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Designing Voice User Interfaces Principles of Conversational Experiences 1st Edition Cathy Pearl
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About the Author
Martin Mitrevski is currently a senior software engineer and tech lead at Netcetera. He’s developed mobile apps in the areas of virtual reality, transport, indoor navigation, publishing, insurance, weather, innovation tools, and live event apps.
Martin is enthusiastic about technology, well-crafted code, books, innovation, and everything that leads us to new and better directions. He likes to follow the latest mobile trends and software development principles in general.
Lately, he’s been fascinated by the possibilities that conversational interfaces bring in simplifying the user experience and how they might change the way we think about apps. Martin is always happy to exchange knowledge with others on his blog at https://martinmitrevski.com and as a conference speaker. You can follow him on Twitter via the handle @mitrevski.
About the Technical Reviewer
Felipe Laso-Marsetti is a senior systems engineer working at Lextech Global Services. He’s also an aspiring game designer/programmer. You can follow him on Twitter via @iFeliLM or on his blog at http://ifeli.me/.
Introduction
User interfaces in mobile apps are continuing to evolve by recognizing the most natural way for users to express their wishes: their voice.
Conversational interfaces are starting to get a lot of attention, mostly because of the latest advancements in natural language understanding and machine learning.
All the big players provide tools and voice assistants in this area. Apple has Siri and the Speech framework, Google has Google Assistant and Dialogflow, Amazon has Alexa and Lex, and Microsoft has Cortana and LUIS. This topic is exciting and will be even more so in the future.
Currently, there’s no book on the market that incorporates all aspects of conversational interfaces on iOS, starting from voice transcription, natural language processing, intent detection, and entities extraction and going all the way to text-to-speech commands.
The book will help you build conversationally aware and smarter iOS applications. With the introduction of the new platforms and exciting technologies, iOS developers now have huge opportunities to take their apps to the next level. In this book, you will be familiarized with the following topics:
• The basics of natural language processing on iOS
• Sentiment analysis with Apple’s new Core ML framework
• The challenges of conversational interfaces and what the future brings
InTroduCTIon
Who This Book is For
The primary audience for the book includes iOS developers, product and innovation managers, and potentially UX experts. It will be helpful to all engineers and managers who want to provide conversational interfaces in their apps.
This book does not cover the basics of iOS development. Specifically, it will not show the steps to create a new Xcode project or introduce you to basic iOS development concepts. Having that knowledge is a prerequisite for getting the most from the book.
What You’ll Need
To follow along and run the code examples in this book, you will need a Mac with macOS Sierra, 10.12.6 or higher. You will also need to have Xcode 9 or higher, with Swift 4.
CHAPTER 1 Conversational Interfaces
People and computers speak different languages—people use words and sentences, while computers are more into ones and zeros. This gap in communication is filled with a mediator that knows how to translate all the information flowing between the two parts. These mediators are called graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
GUI Beginnings
Historically, there have been three major breakthroughs in the quest to create the most suitable user interfaces. The first one was in Xerox’s research lab, where Steve Jobs recognized the huge potential of the mouse cursor clicking around a desktop, opening folders, copying and pasting files, and much more (Figure 1-1). It was a revolutionary approach that made computers accessible to a much broader audience, and it’s still used today.
M. Mitrevski, Developing Conversational Interfaces for iOS, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3396-2_1
Figure 1-1. The first graphical user interface Chapter 1
The second revolution was also something Steve Jobs managed to introduce on a massive scale.
“We’re gonna use the best pointing device in the world. We’re gonna use a pointing device that we’re all born with—we’re born with ten of them. We’re gonna use our fingers.”
These Steve Jobs words about the iPhone’s unveiling introduced the multitouch concept, which is now widely used on all mobile devices. It was another natural but revolutionary step in providing the most intuitive experience for users (Figure 1-2).
These two approaches made interaction with machines (whether that be computers or mobile devices) much easier and accessible.
The third major breakthrough is what this book is all about: conversational interfaces. Before I get to that, let’s take a moment to talk about GUI challenges.
Graphical User Interfaces Challenges
One commonality between these GUIs is that people need to learn how to interact with them. For example, they need to know that a single click on a folder will select that folder and that a double-click will open it. They need to know there’s a “back” hardware button on Android phones but a similar software button (styled differently) in every iOS application. Having many Figure 1-2. The iPhone’s multitouch user interface
different options and different implementations of the two concepts can be confusing for the users. Everyone who has switched from a Windows to a Mac (or vice versa) knows that you need few days (or even weeks) to learn how to efficiently use the different operating system. The same applies to phones—although they all follow the multitouch concept, the transition from one OS to another can take some time.
Another challenge that current GUIs face is the new set of devices recently introduced to the market—wearables. When you have a screen as small as a watch, clicking it to perform some task can be quite a tedious experience. And these devices are targeted mostly to modern, on-the-go users who need some information fast with minimal fuss.
This brings the need for a completely different user interface—one that will unify all the different platforms and will perform tasks for users with little interaction. And what’s the most natural way of expressing your needs? Of course, it’s by using your voice to create words and sentences.
Voice as a User Interface
So, the third major breakthrough in user interfaces is a nongraphical one: conversational interfaces. The idea is not new. We’ve seen it in a lot of movies, usually in the form of some virtual assistant that informs the main character of some new danger ahead. Or the character falls in love with his assistant (like in the 2013 movie Her). Generally speaking, movies can be an interesting source of inspiration for the next innovations in technology. Hollywood is a place where technology meets the liberal arts, and it can have a big impact on consumer technology. Did you know the interactive newspapers in Harry Potter inspired Facebook to introduce self-starting videos in its news feeds? Or that the gesture-driven UI in Minority Report is what now you basically do in interacting with your mobile device? Keep that in mind: inspiration can come from unexpected places.
Understanding Language
Since the idea for conversational interfaces is not that new, why did it take so long for the big tech companies to start making products with them? The main reason is that speech recognition and natural language understanding are two of the most challenging problems in computer science. Sometimes even one small word (such as not, for example) can completely change the meaning of a sentence. Also, punctuation can introduce different meanings to words. Computers are not like humans; they don’t talk with each other in a free-form manner all the time, learning new phrases and meanings along the way. They are pretty exact entities, and they do what they are told to do.
Language is the primary form of communication between humans. It is used to express everything from our feelings to explanations of how we have solved complex programming tasks. This wide range of phrases, expressions, and wishes is dependent on many other circumstances, such as the context in which the phrase is spoken, the beliefs of the people involved in the conversation, and suggestions that are not directly implied by the phrase (called implicatures). For example, say you ask a person who lives with you “Where is my football T-shirt?” and they reply “Can’t you hear the washing machine working?” You can infer that the T-shirt is currently being laundered in the washing machine. Adding to the complexity of the language are presuppositions, which are implicit assumptions about something related to a phrase that’s taken for granted as being true. For example, if you say “I haven’t coded for two years,” the presupposition is that you once coded. The same presupposition holds, even if you say “I have coded for two years.”
There are cases where understanding language can be difficult for humans as well. Sometimes you might run into words that are unknown to you and you must guess what they mean. Or even when you understand the words, the meaning can be ambiguous; in other words, you are not sure what the speaker intended to say. If someone says “Did you see her
dress?” that might mean many different things. It can mean that a girl can’t find her dress and someone is asking around for help. It can also be interpreted as someone checking on whether she has started dressing. Or it can be a gossip between people about the way the girl is dressed.
Figurative speech is another challenge. Using metaphors, similes, and allusions that go beyond the literal meaning of words gives a sentence a whole new meaning. Extracting the correct meaning is a demanding task for humans, so you can imagine how difficult it would be for a computer. However, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing have been making some impressive improvements in the past few years. Engineers are developing sophisticated deep learning algorithms and feeding them with massive amounts of data. Providing as many examples and training sets as possible makes it easier for computers to figure out what users are saying.
Products on the Market
These technological advancements have triggered the creation of new products from every major tech company in this area. Apple has Siri, which is now open for iOS developers through the SiriKit framework. Developers can handle voice commands in their apps that users give to Siri. For example, imagine a user rushing to find a ride to the airport. They will say something like, “Hey, Siri, book me a ride to the airport using YourCoolApp.” Siri will ask your app whether it can handle the request, and the app might ask for some additional information, such as where you want to be picked up (or maybe it would just use the user’s current location) or what type of ride you want (car, taxi, train, etc.). Then Siri presents the information from your app inside Siri (your app is not opened; everything happens in Siri’s context), and if the user agrees to the provided ride offer, your app then reserves the ride, and Siri notifies the user about the status.
Google has OK Google and Google Assistant, which support similar functionalities and extension points for developers. One interesting product from Google is Dialogflow (formerly api.ai), which is a web application through which developers can train the platform to learn how to recognize and extract parts of the sentences and return them in JSON format. This gives developers more flexibility and releases the burden from them in terms of developing complex natural language processing (NLP) solutions by themselves. NLP is a field in artificial intelligence that tries to analyze and understand the meaning of human language.
Facebook’s Wit.ai is another platform that provides excellent tools for developers to add conversational interfaces to their apps. Microsoft has LUIS, a web application through which you can train how the platform recognizes entities in a sentence. In addition, Microsoft has Cortana, its virtual assistant named after a character in the video game Halo. Amazon provides Alexa Skill Set and Amazon Lex. With Amazon Lex, the same natural-understanding platform that is used by Amazon Alexa is available to developers. If you need a reliable enterprise solution, IBM has Watson, with several products that support easier creation of virtual agents and chatbots with a specific domain business knowledge.
Overview of the Process
Let’s look at the products and technologies from the viewpoint of a developer. Integrating a technology that provides a conversational interface to your application requires several steps. These steps might be already integrated in the product. They can also be partially integrated, providing you with customization points that you can use to provide domain-specific knowledge, use a different technology for that customization point, or even provide your own implementation. Figure 1-3 shows an outline of how to add a conversational interface to your iOS application.
Figure 1-3. Steps for integrating a conversational interface product
The first step is to build an agent with the domain-specific knowledge. Building the agent requires infrastructure (data storage, servers), natural language–understanding algorithms, and the actual training with the business domain knowledge. The provider of the agent has to make the service available to the mobile devices in some way—either as a REST service or as a native framework.
Next, the mobile device has to convert the user’s spoken phrase to a machine-readable string. This is usually done on the device, although an external REST service might also be used. After the string is detected, it is sent to the trained agent, which tries to extract the user’s intent and the parameters of that intent (entities) based on the training that was provided in the first step. If the intent and the entities are extracted successfully, the app has enough information to execute the user’s request and provide results of the action.
What the Products Do
Based on the previous overview, let’s see what the current products on the market provide in terms of integrating conversational interfaces in a mobile application. Table 1-1 illustrates the differences between them.
Table 1-1. Conversational Interface Products That Can Be Integrated into iOS Apps
ProductInfrastructureSpeech
siriKit provided provided provided provided
Dialogflow provided not providedBoth options provided
Wit.ai provided providedBoth options provided
amazon leX provided providedBoth options provided
lUis provided not providedBoth options provided
Core Ml not provided not provided not provided not provided
Chapter
1 Conversational interfaCes
First I’ll define what the values in this table mean. The “Provided” value indicates that the service is already enabled (implemented) in the product and you don’t need to do anything by yourself. The “Not provided” value means the service is not available in the product and you need to use other products to fill this gap or implement it by yourself. The “Both options” value indicates that the product provides both a predefined solution for the particular service and a customization point if the developers want to provide app-specific functionality.
SiriKit does all the heavy lifting for you when integrating conversational interfaces to your app. The testing data and the algorithms are stored and running on Apple’s infrastructure. The speech recognition is done by the framework itself, which also does the training and the natural language understanding. You, as a developer, just receive callbacks with values for predefined intents and entities. That doesn’t leave much room for customization. If the currently supported domains are not fitting your application’s goal, then you can’t make much use of the framework. You will get to know SiriKit in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3.
Dialogflow, Wit.ai, Amazon LEX, and LUIS are similar services that provide you with infrastructure and the possibility to train your own agents. Those agents are available to mobile apps as a REST service. In addition to the ability to train your own models, they provide already trained agents, which can be directly used for common things such as checking the weather, setting an alarm, booking a ride or flight, and more.
Some of the products, such as Wit.ai and Amazon LEX, provide iOS SDKs that do the speech recognition part on the mobile device. Others, such as Dialogflow and LUIS, still don’t have such support, which means you have to use other frameworks, such as Apple’s Speech, that convert the user’s spoken input to text. You can find more details on Dialogflow and Wit.ai in Chapters 4 and 5.
You can take a different approach as well, with Apple’s Core ML framework for machine learning. With this approach, you are in charge of finding or creating the dataset, implementing the machine learning
Chapter 1 Conversational interfaCes
algorithm, and training and testing the agent. Apple just provides the glue that enables easier integration of the model in an iOS application. You will explore Core ML in Chapter 7.
Conversational Interfaces Flow
You have probably seen the YouTube video where a kid asks Alexa to play him something like “tickle, tickle” and Alexa responds with some adult movie suggestions.
These comical situations are not rare since there’s still a lot of room for improvement in this area. Users have to be as concise as possible and have to find the right structure of sentences that virtual assistants will understand. To address this broad range of different sentences, the frameworks are offering a bit restrictive flow—they have a few predefined domains (use cases), which are triggered by already defined sentences. They encourage you to avoid open questions and to provide users with different options. For example, if a user wants a train ride from London to Paris, Siri can ask the user “What type of ride do you want?” and your app can provide a few options that Siri will relay to the user, such as firstclass or second-class ticket. Also, the SDKs are designed in a way that you need to find the user’s preferences by asking one question at a time and then proceed with the next question only after you have the answer of the current one. For example, after you know the type of the ride, Siri might next ask the user “Where do you want to go?” if they didn’t specify that in the voice command. Notice also that the questions are pretty simple and clear and they ask for only one piece of information.
This new way of interacting with users is a challenge for developers and user experience experts. There are still no common best practices; you need to experiment and figure out what works and what doesn’t. In any case, the future is exciting, and you will see a lot more innovation in this area.
Natural Language–Understanding Concepts
So that you can understand the examples in the next few chapters, in this section I will cover the concepts that are important for natural language–processing engineering.
The most important concept in conversational interfaces is an intent. This is basically what the user wants the system (application or chatbot) to do. The system might provide several intents. For example, a grocery list application might provide intents for adding, removing, and marking products as bought. It might also provide the ability to directly pay for the products in a list or send the bill to someone else to pay. The first step in natural language processing is to figure out which of the intents you have provided matches the spoken phrase of the user.
There might be cases where there is no mapping of the user input to a specific action. This can happen if the user asks for something you can’t provide. For example, they might ask “Deliver the products of the grocery list to my address,” but your system doesn’t provide such an intent. No matching can also happen if the model you train with sentences is not complete. For example, the user might say “Get rid of milk from my list,” which clearly means the user wants to remove milk from their list. But if you haven’t provided sentences similar to this one, your model might not recognize the user’s intent. Training the model with the domain knowledge specific to the functionality the system provides and with as many sentences as possible is one of the most challenging tasks in natural language processing. That is what gives the system the ability to react to lots of different natural spoken phrases.
After the intent is recognized, you need to figure out what are the parameters of that action. These are also called entities. In the grocery list example, if you have figured out that the user’s intent is to add products to the list, the next step is to determine what those products are. In this case, the entities belong to the defined type of products. There are some common entities to most intents, such as location, date, time, temperature, and many more.
What’s interesting is that entities can appear multiple times in intents but with different meanings. For example, a location entity appears twice in a “booking a ride” intent. If the user says “I want a ride from Paris to London,” the first location entity represents the pickup location of the user, and the second one represents the user’s destination. In the process of training the model, this can be accomplished by defining two (or more) different roles of the same entity and marking the entity and its role in the sentence in as many examples as possible.
Another challenge here is that even if you need two entities from one intent to execute the user’s request, the user might provide only one. They might have forgotten that you need the other value, or they might expect this to be inferred. In the “booking a ride” example, they might expect that you take their pickup location from the location services on the device. However, if for various reasons you are not able to get the needed values from the first input, you should ask the user for the specific value you are missing. Asking the user to say the full sentence again with the missing information is not a good user experience.
Usually in conversational interface systems, the user will ask several things during the conversation. It is expected that the system stores the information about the previous data the user has provided. Storing the parameters from previous expressions is usually called context. For example, you are ordering a sandwich from a chatbot and give information about whether the sandwich should contain ham, cheese, ketchup, olives, and so on. Then, if you want to order another one just like the previous one but without olives, you should be able to say this in a natural manner: “Same as previous one but without olives.” Using context, you can accomplish this. During one conversation, there might be several contexts. The whole conversation, from start to end, is usually called a session.
Figure 1-4 shows the process of food ordering with a chatbot. The user provides a sentence in a plain-text or spoken phrase. The text is processed, and an intent is detected, along with the entities of the intent. After that, the user specifies another request connected with the previous state (sandwich ordering), and the chatbot detects from the context which previous information is required to complete this request. Then, the chatbot asks the user about a drink, thus triggering a different context. The user might later say, for example, “without ice” or “another one to go.” These multiple contexts represent one session, which is the whole interaction between the user and the chatbot during the ordering experience. Chapter 1
1-4. Food ordering interaction with a chatbot
Figure
Summary
As you’ve seen, finding an appropriate GUI can be quite a challenge—and it’s basically the key factor in determining whether your software will be used. If users don’t understand the interactions they need to do to get the most out of it, they will not use it. That’s why the GUIs must be intuitive and easy to learn.
In the following chapters, you will see practical applications of these natural language–understanding concepts in iOS projects. You will start with Apple’s SiriKit framework in the next two chapters by building two apps, one for booking a ride and the other one for adding and removing items in a grocery list. Chapter 1
CHAPTER 2 Booking a Ride with SiriKit
At the WWDC conference in 2016, Apple announced SiriKit, which enables developers to provide functionality that can be executed directly from Siri, without opening the main application. This is another step to the idea of using new, innovative ways to interact with users via conversational interfaces, simplifying the whole user experience. Your app can now provide functionality to Siri directly from the lock screen and when the app is not even started. However, as is usually the case with Apple, there are some limitations. You can use SiriKit only for certain predefined domains.
M. Mitrevski, Developing Conversational Interfaces for iOS, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3396-2_2
Booking a ride with Sirikit
• Car Commands/CarPlay
• Restaurant reservations
What do these domains mean, and what can they do for you as a user? You can, for example, send messages and make calls directly from Siri. You can send money to someone or check your account’s status. You can create to-do lists and notes and add items to them. You can ask Siri to show you your football game ticket when you get near the stadium with the new Visual Codes extension. Siri can also show you photos or book you a ride. With the Car Commands extension, you can manage vehicle door locks and get a vehicle’s status (handy for the people who are unsure whether they have locked their car’s doors). And with SiriKit, you can make restaurant reservations with the help of the Maps application. Although it’s a limited set of domains, SiriKit provides lots of possibilities for innovation and improving the user experience. Also, probably in the future more domains will be added, like when the Lists and Notes and Visual Codes extensions were added in iOS 11. If your app is not solving problems in one of those domains, you will need to wait for (or even suggest to Apple) an extension in the domain that your app needs.
Booking a Ride
In this chapter, you will look at the ride-booking domain. You will build a simple app that will reserve a (fake) ride between two locations provided by the user. Let’s get started!
Before you develop a Siri extension, you need to build the mobile app, which will provide the base “booking a ride” functionality. The UI will be pretty simple; as shown in Figure 2-1, it contains just two text fields for the “from” and “to” locations, as well as a button that will start the booking. When the button is tapped, the found rides are displayed in a list below it. The user interface is already set up for you in the starter project for this chapter. Chapter 2
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CHAPTER XVIII
THE CAPITAL OF THE PUNJAB
"Hatee Aiah! Hatee aiah!"—"The elephant comes!" cried the children running, and one small scamp danced in front and shouted, "Hatee kuta machi bucha"—"The elephant is a dog bad beast," and fled to escape consequences of such boldness. I was now seeing Lahore city from the back of one of the Lieutenant-Governor's State elephants which had swelled with pride the heart of Tambusami, my servant, when in all the bravery of scarlet trappings it came to fetch me from the hotel. Tambusami's respect for "Government" was almost sublime. He rarely showed the faintest interest in shrines or temples, but invariably reflected every manifestation of official interest in, or attention to, his master. On such occasions the whole strain of his body seemed differently keyed, and on the back of that elephant he gave himself the most amusing airs, tilting up his chin and appearing to bask in an atmosphere of luxurious importance for all the world like a child playing at chief minister to some Haroun al Raschid, who had thrown off disguise and shown himself to the public in proper grandeur.
With me was a delightful Pundit Omaid Chand, Superintendent of the Punjab Government Records, who accompanied me during my stay at Lahore. "My native place," he told me, "was Saharanpur in the United Provinces; but now I am a nationalized Punjabi because I have been here fifty years since I was eight years old."
We entered the city by the Delhi Gate and filled the narrow street so that there was consternation among the shopkeepers and joy among the children all along our route. Elephants are no longer used so much as formerly, and at Lahore even the Lieutenant-Governor only keeps two now instead of eight.
When we met a troop of buffaloes there was a mighty hubbub. The shopkeepers squealed and jibbered much that I am sure was impolite as the
frightened beasts plunged and pressed upon their goods. Many of the taller buildings with elaborately carved woodwork belonged to well-to-do Mohammedans, who have their homes away from the city, and use such houses in the intervals of business, and for friends of an evening. They do not usually go home till after nine o'clock at night. We were, of course, on a level with the projecting balconies and carved oriel windows. Here and there awnings were stretched across the street between the opposite houses, and once or twice we had to wait while these were hauled up to let us go by. Passing through another gateway we halted before a beautiful mosque, wondrous with exquisite tints of blue and green in the old glazed tiles that were all about its front and minarets. Its elaborate inscriptions were in blue, with yellow and green ornament on a white ground. Baked daily in the sun for nigh three hundred years the beauty of this glazed inlay was only enhanced by time, and well may it last unharmed through future centuries! The narrow streets, in spite of all their charm, will be swept away as the townsfolk gradually alter their standards and ideas, but the traveller of the age to come should still find this fair mosque to please his eyes.
Out of the city at length we came to the now open space about the crenelated walls and bastions of the fort, and the Badshahi Masjid with its four old capless minars. Midway between the west gate of this mosque and the walls of the Fort stands the graceful pavilion called the Baradari. The stone is mostly red Agra sandstone, Jehangir's favourite building material, recalling Kenilworth in colour, but the mosque has three domes of white marble.
Descending once more to earth I walked all over the fort, with its Pearl Mosque of white Jeypore marble (much, so much less fine than the Moti Masjids of either Delhi or Agra) its white Nau Lakha, its Diwan-y-khas, looking ready to tumble to pieces, though now in the restorer's hands, and its Shish Mahal.
Near these last, to the right of the same quadrangle, is the armoury. In Europe the traveller is often shown instruments of torture—rack or boot or "maiden," and in England what village of tourist attractiveness is without either stocks or pillory? In India, however, such relics are rare, and those shown at the Lahore Armoury, including a machine for pulling off thieves'
fingers, invented by Dhuleep Singh, only remind one of the general absence of such stepping stones to civilization.
There is a great variety among this choice collection of weapons, and although it cannot compete with that of Turin, Valetta or Hertford House, it would prove at least a valuable addition to any one of them. Here are recalled the times of Ranjeet Singh, the one-eyed monarch, who had the genius to gather under him European officers of such calibre as Avitabile, Allard and Ventura. Here are cuirasses, imported by General Ventura for his French legion of 8000 men, bearing on their fronts the Gallic cock with laurels and standards on a star of steel, and beside them Sikh shields with copper bosses. Here are swords from Iran, with ivory hilts and blades engraved with mottoes calling on the help of "Ali." There are combination swords and pistols, Afghan knives, old flint-lock and match-lock guns with barrels damascened, old four-chambered match-lock revolver guns, musquets (short carbines or blunderbusses) carried by the Gurcharahis, (Sikh cavalry 4000 strong), tir kaman (bows and arrows), tarkash (quivers), Abyssinian shotels made with a double curve and wielded with the point downwards, Mahratta swords, farangs—straight swords adapted by the Mahrattas from the Portuguese, Khandahs, those long Sikh swords made broader near the point, a Persian mace of the time of Rustem—a gem for any collection—tabai (battle-axes) gokru, the crowsfoot—caltrap of ancient Europe for throwing down to stop cavalry, a Burmese Dha or Dhas, a fakir's baraggan or short sword-stick leaning on which some "muni of the ages" has sat in meditation in the jungle. There are Goorkha kukris and Hindoo Katars, the iron-shod stick of a Chaukidar, a powder-flask of golden thread, backplates and breast-plates and helmets of steel and brass.
The armoury is certainly more interesting to-day than the Shish Mahal opposite wherein, as in a certain chamber at Versailles, it is said that begums and a man would shut themselves for weeks together. Here there is indeed no armoury of love—is it because the weapons of that warfare were of a kind inseparable from those who wielded them—the charms that vanished with their owners? Or can it be that their enduring pattern has never been improved upon, so that each blade and buckler of the past is still in full demand for current wear?
I went up to the roof of the Shish Mahal for the view of Ranjeet Singh's tomb and the Badshahi mosque, and between its minarets towards the west could see the silver band that is the Ravi River, and then before going back to the elephant I looked at Ranjeet Singh's tomb on which certain bosses are carved in the marble with curious significance. Eleven of these are grouped round a large centre, and of the eleven four are for Ranees (who are married women) and seven for concubines, while at two of the corners of the slab are detached smaller bosses to commemorate a pair of pigeons burned in the funeral pyre.
What a contrast, I thought, on returning to the spacious roads of the modern town outside the city gates, between the new order and the old! On arriving at Lahore the first thing that the stranger notices is the fortified railway station, then a tank and an old mosque covered with green-glazed tiles with others about it of bright peacock-blue; and then, as he drives from the station in a gharry, through white dust, past quite handsome modern buildings in pale red brick, comes the "Upper Mall," a perfect road with an ideal lay-out for a modern town—wide and trim with electric-light standards painted a clean grey on brick-edged grass strips which separate the centre roadway from a riding track that, in its turn, runs parallel to a footway; while on either side stretches a line of gardens. It is all as handsome as the Boulevard Anspach at Brussels, and as different from the more lovable streets in old Lahore as can well be imagined.
I had seen in front of the museum Zam Zammah, the old gun with a long history which Rudyard Kipling played round as a boy long before Kim was written, and had watched the urchin scrambling on its back when the policeman was not looking. Having heard that the character of Mahbub Ali of Kim—"known as one of the best horse-dealers in the Punjab"—was drawn from a man named Wazir Khan (not that minister of Akhbar after whom the Chauk of Wazir Khan is named, but an old horse-dealer who is still alive), I took some trouble to inquire for him. The old man was on the road, however, having gone to a horse-fair at Jhelum, but I found his son and asked him to show me the old Sarai where his father used to sleep on his visits to Lahore. This is called the Sarai of Mahomet Sultan and belongs to the Maharajah of Kashmir. It is a wide quadrangle, about 60 yards square, with round-arched cloisters on all sides; and the son of Wazir Khan showed me, shut off between pillars, the place where his father used to sleep in the
old days. The shadows of a large shisham tree flickered over the broken white plaster of the wall. There was a well in the centre, and near it was a group of horses from Waziristan. Out through the gateway ("the Gate of the Harpies who paint their eyes and trap the stranger") I could see the Lunda Bazaar and a woman squatting on the edge of the footway washing her face with soap. Near her was a tamasha wallah, a boy with a cage of green parrots, and a Hindoo woman cooking chupatties over a fire of dung-cakes, and from one of the houses there was singing in Pushtu.
I returned to the old gun and entered the building of the "wonder-house" in front of which it stands.
The Mayo School of Industrial Art, which is attached to the Lahore Museum, was founded to revive arts now half forgotten, and generally to develop the Industrial Art of the Province. I went thoroughly over its various departments, its schools of modelling and design, architecture, engineering, wood-carving and carpentry, repoussé and blacksmith's work—and I do not think the importance of this college, as an educational institution, could be exaggerated. Its ambition to turn out a constant succession of the best possible craftsmen, rather than theoretic students, makes it the best means yet arrived at of moral and mental development inseparable to my thinking from the purely utilitarian value of handicraft training. Among the students were pointed out to me lads from distant villages and outlying districts, some in receipt of Government stipends, others supported by District and Municipal Boards and others again by Independent States. A well-regulated boarding-house is connected with the school for the accommodation of such pupils, a large proportion of whom find immediate employment on the completion of their course at the school and so continually add to the popularity of its training.
The energy, talent and success of Mr Percy Brown during the many years in which he has developed and enlarged the scheme initiated under the late Mr Lockwood Kipling, are beyond praise, and I only hope that his recent translation to Calcutta may bring an extension to other provinces of India of practical application of the same educational ideas.
The museum is justly proud of its Buddhist sculptures, the best of which is one in black hornblende schiste (from the Yusafzai country near
Peshawar), of Buddha after his forty-nine days' fast. Carved with extreme delicacy and refinement, this wonderful sculpture seems to carry one rather to Renaissance Italy than the North-West Provinces. Who were they, these sculptors? How much or how little were they identified with the people whose gods they carved? Would Alexander of Macedon have had in his train men of sufficient eminence in their craft to account for the apparent Western influence?
One of the latest additions under Mr Brown's curatorship is a collection of paintings and drawings of the Moghul Emperors and people of their times, which includes many exquisite illuminations and old water-colour drawings of extreme fineness and delicacy and yet full of character, design and amazing distinction. Appreciation of such things since the days of their production is only beginning to be re-awakened, and they are still purchasable in India at such prices as the museum can afford. Mr Brown told me that I was the first who had yet looked at this collection with enthusiasm to justify his own in buying them, but "who knows the spelling of Du Guesclin?" They are as wonderful as Holbein's drawings, their detail would have enchanted Altdorfer, and their exquisite line might have delayed the death of Aubrey Beardsley! Such are the Mullah Do Piaza, the picture of Akhbar's jester and his thin Rosinante, or the beautiful drawing of Humayun, Babar's son, out a-hunting.
India is a land which changes any sympathetic traveller to a set of strings on which its spirit plays through all the working-hours. Every day is crowded with new wonders, and no sooner does he sink to earth, as if fallen from the hands of one player, than he is snatched up again and every fibre wrung by some new loveliness he knew not of.
One afternoon I drove out with the pundit to Shaddra where Jehangir is buried and Nour Jehan. We started to the west of the city on the high road to Peshawar, past the Mohammedan cemetery and the Hindoo burning-ground, outside which some women in white and yellow robes sat waiting while their men-folk burned a body within.
In the time of Ranjeet Singh, the pundit told me, the river used to flow past the Badshahi Masjid, a large red sandstone mosque, which we next passed: but in India the rivers are not so constant as the stars in their courses.
A little farther on we crossed the dry bed called the Ravi Nullah and then, driving through the Ravi Forest, reached the bridge of boats that spans the Ravi River at a little distance from the railway-bridge. A merry old Kuka Sikh on a white donkey was waiting at the bridge toll-gate for someone from whom to beg the money to cross. It is a long bridge and very narrow, so that two vehicles cannot pass one another and a bullock-cart, which had just started to cross from the opposite bank, seemed inclined to take an infinity of time about it; but the Kuka Sikh was in no hurry, and when we had paid his toll joked with the pundit to beguile the time. This boat-bridge has to be dismantled in the rainy season, from June to August, when the river is swollen.
We left the Peshawar road soon after crossing the bridge and presently reached Shaddra and Jehangir's tomb, a large and elaborate affair with much space about it and great entrance gateways and lines of narrow water tanks in the gardens within. Dismounting from the gharry we walked over the great open space of the Sarai and through the eastern gateway, with its honeycomb vaulted ceiling and soft warm flower decoration on its pink stucco-covered brick-work, to the water channels of the tomb garden, past the central tank and on to the Mausoleum itself, an exquisite low building with four tall minarets, half of white marble and half of the red Agra stone, of which Jehangir was so fond.
We walked up the steps and crossing a pavement of badal stone entered the inner chamber through an arch with a dado of old glazed inlay. Within, a flat oil-lamp upon a metal stand, threw flickering light in a bright path upon the marble floor. There was rich inlay of agate, cornelian and amethyst, the ninety-nine names of God and the titles of Jehangir, all but the most important title—that of husband of Nour Jehan. She is buried, the Queen who ruled him and his people—only her own brother she could not save from his wrath—about half a mile away and I was surprised to find the place in a state of utter neglect. It is awkward to approach and I expect is rarely visited.
When we reached it the sun was very low. A cow was stalled in one part of the neglected tomb and, as I approached, a Mohammedan fakir, rising from the ground to his full height, tall and thin, shook his hands at the sky
and cried in Persian—Al Mout! Al Mout! ("Everyone must die—everyone must die!")
"But this is a stable," said the pundit, whose learning perhaps did not include Bethlehem. It is true that the tomb was railed round, but the railings were broken and the sturdy rogue of a fakir had settled himself comfortably with his charpoy, his goat and his cow. His beard was grey and his unkempt hair peeped out in tufts from his roughly-tied turban, once white and spotted with dark blue. The things he continued to shout were curious, but the pundit agreed with me it was mere wildness and no scheming for backsheesh that prompted a reference to England. Waving his arms round and round he cried —"The English will rule all over the world," and then—"One God to rule over us all. He created Adam and Eve: bismillah heraai mornana heem la ilia illillah."
I walked up some broken brick steps and passing through a series of lowpointed arches, down on the other side of a low circular wall, I stood before two tombs. The one nearest to me was that of Nour Jehan, who had been called Rose of the Harem, Light of the World: its neighbour was that of her adopted daughter.
The tombs are quite plain plaster-covered brick-work. In the outer passages there remain some traces of painted ornament—but because she had no children, and her stepson, Shah Jehan, was not on good terms with her when she died, there is here no decoration, no inscription. Not for her tomb are the ninety-nine names of God!
Through the arches on the farther side I could see the trunks of date palms and old, old mango trees in the Begumpura, a garden Nour Jehan had loved. I went underground to the crypt-like chamber below the tomb, and with the help of matches made out that there was nothing upon the floor— only in the ceiling one inset space corresponding to the cenotaph above. The pundit thought the body was probably very deep in the ground—I know not.
When we came out above ground the last of daylight was making golden play among the palms and mango trees. They were in flower—and next June fruit would be upon them.
CHAPTER XIX
AT THE COURT OF HIS HIGHNESS THE RAJAH OF NABHA
His Highness the Rajah of Nabha is a noble old Sikh chieftain, distinguished among the native rulers of India, although his territory, one of the Phulkian States, is but small. Through the kindness of the Punjab Government and of His Highness, I was given an opportunity of visiting the little court.
HIS HIGHNESS THE RAJAH OF NABHA.
To reach Nabha, my train from Lahore was the Bombay mail, and I have rarely seen greater confusion at any railway station than reigned upon its arrival. Every class of carriage was already full, yet there were a number of first-class passengers waiting with title to berths booked in advance as well as second and third-class ticket-holders. The train was already of the maximum size permitted and, after half an hour's uncertainty, a third-class
carriage was actually emptied of its fifty or more occupants, taken off the train and replaced by an empty first-class coach. Few more striking instances could be found of purse privilege. It would correspond in England with the dumping on a Crewe platform of the third-class passengers by the Scotch express from Euston to make room for first-class passengers waiting for the train at Crewe. It was not a case of native and foreign, or English and Oriental,—for plenty of native gentlemen travel first-class and it simply meant that having a seat in a third-class carriage in India does not insure your finishing the journey by the train in which you started.
My servant was left behind on this occasion and was consequently not forthcoming when I reached Nabha Station in the morning. Poor faithful Tambusami had not understood whither we were bound, but for some reason or other thought it might be Patiala, and when I returned to Lahore three days later I found him weeping on the platform after vain endeavours to track me.
At Nabha I was met by three of the Rajah's ministers and driven in a luxurious victoria to a large guest-house painted red and blue and standing in quite beautiful grounds. A pair of horses drew the victoria, but a kind of wagonette which followed with my luggage was pulled by two camels which always have rather a circus air in harness.
The red brick-work of the building was all picked out with white, like the walls of a doll's house, and on each side of the wide arch at the entrance there was a life-size painting of a turbaned soldier presenting arms.
His Highness's private secretary could not speak English, and a native gentleman, Mr Hira Singh, who was a schoolmaster in the town, had been deputed to attend me as interpreter during my stay.
I was taken first into the reception-hall, which was hung with small portraits in gouache of former rajahs and famous Sikh monarchs, such as the Rajah Bhagwan Singh (the late Rajah of Nabha), the late Rajah Ragh Bir Singh of Sandoor and the Maharajah Ranjeet Singh, who was painted in a green dress with a halo round his head and mounted upon a brown horse. In large letters on one wall appeared the motto:—
"May God increase your prosperity."
Breakfast was served me in a large room adjoining the great hall. Over the carpet a white drugget was spread and the chairs were all covered in pink chintz.
Mr Hira Singh suggested that I must need some rest and should sleep awhile, so I was taken to my bedroom which was another large apartment. It was a blend of the genuinely Oriental and the Tottenham Court Road. The washstand was humbly and yet aggressively British, while the wide bed was gorgeously upholstered and covered with a beautiful silk coverlet of canary yellow, and was furnished with two tiny hard cushions or pillows in the middle, as well as an ample allowance for the head. I was certainly tired with the journey and nothing loth to lie down. Outside one of the open doors of the room I could see the red-and-blue lance pennon of a sentry appearing and reappearing as he passed to and fro in the sunlight. His footsteps were quite noiseless, and wondering whether after all it was the real sentry or one of the painted ones from the archway wall I fell fast asleep to wake an hour later and find that Sirdar Bishan Singh, Vakil to the political agent of the Phulkian States, a stout, pleasant-looking little man, and Sirdar Jawala Singh, His Highness's minister of finance, taller and darker, were patiently waiting for me in the reception-room, sitting side by side on chairs, with their feet primly together and silently looking before them.
His Highness had graciously consented to give me an hour's sitting the next morning, and these gentlemen had come to drive me to the palace where the painting was to be done to choose a position of suitable lighting. So down I walked again by the five long steps between the blue columns and out through the archway to the victoria, and the painted sentries were still presenting arms and the live one stood at attention. We drove first to the Diwan Khana by the Winter Palace, and going up a long flight of steps to an upper quadrangle I was shown the rooms of the State Treasury and the old heavily-bound boxes containing the wealth of Nabha.
The Diwan Khana itself is used for durbars, and the whole of the upper part of the great room is one continuous forest of chandeliers, mostly of
green cut glass. On the walls of this Durbar Hall I noticed four beautiful old miniature portraits of rajahs, with real pearls fitted in for necklets and precious stones and gems on the horses' trappings as in eikons of the Greek Church and a painting of a feast, larger, but worked in the same style as the miniatures. The building was erected in the time of the Maharajah Jaswan Singh of Nabha, and the very florid carpets were certainly not of any earlier date.
As we drove away I saw many pigeons and green parrots about the walls of the Winter Palace, and noticed that all over the building niches had been left for the birds.
Mr Hira Singh told me that the population of Nabha town is over 15,000 and that it is "quite a busy city" with steam cotton-mills (I had seen the tall chimneys near the railway station). The city gateways I passed through are quite stately buildings and in an upper chamber of each gateway, with its silk covering hanging out over the window-sill, is kept a copy of the sacred Granth of the Sikhs.
Driving through part of the city and out again we passed a Hindoo temple with a spacious tank, over one end of which spread the twisting branches of a beautiful "beri" tree, and before long came to Elgin House, a newer building than the Winter Palace, with a very large Durbar Hall, having at one end a painting of Queen Victoria. It was here that the sitting was to take place, and after choosing a suitable position in which His Highness's gold chair of state might be placed ready I went over the rooms of Elgin House and also upon the roofs of the upper storeys.
The Vakil showed me the chief treasures with great pride, but among them all there was not a single beautiful thing of native craftsmanship. Instead of this there were huge modern German vases—pictures sliced into one another by a mechanical trick, so that as you moved along in front, the Princess of Wales changed gradually into the Prince. Mechanical singingbirds of most expensive accomplishment were made to warble for my delectation and greatest of all wonders at the Court of Nabha, a clock-work group of figures behaved quite like real people and a band of musicians played operatic airs while a ballet dancer stood tiptoe on one leg. The mechanical singing-birds had already made me think of Hans Andersen's
story of the nightingale, and here was the heroine of another of his tales recreated after the burning she endured with her beloved tin soldier as devotedly as any Hindoo widow of suttee days.
The formal gardens were pleasantly arranged, but managed to avoid the beauty of an Oriental Bagh without achieving that of the European style they sought to imitate. The proportions were good, but there was no grass and one longed vainly for spaces of lawn or greensward to contrast with the elaborate carpet bedding.
On leaving Elgin House we drove to the Gurdwara of Baba Ajabal Singh. A tall and handsome black-bearded priest of thirty-two years showed us over the building, but what most interested me was a wild-looking figure I saw hanging about the cloisters. He was armed with a sword and dressed entirely in black garments, with a huge black turban twisting in and out of steel circlets and irons, and bound over and round in its turn by a metal chain. This was an Akali, one of that still privileged sect of fighting fanatics who became famous in Ranjeet Singh's time under the daring and picturesque "Gardana Sahib"—Alexander Gardner (born on the shores of Lake Superior in 1785).
I had heard that the Akalis wear blue garments to perpetuate the memory of the blue clothes the Guru Govind Singh wore as a disguise, on the occasion of an escape from Moghul soldiers, and part of which he gave to one of his disciples to found a new order—that of the Akalis in question, but this man's habiliments were as black as a crow's feathers. Like their famous Rajah, Ranjeet Singh himself, this latter-day specimen of the bhang-drinking cut-and-thrust "immortals" had only one eye, and I asked whether he had by chance lost its fellow in a fight. "I have never had a chance of a fight," said the Akali—adding consistently with the tenets of his sect—"if I did I would never give in." While we were talking a thin old Sikh limped towards us; he had once been taller than the average man, but was now bent and emaciated with constant opium-eating. Mr Hira Singh told me that he took one "masha" (equal to 16 grains) at a time and took it twice in every twenty-four hours. The old rascal, his deep brown eyes twinkling, put to me a special petition that the Government should grant to all real opium eaters a large quantity gratis at regular intervals to make them happy. He said also, on my asking him what he dreamed about—"In my dreams I think of the Creator, and I
feel very earnest to go to a better field and to fight there," which, as I was assured the man was an abandoned scoundrel, may be taken as Oriental humour expressed with an eye to backsheesh.
Driving back to the guest-house we passed an arena where wrestling matches are held, with six circular tiers of high stone steps as seats for the spectators, and a square "loge" built in the middle of one side for the notables, and here is conducted the only physical "fighting" that takes place at Nabha nowadays. The day of the Akalis is over, and while their brother Sikhs make some of the best material in the Indian Army, the devotees of this narrow sect have become wandering mendicants, privileged to carry warlike weapons, and truculently direct in their demands for alms.
The portrait sitting was fixed for eight o'clock the next morning, and ten minutes before his time the noble old Rajah stepped from his carriage and walked almost jauntily up the steps of Elgin House, where I was already installed with palette and canvas.
Gorgeously apparelled in a costume that was like a kiss between two halves of the Arabian Nights, and wearing upon pale greenish silk a galaxy of decorations which included the G.C.I.E. for his part in the last Afghan War (he is now an honorary Colonel in the British Army) and stars and medals from many great Durbars, the Chief of Nabha wore at the same time an air of vigour and joy in life that made the years sit lightly on his shoulders, years that a wrinkled forehead declared numerous.
One of his ministers told me through Mr Hira Singh that at the last Delhi Durbar His Highness had delighted every one by the spirited and boyish way in which he had galloped his horse along in front of the assembled princes. May he appear as hale and vigorous at the Durbar of December next!
After he had shaken hands with me and beamed cordial smiles, we walked through the Durbar hall to the room where I had set up my easel, and the Rajah sat, as arranged, in a chair of gilded brass with lion arms, and directed his gaze at a particular flower vase upon which we had fixed to keep his head in correct position for the portrait. The pupils of his eyes were brown, with a faint grey rim, and he had long waving moustaches as well as a long yellowish white beard. He carried a sword with scabbard of pale
green and gold, a steel mace with spherical head, and a contrivance by which, when a catch was pressed at the end of the handle, a number of short sharp blades started out from the head, and also a steel trident of new pattern. The old man was bent upon having as many arms about him as possible, and sent for a large shield of black metal with four bright bosses and a crescent, a favourite rifle and another trident sceptre, so that I had all I could do to dispose these about him in such a way that he could sit comfortably and keep his head still. He seemed especially proud of the mace with the trick knives, and after explaining the mechanism to me with gusto he continued at intervals during the sitting to manipulate it, at which the whole court laughed heartily. They were grouped on either side in all the glory of official costume and included the Commander-in-Chief, who came to England for the Coronation of Edward VII., the Foreign Minister, the Finance Minister, the Chief Justice, the Medical Adviser, and various generals and councillors.
To paint a portrait in an hour! Well, I was not sorry that His Highness had arrived before the arranged time, and that I had already set my palette, and though it would have been intensely interesting to have talked with the Chief of Nabha through the excellent interpreter, when once the weapons were arranged to incommode him as little as possible, I went at the painting with the fury of an Akali and contented myself with smiling appreciatively at his occasional ejaculations.
Every now and then he made a peculiar coughing noise, which began softly and rose to a crescendo, sounding as formidable as the traditional catchwords of the giant of the bean-stalk. It was like "ahum, ahum, ahum— ahhum," and kept his ministers in lively attention.
As nine o'clock struck (for there were clocks at Nabha as well as at Elsinore) I laid down my palette and am glad to say His Highness expressed with Eastern courtesy great delight at the sketch.
Before going he sent for his favourite grand-child, Sirdar Fateh Singh, a boy of about twelve years of age, who shook hands frankly with me. On hearing that I must positively leave Nabha that afternoon—in spite of his kindly pressure to stay at least a fortnight—the Rajah gave orders for the finest of his State elephants to be sent round to the guest-house that I might
see an ingenious device by which fountains of water from a hidden tank played from the front of his head to lay the dust. The elephant, unlike his vigorous old master, is weak and ailing, but I found him still a magnificent beast and arrayed even more gorgeously than lilies in sunlight-carrying scores of crystal lamps as well as the fountains.
Mechanical arrangements of all kinds seemed specially to delight the Rajah and he again showed me one of the singing birds I had seen the previous day. Just before leaving Elgin House His Highness paid me the pretty compliment of asking if he might have permission to go.
CHAPTER XX
IN SIGHT OF AFGHANISTAN
I left Lahore soon after eight o'clock one evening and when I woke in the train next day found myself smothered in dust and traversing the great Sind Desert, that almost rainless tract, which depends solely for any possibility of cultivation on irrigation from the Indus.
An important trade route from Afghanistan and Persia coming through the Bolan Pass has its base at Shikarpur, in Upper Sind, a few miles from the great cantilever bridge, called the Lansdowne Bridge, which joins Baluchistan to India crossing the Indus between Sukkur and Ruk.
An engineer was waiting at Sukkur railway station to show me the great bridge, and as I had to continue my journey the same evening we were obliged to face the heat of the sun and started back towards the river on a trolley worked by hand levers. We passed a kite's nest close to the railway on the perpendicular face of a mass of limestone rock.
Sukkur is a good-sized town of more than 30,000 inhabitants, but its buildings seemed to be all of wattle and daub, though three and even four
storeys high, and they were grey in colour, uncomfortably monotonous in the terrific heat.
A single span of the bridge joins the Sukkur side to Bhakkur Island, a mass of limestone rock fortified centuries ago. The keys of the gates were in charge of a signaller at the blockhouse and a bridge inspector. While they were being obtained I read the inscription upon the bridge— "Erected by F. E. Robertson and M. S. N. Hecquet, 18871889. Girders made by Westwood Baillie & Co., London. J. S. R., 1887."
It is one of the great monuments of Queen Victoria's reign, one among the many bridges, waterworks and railroads that have so far monopolized in modern India all architectural aspiration. Splendid in its utility, an inspiring instrument of commercial development, it looks like the creation of some great Arachnid but stretches its iron network so far into the air that it is as much larger than any spider's trap-net as the highest of the Himalayas exceeds an ant-hill. I walked a little way on Bhakkur Island and stood on the sand under some high walls looking at the Ruri end of the bridge. They were the walls of an old nunnery called "Suttian," I think for widows who had declined to be burned with their dead husbands. The engineer told me in connection with "Suttian" that a man named Mosu Shah was said to have built a minaret we could see with the object of spying upon one of the nuns with whom he was in love.
Out in the stream in front of us two men were "pala" fishing. They had swum out each with an immense metal chattie to keep him afloat and, resting upon these, fished the river with nets on long slender poles, putting the fish inside the chattie as they took them from the net. The fish come up to spawn and the men float down stream with their nets in front of them.
They drifted through the very reflections of the vast cantilevers just as a train was steaming over the bridge and made one more of the innumerable
contrasts of the old and new order I had seen in India.
Regaining the trolley we crossed to the Ruri shore and walked some distance over the wide burning sand for the best view of the bridge. A number of cattle were down upon the sand near the water-edge seemingly well content, as I have seen great herds baking in summer heat on level sand on the West Coast of Ireland at the edge of the Atlantic. Here at Ruri, however, the sun beat with greater fury and a group of Sindi boatmen and their families, who had been busy mending sails spread out on the sand, had all stopped work till cooler hours arrived.
In the summer, that engineer assured me, the thermometer reaches 240° and even 250° in the shade! "I have been here twelve years," he said, "and during all that time we have had six rainfalls." He pointed out to the right of the bridge the magazine where dynamite was stored for blasting purposes, and, farther to the right, another small island with a very old temple on it. This island is called Khwajah Khisah and the temple shrine, although the building is in the form of a mosque, is frequented by both Hindoos and Mohammedans.
There is a very important project in hand for damming the Indus just above this temple so as to raise the water-level and so feed the canals during the dry season as well as at periods of flood. I could make out the head of the Begari Canal, then quite dry, in the distance between Khwajah Khisah and the island of Bhakkur.
When I returned by the trolley to Sukkur there was a local train in the station and the carriage in front of the waiting-room where I sat resting in the shade seemed to contain the most obviously authentic prototypes of that famous Asiatic "forty," more celebrated even in Europe than the French Academy. Red faces with large mouths agrin between thick moustaches and short bushy black beards, blue turbans and dirty finery—the very perfection of stage villains, but Morgiana? No, I could not see her and the music of the opera, The Barber of Baghdad, with its superb iterations of that lady's name came drifting through my head.
The reflections of the dull red girders of the bridge were now almost green.
I again slept in the train that night and woke up in the Bolan Pass in British Baluchistan. At half-past nine in the morning the sky was very pale and although the shadows of the hill-clefts were clear they were not hard. On each side of the line there was a flat boulder-strewn plain which was stopped abruptly a quarter of a mile away by steeply rising heights of rock. Then suddenly the flat plain itself would be trenched and split into huge cañons, clefts going deep down into the earth. A few grey dried plants, almost the same colour as the stones, were the only visible signs of vegetation.
In the early morning at Sibi Junction I had branched off on the Western (or Quetta) arm of the great loop which extends from Sibi to Bostan Junction. By ten o'clock the train with two powerful engines was ascending a gradient of one in twenty-five beyond Hirok. From the window I could watch, upon the old Kandahar Road below, the old slow-creeping progress of a camel caravan. The pass was now narrowing, closing up on each side and the cliffs rose steeply where at a sharp turn I caught sight of a square block-house perched on a jutting crag.
At Quetta I had the double annoyance of missing luggage and of being taken, on account of my dark beard, for an expected French spy. The latter misunderstanding was put right by a subdivisional officer from Chaman (the present terminus of the railway beyond the end of the Kojak Pass) whither I was bound and where, having left the loop at Bostan Junction, I arrived the same evening to get a peep across the border into Afghanistan—to set foot in the Amir's country, that land of Mohammedan freebooters, waiting and waiting in vain for an autonomous India whereunto their co-religionists would be able to welcome an invading army.
Going out into the sunlight from the gloom of the dak bungalow everything seemed at first only brightness, as if the external world were like a cup brimmed with a throbbing intensity of light. Then, as my eyes accustomed themselves, I saw that near the bungalow were peach and apricot trees holding sprays of blossom, rose and white against the pale blue of the sky, and that in the distance on every side mountains rose out of the plain, not grey and cold but warm with faint tints of amethyst and delicate red, and that snow lay upon their higher peaks.
Chaman lies in the plain within a horseshoe of mountains, and the space of clearly seen country is so vast that the mountains look almost as if drawn upon a map. The little town is entirely of wattle and daub, a grey blanket colour with just a little paint and whitewash about a Hindoo temple, and here and there a peach tree in flush of blossom. The main street is very wide and in front of some of the shops there are tiny enclosures, five or six feet square like miniature front gardens. Two patriarchal looking old Pathans were walking along in front of the shops. They wore the same kind of stout leather boots, and from above the turban peeped the same type of conical headcovering that I had seen worn by pedlars in Ceylon and throughout the length and breadth of India. They were Achakzai Pathans and one, whose name was Malik Samunder Khan, said he was eighty years old.
Seeing the entrance of a caravanserai I was going in when Tambusami demurred. It was a long way truly from his home near Tuticorin, and he gave these Northern folk his favourite epithet calling them "jungle people." Seeing that I was going into the sarai in spite of his remonstrance, he said submissively, "Where you go I come," but added, "Where you not go I not go."
There were not many camels within, but in one corner some Afghans were pouring raisins into heaps, and inviting me to eat, gave me larger and finer dried grapes than I had ever seen. The raisins were called "abjush" and the men were Popalzais (Candaharis). Alas! we could exchange no talk but they made me welcome, and while we squatted silent in the sunlight and the clear delicious air, one, taking up a stringed instrument called a "rahab," sang to its accompaniment. It was certainly not a song of fighting: there was gladness in it—even passion now and then—but no fury—I think it was a love-song. It was not a song of fatherland: there was pride in it but no arrogance. Nor was it assuredly a song of religion: there was faith in it and adoration, but no abasement. Yes, I'm sure it was a love-song.
Quetta with its gardens and orchards, its fortified lines and its command, by reason of natural position, of both the Kojak and the Bolan Passes, is one of the most important of Indian Frontier posts. I returned to it from Chaman and drove and walked about its wide and well-metalled roads such as the "High School Road," the "Agent Road," and the "Kandahar Road." Trees, as
yet bare of leaves, lined the sides, and fruit blossom looked gaily over walls and fences.
The "Holi" festival of the Hindoos coloured these days. The throwing of red powder or red-tinted water seemed pretty general, and hardly a white dhoti was to be seen that was not blotched with crimson or vermilion splashes. People danced in the streets, and one came suddenly on a crowd watching folk wild as bacchanals, both men and women dressed in gay finery, garlanded with flowers and dancing with strange fantastic gestures in obedience to the universal song of spring's new advent. I went early to bed in another dak bungalow, having somewhat of a fever about me since the blazing hours two days before at the Lansdowne Bridge, and awoke in the early hours. My great-coat had fallen down at one side of the charpoy, and I felt as if a cold plaster lay upon my chest. Tambusami was crouched in front of the fire and had fallen asleep covered in his blanket. From the blackened broken hearth a little acrid smoke puffed fitfully into the room. On the floor lay a torn and extremely dirty dhurrie which had once been blue. Between the dhurrie and the damp earth mildewed matting showed here and there through the holes. A decrepit looking-glass in a broken frame stood upon one rickety table against the wall, and on another an iron tray of uncleaned dinner-plates added to the general air of dirt and squalor.
Leaving Quetta by a morning train I was again passing through a region mountainous on either side beyond a plain white with leprous-like tracts of salt. It resembled neither frost nor snow, but was a strange blotchy incrustation as if the earth were smitten with some fearful pestilence.
On one side the mountains were grey with violet shadows following their clefts and scoriations, spotted in places by dark leafless shrubs, and on their summits lay a little snow. On the other side the hills were red with only soft warm hints of shadows, and beyond them was a band of filmy blue almost as light as the sky. Soon, as the train raced on, the intervening plain became strewn with small loose boulders and isolated tufts of dry dead prickly bush. Two long tents like giant slugs hugged the ground with their black bodies, and near them a few scattered sheep hunted the sparse nourish of aridity.
Again I passed Bostan Junction, this time, however, instead of going on towards Chaman, turning to follow round the Eastern arm of the loop by
what is called the Harnai Route. The landscape had quite altered, but was still strange and unhealthy looking. A veritable pigment seemed to exude from it, varying in different parts of the same field of vision. The outlines were noble but the colour, instead of being the effect of light and air upon masses either of local uniformity or varied by differences as of flowers or vegetation, was by this frequent change in the hue of the earth itself too prismatic for majesty and too trivial for grandeur. A rugged pile of grey rock will receive from the procession of the hours indescribable glories, but a mass of mixed French fondants squashed into the same shape could never capture a tithe of such beauty. In chalky half-tones the landscape ran the entire gamut of reds, yellows, blues and greens, with an appearance of false sweetness as if the face of earth had been smeared with pigment destroying all natural glow.
And yet—and yet—as noon grew nearer and the hovering heat made all things hazy and indistinct, where all merged and was lost, and nothing began or ended, surely that was beautiful—earth mother—mother-o'-pearl.
After leaving Mangi Station the train approached the famous Chappa Rift where a vast and sudden break in the mountain makes a wide stupendous chasm, with steep perpendicular sides. I was permitted to ride upon the locomotive for this part of the journey and watch this wild and desolate magnificence of nature's architecture unfold its terrible titanic grandeur. At one point the railway crosses the rift by an iron bridge called after the Duchess of Connaught. Entering a tunnel in the vast wall of rock the train emerges again at one end of the bridge, and after crossing the gulf turns along the other side so that for some long time this narrowest part remains in sight, the maroon red ironwork of the bridge staring dramatically in the centre of a desolate landscape of silver grey. No patch of grass or shrub or any other live thing is to be seen—only the immensity of the scale is marked by one small block-house, a minute sentinel which shows against the sky on the tallest height of cliff.
As the journey continued, the rocks took more fantastic shapes and above a steely gleaming river and its grey beach of stones, the cliff became like serried rows of crumbling columns as if some cyclopean Benares uplifted by earthquake reared its line of petrified palaces against the sky.
CHAPTER XXI
RAJPUTANA
Jaipur was stricken by plague: the number of deaths had gone on increasing and the living were thrown into a state of bewilderment. The Rajput princesses had fled in panic to the old palace of Amber and strangers were, for the time, asked not to visit that ancient capital. The dinner-table that evening, spread in the open courtyard of the hotel, became heaped with moths attracted by the lamps and dying through their ardour, and it almost seemed as if some spiritual light were attracting in the same way human souls to leave their bodies tenantless.
In company with the Nazim (district officer) I started out betimes in the morning—passed the large grey bungalow of the Rajah's chief minister, the lunatic asylum, long cactus hedges and gardens in which white-domed cenotaphs of buried chiefs gleamed among graceful acacia-like Aru trees, while peacocks arched their jewelled necks upon the walls,—and entered the city by that one of its seven gateways called the Moon Door (Chand Pol), crenelated and covered with painted decoration which included a guardian figure on each side of the entrance, turbaned soldiers with fixed bayonets supported on different shoulders in the artist's desire for symmetry.
The gateway was really like a large square tower with considerable open space inside, thatched huts leaning up against its outer wall. Inside the city the wide well-paved streets looked so clean and spacious and the pinkcoloured stucco of the houses so bright and gay, that Death seemed a cruel intruder there without excuse. Yet three corpses were carried past us while we stopped for a moment. "The one in yellow is a woman," said the Nazim. I asked why a group of Mohammedans sat in the courtyard of a house near us, and the Nazim said: "Someone has died there—these are friends met to read some of the aphorisms of the Koran."
The day before there had been fifty-four deaths in the city, which was some decrease as the daily toll had quite recently reached one hundred.
In the Chand Pol Bazaar there were not many people about, though to the stranger there was no evidence of calamity beyond the occasional passing of corpses. The sunshine was so bright and the air so pleasant, and a crowd of pigeons fluttered and strutted with such animation round a sacred bull! Near us a small peepul tree hung over one wall of a red sandstone temple—the Sita Ramjika—like a fountain of green and gold.
At the famous observatory Mr Gokul Chandra Bhawan Raj Jotshi, who is in charge of it, showed me round the strange gigantic instruments. We examined the largest sundial in the world, with gnomon 75 feet high; and standing in the paridhi, the circumference of the dial, I could see, above some pink dwelling houses, the clock in the palace tower which is regulated by the old dial.
Very curious are the twelve houses of the Zodiac (Rashi Valya) each with a little painting of its celestial landlord upon the thickness of the wall under its four-centred arch.
The Nazim took me on to see the Maharajah's Palace, and in its lovely gardens, near a tree of Kachnar in full bloom, we came upon the tomb of a pet dog whose memory had been honoured with a sculpture of his canine incarnation carved in black marble and protected by a dome-topped marble kiosk. The Nazim said the dog had been loved for his extreme obedience, and there was a tale of some gold bangle lost in a billiard-room which he had restored to a despairing owner. It was a graceful monument in beautiful surroundings and a great contrast to the unpleasing tombstones in that crowded little canine cemetery near the Marble Arch in London, but there was another piece of sculpture in that garden which I was more anxious to see, but which, alas for me! was hidden that morning.
Gobindaji, said to be one of the most beautiful of the carved figures at Muttra, was brought here for safety by the Maharajah Mon Singh, and is apparently treated as if the stone has quite corporeal needs, for the Nazim said: "True he lives at the bottom of this garden. He has his hours:
sometimes he has just taken his food and sometimes he is sleeping. Just now he sleeps, so you are not able to see him."
I love most gardens where old statues sleep, but without any wish to disturb their slumbers possess some little of Aladdin's curiosity—or Coventry Tom's; besides, had I known Gobindaji's hours I would have timed my visit more opportunely. As it was, in this garden where dogs have monuments and statues lunch, I could at least enjoy the jasmine flowers and the blossoms of the pomegranates and the grapevines trailing over rough stone uprights.
At the bottom of the garden we passed through a door in the wall, and walking down a narrow flight of steps beheld the Rajah's crocodiles under the windows of the zenana quarters. The keeper of the crocodiles was an old white-bearded man, extremely tall and thin—so thin in fact that his charges must have long ceased to wait with any eagerness for indiscretion in too near approach. The spacious tank was enclosed on three sides by a wall, and on the fourth by the palace itself. We had descended by the steps from a terrace and stood on a small piece of muddy ground on to which the thin keeper enticed his huge charges by throwing a bundle of rag towards them and withdrawing it by a string. In the middle of some beautiful public gardens close to the city stands Jaipur's "Albert Hall," a large building in white marble, which contains a durbar hall and a fine collection of examples of Indian art and industry. Its courts are decorated with mottoes translated from Persian and Hindoo literature, and as maxims for guidance they are not at all easy to reconcile with each other. From the Hitopadesa, for example, on one wall is quoted:—
"Fortune attends the lion-hearted man Who acts with energy; weak-minded persons Sit idly waiting for some gift of fate."
And on another from the same source is written:—
"He has all wealth who has a mind contented. To one whose foot is covered with a shoe
The earth appears all carpeted with leather."
After all they represent different aspirations and only mystify because they are marshalled here as from the same authority. One man would rather have a rough road tearing his defenceless feet as he treads it with a purpose, while another would prefer to watch a garden sundial marking contented hours that leave no record behind them. And the first might fall powerless on the wayside, and the second shatter a kingdom by the report of quiet words.
There are aviaries of beautiful birds in the gardens about the museum— rose-coloured flamingoes and Rajput parrots with heads like peaches and pale grey "Mussulmans" from Mecca, with primrose crests and orange cheeks.
At his bungalow not far away I had the pleasure of a chat with Sir Swinton Jacobs, the dear old engineer and architect who has done so much to keep alive traditions of Indian craft-work, and is one of the very few Englishmen who has not flown from India when white hairs came.
In all India no spot has been so rapturously praised for its beauty as Udaipur in Rajputana and its lake-reflected palaces. Travelling towards it from Jaipur I found myself a day later in the State of Mewar, passing fields of the white opium poppies for which the State is famous.
Udaipur is a white town and comes quite suddenly into view after you have been watching from the train a lovely range of hills, warm and glowing. The bright railway station is a grey stone building with a square tower, and the lower part of it is half smothered in pale convolvulus. The flowers are glorious at Udaipur, and I found the white house of the British Resident bowered in magnificent bougainvillias. This gentleman kindly promised to ask the Maharana to grant me a sitting for a painting.
Driving over a bridge past crenelated walls, a road hedged by dense broad-leaved cactus, led me on to a forest of leafless trees softer in colour than an olive wood. It was like a forest from a fairy-tale, with troops of wild
long-legged swine and peacocks, their bright tails rushing through the branches like a coloured wind. Then I came out upon the waterside where the white group of palaces with their long sloping ramps, their many flights of steps and galleries, their towers and cupolas, rose up majestically, unrivalled save by their own reflection in the lake. What part was plaster looked like marble, and what was marble glowed tremulously warm like some white mineral counterpart of flesh.
THE PALACE OF THE MAHARAJAH OF UDAIPUR. [DRYPOINT ETCHING.]
Four rowers pulled me in a long boat to the Jag Mandar, one of two palaces which, completely covering the small islands on which they are built, appear to be floating upon the water. I landed at some wide steps at one end of a terrace on which four stone elephants stand with raised trunks saluting. A band of darker colour upon their legs and on the walls showed
that the water was at a lower level than it sometimes reached. There was a garden within the walls of the palace from which three palms rose high above the rounded shapes of lower growing trees.
The Maharana had consented to give me a sitting of one hour at four o'clock in the afternoon. A two-horse carriage took me through the city to the lake-front and then along under the white walls of the palace. More than ever as I passed close beneath them was I struck by the similarity in general shape of one great series of towers to those of old Baynard's Castle; but never have the waters of the Thames reflected so white a building! And the beauty of that vast whiteness destroyed for me forever the old argument which tries to explain the former strong coloration of Greek architecture by saying that large surfaces of white building would have been intolerable under Southern sun.
After I had arranged my easel in the room, which had been fixed upon for the painting, the Maharana entered, carrying a long sword in a green scabbard. We bowed to each other and after moving to the chair which had been placed for him he motioned me to be seated also.
Of all the native princes in India, the Maharana of Udaipur has the longest pedigree, and his kingdom is the only Rajput State which can boast that it never gave a daughter in marriage to a Moghul emperor. This tall and dignified chieftain is High Priest of Siva as well as ruler of the State of Mewar, and is revered for his religious office no less than for his temporal sovereignty. He is thoroughly and proudly loyal to the British rule, but a brother of the Englishman who did his utmost (in accordance with expressed wishes from high quarters) to bring him to the Coronation Durbar of 1903, once told me that on the morning of the great function "my brother found Udaipur on the floor of his tent, stark naked and ill with fever, so that he could not go."
His beard and moustache were brushed upwards and stained with some dye which made them a metallic blue colour. A small turban came down over the left temple. He wore no orders or decorations, and his only jewellery consisted in a double row of pearls round the neck and one diamond ring on the right hand. A long gown, with close-fitting sleeves,
made of maroon-coloured cloth, and bound at the waist by a belt and a white sash, clothed him from the neck to the velvet-shod feet.
He had agreed to sit for me for one hour but I thought, in spite of his gentle dignity, the first quarter was for him a long while going. During that time no one had spoken, and I asked whether he had not in the palace some teller of stories who might keep him from feeling the irksomeness of sitting so long in one position. When the interpreter explained my suggestion he smiled and asked whether it could trouble me if he talked with his ministers; and two of these, coming forward at my acquiescence, talked with him throughout the rest of the sitting, and as he still kept well his position for me the change was mutually agreeable.
To my left, beyond an outer gallery, lay the beautiful lake, and, crowning a hill immediately opposite, shone the whiteness of the Summer Palace.
On my way back from Udaipur I stopped at Chitorgarh, fifty miles away, to drive to the famous fortress city of Chitor, the former capital of Mewar.
The hill of Chitor lies on the flat land like a long mole or hog's back. All along its crest old tawny buildings with towers and turrets stretch in a broken line as if they formed the ridge of some old saurian's back with many of the spines broken. Rather beyond the centre the Tower of Victory, yellow and tawny as the rest of the buildings, appears sharply prominent. Trees circle the hill at its base and rising from among them the road leads steeply along and up the side of the cliff in one long zigzag. The slopes of the hill looked grey as I approached.
The tonga I had engaged to drive me from Chitorgarh crossed by a stone parapeted bridge the almost empty River Ghamberi, in the bed of which the bare rock jutted up in sloping shelves. We passed a cemetery and several fields of green barley, and the zigzag road up the hill looked more imposing the nearer we drew, with its eye-holed curtain wall, its bastions and towers. Still in the plain below, we now entered through the pointed arch of a gateway the bazaar of modern Chitor. It was full of dogs, pigeons, cattle and people,—a narrow crowded street at right angles to the hill. We turned by the large white Kotwali and a beautiful temple porch and passed houses with
