[6]. A description of the city and valley will be more appropriate elsewhere.
[8]. The escort consisted of two companies of foot, each of one hundred men, with half a troop of cavalry. The gentlemen attached to the mission were Captain Waugh (who was secretary and commandant of the escort), with Lieutenant Carey as his subaltern. Dr. Duncan was the medical officer.
[9]. [Modes in music.]
[10]. The buckler is the tray in which gifts are presented by the Rajputs.
[11]. If we dare compare the moral economy of an entire people to the physical economy of the individual, we should liken this period in the history of Mewar to intermittent pulsation of the heart—a pause in moral as in physical existence; a consciousness thereof, inertly awaiting the propelling power to restore healthful action to a state of languid repose; or what the Rajput would better comprehend, his own condition when the opiate stimulant begins to dissipate, and mind and body are alike abandoned to helpless imbecility. Who has lived out of the circle of mere vegetation, and not experienced this temporary deprivation of moral vitality? for no other simile would suit the painful pause in the sympathies of the inhabitants of this once fertile region, where experience could point out but one page in their annals, one period in their history, when the clangour of the war trumpet was suspended, or the sword shut up in its scabbard. The portals of Janus at Rome were closed but twice in a period of seven hundred years; and in exactly the same time from the conquest by Shihabu-d-din to the great pacification, but twice can we record peace in Mewar—the reign of Numa has its type in Shah Jahan, while the more appropriate reign of Augustus belongs to Britain. Are we to wonder then that a chilling void now occupied (if the solecism is admissible) the place of interminable action? when the mind was released from the anxiety of daily, hourly, devising schemes of preservation, to one of perfect security—that enervating calm, in which, to use their own homely phrase, Bher aur bakri ekhi thali se piye, ‘The wolf and the goat drank from the same vessel.’ [Another, and more usual form is—Āj kal, sher bakrī ek ghāt pāni pitē hain, ‘Nowadays the tiger and the goat drink from the same stream.’] But this unruffled torpidity had its limit: the Agrarian laws of Mewar were but mentioned, and the national pulse instantly rose.
[12]. Or rather, who makes the monogrammatic signet Sahi (‘correct’) to all deeds, grants, etc.
[13]. [Properly Sūratnavīs, ‘statement-writer.’]
[14]. The Salumbar chief had his deputy, who resided at court for this sole duty, for which he held a village. See p. [235].
[15]. Niyao, Daftar, Taksala, Silah, Gaddi, Gahna, Kapra-bandar, Ghora, Rasora, Nakkar-khana, Jaleb, Rawala.