Golden Afternoon (10 page)

Mother, who dabbled in watercolours and would, during the succeeding years, paint the fort again and again, made her first attempts to capture it on Cox's paper,
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standing sentinel above the flat-topped roofs of the city, dark against a clean expanse of clear, turquoise sky; while Tacklow
told me an intriguing story about it that the old Maharajah had told him long ago. I have never forgotten that tale. It still fascinates me, so if you are sitting comfortably (or even if you aren't) I now propose to tell it to you …

It concerns the old Maharajah — Scindia of Gwalior — and a fabulous treasure that according to local legend was buried centuries ago somewhere within the fort. This, according to the Maharajah, had been searched for by several generations of the ruling house, including himself. He had, he said, searched for it again and again in his youth, until there was hardly a foot of ground within the circumference of that enormous fort that had not been probed and dug over, or examined for signs of a secret chamber. In the end he had decided that there was no truth in the story. But one day an aged man appeared at one of his public
durbahs
(councils) and asked for a private audience, saying that he was an astrologer who had some very important information to impart that was for the ear of His Highness alone …

Well, it was not Scindia's custom (so His Highness assured Tacklow) to grant private audiences to strangers. But something about this particular petitioner aroused his curiosity. And since the man looked far too old and frail to be planning any rough stuff (and even if he had, he, Scindia, felt himself to be more than capable of dealing with anything in that department), he consented, and the two withdrew to the
Diwani-i-Khas
, the Hall of Private Audience.

Only when he was certain that everyone else had been excluded did the old man, lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper, confide that he knew the secret hiding-place of the treasure. He had, he claimed, seen it himself and was prepared to show His Highness the hiding-place. But only on one condition: if, on the night of the next full moon — then only a few days ahead — His Highness would come alone and unarmed to the main gate at the foot of the rock upon which the fort was built, he would meet him there and lead him to where the treasure lay. Was the Maharajah-Sahib prepared to take the risk?

His Highness thought the matter over and inquired if the old man too would come alone and unarmed? ‘Certainly,' replied the stranger; moreover, should the Maharajah-Sahib wish, he could come to the assignation with as large an armed guard as he desired. But they must stay outside the outer gate and he must go the rest of the way alone. ‘Done!' said H. H., and when the old man had gone he took certain precautions.

For two days before the night of the full moon, the fort was closed to the public and exhaustively searched to ensure that the stranger did not have a gang hidden there among the ancient ruins, or in one of the empty palaces — the beautiful Chit Mahal or the Jahangeri Mahal, or any of the old disused buildings that had once been used as gaols, and whose foundations were pitted with underground cells. In addition, on the night of the full moon the foot of the entire rock was ringed by troops — ‘So that not even a mongoose could have slipped out unseen.'

True to his word, the old astrologer was waiting outside the first of the outer gates, alone and unarmed, carrying nothing but a hurricane-lamp. After he was searched the two were admitted, and together they climbed the long, steep road in the bright moonlight. Once through the gateway on the summit the old man stopped, and turning to Scindia said that from now on the Maharajah-Sahib must go blindfold. When Scindia jibbed at this he was told that in that case they would have to call the whole thing off and go back, and since he obviously meant it, H. H. gave in. Whereupon his guide blindfolded him very efficiently and led him forward.

Thereafter the two walked and walked for what seemed like hours, twisting and turning, climbing up and down stairways and in and out of empty buildings, so that in no time at all Scindia had lost all sense of direction and hadn't the least idea where he was or in which direction he was facing. Then at long last they began to descend a narrow stone stairway that wound down and down into cold, airless blackness …

The old Maharajah — who had been a young man then — told Tacklow that he could just make out a faint gleam of light from the hurricane-lamp at the edge of the bandage across his eyes. But that was all. Then all at once, after they had groped their way down for a long time, he thought he heard the sound of soft footsteps creeping down behind him. He strained his ears to listen, and soon became certain that there
was
a third person on the stair. Stout-hearted as he was, he panicked, believing that despite all his precautions he had let himself be lured into a trap and that he was being led to his death.

He had not brought a gun or a knife with him, but had taken the precaution of hiding a weapon in the shape of a short length of lead among his clothing. Now, bringing this out, he snatched his hand from the clasp of his guide's elderly, claw-like hand and, ripping the bandage from his eyes, hit the old man as hard as he could at the base of his skull.
He said he heard the bone crack and as the old man fell forward the lamp, released, crashed to the ground, flared up and went out. Scindia was left in pitch darkness. Gripped by panic, and armed only with the lead truncheon, he turned and fled back up the stairs, guiding himself with one hand against the cold, slimy stone of the curving wall, and, he confessed, in deadly fear of running straight on to the knife of an armed assassin above him. But he met no one.

He told Tacklow that the narrow stairway seemed to wind up for ever, and that when he reached the top, gasping and breathless, he made for the first gleam of moonlight he could see. After groping his way through a maze of dark rooms, and gaping doorways that seemed to lead nowhere, he found himself in the open at last and rushed out into the night, yelling for his guards, and with no idea where he was because, by that time, the moon was well down in the sky and all the shadows were far longer and lying at a different angle. He had, he confessed, worked himself into such a state of terror that he rushed to and fro, screaming and shouting like a lunatic, and when at last he found himself on the slope below one of the inner gates, he pelted down it and collapsed into the arms of the anxious guard with barely enough breath to order that no one must be allowed to leave the rock until further orders.

It was only when he awoke next day that he realized that the footsteps he had heard behind him were probably no more than an echo of his own and his guide's, resounding hollowly in the tunnel-like walls of that winding stair, and that he had almost certainly killed the old astrologer who had been leading him down it. Well, that was too bad. But at least he now knew where to look for the treasure, even though he hadn't the remotest idea in which building or what part of the fort that staircase lay. For now they only had to search for a dead man and a broken kerosene lamp; and neither were insignificant objects that would escape the eye.

No? Well, he was wrong there, admitted old Scindia. They went through the fort with a fine-tooth comb, every foot of it, over and over and over again. Yet they never found a trace of either. No corpse, no broken glass, and no trace of spilled kerosene — or of any stairway that corresponded with the one he had been led down, blindfold, and escaped from in pitch darkness and a state of blind panic. Which could only mean that the entrance to it must have been hidden by a slab of stone that the old man must have been at pains to lift earlier in the evening. Yet if that were so,
how had it been closed? And by whom? ‘For I tell you, my friend,' insisted old Scindia, ‘I heard his skull crack! — on my head and my life, I heard it! Who then let down the stone? Or closed it, if it stands in a wall? Tell me that.'

There is no answer to that one: unless you choose to visit the great fort at Gwalior and see for yourself how easy it would have been for a single accomplice (or even half-a-dozen!) to lie hidden in one of those huge, half-ruined buildings, wait for the moon to rise, and, when the self-styled astrologer appeared with the blindfolded Maharajah in tow, follow the two into that final building, wait for them to emerge from the hidden stairway and — when only one, the panic-stricken ruler — rushed out and fled screaming into the night, cover up the entrance before making his, or her or their own escape.

There is also, of course, another explanation. That His Highness Sir Madhav Rao Scindia of Gwalior was pulling my beloved parent's leg. He was, let's face it, well known for his fondness for practical jokes, and also for being no ordinary character. In his younger days he had managed to blarney himself into accompanying the British Expeditionary Force which, in the opening years of the twentieth century, was sent to China to help put down the Boxer Rising (which was probably the reason for his fondness for my father, since Tacklow, too, as a Captain in the 21st Punjabis, had seen service in North China at that time).

Nevertheless, Tacklow himself was firmly convinced that in this case Scindia had spoken nothing but the truth. This was mainly because H. H. admitted that he had always been haunted by the conviction that if only he had kept his nerve and not given way to panic — if only he had had just a
little
more courage — he would have realized that the footsteps that he thought he heard following him were only echoes, and gone on to find that the fabulous hoard of gold and jewels was no legend, but his for the taking. It was, he insisted, the one great regret that he would take with him to the grave.

If he
had
invented the whole story, said Tacklow (who knew him well), then he had certainly ended by persuading himself that it was all true.

I like to believe that too. India has always been in the habit of salting away gold and jewels in the earth, and I have myself seen a fabulous hoard of gold coins, hidden centuries ago and unearthed by chance in another Rajputana state in the 1940s. In fact, the habit of burying treasure
in times of war, or as an insurance against a rainy day, was so prevalent
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that few Indian palaces or forts would be worthy of the name without a treasure trove having been hidden somewhere at some time under or in it. And what treasures they are! While at Gwalior we were taken to see the State Jewel House, which I had expected to be in some underground dungeon, but turned out to be a small, square, unpretentious and very modern-looking building with whitewashed walls and an armed guard standing outside the door.

The guard, and the fact that the walls of the building looked to be a good six feet thick, while the windows were mere slits protected by solid slabs of glass and further reinforced by iron bars, gave it a forbidding look. But the interior of this modern Aladdin's cave was, at first sight, a distinct anticlimax. It looked far more like a kitchen or a larder than a jewel house, for down the middle of it ran a long, plain wooden kitchen table, while against the whitewashed walls stood what appeared to be an unending line of kitchen dressers, with narrow shelves and row upon row of cheap brass hooks. But laid out on that table, propped on those shelves or hanging from those hooks, were some of the most incredible jewels you could possibly imagine, and I cannot begin to think what they must have been worth in that day — let alone in this one!

Necklaces, rings and brooches, swords and sword-belts, nose-rings and bracelets, anklets and pendants, set with emeralds, rubies, sapphires and diamonds, turquoises, tourmalines, fire opals, amethysts and aquamarines, plus any other jewel you can think of; strings of enormous pearls, the size of pigeons' eggs, hung casually from the brass hooks, side by side with glittering ropes of uncut emeralds, peardrop diamonds and balas rubies.

Some of the diamonds had obviously been sent to Europe, probably to Amsterdam, to be recut, and very splendid they looked. But many of them were table-cut in the old way, and I remember one fabulous sword-belt that was fashioned from wide links of solid gold, each one measuring at least three inches by six, and of a gold so pure that the rows of large diamonds that had been set into it had been hammered into holes gouged out of the soft metal, before being sliced level with the flat surface of the links. Every diamond was roughly the size of my thumbnail, but
though the thing must have been very nearly priceless, the stones, in that setting, lost most of their brilliance and might just as well have been pieces of glass.

It was the sheer casualness with which they were treated that impressed me more than the beauty or value of the jewels. The matter-of-fact manner in which incalculable riches and beauty were carelessly laid out on that unstained and unpolished kitchen table or casually slung on cheap brass hooks. Yet they would have made even the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London look unimportant by contrast.
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Oh, the jewels that were once the glory of India! Where are they now, I wonder? — now that the princes have been deprived of their tides and revenues, and many have been left penniless? So many great names have become no more than the names of towns to which the package tours dispatch their streams of camera-carrying tourists. ‘Where has all the splendour gone? Gone to tourists, every one! Oh will we never learn …'

No, of course we won't. We never do; until it's too late!

One evening we were invited to Jai Vilas, the Maharajah's city palace, to see a famous conjuror who was visiting Gwalior, and I was bitterly disappointed to find that the palace was not in the least like the ones I had seen in Jaipur and Agra, and in the Lai Khila at Delhi. It was a curious western-style mock-up that suggested an over-decorated wedding cake, and was full of European furniture and fittings which included a huge cut-glass fountain, exactly like an immense cruet, in one of the white marble entrance halls.

The palace had, in fact, been built in a tearing hurry in the seventies of the previous century, in anticipation of a visit by Queen Victoria's eldest son, the future King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales. It was designed by an amateur architect, one Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Michael Filose, a one-time British-Indian Army officer who had left the army to enter the service of the state. The Colonel, whose family roots were Italian, obviously had grand ideas; though unfortunately, European rather than Indian ones. But the interior of the palace could not have been more impressive. Cinderella and her prince would have felt truly at home in that vast expanse of shimmering gold. Gold-leaf, gold brocade, gold-plated
this and that, and glittering crystal chandeliers as far as the eye could see. It took your breath away. As for the conjuror, he, too, was out of this world.