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228
WINTER INDIA

at the corners. The red building and its white marble dome are larger than the more delicately modeled, the more ornate, poetic, and feminine structure at Agra. The last scene of the Mutiny was played here when Hobson's men overtook Bahadur Shah, the fugitive Delhi king, and returned the next day for the princes, shot them, and exposed their bodies in the blood-soaked, corpse-strewn Chandni Chauk. Bahadur Shah lived in exile at Rangoon for forty years, and his son, childless and born in exile, a harmless nonentity, was permitted to return to India for the durbar of 1903.

At Humayum's tomb we left the tree-bordered Muttra road, where camel-wagons and strings of donkeys moved phantom-like through the dusty frost haze: the air so very sharp that one wondered how pipul- and tamarind-trees could retain their foliage. The revel of death and ruins, the feast of tombs and mortuary architecture, continued for miles, the names of the honored dead conveying no idea of personality, having no association of individuality to one, all this past so vague and unfamiliar that one moralizes, like Omar, on the vanity of man. One at last identifies four tombs—that of Akbar's brother, that of the Chisti saint, that of a Persian poet and that of the unhappy emperor Mohammed Shah, last occupant of the Peacock Throne so thoroughly despoiled by Nadir Shah. The saint, who was something of a juggler and miracle-worker, a Mohammedan mahatma, rests in a little white jewel-box of marble, whose red awnings give a comforting color-note to the chill court. The saint