Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/183

MODERN GOA 135 broken bricks, once palaces, buried under rank grass; and streets overgrown with cocoanut-trees and jungle. The churches rise mournfully amid the desolation. " II ne reste plus de cette ville que le sacre," said the supe- rior of the Augustinian convent in 1827: " le profane en est entierement banni." " The river washes the remains of a great city," wrote Sir William Howard Eussell fifty years later, in 1877, " an arsenal in ruins, palaces in ruins, quay walls in ruins all in ruins." The still older Goa, built by the native kings, I could only trace by little square rice-fields which marked the ground plan of fortress courts and palace quad- rangles. Panjim and New Goa, which became the resi- dence of the viceroy in 1759, are threatened with a like deterioration. But a railway, built by British enter- prise, now connects Marmagao with the southern Mara- tha line, and holds out hopes of a return to commercial importance. Yet before its decay, Goa had a carnival of pros- perity which proves what a commercial war-policy can for a time effect. " Goa Dourado," or Golden Goa, was a place of fabulous wealth to the plain London merchants who were struggling into an East India Com- pany under Elizabeth. " Whoever hath seen Goa need not see Lisbon," ran the Portuguese proverb. The accounts of the city given by Linschoten, Pyrard de Laval, Fitch, Delia Valle, and other European travellers who visited Goa in the sixteenth or early in the seven- teenth century show that it combined the riches of com- merce with the splendours of ecclesiastical pomp and