Chapter 59 - Page 2

only forty-one when I saw him, a
strangely youthful link to connect the present with so ancient an episode
as the Great Mutiny.

By and by we saw Cawnpore, and the open lot which was the scene of
Moore's memorable defense, and the spot on the shore of the Ganges where
the massacre of the betrayed garrison occurred, and the small Indian
temple whence the bugle-signal notified the assassins to fall on. This
latter was a lonely spot, and silent. The sluggish river drifted by,
almost currentless. It was dead low water, narrow channels with vast
sandbars between, all the way across the wide bed; and the only living
thing in sight was that grotesque and solemn bald-headed bird, the
Adjutant, standing on his six-foot stilts, solitary on a distant bar,
with his head sunk between his shoulders, thinking; thinking of his
prize, I suppose--the dead Hindoo that lay awash at his feet, and whether
to eat him alone or invite friends. He and his prey were a proper accent
to that mournful place. They were in keeping with it, they emphasized
its loneliness and its solemnity.

And we saw the scene of the slaughter of the helpless women and children,
and also the costly memorial that is built over the well which contains
their remains. The Black Hole of Calcutta is gone, but a more reverent
age is come, and whatever remembrancer still exists of the moving and
heroic sufferings and achievements of the garrisons of Lucknow and
Cawnpore will be guarded and preserved.

In Agra and its neighborhood, and afterwards at Delhi, we saw forts,
mosques, and tombs, which were built in the great days of the Mohammedan
emperors, and which are marvels of cost, magnitude, and richness of
materials and ornamentation, creations of surpassing grandeur, wonders
which do indeed make the like things in the rest of the world seem tame
and inconsequential by comparison. I am not purposing to describe them.
By good fortune I had not read too much about them, and therefore was
able to get a natural and rational focus upon them, with the result that
they thrilled, blessed, and exalted me. But if I had previously
overheated my imagination by drinking too much pestilential literary hot
Scotch, I should have suffered disappointment and sorrow.

I mean to speak of only one of these many world-renowned buildings, the
Taj Mahal, the most celebrated construction in the earth. I had read a
great deal too much about it. I saw it in the daytime, I saw it in the
moonlight, I saw it near at hand, I saw it from a distance; and I knew
all the time, that of its kind it was the wonder of the world, with no
competitor now and no possible future competitor; and yet, it was not my
Taj. My Taj had been built by excitable literary people; it was solidly