_Post Scriptum._--There was something very uncanny about the Genius of
the Place. He dragged an ease-loving egotist out of the French bedstead
with the gilt knobs at head and foot, into a more than usually big
folly--nothing less than a seeing of Chitor by moonlight. There was no
possibility of getting Gerowlia out of _her_ bed, and a mistrust of the
Maharana’s soldiery who in the day time guarded the gates, prompted the
Englishman to avoid the public way, and scramble straight up the
hillside, along an attempt at a path which he had noted from Gerowlia’s
back. There was no one to interfere, and nothing but an infinity of
pestilent nullahs and loose stones to check. Owls came out and hooted at
him, and animals ran about in the dark and made uncouth noises. It was
an idiotic journey, and it ended--Oh horror! in that unspeakable
Gau-Mukh--this time entered from the opposite or brushwooded side, as
far as could be made out in the dusk and from the chuckle of the water
which, by night, was peculiarly malevolent.
Escaping from this place, crab-fashion, the Englishman crawled into
Chitor and sat upon a flat tomb till the moon, a very inferior and
second-hand one, rose, and turned the city of the dead into a city of
scurrying ghouls--in sobriety, jackals. Also, the ruins took strange
shapes and shifted in the half light and cast objectionable shadows.
It was easy enough to fill the rock with the people of old times, and a
very beautiful account of Chitor restored, made out by the help of Tod,
and bristling with the names of the illustrious dead, would undoubtedly
have been written, had not a woman, a living, breathing woman, stolen
out of a temple--What was she doing in that galley?--and screamed in
piercing and public-spirited fashion. The Englishman got off the tomb
and departed rather more noisily than a jackal; feeling for the moment
that he was not much better. Somebody opened a door with a crash, and a
man cried out:--“Who is there?” But the cause of the disturbance was,
for his sins, being most horribly scratched by some thorny scrub over
the edge of the hill--there are no bastions worth speaking of near the
Gau-Mukh--and the rest was partly rolling, partly scrambling, and mainly
bad language.
When you are too lucky sacrifice something, a beloved pipe for choice,
to Ganesh. The Englishman has seen Chitor by moonlight--not the best
moonlight truly, but the watery glare of a nearly spent moon--and his
sacrifice to Luck is this. He will never try to describe what he has
seen--but will keep it as a love-letter, a thing for one pair of eyes
only--a memory that few men to-day can be sharers in. And does he,
through this fiction, evade insulting, by the dauberie of pen and ink, a
scene as lovely, wild, and unmatchable as any that mortal eyes have been
privileged to rest upon?
An intelligent and discriminating public are perfectly at liberty to
form their own opinions.
XII.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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