Page:Ranjit Singh (Griffin).djvu/95

Rh exaggeration I must call him the most ugly and unprepossessing man I saw throughout the Punjab. His left eye, which is quite closed, disfigures him less than the other, which is always rolling about wide open and is much distorted by disease. The scars of the small-pox on his face do not run into one another but form so many dark pits in his greyish-brown skin; his short straight nose is swollen at the tip; the skinny lips are stretched tight over his teeth which are still good; his grizzled beard, very thin on the cheeks and upper lip, meets under the chin in matted confusion, and his head, which is sunk very much on his broad shoulders, is too large for his height, and does not seem to move easily. He has a thick muscular neck, thin arms and legs, the left foot and left arm drooping, and small well-formed hands. He will sometimes hold a stranger's hand fast within his own for half-an-hour, and the nervous irritation of his mind is shown by the continual pressure on one's fingers. His costume always contributes to increase his ugliness, being in winter the colour of gamboge from the Pagri (the turban or Sikh cloth) down to his very socks and slippers. When he seats himself in a common English chair with his feet drawn under him, the position is one particularly unfavourable to him, but as soon as he mounts his horse and with his black shield at his back puts him on his mettle, his whole form seems animated by the spirit within, and assumes a certain grace of which nobody could believe it susceptible. In spite of the paralysis affecting one side, he manages his horse with the utmost ease.'

This striking picture is unprepossessing enough; but, previous to his paralytic seizure which occurred in 1834, Ranjít Singh, although short of stature and disfigured by that cruel disease which was wont to decimate the Punjab, and which still, in spite of