Once more was the Johur commanded, while 8000 Rajputs ate the last “beera” together, and put on their saffron robes. The gates were thrown open, “and few survived to stain the yellow mantle by inglorious surrender.”
Thus in the blood-red cloud of battle sank for ever the Sun of Chitor; for from this, the third and last “saka,” the ruined city never rose. Her doom has been as the doom of Babylon, of which Isaiah declared: “It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation … but wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there…. And the wild beasts … shall cry in their desolate houses, and … in their pleasant palaces:… Her days shall not be prolonged.”
The top of the long ascent being reached, the last gate, the Hathi Pol, is passed, and the wayfarer finds himself in the midst of the great dead city, which lies in ruins for three miles along the bastioned brow of the mountain.
Just beyond the first group of stately ruins, we came on the building which was probably the palace built by Lakha Rana in 1373. Here we sat and rested until the elephant, bearing the ladies and the lunch, stalked sedately round the jutting angle of a decayed fort, and then we wended our way along a road lined with many a half-fallen temple, until we reached the ancient palace where, six hundred years ago, dwelt the ill-starred Padmani, whose loveliness brought such woe upon Chitor. Here, in a cool chamber overlooking the tank, upon the brink of which the palace stands, we lunched; afterwards threading our way among the fallen fragments of many a stately shrine and palace towards the high point on which the great Jain Tower of Fame rears its deeply-sculptured shaft into the sky.
For a thousand years the innumerable stone gods which encircle the tower in endless profusion have watched with sightless eyes over the city. Grey already with age were they when they saw, raised in pristine beauty, the shattered domes and broken columns which now lie prone in the brushwood far beneath their feet. What ghastly scenes those stony faces have surveyed, when, swept by the scathing steel, the city has run red with blood, and her defenders have fallen to the last man. One crowning horror, though, they have been always spared, for no maid or matron of Chitor ever deigned to bow her neck beneath the yoke of the Mogul, but rather dared to face a fiery death in the bowels of the great cavern beneath the city than yield her honour to the conqueror.
The Tower of Fame is being repaired by the present Rana, under the superintendence of our host and a party of native workmen. Masons and most skilful carvers in stone were busily engaged in the restoration of parts that had fallen into dangerous decay—an extremely flimsy-looking scaffolding, made apparently of light bamboos, tied together in wisps, and forming a fragile-looking ramp, wound spirally up the outside of the tower. My host seemed to consider it a perfectly safe means of ascent, and as the workmen did not appear to slip off in any appreciable numbers I felt constrained to go up. I should like to have done it on all fours! The climb was well worth undertaking, as it enabled one to inspect the astonishing and finely-carved figures which encrust the whole exterior of the column.
From the Tower of Fame we made our way to the other great landmark of Chitor—the Tower of Victory.
Passing and examining en route many elaborately-carved temples, whose domes rose amid the strangling masses of desert tree and shrub, we came to the base of the red tower, whose shaft, four-square and in perfect preservation, has, with its more venerable brother of Fame, watched for so many centuries over the fallen fortress of Chitor.
Not far away, the rocky wall on which the city stands is shattered into a gloomy chasm, half-hidden in rank vegetation, which, clinging with knotted root to ledge and crevice, hangs darkly over a stagnant pool. Here was the awful portal, “the Gau Mukh,” or “cow’s mouth,” by which, when all was lost to Chitor save honour, her women entered the subterranean cavern while the fuel was heaped high, and an honourable death by suffocation awaited them.
The burning Indian day was over, and the sun blazed red in the west, as we mounted our elephant and paced along the road towards the Hathi Pol. Darker grew the ghostly domes and shattered battlements against a golden sky, and the swift southern night fell, dark yet luminous, as we turned down the hill and left the dead city, splendid in its loneliness and isolation, asleep within its crumbling walls.