Page:Old Deccan Days.djvu/16

 x From Dharwar we crossed the river Krishna, a matter of some difficulty—the elephants, horses, camels, mules, and bullocks swimming, the camp equipage being conveyed on rafts supported on jars or inflated skins, and my father and I, with two of his Staff, crossing in a circular coracle of wicker-work.

From the further bank of the Krishna we rode across interminable plains of black-soiled, cotton-growing country to the ruined Mahometan capital of Beejapore, the vast dome of whose great mosque (thirteen feet larger in diameter than that of St. Paul's), is to be seen standing out clearly against the sky hours before the city itself is reached. Of Beejapore—with its Motee Musjid (Pearl Mosque); its Soap-Stone Mosque; its big eleven ton brass gun, cast by a Turk in the sixteenth century, in which a grown-up person can sit upright; its wonderful Library (of which all that remained had been rescued from destruction by my father some twenty years before, and is now to be studied by those that so will, in the India Office Library in Westminster); its shrine, where are shown the three hairs of Mahomet's beard, and its numberless local traditions and legends of all kinds—this is not the place to tell.

From Beejapore we crossed the Bheema river, and went to Sholapore, whence we returned to Poona by railway.

Some record of the country we traversed is to be found in the Duke of Wellington's Despatches, but much of its manifold interests and wild romantic history has never yet been said or sung. The glory of its works of art, the grandeur of its scenery, the living interest of the faith and fortunes of its people;—whose races represent all forms of Oriental barbarism and civilisation, from the Bedhur whose sole sustenance is parched millet-seed, to the wealthy Mahometan and Hindoo aristocracy and merchants of the great towns.

As there was no other lady in the Camp, and I sometimes had no lady visitors for some days together, I was necessarily much alone.

One day, being tired of reading, writing, and sketching, I asked Anna, my constant attendant, whose caste (the Lingaet) belonged to part of the country that we were traversing, if she could not tell me a story? This she declared to be impossible. I said, 'You have children and grandchildren, surely you tell them stories to amuse them sometimes?' She then said she would try and remember one, such as she told her grandchildren, and which