THE MAHARAJAH OF BHURTPOOR.

4I

peer and an English army. But the painful fact is that you can hardly open a page in the history of India without stumbling upon some incident that recalls the taking of Bhurtpoor.

The day was hot and the ride had been through a low country, the scenery not attractive at the best, but now brown and arid under a scorching sun. We were in a frowsy condition, early rising, long waiting, and an Indian atmosphere not contributing to the comforts of travel. About noon the blare of trumpets and the rolling of the drums told us we were at Bhurtpoor. Putting ourselves together as best we could, and throwing off the sluggishness and apathy of travel, we descended. All Bhurtpoor was out at the station, and the Maharajah at the head. The Prince was accompanied by the British officers attached to his court, and, advancing, shook hands with the General and welcomed him to his capital. The Maharajah looks older than his years, but this is a trait of most Indian princes. He wore a blazing uniform, covered with jewels. He has a firm, stern face, with strong features, a good frame, and, unlike his brother of Jeypore-who gives his days to prayers and his evenings to billiards, and although he has the Star of India, has long since seen the vanity of human glory and hates power-is a soldier and a sportsman, and is called a firm and energetic ruler. He would make a good model for Byron's Lambro, and there was a stern, haughty grace in his unsmiling face. From the station we drove to the palace, into a town whose dismantled walls speak of English valor and English shame, past bazaars, where people seemed to sell nothing, only to broil in the sunshine, and under a high archway into a courtyard, and thence to the palace. There was nothing special about the palace except that it was very large and very uncomfortable. The decorations were odd. There were one or two bits of valuable china, prints of an American circus entering London, an oil painting of our Saviour, various prints of the French and English royal families taken forty years ago. There were the Queen, the Prince Consort, Louis Philippe, Montpensier, and all the series of loyal engravings in vogue at the time of the Spanish marriages; all young and fresh and

smiling faces, some of them now worn and gray, some vanished into silence. The palace seemed to be a kind of store-room, in which the keepers had stored everything that came along, and as you walked from wall to wall, passing from cheap circus showbills to steel engravings of Wellington and oil paintings of our Lord, the effect was ludicrous. The Prince does not live in this palace, but in one more suited to Oriental tastes. It was here where he received the Prince of Wales on the occasion of his visit in 1876. There was a breakfast prepared, which the Prince left us to enjoy in company with our English. friends. You know in this country the hospitality of the highest princes never goes so far as to ask you to eat. The rules of caste are so marked that the partaking of food with one of another caste, and especially of another race, would be defilement. Our host, at the close of the breakfast, returned in state, and there was the ceremony of altar and pan and cordial interchanges of good feeling between the Maharajah and the General.

It was arranged that on our way to Agra we should visit the famous ruins of Futtehpoor Sikra. In the days of the great Mohammedan rulers there was none so great as Akbar. One of the trials to which this rich country-unfortunate India -has been subjected is that with every age there comes a new conqueror, a tide of new invaders. The law of conquest that the North should invade the South, that the sons of the snow should overmaster the children of the sun, that the men of the mountain should put their feet on the men of the valley, has had no better illustration than in the checkered destiny of Hindostan. It was a part of the marvelous career of Islam that its soldiers should come with fire and sword into these plains of Northern India. In 1565, about the time when the Spaniard was carrying the Cross into America, making his way into Mexico and the United States, and rooting out the glorious remnants of Arabian civilization in Andalusia, a Mohammedan prince fought the battle of Kistna. The Hindoos, under their rajah, gathered a mighty army, in which there were 20,000 elephants and 600 cannon. But all this power was unavailing, and

43 he battle was that 100,000 Hindoos should be dethe rajah should be beheaded, and his head kept a trophy. Out of this arose other wars, which it table to dwell upon, and with them the foundation. - of Akbar, who is called by historians "the pride

gul dynasty," the greatest of the Mohammedan rulers He was a soldier and prince. Early in life he was e most devout of Moslems, but as years grew, and s reason, ambition, and military success, he craved renown, and throwing aside his veneration for the announced that there was no God but God, and that as his caliph. The proclamation of dogmas like this

power.

and the dogma of papal infallibility is a privilege of supreme I presume that Akbar's heterodoxy was really a stroke of high statesmanship. He was in Hindostan. He was a sovereign. Among his subjects were millions of Hindoos. These Hindoos were attached to their faith with a devotion which we might envy in our cold, questioning age, and would have died for it with a patience which no modern martyrs could surpass. To have carried out the Prophet's mandate and slain his infidel subjects would have been to destroy a docile and ingenious people, willing to work, carry burdens, and pay taxes. As a consequence Akbar threw aside the severe form of Islam, gave the Hindoos protection, asked them to share honors and power, and consolidated an empire. He married a Hindoo princess, and tried as far as was possible to make himself one with the people whom he had conquered, and over whom he hoped his children would reign.

Akbar was induced to found the city and build the palace of Futtehpoor Sikra by the advice of a holy hermit. Akbar had children, who were taken from him, to his own grief and the peril of his dynasty. On his return from a campaign he was told by the hermit that if he would take up his residence on the top of a certain rock, where the air was good and where the hermit could have his eye upon him while praying, a son would come. This came to pass and the son was born, who was to be the Emperor Jehân Geer, or Conqueror of the World, to have a hard time of it in many ways, and die a victim to his own follies and sin. So overjoyed was Akbar with the coming of the Conqueror of the World that he built a city, a palace, and a mosque on the site of the rock where the hermit lived. What remains of that undertaking is known as Futtehpoor Sikra.

After leaving Bhurtpoor our road was through a series of villages and over a rolling plain. The sun beat fiercely upon our carriage, and we found what refuge we could under the leather curtains. Natives in various processes of squalor came hurrying after our carriages. In the mud huts we saw weavers at work, women grinding corn, tired laborers sleeping in the

ON THE WAY TO THE RUINS.

45

shade. There is a bit of poetry in a drama called "The Toy Cart," written by the Rajah Sudraka, which I have been reading in one of the guide-books, so vivid that I am tempted to copy it as a native writer's picture of an Indian noon.

"The cattle dozing in the shade

Let fall the unchamped fodder from their mouths;
The lively ape with slow and languid pace

Creeps to the pool to slake his parching thirst

In its now tepid waters; not a creature

Is seen upon the public road, nor braves

A solitary passenger the sun;

Among the sedgy shade, and even here
The parrot from his wiry bower complains,
And calls for water to allay his thirst."

We drove on until we came to the first stage. The Maharajah had sent a guard with us-soldiers in heavy gilded uniforms, with fierce, eager, truculent eyes-to keep the robbers away. When we came to the first stage there were camels in waiting, and we had our first experience of camels in India. Two camels were hitched to each one of the carriages, and we drove off with a camel and pair. The road was hilly, and the camels are supposed to have more endurance than horses. Each camel carries a driver, and there is a third person who beats them with a goad or stick. The gait of the camel at first is a pleasant sensation, and the pace a good one. But in time it becomes wearisome, the constant bobbing up and down of the carriage under the uncouth, shambling gait of the beasts tiring you. The General got off in good style and made his way to the ruins without an adventure. The carriage in which Mr. Borie, the Colonel, Dr. Keating and I were riding was not so fortunate. Our animals seemed to have scruples of conscience about climbing the hill, and insisted upon stopping. No inducement could move them. The driver pronged them with his goad, called them names, adjured them by all the gods in the Hindoo mythology to make their way to Futtehpoor Sikra. There they stood. Perhaps under a severe pressure of the goad they would move a few paces and stop again.