Chapter XIII: Delhi

Meerut itself, where the Mutiny first broke out, is but forty miles from Delhi, and when the rebel troops reached the old capital, Delhi became the centre of revolt. It fell entirely into the hands of the mutineers, and when the combined forces defeated the enemy at a village six miles north of Delhi they gained possession of the "Ridge" (where the red sandstone comes to surface in strata of about forty-five degrees), only to find that they who would fain have besieged the city were to become themselves besieged and suffer heavy losses before General Nicholson could reach them with reinforcements from the Punjab.

The storming and recapture of Delhi is one of the chief examples of stubborn determination in the teeth of heavy odds, and one of the principal chapters in the history of British arms.

The various sites connected with those events are familiar from frequent description to many who have never been east of Lowestoft Ness, and from innumerable photographs the {197} Kashmir Gate must be nearly as well known in London as Buckingham Palace.

Near it, and just south of the cemetery where he is buried, there is a capital bronze statue of General Nicholson (by Mr Brock), in a little park named after him.

The building that became the Residency after the Mutiny and was then occupied by Sir David Ochterlony, has been more recently converted to the uses of a Government High School for boys. It was originally built by Shah Jehan as a library for his son Dara Shikoh in 1637, and its spacious rooms suit rather well the purpose of a school. The headmaster, who happens to be a Dutchman, took me through the various class-rooms and introduced me to a number of, doubtless, learned pundits--the special masters for Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, Urdu, English and "Science" subjects. In a class called the 5th High, at the time of my visit, native youth was being lectured upon Nelson's blind eye.

Delhi was the capital of the Moghul Empire before Akhbar removed it to Agra, and it became again the seat of Government under Shah Jehan; so that some of the chief examples of Saracenic work in India are to be found in its buildings. Under Shah Jehan was built Delhi's "Great Mosque" and the Palace within the Fort. The former differs from others of its style in its external grandeur, one of the more usual {198} characteristics of mosque building being the elaboration of the interior rather than the exterior.

Great flights of steps lead up to the three splendid gateways of the large open quadrangle, surrounded on three sides by pillared cloisters. The three divisions of the mosque proper are roofed by magnificent marble domes with black vertical lines inlaid upon them, and on each side of the centre archway long graceful stems rise up and up to end above in tops shaped like a lotus, beautiful from below, but no less so at close quarters, seen from half-way up one of the two tall minarets which flank the building at the north and south. I was well repaid for climbing to the top of one of these by the splendid views from it. To the west I could see the Fort and the river beyond, with a long bridge, and to the north-east the city and the numerous small domes of the so-called Black Mosque, with the mighty Tower of Victory, the red Kutab Minar, in the far distance rising from the ruins of old Delhi.

Down below I was shown the treasures of the mosque, which included a hair of the prophet (a red hair) and some words in his handwriting. On the other side of the marble basin in the centre of the quadrangle there is a sandstone pulpit, paler in colour than the red of the steps and walls, and beyond this, at the back of the interior of the mosque, the wall of marble, through slight {199} inequalities of surface, looks like mother-of-pearl.

Architecturally these glories of Delhi are shared by the Fort and the series of palace buildings within its precincts. The great walls of red sandstone, the magnificent entrance of the Lahore Gate and the long vaulted arcade through which one approaches the interior of the great enclosure are, however, to my thinking, nobler and more impressive than the marble halls of the palace within.

This Lahore Gate is in the middle of the west side of the Fort. On the east flows the Jumna, and at the southern end is another gateway called the Delhi Gate, with a colossal dark grey stone elephant--delight of English children at Delhi--on either side of the entrance.

Among the palace buildings the noblest is the Diwan-i-am or Hall of Public Audience, containing at the back a raised recess where was formerly the famous Peacock Throne of solid gold inlaid with rubies, emeralds and diamonds, backed by two peacocks with jewelled and expanded tails. The glory is long ago departed, but the walls of the alcove on the upper level are still partly covered with inlaid panels of small subjects worked in stones of various colours. Among these, high above the doorway in the upper wall at the back, is one called the Orpheus Panel. Guide-books state that it {200} represents Austin of Bordeaux, one of the foreign architects who helped to adorn the Moghul Court--but the Orpheus is represented as quite a youth, whereas Austin of Bordeaux would have been old at the time.

I was climbing up a bamboo scaffolding to examine this spirited and delightful panel, in which the poet son of Calliope, plays to a group of listening animals, when I met a little fair Italian to whom, through Lord Curzon's efforts, the restoration of the damaged panels and the addition of new ones to fill blank and broken places had been happily entrusted.

For many months the Florentine craftsman had lived here cutting and polishing, and although he sometimes longed for the Arno as he looked out upon the Jumna River, he was of such a gay and merry disposition and took so much delight in his own incomparable skill, that it was a joy to meet him. Of the twenty-four original panels he felt very sure which were of native and which of Italian workmanship, for there were at Delhi, he told me, four unknown Italians doing this work when the decoration was first undertaken. His art is not of a creative kind and he has little invention, but carries to an extreme of skill the imitation in polished inlay of bird or beast or flower. At its worst his work was seen in a piece he showed me as a _tour de force_ of manipulation, imitating a popular painting of a {201} merry monk, but in his panels for the Diwan-i-am he kept quite happily to the spirit of the earlier designs.

I was curious to learn from what far places the stones were gathered which he cut and rubbed, and I noted as an instance those composing one small panel of a bird which he had just completed. These included Green Esmeraldite from Australia; Corniola from the Jumna; Abri and Jal from Jeypore; Black from Liége; Chalcedony from Volterra; Colombino from Val Mugnone; Lapis Lazuli from Colerado; Malachite from St Petersburg; other Colombino from Fiesole; other Lapis Lazuli from Persia; other Malachite from Siberia, and a grey stone from Cairo.

In Florence near the Ponte Vecchio the Italian craftsman's sister keeps a shop going during his absence for the sale of inlay work, and at the same time exercises her own more meticulous talent in making microscopically fine mosaics and miniatures from scales of butterflies. Such a man as her brother is without either the sorrows or the dreams of a great artist, but he seemed as happy in his craft as the Gentle Pieman of the Bab Ballads, and I have little doubt that something he exclaimed--which was too much for my limited knowledge of Italian--might well have been translated by the pieman's words:--

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"I'm so happy--no profession could be dearer--
If I'm not humming 'Tra! la! la!' I'm singing 'Tirer, lirer!'"

But what shall I say of the Diwan-i-Khas which forestalls the highest reach of compliment by calling itself Heaven in a distich? Its marble walls and jewel-petalled flowers, its carved graceful arches, and all its spacious grandeur, appeared woefully deserted, and from this hall of heaven all the dear delicate little angels have long since fled, so that I could not find the tiniest feather. In the Rang Mahal near by I had a more tender impression. This is where the chief Sultana lived, and the painted decoration on the marble walls is of exquisite colour. Pale blues mingle with paler tints of green, and soft red-edged flowers seemed still to brim their cups with memories. Here leaned a woman's shoulder: here pressed a cheek wet with very human tears, and on that marble stamped a little foot, jealous and angry, while light laughter rang, or baskets of ripe figs from the bazaar were searched in breathless hush for hidden messages of love.

To see old Delhi at closer quarters than such a distant view as that from the minaret of the Jama Masjid, I drove east from the city by many great dome-topped tombs, mostly in a half-ruined condition as in an Indian Campagna, and visited on the way the Mausoleum of Humayun, which divides architectural with historic {203} interest. The design of the building is similar to that from which the Taj was later evolved. In its general proportions the total height appears too little for the great and high-terraced platform on which the triple octagon of the great building stands. Underneath this platform I walked through a low dark passage to the vault where the Emperor Humayun was actually buried. With the help of matches I could distinguish a plaster plinth one and a half feet high, and upon this a plaster tomb. I noticed one great hole in the plaster base and another in the ground beside it, and learned that these were made, not by any latterday members of that most repulsive of all Hindoo sects the Aghoris, but by porcupines which I was assured might be seen in numbers on any moonlight night, and one of whose quills I picked up from the floor.

Humayun's tomb is now identified in the pages of our history with a deed of no doubtful daring which was too swiftly followed by one no less doubtfully unwarrantable. It was here that Hodson of Hodson's Horse, with a few troopers and superb audacity, summoned an armed crowd to lay down their weapons, while the King of Delhi surrendered himself.

I should not leave the neighbourhood of Humayun's tomb without referring to the delightful use of blue and green-glazed tiles in the roofs of some adjacent buildings.

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The next stopping-place that day was at the shrine of Nizam-ud-din-Aulia, a holy man who died early in the fourteenth century. High diving from a roof-top into an unclean water tank failed to interest me greatly, but the tomb of Amir Khusran, a poet, within the same enclosure as that of the saint, delighted me as a perfect monument of dignified respect. Quiet and peaceful it looked in the cool shadow. The walls were marble screens fretted with close patterns, and the entrance door was of brass in four upright strips, so that the two halves folded back upon themselves. Outside, heavy-quilted purdahs hung over the marble to keep out dust, and the whole was surrounded by an outer wall of pierced sandstone, which had been whitewashed. At one end of the grave a copy of the Koran lay open upon a wooden reading-desk, and ostrich eggs, covered with written texts, hung from the ceiling.

Close to this poet's tomb is that of a daughter of Shah Jehan, named Jehanara, in a tiny enclosure, with bare earth over the place of sepulture and one upright marble slab with Persian verses inlaid in black marble.

Driving on past domes and ruined walls for some miles farther I came at last to the great Tower of Victory, the famed Kutab Minar, and to the ruins of a magnificent mosque with a series of superb arches, and a courtyard of cloisters divided by Jain pillars.

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In height the red sandstone monument, called the Kutab Minar, is less than a fourth of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, less than half the Washington Column, or Cologne Cathedral, and not much over half of the Great Pyramid. It was built in the early Pathan period, before 1320, and a few decades earlier than Giotto's Campanile in Florence. The latter never received the addition of its intended spire, but as it stands is already fifty feet higher than the Kutab. This actual height is largely discounted in appearance by the close proximity of Brunelleschi's tremendous dome, and the Campanile becomes as was intended but an apanage of the Cathedral. Near the Kutab Minar no rival enters the vast arena of the upper air, and neither the noble arches of the adjacent mosque, gigantic though they are, nor its cloisters with their richly-ornamented pillars taken from the Jain buildings the Mohammedans replaced, do more than dignify the splendid monument of Victory. It gives an impression of soaring strength unrivalled in any building I have seen, an impression practically impossible to be received from pictures or photographs or any representations upon a diminished scale.

By successive storeys banded with balconies and the decorative characters of Arabic inscriptions, the red sandstone building rises up and up, ceasing at last in two tiers of white marble, which seem to the beholder at its base {206} rather entering Heaven than ending anything. From the roof of the mosque the lowest band of inscription can be seen with sufficient clearness to make out its intricate beauty and perfection of decorative design.

Almost blue in colour against the warm sun-lit red sandstone of this mighty tower, the Iron Pillar, fifteen centuries old, stands within the precincts of the ruined mosque, no more than four times a man's height, smooth and undecorated, save for a small inscription on one side and a simple capital with a fluted bulb surmounted by a little flat square slab. A man standing on this, unclothed save for a loin-cloth, looked like a bronze statue. Sometime, it is said, an image of Vishnu stood there.

Next day on the other side of Delhi, between the Flagstaff Tower and the Mutiny Monument, on the rough ground of the Ridge, I was looking at another curious pillar, one of the stone "Lats of Asoka," which is said to date from some centuries before Christ. An inscription at the base of the column states:--

"This pillar was originally erected at Meerut in the third century, B.C., by King Asoka. It was removed thence and set up in the Koshuk Shikar Palace near this by the Emperor Firuzshah, A.D. 1356, thrown down and broken into five pieces by the explosion of a powder magazine, A.D. 1713-1719. It was restored and set up in this place by the British Government, A.D. 1867."

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There was a tearing horrible wind and clouds of dust blowing along the Ridge. The Mutiny memorial is not beautiful.

Tucked away among narrow streets of the old city, where blood-red hand-prints marked the white walls (I think in some connection with the imminent "Holi" festival of the Hindoos), I found the most strange as well as one of the oldest of Delhi's Mohammedan buildings, the Black Mosque, the numerous small domes of which I had seen from the minaret of the Jama Masjid. It belongs to that sloping style of architecture which seems kindred to Egyptian work, and gives an appearance of massive strength. A wide flight of twenty-eight steep stone steps leads up between two tall cones of masonry, which flank the entrance and rise above its battlements.

I had the great pleasure at Delhi of being welcomed by an old friend in the I.C.S., to whom I owe many an interesting screed from India since our schooldays--letters written in the scant leisure possible to an Indian judge. I found Alfred Martineau but little changed--full of the same contented humour he has always possessed. Such cordial hospitality as he and his charming and gifted wife extended to me during my visit came with that welcome contrast to accommodation at hotels and dak bungalows that only travellers can understand, {208} and from the hour when I found him waiting at the railway station on the arrival of my belated train to that of my departure from the Moghul capital, these good friends seemed to think no effort too great to further my pleasure and convenience.

When I look now at the hollyhocks in my own garden I remember always those other English hollyhocks grown with such eager care about a home in Delhi.

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