The sun was so dazzling that everything outside seemed to shiver and shake, but under the cool roof the boys could see quite well. The roof was partly tiled and partly thatched, and the row of brick columns supporting it at the outer edge was covered with white-washed plaster—at least it was once white, but just where Ghafur, one of the boys, leaned his back against it (when he was not bobbing his back up and down as he read) it was nearly black. How difficult it is for anything to keep white all over! It is easy to keep some patches clean, especially when they are in places we don't use. Ghafur began to eat sugar-cane when the Maulwe was not looking.
If you looked between Go Kal Chung (a boy with a dark crimson turban) and Abdul with the green coat, right across beyond the road, through a dip in the wall on the other side to the far distance—although in the dust and the sunlight all distant things seemed nearly the same colour as the sky—you could just make out on the other side of the River Jumna the great white dome of the Taj Mahal.
I liked it best by moonlight.
In India, moonlight seems so much brighter than in England. Walking at night about the gardens I could still see the colours of the flowers; only the white roses seemed to whisper wakeful and restless, and the red ones to be silent.
The long path of water from the main entrance gateway to the pavement below the platform of the Taj is divided half-way by a circular tank and by this there is a marble seat. The soaring spirit of the vertical lines of the minarets was echoed everywhere; in the little fountains at short intervals all the way, and in the cypress trees along the garden beds parallel to the water-course. Far in the distance against the marble wall the glimmering light of a lantern moved waveringly; I could dimly distinguish the figures of some who had just been within to the tomb chamber. Then a spark, a little spurt of brighter light, gleamed out from far up the building.
The moonlight was slowly creeping round like a tide, and ever as it advanced some other of the innumerable gems set in the delicate pallor of that vast facade for some brief moment, gleamed and died again.
The next day when I passed the little school I found it closed and the reason was that Moharam had begun.
The Moharam Festival extends over many days and at Agra I saw it celebrated elaborately. Its origin was in a fight over the question of succession some time after the death of Mohammed. Two Imams, named Hassan and Hussein, direct descendants of the prophet, died in battle. The place where they were killed was called Kerbela, which means the place of sorrow. Now everything connected with that fighting is remembered and, as far as possible, reproduced or re-enacted at the time of Moharam.
For long beforehand the preparations had been going on. Old swords and maces had been brought out and brightened. At the street corners I had seen men furbishing old weapons, long gauntlet-hilted swords, as well as others making new wooden ones for fencing, covered with red or purple cloth.
The Imams, Hassan and Hussein, died on the night of the tenth day of the month of Moharam, and it is on that day that the innumerable tasias are carried in procession to the Kerbela where the Janazas, the two little biers contained within the gorgeous pagoda-like structure of the tasia, are buried in the earth.