I am not writing a book of travels, so shall touch but lightly on the scenes and occurrences which presented themselves on our subsequent route to Dinapore, where my friends and I parted—they remaining there, I, after a time, continuing my onward course to the capital of the Moguls.
Hitherto, our route had lain through Bengal, a country of mud huts and inundations; but we were now approaching a higher level, and one inhabited by a finer race, living in a superior climate, and where the Mahomedan spirit, which approaches nearer to our own, has imparted its more enduring traces in the shape of substantial towns, and more lasting, though still decaying monuments and edifices. Captain Belfield had excited our curiosity by his account of the ruins of Rajmahal, the some time transient capital of Bengal, during the reign of the Emperor Aurungzebe, and we consequently indulged in pleasing anticipations of the rambling and sketching we were to enjoy there.
It was evening when we approached that place; the sun was setting gloriously on the Ganges as we moored our boats in a little bay near the ruins, on one horn of which stood an old grey mosque, partially hidden by tangled shrubs and jungle, and the tapering and feathery bamboo—one, perhaps, of the greatest and most striking ornaments of Indian scenery.
“William,” said Miss Belfield, “you must positively remain here to-morrow, for I can never consent to leave all these fine old ruins unsketched behind me.”
Her brother willingly consented to her wish, and a delightful day of it we had, rambling, pencil in hand, amongst decaying mosques and dilapidated palaces, where the voice of the imaun, or the sounds of revelry, had long given place to the hootings of that mocker of human vanity, the owl.
There are not, in the whole round of the feelings and sensations, any to me so exquisitely, yet sadly pleasing, as those that arise in the mind when we wander amidst the deserted courts of kings, and the monuments of departed power and glory: how strongly do they link us with the past, and how powerfully does the imagination, with such a footing, “body forth” the things that were, but are not!
Captain Belfield, who, like his sister, as I afterwards discovered, was somewhat of a poet, though in most things a matter-of-fact man, amused himself, while we were sketching, in composing the following lines:—
Lines on the Ruins of Rajmahal and the Palace of the Sungy Dulaun, some time the Capital of Bengal.
Ye mould’ring corridors and halls,
Which o’er the steep your shadows cast;