Winter India/Chapter 14

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

 

CHAPTER XIV
AGRA

O the traveler Agra means, stands for, the Taj alone, the most interesting object in India; and, arrived there, one almost fears to precipitate the supreme moment, to put it to the test, to take the first look. There was no inspiration in the gray, cloudy morning or the tedious drive from the hotel in the farthest suburb three miles to the walled garden by the river bank. A sandstone gateway in a long wall admitted us to the serai, or outer court, where cabs and bullock-carts stood and touts, peddlers, and guides squatted waiting for prey, scenting the first tourist rupee of the day. There fronted the Great Gateway, a magnificent sandstone tower in itself worth coming to see, its arch inlaid with white verses and flowers, and a row of airy little bell cupolas fringing the roof-line. We went in through the drafty rotunda of a hall, and straight before us was the vision of beauty, the Taj Mahal—the most supremely beautiful building in all the world—the most perfect creation of that kind that the mind and hand of man have ever achieved—one of the great objectives of travel that does not disappoint, but far exceeds all anticipations—a reward for all the distance one may travel to reach it—recompense for all one endures in Indian travel. Well as one knows it from photographs and engravings, the reality is as astonishing, as overwhelming, as if he had never heard of it. Even while he first looks through the arch to the white dome above the cypress-trees, it seems too rarely perfect to be real, too incredibly beautiful to be true. It would not have surprised me if the light had faded, a curtain had fallen; or, still less, if one had found he could not enter, that no foot could touch the garden-path or the white terrace, which is mere pedestal for this marvelous work of art. After watching the entrance of some others, we paused for a first steadfast look, and then, all excitement and exaltation, followed the marble path and mounted the half-way platform that affords the perfect view-point, the white wonder reflected in the long marble canal at their feet.

The Taj on its high platform, with the red sandstone mosque at the west, the complementary building or "Response" on the east, and the whole sky-space over and beyond the river as background, presents the most harmonious and perfectly balanced composition and is the most admirably placed building in India. The eye travels from feature to feature and detail to detail, and the wonder of its perfection continually grows. The bands of low-relief carving, the panels and borders of inlaid work, afford endless study, and one easily accepts the guide's set story that forty varieties of carnelian

 

THE TAJ MAHAL

 

are inlaid in one small flower, and that the whole Koran is inlaid, verse by verse, on the walls. There is a whole new set of sensations when one enters the softly lighted, dim white interior, with the echo repeating each word like the response of a chanted service—a single note from flute or guitar a whole theme. A trellis of marble tracery, with inlaid borders, screens the two tombs, low sarcophagi of jeweled marble resting on inlaid platforms. Mumtaz-i-Mahal in the center, where the Great Mogul laid her, and with Shah Jahan at her side are laid away in real simple white tombs in a vault immediately below the sarcophagi; and to them the aged guardian conducts one with a lantern.

We went back at sunset, and saw only an uninteresting yellow ball sink against a hazy horizon, and the clear-cut shadows in the arches of the Taj fade to white and gray. In a little while the yellow ball of the full moon rose beyond the river, and flooded the eastern arch with a splendor unimagined. On the platform in mid-garden were other moonlight pilgrims, and what did they talk about in face of this glorious apparition, this wonder of the world? The German professor told how the mutton chops were served at his hotel—brought in and passed around sizzling on the hot grill! Could sacrilege go further?

There was a British artist at our hotel, "painting Tajes," as he naïvely explained, for the "London spring market"—"four rather nice ones" already finished, and more to do while the fine weather lasted; since early in March the hot winds begin, a scorching gale is blowing by noon, and the air is filled with dust. "Yes, it is a bit chilly sitting in the garden so long, these days," he said, "and the tourists do bother a bit, you know; looking over one's shoulder and asking one if it is hard to do." When we hurried from dinner the next night for a second moonlight view, the artist said: "Oh, I say! You Americans have such a notion for seeing the Taj by moonlight. There were some American ladies here last month at the full of the moon, and they went down there after dinner, too."

"Have n't you seen it by moonlight yet?"

"Oh, dear, no! I am there all day, you know."

"But are you not going to-night?" we asked in amazement.

"No, I think not. I will go sometime, though. It might be nice to paint a moonlight Taj," and he went on eating cheese!

"With the round silver moon shining high in the vault of the intense, indigo-blue sky, the Taj Mahal was the frost-palace of one's dreams, and from the dark arch of the entrance gateway it seemed fairly to shine and flash in the strong light poured full on its eastern face. There was silence in the enchanted garden, and as we walked toward the luminous white palace only the far murmur of running water and the scent of violets and mignonette told upon the other senses. We had the place to ourselves for one hour of silence and charm, sitting in the shadows of the Response. Then the chatter, clatter of the tourist contingent was heard at the gateway and down the path. "Ach, Wunderschön! Wunderschön!" the loudest voice proclaimed. Then clouds skimmed over the moon, dimming the Taj, which was suddenly transformed to silver and frosted ivory again as the moon rode out. The "Wunderschön" voices continued down the path until smothered in the staircase inside the platform, came out full-lunged on the terrace, and there proclaimed with greater volume the wonderful beauty of the white building. Echoes came from the domed hall, then the faint, glow-worm light of the custodian's lantern led the voluble gutturals around the octagon and down to the tombs. Next cockney voices came down the garden walk—some "Tommies" from the cantonment with their "’Arriets," who, skylarking down to the terrace, with an all-hands-round at the entrance of the platform stairway, chased, shrieking, up the inner stairway and came out on the platform with shouts of laughter, each slim, trim figure in red coat and box cap standing out distinct in color in the moonlight. Disenchanted, we fled through the darkest garden paths. It was sacrilege of the rankest kind for those sweethearting couples to be skylarking around the marble screen of the tombs, dropping their barbarous "h's" to summon the echo, the pure soul of the Taj Mahal.

For four days we haunted the garden of the Taj, for by noonday, sunset, and moonlight it took on as many rarer qualities and aspects; and six times a day, as we drove those long miles to and from the gateway, we berated the hotel-keepers for not putting the hotel where it should be. The guardians and keepers at the Taj came to know us, the touts and guides let us alone. We found, after many comparative tests, that the best full view of the Taj is to be had from the second story of the entrance gateway; the best sunset view from the west pavilion over the river angle of the terrace, reached by a staircase in the mosque ; and the best moonlight effect is that obtained from the opposite east pavilion, reached by the corresponding stairway in the Response.

There were Philistines among some of the early English commanders at Agra, the most soulless of them all being that Lord William Bentinck who wanted to sell the Taj Mahal, and actually considered the offer of thirty thousand pounds from a rich Hindu. One gasps, too, to hear how the Maharaja of Sindhia entertained a viceroy in the enchanted garden, serving supper in the Response, ham and champagne, "swine's flesh and wine," in the architectural counterpart of the Mosque. Lord Auckland also was entertained in the Taj, when there were games in the garden, with roars of laughter, and ham and champagne again in the Response. In the same way, a ball was given for Lord Ellenborough after the siege of Kabul, lanterns were strung on the cypress-trees, there was dancing to military music on the marble platform, and supper in the Response, as usual. The native press denounced this desecration of a tomb and place of worship, but the Agra officials argued that the Response was not a mosque, and, if it were, it had long since lost sanctity by its desecration by Jats and Hindus. Moreover, they said that the literal translation of its name was "the feast-place"—it was before the tomb was built, Tatar and Mogul alike preparing a beautiful garden in life that it might become their burial-place, after which it was never used for pleasuring, but given over to the care of priests. The Taj Mahal was held in great reverence in Mohammedan days, and visitors were blindfolded at the entrance and not uncovered until they reached the place of prayer. When the Jats took Agra and looted its palaces, they carried off the entrance gates with their thousands of silver nails, each with a rupee as its head. They took away the inner doors of the Taj, each a single translucent slab of agate, the gold spire and crescent, and the precious carpets laid three and four deep on the floor. No vandalism of that kind has taken place in British days, and there has been great interest shown in keeping the gardens in their original condition. In 1876 the whole place was thoroughly repaired and restored in preparation for the Prince of Wales's visit, and the closest watch is kept to prevent natives, soldiers, and tourists from picking out the precious bits of inlaid stone. Severe punishment is visited upon natives who pick flowers or otherwise transgress within the inclosure, and the query was always in my mind whether or not the natives had any comprehension of the beauty and sentiment of the place. It was ever a growing wonder that these people, the Hindus, had ever accomplished it—how even twenty-two thousand of them, working for seventeen or for twenty-two years under Moslem directors, had ever reared it. Like Sir Charles Dilke, one finds it hard to believe that "a people who paint their cows pink with green spots, and their houses orange or bright red, should be the authors of the Pearl Mosque or the Taj. It would be too wonderful." It is easier to credit the plans to the Frenchman Austin de Bordeaux or to any of the master masons or carvers who came from Bagdad, Constantinople, Samarkand, and from every Moslem center of note, and worked here during the same years that the Pilgrim Fathers were building their first log-house on Plymouth Bay.

Driving through the great fortress gate, we saw first the red palace of Akbar, sandstone prelude to the jeweled marble halls of Shah Jahan, the greatest builder of all the Moguls. The first or private audience-hall, the Khas Mahal, lies across the Grape Garden, its windows set in the solid battlemented walls that rise sheer from the moats. It is a dream in white—arches and walls of pure white marble carved in scrolls, traceries, and flowers in low relief, the windows filled with marble lattices. The scheme of white on white is offset by a ceiling of gold and colors, and the Khas Mahal is a model for architects and decorators for all time. By an open terrace on the battlements, and a series of marble halls with walls inlaid with graceful Persian arabesques and flowers in colored stones, we came to the Jasmine Tower, Shah Jahan's finest construction. The rounded balcony of the tower projects beyond the walls and commands the moats below, the long curve of the Jumna, and the white bubbles of the Taj beyond a flat, green foreground of river bottom mosaiced over with the washermen's white patches. The lovely Mumtaz-i-Mahal lived in these rooms around the fountain court, all their surface a maze of precious inlay, the floor of the court a marble pachisi-board, the walls of the inner chambers fitted with long, sunken pockets for jewels that only a woman's slender hand and wrist could reach into. A staircase leads down to the Shish Mahal, or Hall of Mirrors, a cool grotto of a bath set with tiny mirrors in carved plaster, where a cascade once tinkled down a stepped arrangement over colored lights. Overhead is the tiny Gem Mosque, where the women prayed the Prophet to grant them souls; this exquisite marble cell being afterward the prison place of Shah Jahan. Shah Jahan, the accepted Great Mogul of Europeans, and contemporary of Cromwell, was deposed by his son, Jahangir, but cheered in his seven years' captivity by his faithful daughter, Jahanira. Another passage leads along above the battlements from the Jasmine Tower to the Diwan-i-Khas, another private audience-hall with an inner decoration of white on white in low relief, the outer pillars and arches inlaid with color. A considerable annual outlay is required to keep these inlaid walls in order, to replace the bits of carnelian, jade, jasper, amethyst, agate, and lapis lazuli dug out by vicious tourists and idling hooligans of soldiers. This audience-hall fronts upon a terrace flush with the battlements, and there at close of day the Great Mogul used to lounge on a black marble throne, watching the domes and minarets of the Taj grow beneath the hands of the thousands of workmen. When the marauding Jats captured the fort they sacked the palace, despoiled the Divan-i-Khas of its silver ceiling, but when they attempted to sit on this seat of the Great Mogul it broke under the indignity. Half of the court space was once a sunken pond, with a carved niche or throne in the surrounding gallery, where the great one used to sit to fish at ease. It is now but a dry stone court, and no trace remains of the bath-room of precious green marble, whose interior was stripped by the Marquis of Hastings, who wished to send it to England to be reërected as a bath-room for George IV. The loose marbles lay around for years, uncared for, and were finally sold for a trifle. It is not necessary for any outsider to vent his indignation at this barbaric proceeding, as Sir James Fergusson has said it all, with a vehemence none can approach, and has sufficiently laid the lash of his terrible sarcasm on his Philistine countrymen.

From this Court of the Fish-pond a door admits one directly to the Diwan-i-Am, or great audience-hall, its marble lattices and inlaid throne splendid reminders of the past, the rows of British cannon and the red-coated sentries beyond sufficient evidences of the present. We crossed the court and ascended the staircase to the Moti Musjid, the Pearl Mosque, over which three generations of writers have raved as an architectural chef-d'œuvre second only to the Taj. After all the splendid creations of Shah Jahan, this in some way failed to produce an equal impression, and it gave us a distinct sense of disappointment. The simplicity of the white mosque, relieved only by the blue and gray veins

 

PRIVATE AUDIENCE-HALL AND JASMINE TOWER IN AGRA PALACE. TAJ MAHAL IN DISTANCE

 

of the marble and the one long inscription in black inlay, did not appeal. The white court with its mirror tank, the white cloisters, the vista of white arches and columns, and the pale shadows of the interior had beauty,—Vereshchagin's painting had told one that,—but the Moti Musjid gave the chill of the first disappointment in Agra.

The tomb of I'tamadu-daulah, father of Nur Jahan, the famous wife of Jahangir, and grandfather of Mumtaz-i-Mahal, is on the opposite side of the Jumna; far above the Taj and from the high railway bridge and from the garden terraces one has still different views of the Taj. All the roads leading there were crowded one Sunday afternoon with strings of ekkas and bullock-carts overflowing with women and children, and the garden-paths and the marble platform around the marquetry tomb of the Persian treasurer were crowded with family parties. The women and children were all in their most brilliant holiday attire, their jewels and tinsel, fantastic fineries and fripperies of every kind making the green garden around the white pavilion a dazzle of color, a dream of India. Complacent fathers sat stocking-footed on outspread blankets, their veiled women and children, huddled near, regarding the superior being with awe—a joyous Indian family holiday of the middle classes. A small boy flashed by in a petunia satin coat and gold-embroidered cap, bare-legged and tugging at a bow and arrow. Another boy in gorgeous red satin top-clothes munched a green apple, and the petunia archer flew at him with the fury of a tiger. Screams from the combatants and all their female followers rent the air, and when forcibly separated neither was to be appeased by proffered peanuts. Then a small sister of the petunia coat dashed forward and dealt the green-apple boy such a clap on the ear that the female parliament was paralyzed. When we presented the intrepid little woman with some annas of admiration our dumfounded bearer asked, "Why do such curious thing?" and afterward tried half-heartedly to explain to the crouching women that it was our testimonial to the first woman in India with any backbone. With laughter, the four wives, the two daughters, and the wrinkled old nurse in pewter jewelry, who were with the father of the little "new woman," promised to keep her in the habit of resenting tyrant man and redressing promptly all the wrongs that came to her notice.

The garden rang with jingling anklets, and the play of colors was kaleidoscopic. Two beautiful young women raised their white head-sheets to look at us as they passed, red shoes and full yellow skirts and much coin jewelry making them fantastic figures fit for a fancy-dress ball. Scores of women flounced by in red skirts, green skirts, changeable silk skirts with tinsel borders, and wearing purple, green, yellow, and white head-sheets. A nautch-girl came jingling by, her pale-blue skirts the only touch of that color in the whole garden. After we had seen the tombs in the mosaic pavilion, whose inlaid walls were the first to be decorated in pietra dura in India, we mounted to the terrace roof around the upper story of the marble reliquary, which is a mass of fine relief-carving and lattice-work, and looked down upon the brilliant scene in the garden. And this spectacular gathering of so many hundreds of women and children was all to celebrate the ceremonial hair-cutting of the year—the clippings of the children's hair being brought to the terrace and there thrown into the Jumna, with flower offerings.