Heg. 1067 (1657).—Shah Jehan was seized with a paralysis, and his life despaired of; the management of public affairs consequently fell into the hands of Dara.
Heg. 1068 (1658).—Aurungzebe, secretly aspiring to the throne, induced his brother Morad to join him, and defeated the imperial army, under the command of Dara, who retired to Delhi. Having raised fresh forces, they were corrupted by the wily conqueror. The confederate princes appeared before the capital with the combined army. Aurungzebe sent a message to his father, who commissioned his daughter, Jehanara, to visit him: she was deceived by his duplicity, and incautiously betrayed to him the resources of her brother Dara. He intercepted his father’s letter to that prince; and shortly after Mahommed, Aurangzebe’s son, seized within the citadel at Agra, Shah Jehan, who offered him the crown of the Moguls as the price of his release. It was declined by Mahommed. Morad having discovered the duplicity of Aurungzebe, in attempting to defeat it was seized by his crafty brother, and sent prisoner to Agra. The ambitious conqueror advanced to Delhi, and mounted the imperial throne. Dara fled to Lahore.
The Prince and the Fakeer.
CHAPTER I.
On the crest of a lofty hill in the province of Delhi, towards the north, was a fortress of impregnable strength, which had been frequently converted by the Mogul emperors into a state prison. The hill was inaccessible on all sides, presenting, to a height of two hundred and thirty feet from the base, sheer walls of rocks, upon the scarped summit of which a light parapet surrounded one of the most extraordinary fortresses ever constructed by the art of man. Within the parapet it consisted of a shaft, sixty feet deep, sunk into the living stone. At the bottom of this shaft, chambers of considerable dimensions had been hollowed out, lighted by narrow loopholes, perforated through the mountain to the light, of which they admitted just sufficient to render “darkness visible,” and cast a sepulchral gloom through the apartments of this cavernous retreat.
The entrance of this stronghold was a circular aperture at the top of the rock, like the mouth of a well, four feet in diameter; through which the garrison, captives, provisions, and all things in short necessary to be deposited below, were lowered by means of a rope attached to a windlass.
In one of the chambers of this mountain fortress a prisoner was confined whose youth and accomplishments appeared to deserve a better fate. He was in the beautiful dawning of his manhood, when the blood bounds from the heart with a pulse of joy, and flows back again with an untroubled current. He had just passed his nineteenth year. The breeze of the mountain had fanned his cheek, and spread over it the glow of pure but delicate health. The down upon his upper lip had strengthened into a sleek dark curl. His limbs were rounded to their full proportions; and his whole form was one of a symmetry better adapted for the rich woofs from the looms of Cashmere than for the helmet or cuirass. The languid expression of his dark, restless eye, showed that he was unhappy. The only furniture in his prison was a rug upon which he slept, a hookah, a lamp, and a few utensils employed at his meals.
Notwithstanding the severity of his captivity, the prisoner kept up a sort of state in his solitary cell: he treated those attendants who had been appointed to wait upon him with a dignity which commanded respect, and at the same time with an amenity which won obedience. His dress, though of ordinary materials, except that portion of it which covered his brows, was disposed with a taste which at once bespoke refinement of mind and a consciousness of personal elevation. His turban, composed of a fine, thin white muslin, worked in gold, was folded round his head with a care that evidently showed an attention to what was becoming; its numerous convolutions being precisely defined, and managed with almost geometrical precision. A common Cashmere shawl, loosely twisted, encircled his waist, the ends hanging on one side with that peculiar air of elegance which Orientals, whether Mussulman or Hindoo, know so well how to exhibit.
The prisoner had just thrown himself upon his rug to take his rest for the night, when an unusual stir upon the ramparts above roused him. He rose to listen. A parley was evidently going on with some one beneath the fortress. He repaired to a small ante-chamber, in which was a loophole that looked into a deep glen, whence the mountain rose within the bosom of which the place of his painful captivity had been hollowed. The night was calm: not a breeze stirred the thick foliage of the valley. The heavens were starred and radiant, though the moon’s lamp was not yet hung out upon the battlements of heaven. The faint beams of the stars, though they scattered the radiance of their glories over the whole azure surface of the skies, did not penetrate the depths of the ravine formed by the mountain, down the sides of which the prisoner strained his eye from one of the narrow apertures that admitted light and air into his prison. The whole valley was immersed in that equivocal gloom, the more perceptible from contrast with the sparkling heaven, that seemed to smile in its beauty at the dull and torpid earth.
The captive, placing his ear against the artificial fissure in the rock, heard the following dialogue: