Tomb and Temple
Est_1:1 : ’93From India even unto Ethiopia.’94
In all the Bible, this is the only book in which the word India occurs; but it stands for a realm of vast interest in the time of Esther, as in our time. It yielded then, as now, spices and silks and cotton and rice and indigo and ores of all richness, and precious stones of all sparkle, and had a civilization of its own as marked as Egyptian or Grecian or Roman civilization. It holds the costliest tomb ever built, and a unique temple the most idolatrous ever dedicated.
In a journey around the world, it may not be easy to tell the exact point which divides the pilgrimage into halves. But there was one structure toward which we were all the time traveling, and having seen that, we felt that if we saw nothing more our expedition would be a success. That one object was the Taj Mahal of India. It is the crown of the whole earth. The spirits of architecture met to enthrone a king, and the spirit of the Parthenon of Athens was there; and the spirit of St. Sophia of Constantinople was there; and the spirit of St. Izaak of St. Petersburg was there; and the spirit of the Baptistery of Pisa was there; and the spirits of the Great Pyramid, and of Luxor Obelisk, and of the Porcelain Tower of Nankin, and of St. Mark’92s of Venice; and the spirits of all the great towers, great cathedrals, great mausoleums, great sarcophagi, great capitols for the living and of great necropolises for the dead, were there. And the presiding genius of the throng, with gavel of Parian marble, smote the table of Russian malachite, and called the throng of spirits to order, and called for a vote as to which spirit should wear the chief crown, and mount the chief throne, and wave the chief sceptre, and by unanimous acclaim the cry was: ’93Long live the spirit of the Taj, king of all the spirits of architecture! Thine is the Taj Mahal of India!’94
The building is about six miles from Agra, and as we rode out in the early dawn we heard nothing but the hoofs and wheels that pulled and turned us along the road, at every yard of which our expectation rose, until we had some thought that we might be disappointed at the first glimpse, as some that say they were. But how any one can be disappointed with the Taj is almost as great a wonder to me as the Taj itself. There are some people always disappointed, and who knows but that, having entered heaven, they may criticise the architecture of the Temple, and the shape of the white robes, and say that the River of Life is not quite up to their expectations, and that the white horses on which the conquerors ride seem a little spring-halt or spavined?
My son said, ’93There it is!’94 I said, ’93Where?’94 For that which he saw to be the building seemed to me to be more like the morning cloud blushing under the stare of the rising sun. It seemed not so much built up from earth as let down from heaven. Fortunately, you stop at an elaborated gateway of red sandstone, one-eighth of a mile from Taj, an entrance so high, so arched, so graceful, so four-domed, so painted and chiseled and scrolled that you come very gradually upon the Taj, which structure is enough to intoxicate the eye and stun the imagination and entrance the soul. We go up the winding stairs of this majestic entrance of the gateway, and buy a few pictures and examine a few curios, and from it look off upon the Taj, and descend to the pavement of the garden that raptures everything between the gateway and the ecstasy of marble and precious stones. You pass along a deep stream of water in which all manner of brilliant fins swirl and float. There are eighty-four fountains that rise and bend, and arch themselves to fall in showers of pearl in basins of snowy whiteness. Beds of all imaginable flora greet the nostril before they do the eye, and seem to roll in waves of color as you advance towards the vision you are soon to have of what human genius did when it did its best; moon-flowers, lilacs, marigolds, tulips, and almost everywhere the lotus; thickets of bewildering bloom; on each side trees from many lands bend their arborescence over your head, or seem with convoluted branches to reach out their arms towards you in welcome. On and on you go amid tamarind and cypress and poplar and oleander and yew and sycamore and banyan and palm and trees of such novel branch and leaf and girth you cease to ask their name or nativity.
As you approach the door of the Taj, one experiences a strange sensation of awe and tenderness and humility and worship. The building is only a grave, but what a grave! Built for a queen, who, according to some, was very good, and, according to others, was very bad. I choose to think she was very good. At any rate, it makes me feel better to think that this commemorative pile was set up for the apotheosis of virtue rather than vice. The Taj is a mountain of white marble, but never such walls faced each other with exquisiteness; never such a tomb was cut from block of alabaster; never such a congregation of precious stones brightened and gloomed and blazed and chastened and glorified a building since sculptor’92s chisel cut its first curve, or painter’92s pencil traced its first figure, or mason’92s plumb-line tested its first wall, or architect’92s compass swept its first circle.
The Taj has sixteen great arched windows, four at each corner. Also at each of its four corners stands a minaret one hundred and thirty-seven feet high; also at each side of this building is a splendid mosque of red sandstone. Two hundred and fifty years has the Taj stood, and yet not a wall is cracked, nor a mosaic loosened, nor an arch sagged, nor a panel faded. The storms of two hundred and fifty winters have not marred, nor the heats of two hundred and fifty summers disintegrated a marble. There is no story of age written by mosses on its white surface. Montaz, the queen, was beautiful, and Shah Jehan, the king, here proposed to let all the centuries of time know it. She was married at twenty years of age and died at twenty-nine. Her life ended as another life began; as the rose bloomed the rose-bush perished. To adorn this dormitory of the dead, at the command of the king, Bagdad sent to this building its cornelian, and Ceylon its lapis lazuli, and the Punjab its jasper, and Persia its amethyst, and Thibet its turquoise, and Lanka its sapphire, and Yemen its agate, and Punah its diamonds; and bloodstones, and sardonyx, and chalcedony, and moss-agates are as common as though they were pebbles. You find one spray of vine bestarred with eighty, and another with one hundred stones. Twenty thousand men were twenty years in building it; and although the labor was slave labor, and not paid for, the building cost what would be about sixty million dollars of our American money. Some of the jewels have been picked out of the wall by iconoclasts or conquerors, and substitutes of less value have taken their places; but the vines, the traceries, the arabesques, the spandrels, the entablatures are so wondrous that you feel like dating the rest of your life from the day you first saw them.
In letters of black marble the whole of the Koran is spelled out in and on this august pile. The king sleeps in the tomb beside the queen, although he intended to build a palace as black as this was white, on the opposite side of the river, for himself to sleep in. Indeed, the foundation of such a necropolis of black marble is still there, and from the white to the black temple of the dead a bridge was to cross; but the son dethroned him and imprisoned him, and it is wonderful that the king had any place at all in which to be buried. Instead of windows to let in the light upon the two tombs, there is a trellis-work of marble, marble cut so delicately thin that the sun shines through it as easily as through glass. Look the world over and find so much translucency; canopies, traceries, lace-work, embroideries of stone.
We had heard of the wonderful resonance of this Taj, and so I tried it. I suppose there are more sleeping echoes in that building, waiting to be wakened by the human voice, than in any building ever constructed. I uttered one word, and there seemed descending invisible choirs in full chant, and there was a reverberation that kept on long after one would have expected it to cease. When a line of a hymn was sung there were replying, rolling, rising, falling, interweaving sounds that seemed modulated by beings seraphic. There were aerial sopranos and bassos, soft, high, deep, tremulous, emotional, commingling. It was like an antiphonal of heaven. But there are four or five Taj Mahals. It has one appearance at sunrise, another at noon, another at sunset, another by moonlight. Indeed, the silver trowel of the moon, and the golden trowel of the sunlight, and the leaden trowel of the storm build and rebuild the glory, so that it never seems twice alike. It has all moods, all complexions, all grandeurs. From the top of the Taj, which is two hundred and fifty feet high, springs a spire thirty feet higher, and that is enameled gold. What an anthem in eternal rhythm! Lyrics and elegies in marble! Sculptured hosanna! Masonry as of supernatural hands! Mighty doxology in stone! I shall see nothing to equal it till I see the Great White Throne, and on it him from whose face the earth and heavens flee away.
The Taj is the pride of India, and especially of Mohammedanism. An English officer at the fortress told us that when during the general mutiny in 1857 the Mohammedans proposed insurrection at Agra, the representative of the English government aimed the guns of the fort at the Taj, and said, ’93You make insurrection, and that same day we will blow your Taj to atoms;’94 and that threat ended the disposition for mutiny at Agra.
But I thought, while looking at that palace for the dead’97all this constructed to cover a handful of dust, but even that handful has probably gone from the mausoleum’97how much better it would have been to expend sixty millions of dollars, which the Taj Mahal cost, for the living. What asylums it might have built for the sick, what houses for the homeless! What improvement our century has made upon other centuries in lifting in honor of the departed, memorial churches, memorial hospitals, memorial reading-rooms, memorial observatories. By all possible means let us keep the memory of departed loved ones fresh in mind, and let there be an appropriate headstone or monument in the cemetery; but there is a dividing line between reasonable commemoration and wicked extravagance. The Taj Mahal has its uses as an architectural achievement, eclipsing all other architecture; but as a memorial of a departed wife and mother it expresses no more than the plainest slab in many a country graveyard. The best monument that can be built for any of us when we are gone is in the memory of those whose sorrows we have alleviated, in the wounds we have healed, in the kindnesses we have done, in the ignorance we have enlightened, in the recreant we have reclaimed, in the souls we have saved! Such a monument is built out of material more lasting than marble or bronze, and will stand amid the eternal splendors long after the Taj Mahal of India shall have gone down in the ruins of a world of which it was the costliest adornment.
But I promised to show you not only a tomb of India, but a unique heathen temple, and it is a temple underground. With miner’92s candle we had seen something of the underside of Australia, as at Gimpie; and with guide’92s torch we had seen at different times something of the underside of America, as in Mammoth Cave; but we are now to enter one of the sacred cellars of India, commonly called the Elephanta Caves. We had it all to ourselves, the steam yacht that was to take us about fifteen miles over the harbor of Bombay, and between enchanted islands, and along shores whose curves and gulches and pictured rocks gradually prepared the mind for appreciation of the most striking spectacle of India. The morning had been full of thunder and lightning and deluge, but the atmospheric agitations had ceased, and the cloudy ruins of the storm were piled up in the heavens huge enough and darkly purple enough to make the skies as grandly picturesque as the earthly scenery amid which we moved. After an hour’92s cutting through the waters, we came to the long pier reaching from the island called Elephanta. It is an island small of girth, but six hundred feet high. It declines into the marshes of mangrove. But the whole island is one tangle of foliage and verdure; convolvulus creeping the ground; mosses climbing the rocks; vines sleeving the long arms of the trees; red flowers here and there in the woods, like incendiary’92s torch trying to set the groves on fire; cactus and acacia vying as to which can most charm the beholder; tropical bird meeting parti-colored butterfly in jungles planted the same summer the world was born. We stepped out of the boat amid enough natives to afford all the help we needed for landing and guidance. You can be carried by coolies in an easy-chair, or you can walk, if you are blessed with two stout limbs’97which the Psalmist evidently lacked, or he would not have so depreciated them, when he said: ’93The Lord taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man.’94 We passed up some stone steps, and between the walls we saw awaiting us a cobra, one of those snakes which confront the traveler oftentimes in India. Two of the guides left the cobra dead by the wayside. They must have been Mohammedan, for Hindus never kill that sacred reptile.
And now we come near the famous temple hewn from one rock of porphyry, at least eight hundred years ago. On each side of the chief temple is a chapel, cut out of the same stone. So vast was the undertaking, and to the Hindu so clear the human impossibility, that they say the gods scooped out this structure from the rock, and carved the pillars, and hewed its shape into gigantic idols, and dedicated it to all the grandeurs. We climb many stone steps before we get to the gateways. The entrance to this temple has sculptured doorkeepers leaning on sculptured demons. How strange! But I have seen doorkeepers of churches and auditoriums who seemed to be leaning on the demons of bad ventilation and asphyxia. Doorkeepers ought to be leaning on the angels of health and comfort and life. All the sextons and janitors of the earth who have spoiled sermons and lectures, and poisoned the lungs of audiences by inefficiency ought to visit this Cave of Elephanta and beware of what these doorkeepers are doing, when, instead of leaning on the angelic, they lean on the diabolic.
In these Elephanta Caves everything is on a Samsonian and Titanian scale. With chisels that were dropped from nerveless hands at least eight centuries ago, the forms of the gods Brahma and Vishnu and Siva were cut into the everlasting rock. Siva is here represented by a figure sixteen feet nine inches high, one-half man and one-half woman. Run a line from the center of the forehead straight to the floor of the rock, and you divide this idol into masculine and feminine. Admired as this idol is by many, it was to me about the worst thing that was ever cut into porphyry, perhaps because there is hardly anything on earth so objectionable as a being half man and half woman. Do be one or the other, my hearer. Man is admirable, and woman is admirable, but either in flesh or trap-rock, a compromise of the two is hideous. Save us from effeminate men and masculine women!
Yonder is the King Ravana worshiping. Yonder is the sculptured representation of the marriage of Shiva and Parhati. Yonder is Daksha, the son of Brahma, born, according to the legend, from the thumb of his right hand. He had sixty daughters. Seventeen of those daughters were married to Kasyapa and became the mothers of the human race. Yonder is a god with three heads. The center god has a crown wound with necklaces of skulls. The right-hand god is in a paroxysm of rage, with forehead of snakes, and in its hand is a cobra. The left-hand god has pleasure in all its features and the hand has a flower. But there are gods and goddesses in all directions. The chief temple of this rock is one hundred and thirty feet square and has twenty-six pillars rising to the roof. After the conquerors of other lands, and the tourists from all lands have chipped and defaced and blasted and carried away curios and mementos for museums and homes, there are enough entrancements left to detain one, unless he is cautious, until he is down with some of the malarias which encompass this island, or gets bitten with some of its snakes.
I felt the chilly dampness of the place, and left this congress of gods, this pandemonium of demons, this pantheon of indifferent deities, and came to the steps and looked off upon the waters which rolled and flashed around the steam yacht, that was waiting to return with us to Bombay. As we stepped aboard, our minds filled with the idols of the Elephanta Caves, I was impressed as never before with the thought that man must have a religion of some kind, even if he has to contrive one himself; and he must have a god, even though he make it with his own hand. I rejoice to know the day will come when the one God of the Universe will be acknowledged throughout India.
That evening of our return to Bombay, I visited the Young Men’92s Christian Association, with the same appointments that you find in the Young Men’92s Christian Associations of Europe and America, and the night after that I addressed a throng of native children who are in the schools of the Christian Missions. Christian universities gather under their wings of benediction a host of the young men of India. Bombay and Calcutta, the two great commercial cities of India, feel the elevating power of an aggressive Christianity. Episcopalian liturgy, and Presbyterian Westminster catechism, and Methodist anxious-seat, and Baptist waters of consecration now stand where once basest idolatries held undisputed sway. The work which the apostolic shoemaker Carey inaugurated at Seram-pore, India, translating the Bible into forty different dialects, and leaving his worn-out body amid the natives whom he had come to save, and going up into the heavens from which he can better watch all the field’97that work will be completed in the salvation of the millions of India. Beside Carey, gazing from the same high places, stand Bishop Heber and Alexander Duff and John Scudder and Mackay, who fell at Delhi; and Moncrieff, who fell at Cawnpore; and Polehampton, who fell at Lucknow; and Freeman, who fell at Fatehghur, and all heroes and heroines who, for Christ’92s sake, lived and died for the Christianization of India: and their heaven will not be complete until the Ganges that washes the ghats of heathen temples shall roll between churches of the living God, and the trampled womanhood of Hinduism shall have all the rights purchased by him who, amid the cuts and stabs of his own assassination, cried out: ’93Behold thy mother!’94 and from Bengal Bay to Arabian Ocean, and from the Himalayas to the coast of Coromandel there be lifted hosannas to him who died to redeem all nations. In that day, Elephanta Cave will be one of the places where idols are ’93cast to the moles and bats.’94 If any clergyman asks me, as an unbelieving minister of religion once asked the Duke of Wellington, ’93Do you not think that the work of converting the Hindus is all a practical farce?’94 I answer him, as Wellington answered the unbelieving minister: ’93Look to your marching orders, sir!’94 Or if any one, having joined in the Gospel attack, feels like retreating, I say to him, as General Havelock said to a retreating regiment, ’93The enemy are in front, not in the rear,’94 and led them again into the fight, though two horses had been shot under him.
Indeed, the taking of this world for Christ will be no holiday celebration, but as tremendous as when, in India during the mutiny of 1857, a fortress manned by Sepoys was to be captured by Sir Colin Campbell and the army of Britain. The Sepoys hurled upon the attacking columns burning missiles and grenades, and fired on them shot and shell, and poured on them from the ramparts burning oil, until, a writer who witnessed it says, ’93it was a picture of pandemonium.’94 Then Sir Colin addressed his troops, saying ’93Remember, the women and children must be rescued!’94 and his men replied, ’93Ay, ay, Sir Colin! We stood by you at Balaklava, and will stand by you here!’94 And then came the triumphant assault of the battlements. So in this Gospel campaign which purposes capturing the very last citadel of idolatry and sin, and hoisting over it the banner of the Cross, we may have hurled upon us mighty opposition and scorn and obloquy and many may fall before the work is done; yet at every call for new onset, let the cry of the church be, ’93Ay, ay, Great Captain of our salvation! We stood by thee in other conflicts, and we will stand by thee to the last!’94 And, if not in this world, then from the battlements of the next, as the last Apollyonic fortification shall crash into ruin, we will join in the shout, ’93Thanks be unto God who giveth us the victory!’94 Hallelujah! for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage