Winter India/Chapter 15

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

 

CHAPTER XV
AKBAR, THE GREATEST MOGUL OF THEM ALL

T Agra, Akbar, the greatest of all the Mogul sovereigns, descendant of Baber and Timur, and of tribal connection with Genghis Khan, becomes a very real personage. He lived in that age of great sovereigns when Henry IV, Philip II, and Queen Elizabeth ruled in Europe. He has been called the Marcus Aurelius and the Frederick the Great of India, and he was the greatest builder the country had then known. Forts, palaces, tombs, and whole cities sprang up by his command, and at his court literature, art, and all religions were honored. Brahmans, Mohammedans, Sikhs, Jains, and Catholic priests expounded and argued with him in a first parliament of religions, and, regarding them all impartially, he devised a universal theology, a compromise creed which his vizier and not a few courtiers adopted. He himself worshiped the sun every morning, as representative of the divinity which animates and rules the world. He was a strenuous sort of ruler too, walking twenty and thirty miles a day, to the dismay of his courtiers; and once he rode from Ajmir to Agra in two days, covering the two hundred and twenty miles by innumerable relays of fast horses. Akbar wrote his memoirs, in worthy emulation of Baber, whose autobiography in illuminated Persian text is treasured in the Agra College library.

In the usual reverse order of all Indian sight-seeing, we first saw Akbar's tomb, and then his City of Victory. The tomb is at Secundra, a suburb of Agra. A great red sandstone gateway admits one to the flagged court, and the impressive pillared pavilion, rising story upon story, after the oldest Buddhist constructions, covers the remains of the greatest of the Moguls. A pierced marble screen walls the upper terrace, where the white sarcophagus, covered with carving, lies open to the sun and sky, the intended white dome never having been completed by Akbar's successors. The real tomb is reached by a sloping passageway, and the monarch lies in a grave scooped in the earth like the graves of his desert-chief ancestors.

Never on any sleigh-ride, nor in winter travel in the North, have I known such suffering from cold as during the twenty-two-mile ride from Agra to Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar's City of Victory. The heaviest winter clothing and all the wraps, rugs, razais, and hot-water bottles could not defy the insidious air. The sun shone, the trees were green, the road was smooth and well kept, but the keen, raw, icy wind of a Canadian March so benumbed us on our way to Akbar's Versailles that several times we ran beside the victoria in our efforts to restore circulation. We paused not for sights when once arrived there. What were Akbar's outer walls, his treasury, mint, or any lot of ruined stonework to us until we could reach the cold splendors of the dak bangla, once the Record Office and Akbar's House of Dreams, and thaw our fingers over the cook-house charcoals? We shut the mullioned windows in the cliff-like outer walls commanding the vast prospect of the plain, and supplemented the slight and shadowy, the sketchy, impressionist imitation of a breakfast of the Agra hotel with scalding chocolate and really hot toast, and embarked the sympathetic old khansamah on a more solid tiffin than he had contemplated. We proposed to stoke up with all the bodily fuel possible for the return drive in the teeth of the wind.

A troop of guides lay in wait for us, and luck let us have another of those stupid parrots who, in embroidered caps and winding chuddas, mislead one over all the show-places of India. This one stuttered—may all others know and avoid him by that sign!—and, like all of his gild, reversed the guide-book order of sight-seeing. We had already suffered enough in that way, and we ordered him to right about face and march to the Turkish queen's house, first on the Murray list and first object before the Hall of Records. "But, ladyship, I wish f-f-first to sh-sh-show you the mosque and my ancestor's grave." But we wanted none of his ancestors, except in their regular order. "Oh, your ladyship, your ladyship, take me, take me. God is good. Take me, take me," mumbled a toothless collection of wrinkles in white grave-clothes. "I know the palace well. I know the Turkish queen. I showed the Prince of Wales all Fatehpur Sikri." And then guides grew thick and thicker around us, rising from the very flagstones. They whined in procession after us across the court, and it was easy to make compact with our guide, who was almost exploding with spasms of stuttering wrath at the interlopers. He was to lead us in the straight and direct path of the "Murray book," and receive bakshish in proportion to his success in keeping his rivals away and in omitting his "ladyships."

As we wandered in admiration through the sun-warmed courts, sheltered from the biting blast, our benumbed senses revived, and we warmed to real enthusiasm over this "romance in stone," over all the exquisite fantasies, the veritable maisons bijoux Akbar had built for his favorite wives. The Great Mogul was as eclectic and as far-reaching in his consort collecting as in his religion, and we were shown the house of his Turkish queen Miriam; that of his Christian Portuguese wife; the house of Birbal, his Hindu wife, and a great zenana. Of the same order of lavish ornamentation is the wonderful council-chamber with its central pillar, all these structures carved over every inch of surface with the finest and most intricate ornament, geometrical patterns, and traceries. Outside, inside, over all the walls and ceilings spreads the revel of ornament, and the windows hold perforated stone and marble screens as fine as woven reed-work. This was the real India of the imagination, the setting for "The Naulahka," every part of the carved labyrinth a scene for melodrama. There was one great five-story pavilion, strangely like Akbar's tomb in design, each pillared and open hall of fairy lightness, with a row of fantastic bell-cupolas on top. There the zenana women took the air, and near by was Akbar's great pachisi-board inlaid in a court pavement, where he played the game with his vizier, using slave-girls for pawns, and the successful one keeping the beauties he won. On the seat overlooking this checker-board, Akbar doubtless flourished his famous bon-bon box, with its harmless delights in one compartment, perfumed poison in the other. After having dealt death to many courtiers deliberately, he accidentally took the wrong sugar-plum himself one day, and ended his life in the most satisfactory, retributive, story-book way.

Our guide finally led us through the inlaid gate to the court of the mosque, and was about to launch full-lunged on his ancestors of honorable burial when our eyes fell upon the little white marble tomb of Selim Chisti, the hermit saint and local genius, whose prophecies led Akbar to build this palace and city on the arid plain. The saint's tomb is the most exquisite thing of its kind in India, a tiny marble jewel-box, hardly larger than an elephant's howdah, a filigree reliquary, with fine lattice walls, fantastic brackets, and a domed roof shining in the sunlight. The ebony doors admit one to the tomb, where ostrich eggs hang and ebony panels are inlaid with mother-of-pearl. One looks through the marble screens, as fine as basketry, at the Indian sky, as

 

MAUSOLEUM OF SELIM CHISTI, FATEHPUR SIKRI

 

clearly blue as sapphire. We forgot the inlaid arches and the tiled facings of the mosque, which is a copy of the mosque at Mecca, and turned only to look again and again at the tiny white tomb shining like a frost creation in the empty stone court, the reality infinitely more satisfactory than even Vereshchagin's painting had led us to expect. In front of this little prettiness the great gate of Victory opens to the plain and the ruined city, a broad staircase leading down to the rubbish-strewn common. We went through the great domed arch, the doors studded with votive nail-heads and horseshoes, and from the foot of the staircase had the intended view of this gate which Fergusson calls "noble beyond that of any portal attached to any mosque in India, perhaps in the whole world." Across the front of this gate Akbar inlaid the famous inscription: "Isa [Jesus], on whom be peace, said: 'The world is a bridge, pass over it, but build no house on it. The world endures but an hour, spend it in devotion.'" There is a great green, oval well, with a parapet and arched chambers surrounding it, close beside the steps and the high, battlemented walls. Despite the keen and wintry air, lean men and boys, shivering in a few flutters of cotton drapery, offered to jump the eighty feet from the battlements into the well. While we demurred, covered with goose-flesh at the mere idea, there was a shout from above, a brown figure shot out into the air, whirling his arms frantically to keep the body upright, and dropped feet foremost into the pool. The green scum closed over him, and before we could recover breath the black head swam to the steps, wound on a dry sheet, and came, all green and shivering, to claim a rupee for the feat. He dashed instantly out of sight, reappeared on the battlements, and made a second plummet drop into the well. Only the fact that those two dearly earned rupees assured him food for the day could ease one's conscience for aiding and abetting such inhuman sport. Two Scotch tourists, who had watched the cold plunger from the head of the steps, refused to pay a rupee apiece, or even one anna, to the "poor man with family to feed." We could hear them say that they had not engaged the man to jump, the ladies had arranged that. "But you saw me. You watched me. You all looked at me," howled the jumper, following them. And the Scotchmen said: "Those Americans can just pay more, then. We won't give you an anna. Jao!"

After the arctic drive back to Agra, we had time only for a cup of scalding tea before hurrying to the Taj to witness the most wonderful sunset of all, an amber afterglow illuminating every inner curve and recess and dispelling all shadows, the light seeming to radiate from the glowing marble, to emanate from the white surface itself. As if that six-mile pilgrimage, added to our forty-four-mile drive of the day, were not enough, the clear sparkle of the stars and the nipping air of that night suggested a different Taj, and after dinner we rattled down the Strand Road to see by moonlight such a glitteringly white, splendidly snowy frost-palace as we had not dreamed of finding in India.

We essayed a rainy day of rest, taking our ease at our inn, myself in a superior, sunless, fireless, cheerless room, which was but a long, whitewashed vault with a carefully curtained door opening on a brick portico. Drafts that were small gales blew through, making reading, writing, or anything but sneezing impossible. The peddlers marked us for their own that day, and every few moments there was a tap on the glass door, a brown hand was thrust in with some object for sale; and a plaintive "memsahib" or "ladyship" distracted one. "Please buy. Please buy. I am poor man," rang in my ears all day, and the transfer of packs from the bricks outside to the dirty matting within was accomplished imperceptibly. I was first aware of some pleading, whining creature with a shop spread on the floor around him—silver, jewelry, embroideries, shawls, beetle-winged gauzes, gay pulkharries, and souvenir spoons. Every day a huge damascened fork or trident was offered me as I passed in or out,—whether a dagger or an elephant goad I could not say. "Oh, yes, your ladyship," said the oily one in answer, "this is toast-fork. Very nice. Very comfortable thing for traveling. Please buy. I am poor man." But he and his tribe were ordered to begone, and as the toast-master shuffled out with his bundle he paused at the threshold to slip into his Mohammedan shoes, using the big fork for a shoe-horn. "Very useful. See, your ladyship," he said, adjusting the second shoe with the combination toasting-fork, "Silputs [slippers] help on, also."

When the sky cleared in the late afternoon we betook ourselves to the fort to await the rose-red sunset that the humid atmosphere promised. The old chuprassy welcomed us to the Jasmine Tower, and gave us wicker stools that we might comfortably watch the white bubbles beyond the green foreground flame to rose-red and then fade away, effaced in the gray mists that rolled up the river, presage of the deluge rain that followed. The keeper brought torches and led us down to the labyrinth of dark chambers and vaults that underlie the zenana and the Grape Garden. Six thousand people found refuge in the fort during the Mutiny, and then all this underground world was explored, with its oubliettes and long passages reaching to the moats and the water-gate. The rooms we saw were the prisons for zenana offenders, and by dumb show and much mixed language we were informed that it was Akbar's wives who suffered most often here by torture and the rope, the sack, and the drop down the echoing well. No screams could be heard in the sunny Grape Garden, nor in the beautiful audience-hall; and, after Akbar's career of domestic tyranny, it was fitting that his son, Jahangir, should be ruled by his Persian wife, Nur Jahan, and that Shah Jahan, the grandson, should worship in life, and after her death, Mumtaz-i-Mahal.