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our glorious view was blotted out, snow was beginning to fall, and, to crown all, R. seemed very ill indeed.

For some time our progress was very slow, for he had to be helped forward every step, but after a time we came to a slope of snow of the right consistency for a sitting glissade. The Indians had brought mats for this purpose, on which we sat, each with our guide in front. In an incredibly short space of time we got down nearly 2000 feet, and the sensation was delightful. At least I found it so, but I am afraid R. was not capable of enjoying anything just then. In fact, he was still so bad when we reached the spot where the horses had been brought to meet us, that after covering him with blankets, for it was now snowing hard, and making one of the Indians lead his horse, I hurried on to the cave to make things comfortable against his arrival, and prepare a hot drink. Twenty minutes after me he rode up whistling, and said he never felt better in his life. Such are the strange vicissitudes of mountain sickness.

It was too late to get back to Chalchicomula before dark; besides, the comforts of the cave appealed to us strongly.

So we passed another night there, nor did we forget to drink to the health of our newly-conquered summit, as we sat round the edge of a blazing fire and dined. Only one contretemps took place. Señor Couttolenc

had insisted on our bringing two bottles of aguardiente, a most potent spirit, with which to rub ourselves as a safeguard against stiffness. We were not feeling stiff, and had forgotten all about the bottles. Not so the Indians; but unfortunately they preferred interior to exterior lubrication. Soon a heated argument arose, then a quarrel, then the flash of a knife was visible in the dancing firelight. R., with great presence of mind, immediately discharged his revolver over the heads of the offenders, and a threat to report them to their master had a most sobering effect. We ordered the return of the aguardiente, but found that, in the words of the delinquents, "none of it had been wasted." Then came peaceful sleep.

Next morning we returned to Chalchicomula, where we were cordially greeted by Señor Couttolenc. He added to our joy by assuring us that we were the first Englishmen to make the ascent of Citlaltepetl, as Orizaba is termed in the Indian tongue. This I believe to be correct; at any rate the statement, made in

The Alpine Journal' after our ascent, has not been contravened. Not that there is any merit in being the first to do what any one in decent training and ordinary health could do if they liked, but still the thought brings a certain amount of satisfaction.

And so I saved my hat!

AMRITSAR.

"The Sikhs of Govind shall bestride horses, and bear hawks upon their hands,

The Toorks who behold them shall fly,
One shall combat a multitude,

And the Sikh who thus perishes shall be blessed for ever."

1

FROM days before Alexander the Punjab has been possessed by the best horsemen and swordsmen that have come through the passes. Scythians, Greeks, Persians, Turks, Afghans have over-ridden the country, despoiled it, and ridden away. The Sikhs are the only Cis-Himalayan 1 folk who have become masters of the soil and held it for any length of time; and Amritsar, "the Lake of Immortality," was the focus of all the sanguinary struggles they carried on with the forces of Islam from the days of Har Govind until the ascendancy of Ranjit Singh. The Durbar Sahib, the present temple, has been destroyed three times. It has been polluted with cow's blood and the site heaped with pyramids of the heads of the faithful. Each time the Sikhs retaliated as soon as they were strong enough by destroying the Muhammadan mosques and rinsing the floors with the blood of swine. It can easily be understood that there is no building in the Punjab of any great age.

The Durbar Sahib, or Golden Temple, as we call it, stands

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-The Tunkha Nameh of Guru Govind.

after it was destroyed by the Afghan, Ahmed Shah, in 1762, only with additions. The story of its making, its disappearances and recrudescences, is, of course, the history of the Sikhs in abstract. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it needed strong defences. That it has stood since 1775 means that the Sikhs have been in the ascendant from this date until they fought the British in 1846, after the death of Ranjit Singh. For all that, they built it as men who needed a wall behind their backs.

The temple rises from an artificial lake of green water, in which the placid reflection of its marble walls and gilded roof and cupolas rests dreamily all day. It is approached by a marble causeway. The walls are inlaid with cornelian and mother-of-pearl, and the doors. are sheathed in silver. Iron and brass are "nothing accounted of" in the temple. The tank is 500 ft. in length and in breadth. The pavement round it is of marble, 30 ft. broad, and is enclosed on three sides by the Bangas, or hostels, which open into it. These belong to the different

1 The Jats, from whom the majority of the Sikhs spring, have been identified with the Scythians. They have been established in India since about 100 B.C.

Sikh chiefs, and are used by
them and their retainers when

they visit Amritsar. The
Ramgharia Banga on the east
has two towers where the
watchmen kept a look-out for
the enemy.
For the Durbar
Sahib is a soldier's shrine.

One may stand in the gallery on the second storey of the temple and watch the file of worshippers approach along the marble causeway through the Darshani Darwaza, or Gate of Adoration, and from the same spot one may look down on the Granth Sahib within and see the offerings made to the holy book and read the spirit of creed in the faces of the

a

worshippers.

bred men bear to a temporal
lord, with a certain love and
a certain ease withal. There
is less awe than in Hindu
temples, because there is less
superstition.
superstition. In the place of
distorted images and emblems
there is the holy book. The
temple is called the Durbar
Sahib because the ceremony is
a Durbar in the literal sense of
the word. The book is carried
to the shrine with all circum-
stance and pomp. It is the
deputy, or vicar, of the Gurus
who have passed away, and
the disciples approach in an
unending stream to pay honour
to their lord.

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One is struck most with the gentlemanliness of it all-there The Granth rests on a low is no other word for it. In stand, the Manjhi Sahib, and Anglo-Indian slang the place is covered with wrappings of would be called a Sahib's silk, and protected from the temple." temple." One is not dunned, offerings of pigeons by a silk or jostled, or insulted, or awning above. Behind it sits fawned upon there as one is the Granthi, a priest of the old at Benares or Brinda Ban or type, grey-bearded, keen-eyed, Lashkar or the temple of Kali with an oval face, and an old- in Calcutta, where a mob of fashioned turban lying flat on brazen - tongued, cadging, illthe head in coils. As in the conditioned, noisily - extortionHindu temples, men, women, ate rascals surround and children drift in a stream carriage before one is a hundred towards the priest, throw offer- yards from the gate, and are ings of flowers, sugar, or copper allowed by the temple authoricoins on the object of venera- ties to palm themselves off as tion, and receive consecrated priests. Instead there is a rich ones in return. All coin of simplicity in this as in all Sikh the realm, in silver or gold, is shrines. The Gurus abhorred sonorously announced, dropped idols, priestcraft, ritual, superin a jar before the book, and stition, tamperings with the withheld for temple funds. All supernatural, and all attempts unvalued things receive the to localise, personify, or insist currency of sanctity by contact upon special attributes or with the Granth, and are manifestations of the Divine passed on to new comers. Being. The highest building The Sikh offerers approach in the precincts of the place with the respect that well- is a nine-storeyed monument to

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the opposite idea. The Baba Atal is an elegy in stone to the son of the sixth Guru, who was chid by his father for restoring a playmate to life. "Two swords cannot be put in one scabbard," his father said, and bade the boy set his heart on pure-living rather than vain meddling and display. The boy made good his mistake as well as he could by lying down on the spot and giving up the ghost. It would have been better if he had laid violent hands on himself like a man of ordinary passions, for the record is marred by that commonest of human weaknesses, the boast by inference. Anyhow, that was the Sikh attitude towards miraculous pretensions. The whole story is illustrated in frescoes on the entrance gate to the shrine.

All through the day the worshippers flock to the Granth. There is no service from the time of the short reading, when the book is borne in on a palanquin an hour before dawn, until the evening prayer. Only the musicians are constantly in attendance, singing hymns to the rebeck and the lute. These are the Rababis, the descendants of the Muhammadan fakir, Mardana Mirasi of Merawat, who loved Nanak, and set his hymns to music nearly five hundred years ago. As Mardana sat by Nanak's side and ministered to him, yet kept his own faith, so his family have made music for the Gurus or for their deputy, the Book, these five hundred years, and served the Khalsa and held

to Islam through generations, when to be a Sikh meant to slay "a Toork" at sight, or be slain by him. What were these Muhammadans doing in the shrine? I asked. When I was told they were the children of Mardana, I understood.

One meets diverse races in this Catholic shrine. In the throng of worshippers there are many who are drawn there by curiosity, or the off-chance that Nanak may have been the one man to whom God divulged His secret, just as careful men keep rubbish of odd kinds in the hope that one day it may help them in some unforeseen need. As Amritsar is the Indian market for Central Asia, the crowd is diversified by many weather-beaten folk, merchants and muleteers, their red faces seamed with the wind, who have come in across the Himalayas with their caravans from Kashgar, or Yarkand, or far Bokhara. They go about in wedge-like flocks, happy as most migrants and laughing at everything, one of them always in the van to pilot the rest with some kind of jargon that can be understood. I met a party who had come in the day before from Yarkand. They told me they had made the journey in fifty days, with other cheerful tidings, which I could only interpret as such by their becks and smiles. On their heels followed a mendicant of the Oghar sect, with an empty skull in his hand, from which he professed to drink, making capital out of the vulgar by playing upon their sense of the grotesque, a

species of tomfoolery that the old Gurus would have abhorred. Another anomalous interloper wore trousers and a black coat. He called me "mister" in a rasping voice, and I turned away, thinking him a tout. But the fellow persisted until he had delivered himself of his story in the "favour" he had to ask me, which was to tell him in what safe bank he might deposit his hoard. He turned out to be a transmogrified Sikh of Multan, returned after fifteen years in the Australian gold mines. Like the the Ancient Mariner, he stopped men to impart his tale. He wished them to know that he had crossed the sea, dug on equal terms with white men, and "made a bit." A human instinct after all.

Next, a jolly Tibetan and his wife shambled along the causeway, as if they were treading over rocks and snow. I greeted him, and he replied with a grin that displayed all his molars, as much as to say, "Isn't it a joke that odd folk like you and me should meet here of all places in the world." And he laughed, making the place echo with his cracked-bell voice, tuned to the wilderness, as he told me how he had come down from Leh with merchandise by the Kangra valley through much snow, and was picking up any merit that might be had for the asking on the way.

All this palaver took place on the pavement outside the shrine, and must have been audible within. Meanwhile Sikh soldiers and fanatic

Akalis passed by, all stamped with the dint of the ideal that Guru Govind left them, an air that one cannot mistake or describe, or explain away by any common heritage of blood, for they are sprung from many castes, Khattris, Brahmins, and Muhammadan converts, but most of all from the hard Jat yeoman, from whom they differ just by the Guru's mark. For it has been well said that this great man left his impress, not only on the minds but on the features of a nation.

In the Durbar Sahib, the centre of Sikh worship and tradition, I hoped to gain some insight into the influence that has marked these people and knit them into the community which fought against us with such splendid courage at Ferozeshah, Aliwal, and Sobraon. One expects a vein of bigotry in a crusader. But the Sikhs have no very positive theological convictions. They do not believe more or less than the religious-minded man with no particular tenets all the world over. Guru Nanak, the founder of the religion, was the declared enemy of superstition. He only sought to remove the cobwebs that had overgrown sectarian conceptions of God. His is expressed in the first words of the Sikh morning prayer.

"God is one, His name is true,

He is the Creator, without fear, without enmity, Timeless Being, Formless, has never come in a womb, is self-existing, great and merciful."

That is a creed to which the

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