Roving East and Roving West | Page 8

the garden and palace of Delhi Fort as the loveliest spot in
India. Not the most beautiful, not the most impressive; but the loveliest.
The Taj Mahal has a greater beauty; the ruined city of Fatehpur-Sikri
has a greater dignity; but for the perfection of domestic regality in
design and material and workmanship, this marble home and mosque
and accompanying garden and terrace could not be excelled. After the
Halls of Audience we come to the seraglio and accompanying buildings,
where everything is perfect and nothing is on the grand scale. The Pearl
Mosque could hardly be smaller; and it is as pure and fresh as a lotus.
There is a series of apartments all in white marble (with inlayings of
gold and the most delicately pierced marble gratings) through which a
stream of water used to run (and it ran again at the Coronation Durbar
in 1911, when the Royal Baths were again made to "function") that
must be one of the most magical of the works of man. Every inch is
charming and distinguished. All these rooms are built along the high

wall which in the time of Shah Jahan and his many lady loves was
washed by the Jumna. But to-day the river has receded and a broad
strip of grass intervenes.

A DAY'S HAWKING
One of my best Indian days was that on which Colonel Sir Umar Hayat
Khan took us out a-hawking. Sir Umar is himself something of a
hawk--an impressive figure in his great turban with long streamers, his
keen aquiline features and blackest of hair. All sport comes naturally to
him, whether hunting or shooting, pig-sticking, coursing or falconry;
and the Great War found him with a sportsman's eagerness to rush into
the fray, where he distinguished himself notably.
We found this gallant chieftain in the midst of his retainers on the
further bank of the Jumna, at the end of the long bridge. Here the plains
begin--miles of fields of stubble, with here and there a tree and here
and there a pool or marsh, as far as eye can reach, an ancient walled
city in the near distance being almost the only excrescence. Between
the river and this city was our hunting ground.
With the exception of Sir Umar, two of his friends and ourselves, the
company was on foot; and nothing more like the middle ages did I ever
see. The retainers were in every kind of costume, one having an old
pink coat and one a green; one leading a couple of greyhounds in case
we put up a hare; others carrying guns (for we were prepared for all);
while the chief falconer and his assistants had their hawks on their
wrists, and one odd old fellow was provided with a net, in which a
captive live hawk was to flutter and struggle to attract his hereditary
foes, the little birds, who, deeming him unable to hit back, were to
swarm down to deride and defy and be caught in the meshes.
I may say at once that hawking, particularly in this form, does not give
me much pleasure. There is something magnificent in the flight of the
falcon when it is released and flung towards its prey, but the odds are
too heavy in its favour and the whimperings of the doomed quarry

strike a chill in the heart. We flew our hawks at duck and plovers, and
missed none. Often the first swoop failed, but the deadly implacable
pursuer was instantly ready to swoop again, and rarely was a third
manoeuvre necessary. Man, under the influence of the excitement of
the chase, is the same all the world over, and there was no difference
between these Indians moving swiftly to intervene between the hawk
and its stricken prey and an English boy running to retrieve his rabbit.
Their animation and triumph--even their shouts and cries--were alike.
And so we crossed field after field on our gentle steeds--and no one
admires gentleness in a horse more than I--stopping only to watch
another tragedy of the air, or to look across the river to Delhi and see
the Fort under new conditions. All this country I had so often looked
down upon from those high massive walls, standing in one of the
lovely windows of Shah Jahan's earthly paradise; and now the scene
was reversed, and I began to take more delight in it than in the sport.
But at a pond to which we next came there was enacted a drama so
absorbing that everything else was forgotten, even the heat of the sun.
Upon this pond were three wild-duck at which a falcon was instantly
flown. For a while, however, they kept their presence of mind and
refused to leave the water--diving beneath the surface at the moment