Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924073057345).pdf/380

 372 LUC other of the victims of the Mitauli Rája's gratitude and hospitality (Sir M. Jackson, Captain Orr, Lieutenant Burns, Sergeant Morton, on the 16th November, 1858,) completed the tale of sickness, imprisonment, indignity, and despair, by suffering a cruel martyrdom. A memorial has been put up to commemorate these massacres, almost on the spot where they occurred. Both of them were chiefly owing to the fury of the defeated sepoys when they could no louger resist the advance of General Havelock and of the Commander-in-Chief, but both were also instigated and encour- aged by the leaders of the rebellion, and the nobles of Oudh. One of these leaders, Rája Jai Lál Singh, a man of large territorial possessions, and of great influence with the mutineers, followed the first party of prisoners to the fatal scene, and mounted one of the gates of the Qaisar Bágh, since destroyed, in order better to feast his eyes on their dying agonies, and to applaud the prowess of his sepoys. Two years bad elapsed since that time, he had been received into favour; his rebellion had been condoned under the amnesty, and haply he persuaded himself that the memory of that deed had faded away, that even he might hope to die the common death of all men, and be visited by the visitation of all men. But justice, though slowly, was following surely in the criminal's track. Like the storied cranes of Ibycus, it came on hina when he least expected it, from the quarter where he thought himself safest. His own confiden- tial servants tumed against him, link after link, a wonderful chain of circumstantial evidence developed itself, and heaped the guilt with deadly certainty on his head. On the 1st day of October, 1859, on the very spot where his crime was committed, he paid the extremest penalty of the law. And this was followed, on the 12th of October, by the execution of Bandeh Kusen and Fateh Ali, who had hunted down and brought into Lucknow some of the poor captives massacred here. The Roshan-ud-daula Kothi, the present district Kachehri, was built by Nasír-ud-din Haidar's minister, whose name it bears. Muhammad Ali Shah, uncle of Nasír-ud-dín Haidar (A.D. 1837), built the splendid Husenabad Imámbára as a burial place for himself; it consists of two large enclosures, one of which is at right angles to the other. Leaving the fort by the great Rúmi Darwáza, a broad road near the Gumti, about a quarter of a mile long, conducts to the gate of the outer quadrangle. The visitor standing a little west of the road can take in at one view the great Imámbára and Rúmi Darwaza to the right, with the Husenabad and the Jáma Masjid to the left. The whole forms, as Bishop Heber remarks, one of the finest architectural views in the world. This king also laid out the road that leads to it from the Chhatar Manzil through the fort along the banks of the river. Along with the Husenabad Imambara Muhammad Ali Shah built a magnificent tank, which stands by the side of the road, and began a mosque at a short distance from the imámbára which was intended to surpass the Jáma Masjid (at Delhi) in size, but which he never lived to complete. It stands still unfinished, with the scaffolding gradually rotting away, untouched since the day he died. He also began a watch tower, a " Sat