came to our relief after six long, long hours,-the poor hookah, or cheroot, or pipe, that is in such awful unpopularity with the Railway authorities, and threatened by their highest penal denouncements. Hiring a gharry, and taking in it all our luggage and baggage, that made us feel about as comfortable as one is in stocks, we proceeded,―pulling at, and puffing away from, a hubblebubble to keep off the unceremonious flies-to make our entry into the city of the Great Mogul in a right earnest Mogul style. Before us intervened the Jumna, spanned by a bridge of boats, similar to which there existed one in the days of the Timurean princes. The beautiful railway bridge through which the train is to ride hereafter direct into the city, is nearly complete for being thrown open for traffic. Forsooth, that ironbridge is as it were the reality of Xerxes' chain and rod thrown over the proud Jumna. Oh! ye shades of Judisthira, Bheema, and Arjoona, with what pious horror must you look down from your blest abodes, upon the impious bridge that binds and lashes the waves of that classic stream.-But poetry has had its reign, and science now must hold her sway for the comfort of wayfaring men. It was not our blessed fortune to be able to go across through that bridge, though it might have been profaning the memory of our ancestors by hurrying at once most unclassically right into the heart of their city. Greatly to our disappointment, our gharry had to go rumbling over the bridge of boats towards the grand donjon of a giant keep that frowns over the flood.' The jolting of the carriage had well-nigh caused us a serious loss, if a package that had dropped from its top had gone into the river. Passing by the guard-house that is stationed to levy a toll, and mounting to the height on which the city stands, we at last found ourselves within its battlemented walls, and fairly on the soil of 'O Delhi! my country! city of the soul! The orphans of the heart must turn to thee, Lone mother of dead empires! and control In their shut breasts their petty misery. What are our woes and sufferance ? The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, ye Whose agonies are evils of a day Come and see A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay. "The Niobe of nations! there she stands, Of their heroic dwellers: dost thou flow, Old Jumna! through a marble wilderness? Rise, with thy azure waves, and mantle her distress. This is an apostrophizing into which a Hindoo by birth and antecedents is likely to fall, as all the associations connected with the interesting ground press upon him and come home to his heart. It is impossible for him to stand upon the classical soil, and resist conjuring up the ghosts of the departed Pandavas, and hold converse on their own ground with Vyas' heroes. But for a little while he may cling to the illusions of the past, till the mystery is dissolved, and truth breaks in to disenchant the scene before his view. He has little time to meditate upon what Delhi was, and what she now is. Old things are passing away, and all things are becoming new under the name of improvements. The hallowed associations of ancient Indraprastha have all faded away. This may be regretted and mourned over, but cannot be helped. The world is marching onward, and, before long, Delhi shall claim our attention with objects and events of the latest hour. As travellers, whose bones were aching from a long journey, and who had fed upon a scanty meal in the morning, the idea of lodging and supper was rather prominent in our reveries, and we worked our way through crowded streets, stared at by all men, towards Nil-ka-katra, to go to a banker, to whom we had a letter of introduction. The reader may probably condemn us for such a trifle uppermost in our thoughts, but so it was; and when we found ourselves under the roof of a comfortable two-storied building, and a complaisant gentleman asked us what we would have for supper, and showed us our beds for the night, we almost agreed that indulging in a classical humour suited better to boys just out of college than to matter-of-fact-minded men. new. November 7th.-Of the sights of Delhi it is impossible to say nothing—and it is difficult to say anything There are two modes of seeing them: the topographical-which is to go through them as they fall in your way, jumbling antiquities, mediævalities, and modernnesses into a salgamundi. The other is chronological-which is to go regularly from the house of Pandoo to that of the last Mogul. The latter had our preference, and off we hied to the Pooranah-Killah, or 'old fort,' to begin from the beginning, and not to write, like the Persian, from the right to the left. Three epochs, three sovereignties, and three civilizations, combine to form the mingled yarn' of Delhi's history. The Pandoo, the Moslem, and the Briton, encounter each other on the same ground. The place was first a temple, then a mosque, and has now become a church. In each point of view it is an object of regard-a place thrice sacred with reminiscences for the traveller. To go through his sight-seeing, in a chronological seriatim, he should first of all drive down to the Pooranah-Killah, or Indrapat, in which tradition still preserves the name of ancient Indraprastha. The way to this spot lies through a waste of ruins that realize the graphic description of Heber-A very awful scene of desolation, ruins after ruins, tombs after tombs, fragments of brick-work, free-stone, granite, and marble, scattered everywhere over a soil naturally rocky and barren, without cultivation, except in one or two small spots, and without a single tree.' The old bed of the Jumna is traced in passing through this chaos of ruins. That river appears to have formerly flowed upwards of a mile to the westward of its present channel, and along its right bank had Judishthira built his capital of Indraprastha. The site of that famous city is now some two miles from modern Delhi. Indraprastha was one of the five pats or prasthas* which had been demanded *The five pats which still exist, were Panipat, Sonpat, Indrapat, Tilpat, and Baghpat, of which all but the last were situated on the right or western bank of the Jumna. The term prastha, according to H. H. Wilson, means anything "spread out or extended," and is commonly applied to any level piece of ground, including also table-land on the top of a hill. But its more literal or restricted meaning would appear to be that particular extent of land which would require a by Judishthira as the price of peace between the rival Kurus and Pandavas, and which old Dhritorashtra gave away as a slice from his kingdom to sop his would-be turbulent nephews. The principality assigned to them was a bit of forest-land, then known under the name of Khandara-vana. Content, as all fatherless and disinherited orphans are, to make a start with this small assignment, the Pandavas set to building a town on it for their capital. This was about fifteen hundred years before the Christian era, when, far away by the shores of the Egean, Cecrops was building Athens, destined, perhaps, as twin cities, to shed their glory over the East and West.* * prastha of seed, that is, 48 double hands-full, or about 48 imperial pints, or two-thirds of a bushel. This was, no doubt, its original meaning, but in the lapse of time it must gradually have acquired the meaning, which it still has, of any good-sized piece of open plain. Indraprastha would, therefore, mean the plain of Indra, which was, I presume, the name of the person who first settled there. Popular tradition assigns the five pats to the five Pandu brothers.—Cunningham. The date of the occupation of Indraprastha as a capital by Judishthira may, as I believe, be attributed, with some confidence, to the latter half of the 15th century before Christ. The grounds on which I base this belief are as follows:-1st, That certain positions of the planets, as recorded in the Mahabarat, are shown by Bentley to have taken place in 1424-25 B.C., who adds that there is no other year, either before that period or since, in which they were so situated. 2nd, In the Vishnu Purana it is stated that at the birth of Parikshita, the grandson of Arjuna Pandara, the seven Rishis were in Mugha, and that when they are in Purca Asharha, Nanda will begin to reign. Now, as the seven Rishis, or stars of the Great Bear, are supposed to pass from one lunar asterism to another in 100 years, the interval between Parikshita and Nanda will be 100 years. But in the Bhagavata Purana this interval is said to be 1015 years, which, added to 100 years, the duration of the reigns of the nine Nandas, will place the birth of Parikshita 1115 years before the accession of Chandra Gupta in 315 B.C., that is, in 1430 B.C. By this account the birth of Parikshit, the grandson of Arjuna, took place just six years before the Great War in B.C. 1424. These dates, which are derived from two inde |