The sepoys, reinforced by the Ghoojurs, were now rushing into the city from every direction, and the reign of pandemonium began. Plunder, outrage, massacre and death were on every hand.
On that lurid 11th of May, 1857, while the sepoys were swarming into the doomed city, another party ran to the river gate of the emperor's palace, where they opened communication with the adherents of the potentate. After a brief parley he gave orders to admit the troopers.
Hurrying into the audience chamber, they declared that the whole of Hindostan had risen in rebellion and cast off the English yoke; that Calcutta and other leading cities were already in the possession of the native troops, and that it only remained for his Imperial Majesty to unfurl the sacred banner of the Prophet, when the millions of India would rally beneath it and the Mogul Empire, in all its ancient glory, should be re-established to last as long as the sun and stars.
The Emperor of Delhi at that time was four score years of age, wan and thin to emaciation, with a snow white beard, scant hair, lack luster eyes and a frame enfeebled by a lifetime of indolence and indulgence. It would have been thought that within such an aged bosom the fires of ambition had long since died out, and that all he could have desired was peace, rest, and a quiet death.
But the blood tingled in his languid frame, his feeble heart quickened its throbbings, and the flame was kindled anew in the dim eye, as he saw the picture thus held aloft before him.
The Mogul Empire restored!
Back through the dim vista of the centuries to the Moslem invasion, nearly a thousand years before, to that year, 1205, when Cootub, the Afghan conqueror, made Delhi the capital, to 1525, when Baber slew the last Afghan monarch and established the line of Mogul princes, to the consolidation of the empire and its culmination under Aurungzebe; then down the slow but steady dry rot, until the English came a century before and established themselves masters of the mighty empire.
Thoughts of those stupendous epochs and the dream of restoring the splendor, the barbaric pomp, the magnificence and glory of the Mogul Empire, must have stirred the sluggish blood of the wan old puppet until, rapt by the dazzling vision, he consented.
A throne of silver, that had been laid away since the year 1843, was brought into the "hall of special audience," and Mohammed Suraj-oodeen Shah Gezee took his seat upon it as the Great Mogul of India.
Two troops of artillery from Meerut entered the city by the Calcutta Gate and fired a royal salute of twenty one guns in front of the palace. Instantly the multitude became frantic in their exultation, for they felt that now they had a head, a rallying point for the faithful of India, and the days of English rule were numbered.