Mutiny was their rule extinguished. As I have just said, in India the
sense of chronology vanishes, or goes astray, and it is with a start
that one is confronted, in the Museum in Delhi Fort, by a photograph of
the last Mogul!

In Bombay, during my wakeful moments in the hottest part of the day, I
had passed the time and imbibed instruction by reading the three
delightful books of the late E. H. Aitken, who called himself "Eha"--
"Behind the Bungalow," "The Tribes on My Frontier" and "A Naturalist on
the Prowl." No more amusing and kindly studies of the fauna, flora and
human inhabitants of a country can have ever been written than these;
and I can suggest, to the domestically curious mind, no better
preparation for a visit to India. But at Raisina, when the cool evenings
set in and it was pleasant to get near the wood fire, I took to history
and revelled in the story of the Moguls as told by many authorities, but
most entertainingly perhaps by Tavernier, the French adventurer who took
service under Aurungzebe. If any one wants to know what Delhi was like
in the seventeenth century during Aurungzebe's long reign, and how the
daily life in the Palace went, and would learn more of the power and
autocracy and splendour and cruelty of the Grand Moguls, let him get
Tavernier's record. If once I began to quote from it I should never
stop; and therefore I pass on, merely remarking that when you have
finished the travels of M. Tavernier, the travels of M. Bernier, another
contemporary French observer, await you. And I hold you to be envied.

The Palace in the Fort is now but a fraction of what it was in the time
of Aurungzebe and his father, but enough remains to enable the
imaginative mind to reconstruct the past, especially if one has read my
two annalists. One of Bernier's most vivid passages describes the Diwan-
i-Am, or Hall of Public Audience, the building to which, after leaving