Page 99 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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the last part of the journey partly by train and partly by horse,
Gertrude’s costume consisting of a sun helmet, a cotton gown
and a fur coat, a combination which she found suited to the
variations of the Indian climate. At Agra they saw the palaces of
Akbar and his successors and rode out to sec remains of the old
Moghul empire. Gertrude was once more in that world of
antiquity which she knew almost instinctively:

Outside we found a solemn Muhammadan waiting for us who
said, ‘I am guide —my name Chisti. I am very holy man.’ With
which he marched us off to the great mosque ... One of the
most magnificent gates in the world leads into the mosque,
colossal, standing on top of a long flight of steps coming up
from the town inlaid with bold designs in white marble,
topped by a long scroll of inscription, the famous verse from
the Koran: Jesus said, ‘This world is a bridge, make us
abiding’—It is almost too significant a motto for the deserted
palaces of the capital of a dead empire.
The Russells, Arthur Godman her first cousin, Valentine Chirol
(who had arranged to meet her in Delhi before she left London),
and many other familiar faces were awaiting her at Delhi. After a
visit to the polo ground she remarked that they had met ‘all the
world’. But she was about to witness a world whose splendours
she had scarcely imagined. ‘Pack six kings dressed in green,
yellow and gold, and a state treasury of pearls and emeralds, into
one landau, harness six horses to it, with postillions clothed in
every colour of the rainbow, put four mounted lancers in front
and four behind, and you have just the beginning of the vaguest
idea of what a Raja looks like when he goes out driving. And you
meet twenty of them in half an hour.’ Gertrude was in Delhi at
the high summer of empire.
The excitement built up day by day to the climax of the great
event itself in the first days of January 1903. Nobody was better
than Gertrude at conveying the enchantment and, if need be, the
impiety of a great occasion:

The function began with the entrance of the Delhi siege
veterans — this was the greatest moment of all, a body of old
men, white and native, and every soul in that great arena rose
and cheered. At the end came some twenty or thirty Gurkhas,
litde old men in bottle green, some bent double with years,