Meanwhile the Sultaun had been a severe sufferer; the sprain of his foot was acutely painful, and subsided only after a tedious confinement, during which his temper had been more than usually capricious. The failure of his noble embassy to Turkey, the immense sum it had cost him, without any equivalent, except a letter of compliment from the Sultaun of Constantinople, the true value of which he could justly appreciate—the continued preparations of the English, the Mahrattas, and the Nizam, and their united power—pressed on him with force and occupied his thoughts by day and his dreams by night.
He had summoned the heaviest of his artillery from Seringapatam, and in time he had completed a breach, some hundred yards in extent, which invited attack; at length it was made. Opposition there was none, and the army, thirsting for revenge and plunder, poured upon the now defenceless territory of Travancore. Impelled by a smarting sense of the degradation they had suffered in the attack on the wall, and in the subsequent delay which had occurred before the storming of the breach, the army now gave itself up to frightful excesses. The inhabitants were hunted like wild beasts, shot and speared by the merciless soldiery—their women and children destroyed, or sent into a captivity, to which death would have been preferable. Thousands were forcibly made to profess the faith, and amidst the jeers of the rabble were publicly fed with beef and forced to destroy cows, which they had hitherto venerated.
But the necessities of his position began at length to press hard upon the mind of the Sultaun; he was far from his capital; in his present condition he was unable to strike a blow against his enemies; and, though he had endeavoured to mislead the English by plausible letters, and protestations of undiminished friendship, yet he could not disguise from himself that there was a stern array of preparation against him, which required to be met by decisive and vigorous operations.
‘They shall see—the kafir English!’—he exclaimed in his Durbar, after the receipt of a letter from his capital, which warned him of danger; ‘they shall see whether the Lion of the Faith is to be braved or not. Mashalla! we have hitherto been victorious, and the stars show our position yet to be firm; our dreams continue good, our army is faithful and brave, and those who remember the triumphs of Perambaukum and of Bednore will yet strike a blow for the Sultaun.’
These addresses were frequent, and the army was in daily expectation of being ordered to return, but as yet it did not move; the most sagacious of his officers, however, urged it at last with such force upon the Sultaun’s notice, that he could no longer delay. ‘We must utterly destroy the wall,’ he replied to them; ‘then we will return.’
And this was done. It was a magnificent sight to see that whole army, headed by the Sultaun himself, advance to the various positions upon the wall, which had been previously assigned, for the purpose of razing it to the ground. As the morning broke, the various divisions, without arms, moved to their posts, where pickaxes and shovels had been already prepared for them. All the camp-followers, the merchants, grain-sellers, money-changers, men of all grades, of all castes, were required to join in the work, and in the enthusiasm of the moment rushed to it eagerly. The Sultaun himself, dressed in gorgeous apparel, and surrounded by his courtiers, his chiefs and slaves, quitted his tent amidst a discharge of cannon which rent the air, the sound of kettle-drums and cymbals, and the shouts of assembled thousands, ‘Alla Yar! Alla Yar! Deen! Deen!’
Tippoo rode on Hyder, his favourite elephant: the umbaree he sat on was of silver gilt, the cushions of crimson velvet, and the curtains of the finest cloth with gold fringes. The housings of the noble beast, of crimson velvet trimmed with green, swept the ground. Around him were all his officers, on a crowd of elephants and horses, decked with their richest trappings, and wearing cloth-of-gold or muslin dresses, with turbans of the gayest colours, red and pink, white, lilac, or green, sometimes twisted into each other.
The Sultaun dismounted from his elephant, for which a road had been made across the ditch, and seizing a pickaxe ascended the wall. For a while he stood alone, high upon a pinnacle of a tower, in the sight of his whole army, whose shouts rose to the skies, with pride in his heart and exultation flashing from his eye: his favourite astrologer was beneath him, busied with calculations.
‘Is it the time, Sheikh?’ he asked: ‘surely it is near?’
‘My art tells me it will be in a few minutes,’ was the reply.