'THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT'
[Footnote: Copyright, 1891, by MACMILLAN &Co.]
The dense wet heat that hung over the face of land, like a blanket,prevented all hope of sleep in the first instance. The cicalas helpedthe heat; and the yelling jackals the cicalas. It was impossible to sitstill in the dark, empty, echoing house and watch the punkah beat thedead air. So, at ten o'clock of the night, I set my walking-stick onend in the middle of the garden, and waited to see how it would fall.It pointed directly down the moonlit road that leads to the City ofDreadful Night. The sound of its fall disturbed a hare. She limped fromher form and ran across to a disused Mahomedan burial-ground, where thejawless skulls and rough-butted shank-bones, heartlessly exposed by theJuly rains, glimmered like mother o' pearl on the rain-channelled soil.The heated air and the heavy earth had driven the very dead upward forcoolness' sake. The hare limped on; snuffed curiously at a fragment ofa smoke-stained lamp-shard, and died out, in the shadow of a clump oftamarisk trees.
The mat-weaver's hut under the lee of the Hindu temple was full ofsleeping men who lay like sheeted corpses. Overhead blazed the unwinkingeye of the Moon. Darkness gives at least a false impression of coolness.It was hard not to believe that the flood of light from above was warm.Not so hot as the Sun, but still sickly warm, and heating the heavy airbeyond what was our due. Straight as a bar of polished steel ran theroad to the City of Dreadful Night; and on either side of the road laycorpses disposed on beds in fantastic attitudes--one hundred and seventybodies of men. Some shrouded all in white with bound-up mouths; somenaked and black as ebony in the strong light; and one--that lay faceupwards with dropped jaw, far away from the others--silvery white andashen gray.
'A leper asleep; and the remainder wearied coolies, servants, smallshopkeepers, and drivers from the hackstand hard by. The scene--a mainapproach to Lahore city, and the night a warm one in August.' This wasall that there was to be seen; but by no means all that one could see.The witchery of the moonlight was everywhere; and the world was horriblychanged. The long line of the naked dead, flanked by the rigid silverstatue, was not pleasant to look upon. It was made up of men alone.Were the womenkind, then, forced to sleep in the shelter of the stiflingmud-huts as best they might? The fretful wail of a child from a lowmud-roof answered the question. Where the children are the mothers mustbe also to look after them. They need care on these sweltering nights. Ablack little bullet-head peeped over the coping, and a thin--a painfullythin--brown leg was slid over on to the gutter pipe. There was a sharpclink of glass bracelets; a woman's arm showed for an instant above theparapet, twined itself round the lean little neck, and the child wasdragged back, protesting, to the shelter of the bedstead. His thin,high-pitched shriek died out in the thick air almost as soon as it wasraised; for even the children of the soil found it too hot to weep.
More corpses; more stretches of moonlit, white road, a string ofsleeping camels at rest by the wayside; a vision of scudding jackals;ekka-ponies asleep--the harness still on their backs, and thebrass-studded country carts, winking in the moonlight--and again morecorpses. Wherever a grain cart atilt, a tree trunk, a sawn log, a coupleof bamboos and a few handfuls of thatch cast a shadow, the ground iscovered with them. They lie--some face downwards, arms folded, in thedust; some with clasped hands flung up above their heads; some curledup dog-wise; some thrown like limp gunny-bags over the side of the graincarts; and some bowed with their brows on their knees in the full glareof the Moon. It would be a comfort if they were only given to snoring;but they are not, and the likeness to corpses is unbroken in allrespects save one. The lean dogs snuff at them and turn away. Here andthere a tiny child lies on his father's bedstead, and a protectingarm is thrown round it in every instance. But, for the most part, thechildren sleep with their mothers on the house-tops. Yellow-skinnedwhite-toothed pariahs are not to be trusted within reach of brownbodies.
A stifling hot blast from the mouth of the Delhi Gate nearly ends myresolution of entering the City of Dreadful Night at this hour. It is acompound of all evil savours, animal and vegetable, that a walled citycan brew in a day and a night. The temperature within the motionlessgroves of plantain and orange-trees outside the city walls seems chillyby comparison. Heaven help all sick persons and young children withinthe city to-night! The high house-walls are still radiating heatsavagely, and from obscure side gullies fetid breezes eddy that oughtto poison a buffalo. But the buffaloes do not heed. A drove of themare parading the vacant main street; stopping now and then to lay theirponderous muzzles against the closed shutters of a grain-dealer's shopsand to blow thereon like grampuses.
Then silence follows--the silence that is full of the night noises of agreat city. A stringed instrument of some kind is just, and only just,audible. High overhead some one throws open a window, and the rattleof the wood-work echoes down the empty street. On one of the roofs,a hookah is in full blast; and the men are talking softly as thepipe gutters. A little farther on, the noise of conversation is moredistinct. A slit of light shows itself between the sliding shutters ofa shop. Inside, a stubble-bearded, weary-eyed trader is balancing hisaccount-books among the bales of cotton prints that surround him. Threesheeted figures bear him company, and throw in a remark from time totime. First he makes an entry, then a remark; then passes the back ofhis hand across his streaming forehead. The heat in the built-in streetis fearful. Inside the shops it must be almost unendurable. But thework goes on steadily; entry, guttural growl, and uplifted hand-strokesucceeding each other with the precision of clock-work.
A policeman--turbanless and fast asleep--lies across the road on theway to the Mosque of Wazir Khan. A bar of moonlight falls across theforehead and eyes of the sleeper, but he never stirs. It is close uponmidnight, and the heat seems to be increasing. The open square in frontof the Mosque is crowded with corpses; and a man must pick his waycarefully for fear of treading on them. The moonlight stripes theMosque's high front of coloured enamel work in broad diagonal bands; andeach separate dreaming pigeon in the niches and corners of the masonrythrows a squab little shadow. Sheeted ghosts rise up wearily from theirpallets, and flit into the dark depths of the building. Is it possibleto climb to the top of the great Minars, and thence to look down on thecity? At all events the attempt is worth making, and the chances arethat the door of the staircase will be unlocked. Unlocked it is; but adeeply sleeping janitor lies across the threshold, face turned tothe Moon. A rat dashes out of his turban at the sound of approachingfootsteps. The man grunts, opens his eyes for a minute, turns round, andgoes to sleep again. All the heat of a decade of fierce Indian summersis stored in the pitch-black, polished walls of the corkscrew staircase.Half-way up, there is something alive, warm, and feathery; and itsnores. Driven from step to step as it catches the sound of my advance,it flutters to the top and reveals itself as a yellow-eyed, angry kite.Dozens of kites are asleep on this and the other Minars, and on thedomes below. There is the shadow of a cool, or at least a less sultrybreeze at this height; and, refreshed thereby, turn to look on the Cityof Dreadful Night.
Dore might have drawn it! Zola could describe it--this spectacle ofsleeping thousands in the moonlight and in the shadow of the Moon. Theroof-tops are crammed with men, women, and children; and the air is fullof undistinguishable noises. They are restless in the City of DreadfulNight; and small wonder. The marvel is that they can even breathe. Ifyou gaze intently at the multitude, you can see that they are almost asuneasy as a daylight crowd; but the tumult is subdued. Everywhere,in the strong light, you can watch the sleepers turning to andfro; shifting their beds and again resettling them. In the pit-likecourt-yards of the houses there is the same movement.
The pitiless Moon shows it all. Shows, too, the plains outside the city,and here and there a hand's-breadth of the Ravee without the walls.Shows lastly, a splash of glittering silver on a house-top almostdirectly below the mosque Minar. Some poor soul has risen to throw a jarof water over his fevered body; the tinkle of the falling water strikesfaintly on the ear. T
wo or three other men, in far-off corners of theCity of Dreadful Night, follow his example, and the water flashes likeheliographic signals. A small cloud passes over the face of the Moon,and the city and its inhabitants--clear drawn in black and whitebefore--fade into masses of black and deeper black. Still the unrestfulnoise continues, the sigh of a great city overwhelmed with the heat, andof a people seeking in vain for rest. It is only the lower-class womenwho sleep on the house-tops. What must the torment be in the latticedzenanas, where a few lamps are still twinkling? There are footfalls inthe court below. It is the Muezzin--faithful minister; but he ought tohave been here an hour ago to tell the Faithful that prayer is betterthan sleep--the sleep that will not come to the city.
The Muezzin fumbles for a moment with the door of one of theMinars, disappears awhile, and a bull-like roar--a magnificent bassthunder--tells that he has reached the top of the Minar. They musthear the cry to the banks of the shrunken Ravee itself! Even across thecourtyard it is almost overpowering. The cloud drifts by and shows himoutlined in black against the sky, hands laid upon his ears, and broadchest heaving with the play of his lungs--'Allah ho Akbar'; then a pausewhile another Muezzin somewhere in the direction of the Golden Templetakes up the call--'Allah ho Akbar.' Again and again; four times inall; and from the bedsteads a dozen men have risen up already.--'I bearwitness that there is no God but God.' What a splendid cry it is, theproclamation of the creed that brings men out of their beds by scores atmidnight! Once again he thunders through the same phrase, shaking withthe vehemence of his own voice; and then, far and near, the night airrings with 'Mahomed is the Prophet of God.' It is as though he wereflinging his defiance to the far-off horizon, where the summer lightningplays and leaps like a bared sword. Every Muezzin in the city is in fullcry, and some men on the roof-tops are beginning to kneel. A long pauseprecedes the last cry, 'La ilaha Illallah,' and the silence closes up onit, as the ram on the head of a cotton-bale.
The Muezzin stumbles down the dark stairway grumbling in his beard.He passes the arch of the entrance and disappears. Then the stiflingsilence settles down over the City of Dreadful Night. The kites on theMinar sleep again, snoring more loudly, the hot breeze comes up in puffsand lazy eddies, and the Moon slides down towards the horizon. Seatedwith both elbows on the parapet of the tower, one can watch and wonderover that heat-tortured hive till the dawn. 'How do they live downthere? What do they think of? When will they awake?' More tinkling ofsluiced water-pots; faint jarring of wooden bedsteads moved into orout of the shadows; uncouth music of stringed instruments softened bydistance into a plaintive wail, and one low grumble of far-off thunder.In the courtyard of the mosque the janitor, who lay across the thresholdof the Minar when I came up, starts wildly in his sleep, throws hishands above his head, mutters something, and falls back again. Lulled bythe snoring of the kites--they snore like over-gorged humans--I drop offinto an uneasy doze, conscious that three o'clock has struck, and thatthere is a slight--a very slight--coolness in the atmosphere. The cityis absolutely quiet now, but for some vagrant dog's love-song. Nothingsave dead heavy sleep.
Several weeks of darkness pass after this. For the Moon has gone out.The very dogs are still, and I watch for the first light of the dawnbefore making my way homeward. Again the noise of shuffling feet. Themorning call is about to begin, and my night watch is over. 'Allah hoAkbar! Allah ho Akbar!' The east grows gray, and presently saffron; thedawn wind comes up as though the Muezzin had summoned it; and, as oneman, the City of Dreadful Night rises from its bed and turns its facetowards the dawning day. With return of life comes return of sound.First a low whisper, then a deep bass hum; for it must be rememberedthat the entire city is on the house-tops. My eyelids weighed down withthe arrears of long deferred sleep, I escape from the Minar through thecourtyard and out into the square beyond, where the sleepers have risen,stowed away the bedsteads, and are discussing the morning hookah. Theminute's freshness of the air has gone, and it is as hot as at first.
'Will the Sahib, out of his kindness, make room?' What is it? Somethingborne on men's shoulders comes by in the half-light, and I stand back.A woman's corpse going down to the burning-ghat, and a bystander says,'She died at midnight from the heat.' So the city was of Death as wellas Night after all.