The Englishman regained Gerowlia and demanded to be taken away, but Gerowlia's driver went forward instead and showed him a new Mahal just built by the present Maharana. Carriage drives, however, do not consort well with Chitor and the "shadow of her ancient beauty." The return journey, past temple after temple and palace upon palace, began in the failing light, and Gerowlia was still blundering up and down narrow by–paths—for she possessed all an old woman's delusion as to the slimness of her waist when the twilight fell, and the smoke from the town below began to creep up the brown flanks of Chitor, and the jackals howled. Then the sense of desolation, which had been strong enough in all conscience in the sunshine, began to grow and grow.
Near the Ram Pol there was some semblance of a town with living people in it, and a priest sat in the middle of the road and howled aloud upon his gods, until a little boy came and laughed in his face and he went away grumbling. This touch was deeply refreshing; in the contemplation of it, the Englishman clean forgot that he had overlooked the gathering in of materials for an elaborate statistical, historical, geographical account of Chitor. All that remained to him was a shuddering reminiscence of the Gau–Mukh and two lines of the "Holy Grail,"
Post Scriptum.—There was something very uncanny about the Genius of the Place. He dragged an ease–loving egotist out of the French bedstead with the gilt knobs at head and foot, into a more than usually big folly—nothing less than a seeing of Chitor by moonlight. There was no possibility of getting Gerowlia out of her bed, and a mistrust of the Maharana's soldiery who in the day–time guarded the gates, prompted the Englishman to avoid the public way, and scramble straight up the hillside, along an attempt at a path which he had noted from Gerowlia's back. There was no one to interfere, and nothing but an infinity of pestilent nullahs and loose stones to check. Owls came out and hooted at him, and animals ran about in the dark and made uncouth noises. It was an idiotic journey, and it ended—Oh, horror! in that unspeakable Gau–Mukh—this time entered from the opposite or brushwooded side, as far as could be made out in the dusk and from the chuckle of the water which, by night, was peculiarly malevolent.
Escaping from this place, crab–fashion, the Englishman crawled into Chitor and sat upon a flat tomb till the moon, a very inferior and second–hand one, rose, and turned the city of the dead into a city of scurrying ghouls—in sobriety, jackals. The ruins took strange shapes and shifted in the half light and cast objectionable shadows.
It was easy enough to fill the rock with the people of old times, and a very beautiful account of Chitor restored, made out by the help of Tod, and bristling with the names of the illustrious dead, would undoubtedly have been written, had not a woman, a living breathing woman, stolen out of a temple—what was she doing in that galley?—and screamed in piercing and public–spirited fashion. The Englishman got off the tomb and departed rather more noisily than a jackal; feeling for the moment that he was not much better. Somebody opened a door with a crash, and a man cried out: "Who is there?" But the cause of the disturbance was, for his sins, being most horribly scratched by some thorny scrub over the edge of the hill—there are no bastions worth speaking of near the Gau–Mukh—and the rest was partly rolling, partly scrambling, and mainly bad language.
When you are too lucky sacrifice something, a beloved pipe for choice, to Ganesh. The Englishman has seen Chitor by moonlight—not the best moonlight truly, but the watery glare of a nearly spent moon—and his sacrifice to Luck is this. He will never try to describe what he has seen—but will keep it as a love–letter, a thing for one pair of eyes only—a memory that few men to–day can be sharers in. And does he, through this fiction, evade insulting, by pen and ink, a scene as lovely, wild, and unmatchable as any that mortal eyes have been privileged to rest upon?
An intelligent and discriminating public are perfectly at liberty to form their own opinions.
XII
Contains the History of the Bhumia of Jhaswara, and the Record of a Visit to the House of Strange Stories. Demonstrates the Felicity of Loaferdom, Which is the Veritable Companionship of the Indian Empire, and Proposes a Scheme for the Better Officering of Two Departments
Come away from the monstrous gloom of Chitor and escape northwards. The place is unclean and terrifying. Let us catch To–day by both hands and return to the Station–master who is also booking–parcels and telegraph–clerk, and who never seems to go to bed—and to the comfortably wadded bunks of the Rajputana–Malwa line.
While the train is running, be pleased to listen to the perfectly true story of the bhumia of Jhaswara, which is a story the sequel whereof has yet to be written. Once upon a time, a Rajput landholder; a bhumia, and a Mahometan jaghirdar, were next–door neighbours in Ajmir territory. They hated each other thoroughly for many reasons, all connected with land; and the jaghirdar was the bigger man of the two. In those days, it was the law that the victims of robbery or dacoity should be reimbursed by the owner of the lands on which the affair had taken place. The ordinance is now swept away as impracticable. There was a highway robbery on the bhumia's holding; and he vowed that it had been "put up" by the Mahometan who, he said, was an Ahab. The reive–gelt payable nearly ruined the Rajput, and he, labouring under a galling grievance or a groundless suspicion, fired the jaghirdar's crops, was detected and brought up before the English Judge who gave him four years' imprisonment. To the sentence was appended a recommendation that, on release, the Rajput should be put on heavy securities for good behaviour. "Otherwise," wrote the Judge, who seems to have known the people he was dealing with, "he will certainly kill the jaghirdar." Four years passed, and the jaghirdar obtained wealth and consideration, and was made, let us say, a Khan Bahadur, and an Honorary Magistrate; but the bhumia remained in gaol and thought over the highway robbery. When the day of release came, a new Judge hunted up his predecessor's finding and recommendation, and would have put the bhumia on security. "Sahib," said the bhumia, "I have no people. I have been in gaol. What am I now? And who will find security for me? If you will send me back to gaol again I can do nothing, and I have no friends." So they released him, and he went away into an outlying village and borrowed a sword from one house, and had it sharpened in another, for love. Two days later fell the birthday of the Khan Bahadur and the Honorary Magistrate, and his friends and servants and dependants made a little levee and did him honour after the native custom. The bhumia also attended the levee, but no one knew him, and he was stopped at the door of the courtyard by the servant. "Say that the bhumia of Jhaswara has come to pay his salaams," said he. They let him in, and in the heart of Ajmir City, in broad daylight, and before all the jaghirdar's household, he smote off his enemy's head so that it rolled upon the ground. Then he fled, and though they raised the countryside against him he was never caught, and went into Bikanir.