Chapter XVIII: The Capital of the Punjab

"_Hatee Aiah! Hatee aiah!_"--"The elephant comes!" cried the children running, and one small scamp danced in front and shouted, "_Hatee kuta machi bucha_"--"The elephant is a dog bad beast," and fled to escape consequences of such boldness. I was now seeing Lahore city from the back of one of the Lieutenant-Governor's State elephants which had swelled with pride the heart of Tambusami, my servant, when in all the bravery of scarlet trappings it came to fetch me from the hotel. Tambusami's respect for "Government" was almost sublime. He rarely showed the faintest interest in shrines or temples, but invariably reflected every manifestation of official interest in, or attention to, his master. On such occasions the whole strain of his body seemed differently keyed, and on the back of that elephant he gave himself the most amusing airs, tilting up his chin and appearing to bask in an atmosphere of luxurious importance for all the world like a child playing at chief minister to some Haroun al Raschid, {252} who had thrown off disguise and shown himself to the public in proper grandeur.

With me was a delightful Pundit Omaid Chand, Superintendent of the Punjab Government Records, who accompanied me during my stay at Lahore. "My native place," he told me, "was Saharanpur in the United Provinces; but now I am a nationalized Punjabi because I have been here fifty years since I was eight years old."

We entered the city by the Delhi Gate and filled the narrow street so that there was consternation among the shopkeepers and joy among the children all along our route. Elephants are no longer used so much as formerly, and at Lahore even the Lieutenant-Governor only keeps two now instead of eight.

When we met a troop of buffaloes there was a mighty hubbub. The shopkeepers squealed and jibbered much that I am sure was impolite as the frightened beasts plunged and pressed upon their goods. Many of the taller buildings with elaborately carved woodwork belonged to well-to-do Mohammedans, who have their homes away from the city, and use such houses in the intervals of business, and for friends of an evening. They do not usually go home till after nine o'clock at night. We were, of course, on a level with the projecting balconies {253} and carved oriel windows. Here and there awnings were stretched across the street between the opposite houses, and once or twice we had to wait while these were hauled up to let us go by. Passing through another gateway we halted before a beautiful mosque, wondrous with exquisite tints of blue and green in the old glazed tiles that were all about its front and minarets. Its elaborate inscriptions were in blue, with yellow and green ornament on a white ground. Baked daily in the sun for nigh three hundred years the beauty of this glazed inlay was only enhanced by time, and well may it last unharmed through future centuries! The narrow streets, in spite of all their charm, will be swept away as the townsfolk gradually alter their standards and ideas, but the traveller of the age to come should still find this fair mosque to please his eyes.

Out of the city at length we came to the now open space about the crenelated walls and bastions of the fort, and the Badshahi Masjid with its four old capless minars. Midway between the west gate of this mosque and the walls of the Fort stands the graceful pavilion called the Baradari. The stone is mostly red Agra sandstone, Jehangir's favourite building material, recalling Kenilworth in colour, but the mosque has three domes of white marble.

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Descending once more to earth I walked all over the fort, with its Pearl Mosque of white Jeypore marble (much, so much less fine than the Moti Masjids of either Delhi or Agra) its white Nau Lakha, its Diwan-y-khas, looking ready to tumble to pieces, though now in the restorer's hands, and its Shish Mahal.

Near these last, to the right of the same quadrangle, is the armoury. In Europe the traveller is often shown instruments of torture--rack or boot or "maiden," and in England what village of tourist attractiveness is without either stocks or pillory? In India, however, such relics are rare, and those shown at the Lahore Armoury, including a machine for pulling off thieves' fingers, invented by Dhuleep Singh, only remind one of the general absence of such stepping stones to civilization.

There is a great variety among this choice collection of weapons, and although it cannot compete with that of Turin, Valetta or Hertford House, it would prove at least a valuable addition to any one of them. Here are recalled the times of Ranjeet Singh, the one-eyed monarch, who had the genius to gather under him European officers of such calibre as Avitabile, Allard and Ventura. Here are cuirasses, imported by General Ventura for his French legion of 8000 men, bearing on their fronts the Gallic cock with laurels and standards on a star {255} of steel, and beside them Sikh shields with copper bosses. Here are swords from Iran, with ivory hilts and blades engraved with mottoes calling on the help of "Ali." There are combination swords and pistols, Afghan knives, old flint-lock and match-lock guns with barrels damascened, old four-chambered match-lock revolver guns, musquets (short carbines or blunderbusses) carried by the Gurcharahis, (Sikh cavalry 4000 strong), tir kaman (bows and arrows), tarkash (quivers), Abyssinian shotels made with a double curve and wielded with the point downwards, Mahratta swords, farangs--straight swords adapted by the Mahrattas from the Portuguese, Khandahs, those long Sikh swords made broader near the point, a Persian mace of the time of Rustem--a gem for any collection--tabai (battle-axes) gokru, the crowsfoot--caltrap of ancient Europe for throwing down to stop cavalry, a Burmese Dha or Dhas, a fakir's baraggan or short sword-stick leaning on which some "muni of the ages" has sat in meditation in the jungle. There are Goorkha kukris and Hindoo Katars, the iron-shod stick of a Chaukidar, a powder-flask of golden thread, back-plates and breast-plates and helmets of steel and brass.

The armoury is certainly more interesting to-day than the Shish Mahal opposite wherein, as in a certain chamber at Versailles, it is {256} said that begums and a man would shut themselves for weeks together. Here there is indeed no armoury of love--is it because the weapons of that warfare were of a kind inseparable from those who wielded them--the charms that vanished with their owners? Or can it be that their enduring pattern has never been improved upon, so that each blade and buckler of the past is still in full demand for current wear?

I went up to the roof of the Shish Mahal for the view of Ranjeet Singh's tomb and the Badshahi mosque, and between its minarets towards the west could see the silver band that is the Ravi River, and then before going back to the elephant I looked at Ranjeet Singh's tomb on which certain bosses are carved in the marble with curious significance. Eleven of these are grouped round a large centre, and of the eleven four are for Ranees (who are married women) and seven for concubines, while at two of the corners of the slab are detached smaller bosses to commemorate a pair of pigeons burned in the funeral pyre.

What a contrast, I thought, on returning to the spacious roads of the modern town outside the city gates, between the new order and the old! On arriving at Lahore the first thing that the stranger notices is the fortified railway station, then a tank and an old mosque covered {257} with green-glazed tiles with others about it of bright peacock-blue; and then, as he drives from the station in a gharry, through white dust, past quite handsome modern buildings in pale red brick, comes the "Upper Mall," a perfect road with an ideal lay-out for a modern town--wide and trim with electric-light standards painted a clean grey on brick-edged grass strips which separate the centre roadway from a riding track that, in its turn, runs parallel to a footway; while on either side stretches a line of gardens. It is all as handsome as the Boulevard Anspach at Brussels, and as different from the more lovable streets in old Lahore as can well be imagined.

I had seen in front of the museum Zam Zammah, the old gun with a long history which Rudyard Kipling played round as a boy long before Kim was written, and had watched the urchin scrambling on its back when the policeman was not looking. Having heard that the character of Mahbub Ali of _Kim_--"known as one of the best horse-dealers in the Punjab"--was drawn from a man named Wazir Khan (not that minister of Akhbar after whom the Chauk of Wazir Khan is named, but an old horse-dealer who is still alive), I took some trouble to inquire for him. The old man was on the road, however, having gone to a horse-fair at Jhelum, but I found his son and asked {258} him to show me the old Sarai where his father used to sleep on his visits to Lahore. This is called the Sarai of Mahomet Sultan and belongs to the Maharajah of Kashmir. It is a wide quadrangle, about 60 yards square, with round-arched cloisters on all sides; and the son of Wazir Khan showed me, shut off between pillars, the place where his father used to sleep in the old days. The shadows of a large shisham tree flickered over the broken white plaster of the wall. There was a well in the centre, and near it was a group of horses from Waziristan. Out through the gateway ("the Gate of the Harpies who paint their eyes and trap the stranger") I could see the Lunda Bazaar and a woman squatting on the edge of the footway washing her face with soap. Near her was a tamasha wallah, a boy with a cage of green parrots, and a Hindoo woman cooking chupatties over a fire of dung-cakes, and from one of the houses there was singing in Pushtu.

I returned to the old gun and entered the building of the "wonder-house" in front of which it stands.

The Mayo School of Industrial Art, which is attached to the Lahore Museum, was founded to revive arts now half forgotten, and generally to develop the Industrial Art of the Province. I went thoroughly over its various departments, its schools of modelling and design, architecture, {259} engineering, wood-carving and carpentry, repoussé and blacksmith's work--and I do not think the importance of this college, as an educational institution, could be exaggerated. Its ambition to turn out a constant succession of the best possible craftsmen, rather than theoretic students, makes it the best means yet arrived at of moral and mental development inseparable to my thinking from the purely utilitarian value of handicraft training. Among the students were pointed out to me lads from distant villages and outlying districts, some in receipt of Government stipends, others supported by District and Municipal Boards and others again by Independent States. A well-regulated boarding-house is connected with the school for the accommodation of such pupils, a large proportion of whom find immediate employment on the completion of their course at the school and so continually add to the popularity of its training.

The energy, talent and success of Mr Percy Brown during the many years in which he has developed and enlarged the scheme initiated under the late Mr Lockwood Kipling, are beyond praise, and I only hope that his recent translation to Calcutta may bring an extension to other provinces of India of practical application of the same educational ideas.

The museum is justly proud of its Buddhist {260} sculptures, the best of which is one in black hornblende schiste (from the Yusafzai country near Peshawar), of Buddha after his forty-nine days' fast. Carved with extreme delicacy and refinement, this wonderful sculpture seems to carry one rather to Renaissance Italy than the North-West Provinces. Who were they, these sculptors? How much or how little were they identified with the people whose gods they carved? Would Alexander of Macedon have had in his train men of sufficient eminence in their craft to account for the apparent Western influence?

One of the latest additions under Mr Brown's curatorship is a collection of paintings and drawings of the Moghul Emperors and people of their times, which includes many exquisite illuminations and old water-colour drawings of extreme fineness and delicacy and yet full of character, design and amazing distinction. Appreciation of such things since the days of their production is only beginning to be re-awakened, and they are still purchasable in India at such prices as the museum can afford. Mr Brown told me that I was the first who had yet looked at this collection with enthusiasm to justify his own in buying them, but "who knows the spelling of Du Guesclin?" They are as wonderful as Holbein's drawings, their detail would have enchanted Altdorfer, and their exquisite line {261} might have delayed the death of Aubrey Beardsley! Such are the Mullah Do Piaza, the picture of Akhbar's jester and his thin Rosinante, or the beautiful drawing of Humayun, Babar's son, out a-hunting.

India is a land which changes any sympathetic traveller to a set of strings on which its spirit plays through all the working-hours. Every day is crowded with new wonders, and no sooner does he sink to earth, as if fallen from the hands of one player, than he is snatched up again and every fibre wrung by some new loveliness he knew not of.

One afternoon I drove out with the pundit to Shaddra where Jehangir is buried and Nour Jehan. We started to the west of the city on the high road to Peshawar, past the Mohammedan cemetery and the Hindoo burning-ground, outside which some women in white and yellow robes sat waiting while their men-folk burned a body within.

In the time of Ranjeet Singh, the pundit told me, the river used to flow past the Badshahi Masjid, a large red sandstone mosque, which we next passed: but in India the rivers are not so constant as the stars in their courses.

A little farther on we crossed the dry bed called the Ravi Nullah and then, driving through the Ravi Forest, reached the bridge of boats {262} that spans the Ravi River at a little distance from the railway-bridge. A merry old Kuka Sikh on a white donkey was waiting at the bridge toll-gate for someone from whom to beg the money to cross. It is a long bridge and very narrow, so that two vehicles cannot pass one another and a bullock-cart, which had just started to cross from the opposite bank, seemed inclined to take an infinity of time about it; but the Kuka Sikh was in no hurry, and when we had paid his toll joked with the pundit to beguile the time. This boat-bridge has to be dismantled in the rainy season, from June to August, when the river is swollen.

We left the Peshawar road soon after crossing the bridge and presently reached Shaddra and Jehangir's tomb, a large and elaborate affair with much space about it and great entrance gateways and lines of narrow water tanks in the gardens within. Dismounting from the gharry we walked over the great open space of the Sarai and through the eastern gateway, with its honeycomb vaulted ceiling and soft warm flower decoration on its pink stucco-covered brick-work, to the water channels of the tomb garden, past the central tank and on to the Mausoleum itself, an exquisite low building with four tall minarets, half of white marble and half of the red Agra stone, of which Jehangir was so fond.

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We walked up the steps and crossing a pavement of badal stone entered the inner chamber through an arch with a dado of old glazed inlay. Within, a flat oil-lamp upon a metal stand, threw flickering light in a bright path upon the marble floor. There was rich inlay of agate, cornelian and amethyst, the ninety-nine names of God and the titles of Jehangir, all but the most important title--that of husband of Nour Jehan. She is buried, the Queen who ruled him and his people--only her own brother she could not save from his wrath--about half a mile away and I was surprised to find the place in a state of utter neglect. It is awkward to approach and I expect is rarely visited.

When we reached it the sun was very low. A cow was stalled in one part of the neglected tomb and, as I approached, a Mohammedan fakir, rising from the ground to his full height, tall and thin, shook his hands at the sky and cried in Persian--_Al Mout! Al Mout!_ ("Everyone must die--everyone must die!")

"But this is a stable," said the pundit, whose learning perhaps did not include Bethlehem. It is true that the tomb was railed round, but the railings were broken and the sturdy rogue of a fakir had settled himself comfortably with his charpoy, his goat and his cow. His beard was grey and his unkempt hair peeped out in tufts from his roughly-tied turban, once white {264} and spotted with dark blue. The things he continued to shout were curious, but the pundit agreed with me it was mere wildness and no scheming for backsheesh that prompted a reference to England. Waving his arms round and round he cried--"The English will rule all over the world," and then--"One God to rule over us all. He created Adam and Eve: _bismillah heraai mornana heem la ilia illillah_."

I walked up some broken brick steps and passing through a series of low-pointed arches, down on the other side of a low circular wall, I stood before two tombs. The one nearest to me was that of Nour Jehan, who had been called Rose of the Harem, Light of the World: its neighbour was that of her adopted daughter.

The tombs are quite plain plaster-covered brick-work. In the outer passages there remain some traces of painted ornament--but because she had no children, and her stepson, Shah Jehan, was not on good terms with her when she died, there is here no decoration, no inscription. Not for her tomb are the ninety-nine names of God!

Through the arches on the farther side I could see the trunks of date palms and old, old mango trees in the Begumpura, a garden Nour Jehan had loved. I went underground to the crypt-like chamber below the tomb, and with the help of matches made out that there was {265} nothing upon the floor--only in the ceiling one inset space corresponding to the cenotaph above. The pundit thought the body was probably very deep in the ground--I know not.

When we came out above ground the last of daylight was making golden play among the palms and mango trees. They were in flower--and next June fruit would be upon them.

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