'Up the Country': Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of IndiaEden, Emily
History
'Up the Country': Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India
Eden, Emily
Eden, Emily, 1797-1869 -- Correspondence; India -- Description and travel
We set off early on Wednesday morning in two of the king's carriages,
and saw the tombs of Saadut Ali and his wife. A very fine building, but
the wife is not allowed any little tops to the cupola of her tomb, which
is mean. Then to 'Constantia,' a sort of castle in a fine jungly park,
built by an old General La Martine, who came out to India a private
soldier, and died worth more than a million. I wish we had come out in
those days.
He left his house at Constantia to the public. Any European in want of
change of air might go with his family and live there for a month, and
beyond the month, unless another family wanted it. This would be a great
convenience to the few English in Oude, particularly to poor officers;
so of course, for thirty years, the Supreme Court has been doubting
whether the will meant what it said it meant, and the house has been
going to decay; but it is now decided that people may live there, and it
is all to be repaired.
Then we went to Dilkushar, a country palace of the king's, very pretty,
and then to a tomb of a former king, where there are silver tigers as
large as life, a silver fish, a silver mosque, and all sorts of
curiosities, and priests who read the Koran night and day. Then we came
home to breakfast and to rest, and the gentlemen went to the prison to
see some Thugs.
You have heard about them before, a respectable body of many thousand
individuals, who consider it a point of religion to inveigle and murder
travellers, which they do so neatly that 'Thuggee' had prospered for
2,000 years before it was discovered.
A Captain G. here is one of its great persecutors officially, but by
dint of living with Thugs he has evidently grown rather fond of them,
and has acquired a latent taste for strangling. One of the Thugs in the
prison told the gentlemen: 'I have killed three hundred people since I
began;' and another said, 'I have killed only eighty myself, but my
father has done much more.'
Then they acted over amongst themselves a scene of Thuggee. Some of them
pretended to be travellers, and the others joined them and flattered
them, and asked them to sit down and smoke, and then pointed up to the
sun, or a bird; and when the traveller looked up, the noose was round
his neck in an instant, and of course, as a _real_ traveller, he would
have been buried in five minutes.
Then they threw the noose over one of Colonel L.'s surwars who was
cantering by, just to show him how they could have strangled him. I
think it is a great shame allowing them to repeat their parts, but they
really believe they have only done their duty. They say they would not
steal from a house, or a tent, but they have a profession of their own,
and all these men regret very much that they cannot teach their sons to
walk in the right way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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