Page:Viscount Hardinge and the Advance of the British Dominions into the Punjab.djvu/161

Rh India in later years; but no one who was present on this occasion can have forgotten the strange and picturesque scene. The sagacious animals crashed through the heavy jungle, uprooting with their trunks the smaller trees in their way, and avoiding with natural instinct the dangerous bogs that abounded. The sport was excellent, two or three tigers being brought back to camp each day. The Lord Sahib was as keen as the youngest staff-officer, especially when a tiger was on foot. We all felt that he had well earned such relaxation after the constant anxieties of the last two years.

Thence we proceeded to Cawnpur, then known only as a large cantonment and a prosperous mercantile town, but destined ten years later to be the scene of that terrible tragedy with which its name must ever hereafter be associated. There we crossed the Ganges, and entered the dominions of the King of Oudh, which are naturally fertile and densely inhabited. The population especially attracted our notice, as supplying at that time the best high-caste Sepoys to the Bengal army. Lucknow, the capital, is a good specimen of an Eastern city, studded with palaces, mosques, and other picturesque buildings. When illuminated at night, as on the occasion of the Governor-General's visit, the effect was most striking. I can only speak of Lucknow as it was in 1847. The vicissitudes which it has since gone through may have changed its aspect materially; but in those days its situation on the river Gúmti, with the mosque of