But the Englishman went first to the Hospital, and found the
out-patients beginning to arrive. A hospital cannot tell lies about its
own progress as a municipality can. Sick folk either come or lie in
their own villages. In the case of the Mayo Hospital they came, and the
operation-book showed that they had been in the habit of coming. Doctors
at issue with provincial and local administrations, Civil Surgeons who
cannot get their indents complied with, ground-down and mutinous
practitioners all India over, would do well to visit the Mayo Hospital,
Jeypore. They might, in the exceeding bitterness of their envy, be able
to point out some defects in its supplies, or its beds, or its splints,
or in the absolute isolation of the women’s quarters from the men’s.
Envy is a low and degrading passion, and should be striven against. From
the Hospital the Englishman went to the Museum in the centre of the
Gardens, and was eaten up by it, for Museums appealed to him. The casing
of the jewel was in the first place superb--a wonder of carven white
stone of the Indo-Saracenic style. It stood on a stone plinth, and was
rich in stone-tracery, green marble columns from Ajmir, red marble,
white marble colonnades, courts with fountains, richly-carved wooden
doors, frescoes, inlay and colour. The ornamentation of the tombs of
Delhi, the palaces of Agra and the walls of Amber, have been laid under
contribution to supply the designs in bracket, arch, and soffit; and
stone-masons from the Jeypore School of Art have woven into the work the
best that their hands could produce. The building in essence, if not in
the fact of to-day, is the work of Freemasons. The men were allowed a
certain scope in their choice of detail and the result ... but it should
be seen to be understood, as it stands in those Imperial Gardens. And
observe, the man who had designed it, who had superintended its
erection, had said no word to indicate that there was such a thing in
the place, or that every foot of it, from the domes of the roof to the
cool green chunam dadoes and the carving of the rims of the fountains in
the courtyard, was worth studying! Round the arches of the great centre
court are written in Sanskrit and Hindi, texts from the great Hindu
writers of old, bearing on the beauty of wisdom and the sanctity of
knowledge.
In the central corridor are six great frescoes, each about nine feet by
five, copies of illustrations in the Royal Folio of the _Razmnameh_,
the _Mahabharata_, which Akbar caused to be done by the best artists of
his day. The original is in the Museum, and he who can steal it, will
find a purchaser at any price up to fifty thousand pounds.
V.
_Of the Sordidness of the Supreme Government on the Revenue Side;
and of the Palace of Jeypore--A great King’s Pleasure-House, and
the Work of the Servants of State._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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