Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/135

Rh Alas! what scenes of perfidy and blood have been witnessed within the walls of this Dewan Khass! Sleeman and others have narrated some of them, but the half has not been told, and all are only known to Heaven. The last of them, in 1857, exhausted the patience of the Almighty, and the dynasty and their Khass were destroyed by that “stone” which then fell upon them, and ground them to powder.

Here in this hall, which he himself had built, sat the great Shah Jehan, obliged to receive the insolent commands of his own grandson, Mohammed, when flushed with victory, and to offer him the throne, merely to disappoint the expectations of the youth's rebel father. Here sat Aurungzebe—Shah Jehan's fourth son—when he ordered the assassination of his own brothers, Dara and Morad, and the imprisonment and destruction by slow poison of his own son Mohammed, who had so often fought bravely by his side in battle. Here, too, stood in chains the graceful Sooleeman, to receive his sentence of death, with his poor young brother. Sipeher Shekoh, who had shared all his father's toils and dangers, and witnessed his brutal murder. And here sat the handsome, but effeminate, Mohammed Shah, in March, 1739, bandying compliments with his ferocious conqueror, Nadir Shah, the Persian King, who had destroyed his armies, plundered his treasury, appropriated his throne, and ordered the murder of nearly one hundred thousand of the helpless inhabitants of his capital, men, women, and children, in a general massacre. The bodies of these people lay unburied in the streets, tainting the air, while the two sovereigns sat here sipping their coffee in the presence of their courtiers, and swearing to the most deliberate lies in the name of their God, prophet, and Koran!

Sleeman relates that on this occasion the coffee was brought into the Dewan Khass upon a golden salver, and delivered to the two sovereigns by the most polished gentleman of Mohammed Shah's Court. Precedence and public courtesies are, in the East, managed and respected with a tenacity and importance that to us of the Western world seems positively ridiculous.