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. CITIES SEEN IN EAST & WEST BY ( dX-/u^.,j')c_, pM/t MRS. WALTER TIBBITS AUTHOR OF "the VOICE OF THE ORIENT" Cain builded a city. GiNKSK. WITH 34 ILLUSTRATIONS LONDON HURST & BLACKETT, LTD. PATERNOSTER HOUSE, E.G. 1912 ^-^ t ^ * ^ - ' : : T T ^ .^: THE GOLDEN MOSQUE City of cities, are you a dream ? Do you simply drift on the heart's gold gleam ? Do you float on the banks of the brain's blue stream ? Is there no such city anywhere ? L.M. CONTENTS PART LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The Golden Mosque Frontispiece FACING PAGE Ballygarth Castle 4 L'EsCALIER DES AnGES 24 The Aloes throw Indigo Shadows 30 The Temple of Mammon 52 The Ocean Tramp 60 The Early, Pearly Morning at Port Said 60 The City of the Sun . 120 The Reflections are More Beautiful than the Reality 128 Driving down the Eternal Avenues 128 " Terraces made by the " Light of the World 130 Fountains guarded by Giant Chenars (Shalimar) 132 The Martand Temple to Mahadev 134 A Grove of Iris 136 " " FiCKE Neh, Mem Sahib ! 138 The Priest came down from the Temple 140 The Casket of Love 142 The Snowy Marble Platform 144 In the Garden of Love 146 Akbar's Pillar of Philosophy 158 In the City of Lions 180 The Tomb of Subtlety (Itmad-ud-daula, at Agra). 2 A ix CITIES SEEN IN EAST AND WEST FACING PAGE The Tomb of Subtlety—Detail In Wazir Khan's Mosque 192 Temples of the Great Ascetic 208 The Seething Swirl of Pilgrims 220 Sins in Solution 222 The Garment of a Lovely Child 302 The Island of Gold 328 The Mysterious By-waterways of the City 330 Bridges as Beautiful as the Bridge of Sighs 33^ The Misty Shadows of the Asiatic Venice . 33+ Evening is the Time for Prayer . 336 A Shivite Brahmani 338 PART I TO THE MEN AND WOMEN MET IN ALL CITIES AND SEAS WHO ALSO HAFE WISHED FOR ALL SENSATIONS PREAMBLE TO THOSE LEFT BEHIND The true traveller has never left the goal of his travels till he reaches a land in which all social duties vanish—even the sug- gestion of them. Then the spell begins to be woven round him. The men and women he sees are no longer fellow-citizens, but figures moving in a magician's crystal. The streets and gardens he passes through all belong to fairyland, and take the colour of his own longings and fancies, just like the woman seen by Faust on the Brocken, who to each man looking at her had the likeness of the woman he loved. We are, in fact, under happy circumstances such as these, redeemed for a little from what life has done to us, and we walk amongst images of what we once hoped it would do. In an Enchanted Island. TXT'HEN my first book appeared, among those ^ ' who, from royalty to bookstall boys, were good enough to acclaim there was some blame. With the critics, the ladies and gentlemen of the Press, it was indeed a case of tot homines tot sententia. While several saluted "a true poet," one shook his Presbyterian head over " a frank pagan." One man hailed me as " the Lafcadio Hearn of India," while another denounced me to moralists as " worse than Rabelais." A woman found me "a pure mystic," a man *' a thousand times worse than de Maupassant." He wished my work kept out of the country as " smelling of oriental hotbeds, which made his brain reel," while yet another knight of the pen scented it as " a bouquet of delicious xvi CITIES SEEN IN EAST AND WEST flowers." The man of The World felt it his duty to awaken Puritan England to " a female keeper of a literary opium den," the Catholic Times recognised " a heroine " and " a strong and great soul." The Academy^ edited by Lord Alfred Douglas, condemned the work as " too voluptuous " and thus joined forces with the daughters of the vicar of Bray who thought it " too fast " for their parochial library, but read it and lent it in their own private circle. But friend and foe, those who blessed and those who cursed, were all agreed on one thing, that my book was different from every other book. That is something at this stage of the world's history. But I have never tried to be original, only to be true. It is hard to keep one's own brain calm while tossed, faint yet pursuing, in this maelstrom of opinion. I would wish to mollify one eminent critic who wrote from Fleet Street vexed in spirit that I had not narrated more of what I saw and did in India and Kashmir. More information he wanted specially about the boatman of Ganderbal. He would have been delighted for him to have been hugged by a bear, to have seen us chased by a tiger. Such books are written at Charing Cross and in the Strand. But in the Orient it is what people think that matters. The tigers, the cobras, the rajahs, the howdahs are the least of her marvels. They only mask the Behind. You will see in the second division of this book that Aladdin's dreams shrivel before India's mysteries. The real reward for the time, travel, and trouble expended on the production of The Voice of the Orient is in the letters of the men and women in every part of the world who have written thanks for help it has given them : letters written in English PREAMBLE xvii country-houses and in Irish demesnes, in London hotels and in quiet Thames-side rectories, on Parisian boulevards and from Hungarian fastnesses, from busy Australian capitals and solitary New Zealand stations, from palatial yachts and from canvas tents, penned by the busy fingers of British ofiicers in far- away frontier forts, as well as by the subtler brains of the Children of the Sun in their marble palace on the lake of Udaipur, and by others brooding in the dim windings of Indian cities and bazaars. They will never know how much they were valued ! There is a Parisienne whose books have an enormous sale in France because they are romans vecus. They are the last word for those interested in the world which they describe, li this narrative seems to adopt a tone too personal, I must plead in extenuation that I also have written only and solely from experience, of history lived. How many women " at home " are dying to start " " too ! When one has loved the wide world at home means a prison cell. Two friends, officers' wives, live vis-a-vis in lodgings in a hideous garrison town. The dust whirls in sheets through the squalid streets in the spring. The grey drizzle obscures the days which should be summer. The winter brings hack- ing coughs to lungs lately breathing tropical heat. Their windows look on to a grey landscape, scudding clouds, and furious windmills. The daily and hourly prayer of these women, as of hundreds of others in England, is to return to India. One of them was last met in Bombay. Then her life was passed in palmy palaces. Now the daily round consists of tradesmen's books and provincial tea-parties. The future, poor little woman, holds nothing brighter than retired pay and a depot. Even more pathetic xviii CITIES SEEN IN EAST AND WEST is the wistful Godspeed of one to whom India gave a royal state which many princesses of the blood of Europe would envy. Once guns thundered at the approach of her scarlet and gold liveries, and a body- guard trotted ahead of her carriage, and everywhere on her triumphal progress through the land were depu- tations and decorations and shamianas and bowing A.D.C.'s on crimson carpets. There is, perhaps, no greater vicissitude in the gamut of human experience than to drop from such a life to the Streatham villa and "first-aid" lectures. From an ex-Resident's wife came a kindly farewell. Till lately she dispensed royal hospitality in Kashmir. Her barge upon the Jhelum rivalled Cleopatra's. Its crew in vermilion cloth paddled swiftly up and down the river. In rest it lay moored among groves of purple iris. Now she shivers in chilly English country-houses and yawns among beefy relatives, while her lord, lately the guardian angel of a state larger than Holland, kicks up his heels and wonders what on earth to do. From an older woman who has let life slip past her comes the saddest message of all, written by the sight of the one eye left : "If 1 were only younger and " could go too ! The door into the life romantic opens to the aspirant widest in the world of travel. The giant rock of Gibraltar guards its entrance. Algeciras, lulled in the sea-green lights of a stormy evening, promises lethe of the past. In that world too, in every land, you will find your friends, the people who count, whose personalities leave a mark. A freemasonry exists the earth over amongst such. " It is the power we like," said Cecil Rhodes to Melba. PREAMBLE xix Your enemies are the everyday people, the genteel Hodge. If you are wise you will shun him like the plague. Let him chaw his bacon while you sip golden wine. The first part of this book is dedicated to you. The second part is for a different circle. It is for those men and women, forming a belt of fire all round the world, of every colour, creed, and clime, who have known and sickened of all experiences of the outer life and wish for definite knowledge of the World Unseen, but have not yet the power to penetrate it for themselves.

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