I was climbing up a bamboo scaffolding to examine this spirited and delightful panel, in which the poet son of Calliope, plays to a group of listening animals, when I met a little fair Italian to whom, through Lord Curzon's efforts, the restoration of the damaged panels and the addition of new ones to fill blank and broken places had been happily entrusted.
For many months the Florentine craftsman had lived here cutting and polishing, and although he sometimes longed for the Arno as he looked out upon the Jumna River, he was of such a gay and merry disposition and took so much delight in his own incomparable skill, that it was a joy to meet him. Of the twenty-four original panels he felt very sure which were of native and which of Italian workmanship, for there were at Delhi, he told me, four unknown Italians doing this work when the decoration was first undertaken. His art is not of a creative kind and he has little invention, but carries to an extreme of skill the imitation in polished inlay of bird or beast or flower. At its worst his work was seen in a piece he showed me as a tour de force of manipulation, imitating a popular painting of a merry monk, but in his panels for the Diwan-i-am he kept quite happily to the spirit of the earlier designs.
I was curious to learn from what far places the stones were gathered which he cut and rubbed, and I noted as an instance those composing one small panel of a bird which he had just completed. These included Green Esmeraldite from Australia; Corniola from the Jumna; Abri and Jal from Jeypore; Black from Liége; Chalcedony from Volterra; Colombino from Val Mugnone; Lapis Lazuli from Colerado; Malachite from St Petersburg; other Colombino from Fiesole; other Lapis Lazuli from Persia; other Malachite from Siberia, and a grey stone from Cairo.
In Florence near the Ponte Vecchio the Italian craftsman's sister keeps a shop going during his absence for the sale of inlay work, and at the same time exercises her own more meticulous talent in making microscopically fine mosaics and miniatures from scales of butterflies. Such a man as her brother is without either the sorrows or the dreams of a great artist, but he seemed as happy in his craft as the Gentle Pieman of the Bab Ballads, and I have little doubt that something he exclaimed—which was too much for my limited knowledge of Italian—might well have been translated by the pieman's words:—
"I'm so happy—no profession could be dearer—
If I'm not humming 'Tra! la! la!' I'm singing 'Tirer, lirer!'"
But what shall I say of the Diwan-i-Khas which forestalls the highest reach of compliment by calling itself Heaven in a distich? Its marble walls and jewel-petalled flowers, its carved graceful arches, and all its spacious grandeur, appeared woefully deserted, and from this hall of heaven all the dear delicate little angels have long since fled, so that I could not find the tiniest feather. In the Rang Mahal near by I had a more tender impression. This is where the chief Sultana lived, and the painted decoration on the marble walls is of exquisite colour. Pale blues mingle with paler tints of green, and soft red-edged flowers seemed still to brim their cups with memories. Here leaned a woman's shoulder: here pressed a cheek wet with very human tears, and on that marble stamped a little foot, jealous and angry, while light laughter rang, or baskets of ripe figs from the bazaar were searched in breathless hush for hidden messages of love.
To see old Delhi at closer quarters than such a distant view as that from the minaret of the Jama Masjid, I drove east from the city by many great dome-topped tombs, mostly in a half-ruined condition as in an Indian Campagna, and visited on the way the Mausoleum of Humayun, which divides architectural with historic interest. The design of the building is similar to that from which the Taj was later evolved. In its general proportions the total height appears too little for the great and high-terraced platform on which the triple octagon of the great building stands. Underneath this platform I walked through a low dark passage to the vault where the Emperor Humayun was actually buried. With the help of matches I could distinguish a plaster plinth one and a half feet high, and upon this a plaster tomb. I noticed one great hole in the plaster base and another in the ground beside it, and learned that these were made, not by any latterday members of that most repulsive of all Hindoo sects the Aghoris, but by porcupines which I was assured might be seen in numbers on any moonlight night, and one of whose quills I picked up from the floor.
Humayun's tomb is now identified in the pages of our history with a deed of no doubtful daring which was too swiftly followed by one no less doubtfully unwarrantable. It was here that Hodson of Hodson's Horse, with a few troopers and superb audacity, summoned an armed crowd to lay down their weapons, while the King of Delhi surrendered himself.
I should not leave the neighbourhood of Humayun's tomb without referring to the delightful use of blue and green-glazed tiles in the roofs of some adjacent buildings.