There are many show places and "points of interest" in India that have a hundred times more attention in the guide books, but there is a simple tomb in Lucknow--it cost no more than many a plain farmer's tombstone in our country burying-places--which impressed me more than anything else I saw excepting only the Himalayas, the Taj Mahal and the view of Benares from the river.
It is the tomb of the heroic Sir Henry Lawrence, who died so glorious a death in the great mutiny of 1857. No commander in all India has planned more wisely for the defence of the men and women under his care; and yet the siege had only begun when he was mortally wounded. He called his successor and his associates to him, and at last, having omitted no detail of counsel or information that might enable them to carry out his far-seeing plans, he roused himself to dictate his own immortal epitaph:
| Here Lies HENRY LAWRENCE Who Tried to Do His Duty May the Lord Have Mercy on his Soul. |
And so to-day these lines, "in their simplicity sublime," mark his last resting place; and one feels somehow that not even the great Akbar in Secundra or Napoleon in Paris has a worthier monument.
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There are many places in India to which I should like to give a paragraph. I should like to write much of Delhi and its palaces in which the Great Moguls once lived in a splendor worthy of the monarchs in the Arabian Nights--no wonder the stately Diwan-i-Khas, or Hall of Public Audience, bears the famous inscription in Persian:
"If there be Paradise on earth.
It is this, oh, it is this, oh, it is this!"
In the ruins of seven dead and deserted Delhis round about the present city and the monuments and memorials which commemorate "the old far-off unhappy things" of conquered dynasties and romantic epochs, there is also material for many a volume.
Then there is Cawnpore with its tragic and sickening memories of the English women and children (with the handful of men) who were butchered in cold blood by the treacherous Nana Dhundu Pant; and I was greatly interested in meeting in Muttra one of the few living men, a Christianized Brahmin, who as a small boy witnessed that terrible massacre which for cruelty and heartlessness is almost without a parallel in modern history.
In Agra is the Pearl Mosque, which is itself an architectural triumph splendid enough to make the city famous if the Taj had not already made it so; the Great Temple in Madura is one of the most impressive of the strictly Hindu structures in India; in Madras I found a curious reminder of early missionary activity in the shape of a cathedral which is supposed to shelter the remains of the Apostle Thomas; and the ruins of the once proud and imperial but now utterly deserted cities of Amber and Fatehpuhr-Sikri have a strange and melancholy interest. But all these have been often enough described, and there are things of greater pith and moment in present-day India to which we can better give attention.