“The Governor-general has sold the beautiful piece of architecture, called the Mootee Musjid, at Agra, for 125,000 rupees (about £12,500), and it is now being pulled down! The taj has also been offered for sale! but the price required has not been obtained. Two lacs, however, have been offered for it. Should the taj be pulled down, it is rumoured that disturbances may take place amongst the natives.”
If this be true, is it not shameful? The present king might as well sell the chapel of Henry the Seventh in Westminster Abbey for the paltry sum of £12,500: for any sum the impropriety of the act would be the same. By what authority does the Governor-general offer the taj for sale? Has he any right to molest the dead? To sell the tomb raised over an empress, which from its extraordinary beauty is the wonder of the world? It is impossible the Court of Directors can sanction the sale of the tomb for the sake of its marble and gems. They say that a Hindoo wishes to buy the taj to carry away the marble, and erect a temple to his own idols at Bindrabund!
The crows are a pest; they will pounce upon meat carried on a plate, and bear it off: they infest the door of the Bawarchī Khānā (cook room), and annoy the servants, who retaliate on a poor kawwā, if they can catch one, by dressing it up in an officer’s uniform, and letting it go to frighten the others. The poor bird looks so absurd hopping about. Sometimes they drill a hole through the beak, and passing a wire through it, string thereon five cowries; this bears the poor crow’s head to the ground, and must torture it. Such cruelty I have forbidden. The crow is a bird of ill omen.
On a babūl-tree in the grounds are twelve or fifteen beautiful nests pendant from the extremity of slender twigs—the habitations of a little community of Byā birds. I took down three of the nests; they contained two, three, and four little white eggs; the parent birds made a sad lament when the nests were taken. If you take a nest with the young birds in it, the parent bird will follow and feed them. The natives consider it highly improper to shoot the Byā birds; they are sacred, and so tame. One of my servants has brought me a young bird, it flies to my hand when I call it. There is a pretty fable which says, “The old birds put a fire-fly into their nests every night to act as a lamp.” Perhaps they sometimes feed their young on fire-flies, which may be the origin of the story. It is pleasing to imagine the sacred birds swinging in their pretty nests pendant from the extreme end of a branch, the interior lighted by a fire-fly lamp. The Byā bird is the Indian yellow-hammer; the nests I speak of are almost within reach of my hand, and close to the house. For the shape of the nests, see the sketch entitled “[The Spring Bow].” They are of grass beautifully woven together, and suspended by a long thin tapering end, the entrance hanging downwards. In the nests containing the young, there is no division, the swelling on the side is the part in which the young ones nestle together. Some of the nests appear as if they were cut short off: these are purposely built so, and contain two apartments, which are, I suppose, the places where the parent birds sit and confabulate on the aspect of affairs in general. The birds are very fond of hanging their nests from slender twigs, over a pool of water, as in the sketch, the young birds thus being in greater safety.
The wood of the babūl (acacia Arabica) is extremely hard, and is used by the Brahmans to kindle their sacred fire, by rubbing two pieces of it together, when it is of a proper age, and sufficiently dried. It produces the Indian gum Arabic. The gold ear-rings made in imitation of the flower of the babūl, worn by Indian women, and by some men also, are beautiful.
My ayha is ill with cholera: there is no hope of her recovery. The disease came across the Jumna, about four miles higher up than our house, and is regularly marching across the country to the Ganges: as it proceeds no fresh cases occur in the villages it leaves behind.
The old peepul moans and rustles in the wind so much, that deceived by the sound, we have often gone into the verandah joyously exclaiming “There is the rain!” To our sorrow it was only the leaves of the tree agitated by the wind.
In such a climate and during the hot winds, you cannot imagine how delightful the noise of the wind (like rain) in the old peepul appeared to us, or the lullaby it formed. It is a holy tree, every leaf being the seat of a god. They do not listen to the music of its rustling with greater pleasure than I experience; indeed, my penchant for the tree is so great, I am half inclined to believe in its miraculous powers.
August 31st.—The ice has lasted four months and fifteen days, which we consider particularly fortunate. It was opened the 15th of April.