Round the Wonderful World

by G. E. Mitton

A CARPET SHOP, DELHI.

We must get out and look at the gate where this actually happened not sixty years ago.

There are two wide arches in the shattered wall, and the coping above is half gone; it remains unrestored just as it was that day. On a slab is an inscription telling of this noble deed when men died for their country without hesitation.

Close by is the cemetery where General Nicholson is buried. You can see his statue in the city raised high on a pedestal. He stands with bared head and drawn sword. But Nicholson's is not the only name immortalised by the Mutiny—there are the two brothers, John and Henry Lawrence, Outram and Havelock, Hodson, Sir Colin Campbell, and many another name which is a household word in England. These men, in those days of fierce fighting and desperate stress, made history and wrote themselves in its pages by deeds that still cause every British boy's heart to ring within him. We have passed through the Kashmir Gate, and here, on one side of the street, is a battered bit of arcade, another Mutiny memorial. In the early days, just at the first outbreak, when no one realised what was going to happen, the mutineers marched on Delhi. This bit of wall was part of the powder magazine, then in charge of nine men. They defended it against a swarming army of Sepoys, as the native soldiers were called, and when they found that they could not hold it in spite of their desperate defence, they calmly blew up the powder magazine, and themselves with it, to prevent its falling into the hands of the mutineers and being used against their kinsmen. The most incredible part of the whole story is that three of those who blew up the magazine actually escaped with their lives!

We are now approaching the fort and palace, the kernel of the city, which it is best to see after the ridge.

It is a fine building that faces us, with an ornamental arcade running along the upper part. We pass in on foot under the gateway and see another, a Hall of Public Audience, with red sandstone pillars. Inside is a great throne of white marble, inlaid with mosaic work, where the old kings of Delhi used to sit and listen to their ministers. The last of this line was still living in the palace when the Mutiny broke out. He was a poor specimen, given up to indulgence and sloth; but the British had left him the state of royalty and all his wealth until the rising made it impossible any more. His sons and grandson, who, when the Mutiny broke out, themselves actually murdered and tortured helpless English women and children, and watched their agonies as "sport," were rightly shot out of hand, and the old king became a prisoner.

Coming out of this hall our eyes are caught by a gleam of something lustrously white against a sky which is now burning blue. This is another Hall of Audience, the Diwan-i-Khas, more beautiful than the first. It is of white marble, which, in this clear atmosphere, remains white, and it is richly ornamented with gilt. It is in the form of a square cloister or arcade, with a little dome at each corner, and if we stand inside and look out between the white pillars to see the lawns and the trees in the old palace gardens, we shall find it difficult to realise that this place of beauty and peace was ever a scene of fierce revolt. The rest of the palace is now used partly as a barracks.

When the British, having beaten their way through the narrow streets, and swept them clear of the foe, arrived here on that fateful day, the 14th September 1857, they found the palace deserted, except for a stray sentry, holding his position with sublime courage. The rest had fled,—thousands flying from hundreds,—and well they might, for the British troops were wrought up by the cruelties of the Sepoys to a sublime and just fury that made them seem like avenging angels. It is said in one place that the sternness of the expression of the Sikhs' faces made the wretched Sepoys fly without a shot being fired. The palace area is full of beautiful buildings, and we shall see many more specimens of this kind of Oriental architecture when we visit the mosques in the town this afternoon.