhbar a son the child of the holy man was sacrificed; but that is not true, for the babe, of its own mind, ceased to live that a child might be born to Akhbar. As for the tooth," he went on, "there was a woman who lived in our family a long time ago (we may not tell the names of our women), whose husband went away with Jehangir when the king sent an army to capture Nour Jehan. Now this man who went with Jehangir died in battle, and because his body could never be found and his wife happened to have one tooth of his which had come out, the tooth was buried in memory of her husband."

And this is how Riaz Ahmad told me the story of Jehangir's marriage as we sat in the shade by the mosque wall.

"Nour Jehan was found by a traveller--abandoned upon the road when she was quite a baby, because her parents could not bear to support her on account of the poverty, and she was presented by the traveller to the king because she was beautiful, with the report that he had found her upon the roadside. And as he also found her to be of extreme beauty the king ordered her to be nursed in his palaces. When {189} she became twelve years old Jehangir, who was about the same age and had played with her as companion, became enchanted with her beauty and loved her." I thought of their padding feet as they chased one another in children's games about those paved courts--playing "catch me" over the pachisi-board, and of Nour Jehan shrieking safety as she reached a crossed square where the pieces are not permitted to be "taken."

And Riaz continued--"But Akhbar would have none of this, and to keep her away from Jehangir, married her to Shareef-Ghan-Khan, the Governor of Bengal. Now Nour Jehan had never loved Jehangir, but had only played with him in friendship. When Akhbar died, Jehangir at once sent to Shareef-Ghan-Khan demanding his wife, but was refused. Then sent Jehangir an army in which that man of the tooth was one of the officers. After great fighting, that Shareef was killed and Nour Jehan was forced to come to the Imperial Palace, though she said she would have been more contented to be the wife of a common soldier than to be queen with a husband she did not love. For six months she lived in the palace in a separate house with the mother of Jehangir, but at last when she did not see any way to get rid of him she accepted his love, became queen and obtained such influence over her husband that he put her name upon the coins."

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This story led us to talk about women and Riaz Ahmad said, in spite of the tale of Nour Jehan--"God gave the man more power than woman, so she is the inferior; she is not like man. She has the right that we should be just to her, to clothe her as well as we clothe ourselves, and not to give away her right to another woman. We may not say of one of our wives--'she is the more beloved'--they must be equal, otherwise it would be a sin to have more than one wife." Perhaps emperors may have preferences!

Before leaving Fatehpur-Sikri I went to see the magnificent Gate of Victory. Inside, the inner portals are carved with wonderful skill, letters upstanding upon the red sandstone. At the top words are carved in Arabic, which Riaz translated for me thus:--"That one who stands up to pray and his heart is not in his duty, he remains far from God. Thy best possession is to give in alms and thy best traffic is to sell this world for the next." Then a Persian Rubaiyat:--"What fame could you gain sitting on a throne in a silver mansion? The beauty of the world is simple, like a looking-glass. Behold yourself when you look at it." There follows the name of the carver of these verses--"Mohammed Mason."

Riaz Ahmad followed strictly the ideas of his forbears, and would not hear of any relaxation of the seclusion of women. In this he was {191} very different from a younger co-religionist whom I had met at Agra at the Moharam Festival, and who was very anxious to talk to the English stranger about what he considered the unfairness of Government regulations. He belonged to what he called the reformed Mohammedans, and said that his sisters were quite free to go about unveiled where they would. He complained of the lack of freedom of the press in India, claiming that it should be just as free as it was in England, and was much surprised when I told him that in England we should not permit any newspaper to publish direct appeals to assassinate the sovereign. He was quite a young fellow, two-and-twenty, and just out of college, hoping to get a billet in the post-office--although he declared that the English clerks are paid higher salaries than natives for the same work.

I think it would be an excellent thing if some good English publisher made it his business to arrange for the translation into Urdu of some of the best English fiction. This young man, for instance, said he had read all he could get and informed me that "Reynolds" was our greatest novelist and that a large number of his books were published in Urdu. I asked him the names of some of the chief ones and he mentioned _Mary Price_, _The Star of Mongolia_ and _The Mysteries of the Court of London_. He added that the last-named had been prohibited by Government, but {192} that of course such copies as had already been issued had naturally been treasured by their possessors. He urged the desire of himself and his friends to read the books that are read by well-educated people in England, and I think the range of books available is very restricted. He talked to me about Indian poets, and said that the best modern ones were Dagh of Delhi (poet to the Nizam of Hyderabad, Deccan) and Amir of Lucknow, both of whom died a few years ago, and I hoped the standing of their works was higher than that of _Mary Price_ and _The Mysteries of the Court of London_. He told me of the writers of Marsias also--Amias and Dabir of Lucknow and added, "I cannot myself write good Marsias, so what is the use of writing at all? But I do write _Gazal_, which have two lines, and _Rubaiyat_, which have four lines, and also _Kasida_, in praise of any famous men."

He certainly had some imagination, for he went on to inform me, laughing, that His Highness the Nizam prided himself upon the swiftness of his carriage-horses which went so quickly that only his moustache could be seen; and after he had passed, no one was able to say what clothes he had had on because of the fleetness of those horses.

We went together to the great mausoleum Nour Jehan built for her parents in the days of {193} her power, and he also accompanied me to Sikandra, the tomb of Akhbar. We drove thither from Agra one hot day, till tall white minarets appeared on the right of the road some miles away across golden fields of mustard, and we soon found ourselves in front of the outer gateway.

Filling a wide band round and over the arch and making very handsome and indeed perfect decoration, are some quotations from the Koran, and added at the base of the left side are the name and date of the carver--"Kutba Abdul Hal Shirazi, year 1022, Hijra."

The whole interior of the great building of Akhbar's tomb is one dark vault 74 feet high. Ending just above the marble of the grave itself there comes down from the darkness the thin chain of a lamp, which is lighted only at the annual festival of Akhbar's death, called in Persian, "Barsi." While two Khadims (servants of the mausoleum) in white turbans and white dhotis held hurricane lanterns for me and the young Mohammedan, a little daylight filtered through the long stone entrance passage, and above, from one of four openings in the wall, a clearer shaft crossed the great void, illuminating part of the chain and falling upon the opposite wall in a pale shade of blue. There is no decoration in this vault--only the plinth of the tomb has one chiselled pattern along its {194} edge. The body--Akhbar's body--wrapped in a white cloth, on which lavender, camphor and other scents had been scattered before it left the palace, was laid upon stones some three or four yards below the floor level and then, after other stones had been placed at the sides, one long slab was laid across the top and earth put over it. The older of the two Khadims said that the rings would have been taken off the king's fingers. He had been thirty-eight years at Sikandra but remembered no strange thing ever happening in the mausoleum. There he has held the lantern for people of all degrees and many countries--people of the West as well as of the East; Edward the Seventh (when Prince of Wales), the Tsar of Russia (when Tsarevitch), the Amir of Afghanistan, as well as our present king.

As I walked slowly round and was looking at the chain--part of which now told as a sharp black silhouette against the light patch of wall beyond--and the broken end hanging to its ring, the young Mohammedan chanted for me some passages from the Koran, his musical voice echoing sweetly in the great dome.

Facing the main gateway to right and left of the central vault are the tombs of Arambano, a daughter of Akhbar, and of Mehrin Nisa, the learned daughter of his great grandson Aurangzebe, who used to write Persian poems. Above the domed central vault with its prisoned air and {195} darkness, reached by a long stairway, is a square court open to the sun and surrounded by cloisters of which the outer walls are marble screens carved in intricate geometric patterns, through which the light comes softly.

Along these cloisters, on the side facing the centre of the court (where a block of white marble bears the ninety-nine names of God), each spandril has a Persian verse above it, and contains a rosette in which is cut part of a poem. These are so interesting that in all twenty-five people, lost in the pleasure of reading from one spandrel to another, as they moved round, have fallen into one of the unprotected wells of the stairways and been killed!

I walked round with the young Mohammedan--keeping one eye open for the stair-wells--while he read me the verses, of which here are several:--

"Think not that the sky will be so kind as Akhbar was."

"His life was free from every kind of fault."

"All kings which were, or which are, or which will be upon the earth are not so great as Akhbar was."

"He gave justice to all his people."

"The sky is not so elegant or so lofty as the throne of Akhbar."

"No one is saved from the hands of Death."

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