Through India and Burmah with pen and brush

by A. Hugh Fisher

The storming and recapture of Delhi is one of the chief examples of stubborn determination in the teeth of heavy odds, and one of the principal chapters in the history of British arms.

The various sites connected with those events are familiar from frequent description to many who have never been east of Lowestoft Ness, and from innumerable photographs the Kashmir Gate must be nearly as well known in London as Buckingham Palace.

Near it, and just south of the cemetery where he is buried, there is a capital bronze statue of General Nicholson (by Mr Brock), in a little park named after him.

The building that became the Residency after the Mutiny and was then occupied by Sir David Ochterlony, has been more recently converted to the uses of a Government High School for boys. It was originally built by Shah Jehan as a library for his son Dara Shikoh in 1637, and its spacious rooms suit rather well the purpose of a school. The headmaster, who happens to be a Dutchman, took me through the various class-rooms and introduced me to a number of, doubtless, learned pundits—the special masters for Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, Urdu, English and "Science" subjects. In a class called the 5th High, at the time of my visit, native youth was being lectured upon Nelson's blind eye.

Delhi was the capital of the Moghul Empire before Akhbar removed it to Agra, and it became again the seat of Government under Shah Jehan; so that some of the chief examples of Saracenic work in India are to be found in its buildings. Under Shah Jehan was built Delhi's "Great Mosque" and the Palace within the Fort. The former differs from others of its style in its external grandeur, one of the more usual characteristics of mosque building being the elaboration of the interior rather than the exterior.

Great flights of steps lead up to the three splendid gateways of the large open quadrangle, surrounded on three sides by pillared cloisters. The three divisions of the mosque proper are roofed by magnificent marble domes with black vertical lines inlaid upon them, and on each side of the centre archway long graceful stems rise up and up to end above in tops shaped like a lotus, beautiful from below, but no less so at close quarters, seen from half-way up one of the two tall minarets which flank the building at the north and south. I was well repaid for climbing to the top of one of these by the splendid views from it. To the west I could see the Fort and the river beyond, with a long bridge, and to the north-east the city and the numerous small domes of the so-called Black Mosque, with the mighty Tower of Victory, the red Kutab Minar, in the far distance rising from the ruins of old Delhi.

Down below I was shown the treasures of the mosque, which included a hair of the prophet (a red hair) and some words in his handwriting. On the other side of the marble basin in the centre of the quadrangle there is a sandstone pulpit, paler in colour than the red of the steps and walls, and beyond this, at the back of the interior of the mosque, the wall of marble, through slight inequalities of surface, looks like mother-of-pearl.

Architecturally these glories of Delhi are shared by the Fort and the series of palace buildings within its precincts. The great walls of red sandstone, the magnificent entrance of the Lahore Gate and the long vaulted arcade through which one approaches the interior of the great enclosure are, however, to my thinking, nobler and more impressive than the marble halls of the palace within.

This Lahore Gate is in the middle of the west side of the Fort. On the east flows the Jumna, and at the southern end is another gateway called the Delhi Gate, with a colossal dark grey stone elephant—delight of English children at Delhi—on either side of the entrance.

Among the palace buildings the noblest is the Diwan-i-am or Hall of Public Audience, containing at the back a raised recess where was formerly the famous Peacock Throne of solid gold inlaid with rubies, emeralds and diamonds, backed by two peacocks with jewelled and expanded tails. The glory is long ago departed, but the walls of the alcove on the upper level are still partly covered with inlaid panels of small subjects worked in stones of various colours. Among these, high above the doorway in the upper wall at the back, is one called the Orpheus Panel. Guide-books state that it represents Austin of Bordeaux, one of the foreign architects who helped to adorn the Moghul Court—but the Orpheus is represented as quite a youth, whereas Austin of Bordeaux would have been old at the time.