Winter India/Chapter 24
CHAPTER XXIV
GWALIOR
FTER any experience with the ordinary dak bangla and the up-country hotels, the Mussaffirkhana, the maharaja's rest-house at Gwalior, is a dream of luxury. Used only to dirty carpets and dhurries, or ancient reed mattings laid on cement or mud floors, we rubbed our eyes at sight of the shining white stairway, at the clean, soft-piled carpets of the beautiful white villa, and more at the great-windowed bedrooms that were actually furnished. There were real bureaus and real beds—complete beds with springs, mattresses, pillows, sheets, blankets, and spreads! We sat down in amaze, and the sense of wonder was exhausted when we found every lock, hinge, knob, and fastening of the doors and windows in working order and the whole place spotlessly clean. Such sights had not been seen since Colombo. Below-stairs the pretty drawing-room and dining-room were as well kept and modern. The Mussaffirkhana was the greatest surprise in India, the enlightened maharaja a special providence to hardship-worn tourists fortunate enough to be permitted to inhabit that abode of bliss, a literal resthouse and a temple of cleanliness and order. Naturally we dreamed of American hotels and other high products of our civilization, and happily waked to find the Mussaffirkhana not a dream but luxurious reality. After the chota hazri, as daintily perfect as the little breakfast of a Paris hotel, we drove about the well-kept town in a palace carriage, a perfectly appointed victoria. The streets were lined with white houses, whose tracery windows and ornamental balconies were worthy an art museum. The street crowds were most brilliant, and more yellow was worn in Gwalior than elsewhere, along with the endless variety of Mahratta turbans, which surpass in number and originality those of any other people. The very imposing coachman snapped his whip and the blooded horses sped away like the wind, straight down the middle of each street, the sais yelping shrill warnings, the crowds parting automatically and saluting the palace livery. We saw the beautiful unfinished temple to Sindhia's mother, for which the stone-cutters were chipping out as fine traceries and latticings as any in Delhi or Agra, and then returned for the serious British breakfast, at a table fragrant with roses and mignonette. It was radiant, mild, ideal spring weather, and after all our sufferings from cold we basked with delight in the open air, faring forth again to the foot of the rock-fortress which rises like Gibraltar from the plain. A splendid elephant in red-velvet trappings stood waving its trunk as we drove up, and at the word of command sank upon its hind legs in a deep courtesy, stretched out its great body, slowly bent its fore
THE HALL OF MIRRORS
Again our stately transport knelt, we climbed to the red-velvet jaunting-car on its back, and it paced across the flat, table-topped mesa to the half-ruined Jain temples, where conquering Moguls wreaked their fanatic zeal, chipping and mutilating the myriad tiny figures in the bas-reliefs with which walls and columns were covered, and further effacing them with coats of chunam and whitewash. The wealth of intricate ornament lavished on these temples would be incomprehensible were there not the perfect Jain temples at Mount Abu to show what the shrines of Gwalior rock once were in less degree. While we lingered at that angle of the rock's parapet to look down upon the city below us, the yellow-turbaned mahout made his elephant do tricks like any poodle. It picked up and threw stones, waved its spotted ears and trunk as commanded, and nosed up the tiniest coins from grass or gravel and gave them to the mahout. It lumbered after us over the grass as tamely as a kitten, its great soft feet shuffling with a strange barefoot tread as it followed us to a pyramidal temple ruin very similar to the Buddhist ruins in Java. The same indefatigable Major Keith who rescued and preserved the old carved and tiled palace worked over this temple, too, restoring the gateway and replacing as far as possible every carved fragment. We remounted, and the mahout guided the monster down the road and then close beside the parapet, goaded it until it was as close to the coping as possible, and then bade us look down and see the rock-sculptures that adorn the perpendicular face of a ravine of the rock. With three hundred feet of space below our feet, the breathing of the elephant seeming enough to burst the girths that bound the car to it, and its lurches as it shifted its weight from one foot to the other enough to propel us into the air, we cared nothing for bas-reliefs and images. A tank far below, and the winding white Lashkar road, seemed to sway in air and rise toward us, and we clutched the car-frame in agony and begged only to be taken down to the safe level of the plain again, to horses and wheeled vehicles. We could easily believe that much elephant-riding makes one mad, and that the motion and the heat of the elephant's body affect the spine and shorten the life of a mahout. After the jerking and jolting of its downhill progress we gladly left the gentle giantess in the red-velvet cloak salaaming and putting its trunk to its forehead in thanks, in ridiculous parody of the slim little mahout beside it.
We were allowed to peep into the court of the Jama Masjid without unshoeing, and went then to see the splendid and impressive tomb of Mohammed Ghaus, a Moslem saint of Akbar's time, who rests in an immense domed hall shut in by sandstone lattices of exquisite and intricate design. Next came the tomb of Tansen, a musician, sheltered by a tamarind-tree whose leaves, if chewed prayerfully, will secure one a sweet voice. The dancing-girls come to worship at this tomb, and tree after tree has been stripped of leaves and killed, so that seedling descendants are kept at hand to replace them.
"Memsahib," said the bearer, excitedly, "there will be fight this day with lion, unicorn, and elephant. Will memsahib see?" Learning that the unicorn was a rhinoceros, we were ready to see the fray which is the national pastime, as in Akbar's day. A British major from Rawal Pindi cantonment, showing India by winter to a visiting niece and nephew, and staying at the Mussaffirkhana, implored us so earnestly not to go that we deferred to his advice—and have regretted it ever since, wondering how much of local color and national character we missed in not seeing Sindhia's subjects at their favorite sport, to which bull-fighting must be child's play.
The bazaars were brilliant enough when crowded with white-clad Mahratta men in their fantastic turbans, and Mahratta women in full, bunchy skirts of every hue, swinging and tilting past, clashing and jangling their anklets; but when a part of the raja's body-guard, preceding the maharani on her way to worship, paraded down a street of white houses, the stage pageant was complete. Horsemen in gay uniform and gorgeous turbans, with fluttering pennons; horses in bright saddle-cloths, yellow bridles and trimmings; a state elephant in red velvet and gold trappings, with cloth-of-gold curtains to its gilded howdah; and a troop of women surrounding the gilded palanquin, made up a very spectacular church parade. It was all so splendidly theatrical, so really Oriental, as at Alwar, that we said: "This is the last touch, the perfect climax. Let us go quickly, before the curtain falls, the people put on their every-day clothes, and we are disillusioned. Let Gwalior remain in memory with all the bloom of the first overpowering impression." We would not wait two days on the chance of meeting Sindhia himself when he should return from a hunting-trip, and we took train for Agra—arriving at midnight, of course.
We had a quiet Sunday to revisit tombs in appropriate observance of the day, and to sit again on the Jasmine Tower and watch the sunset play over the Taj Mahal. There was an unmistakable Sabbath atmosphere to the view, although the dhobiemen were swinging, pounding, and spreading out acres of cloths to dry on the flats below the fort, and twittering parrakeets flashed in and out of the creviced wall, and fluttered over the dry moat where Akbar's elephants and unicorns fought for his entertainment. A sudden impulse seized us as the pageant began, and we hurried to the gharry, implored the sais to make all speed, and running through the garden of the Taj, settled ourselves once more in the upper story of the western minaret overhanging the river. The great white temple was richly yellow in the last beams of the sun, with blue shadows in every recess. Softly rolling white clouds across the Jumna took on rose-lights and were reflected in the river. The Taj flushed rose-pink, and before the golden burst of the afterglow had faded the February moon rose full, round, blood-red in the east. The vision was complete. Fifteen times had we entered the garden of the Taj, and each time the spell of the Taj was stronger.
The next day dragged through with odds and ends of sight-seeing until sunset. We dutifully did the jail, the most populous in India, where often a thousand prisoners are kept, and carpet-weaving is the chief of many industries. Great efforts have been made, by following the best old designs and using only vegetable dyes, to attain a high standard and keep the Agra carpets first in the foreign market. Thirteen rupees a square yard is the average price, and over five thousand yards are woven a year, the jail earning 90,000 rupees a year by its industries. Agra criminals long furnished the best jail carpets in India, but good conduct reduced the time of some and Jubilee benevolence released others of the best long-sentence weavers, and the Agra carpets declined for a time. That afternoon we stayed by the Jasmine Tower and watched the white bubbles on the horizon flush rose-red for a brief moment against a misty gray sky. Then white mists rolled up from the river, and rain-clouds gathered and hid the Taj Mahal forever from our view.