CHAPTER XVI.

From Agra to Singapore.

A couple of miles from the cantonment, and the broad Jumna is crossed on a pontoon bridge, the buoys of which are tubular iron floats instead of boats.  Crocodiles are observed floating, motionless as logs, their heads turned up-stream and their snouts protruding from the water.  The road is undulating for a few miles and then perfectly level, as, indeed, it has been most of the way from Lahore.

Pilgrims carrying little red flags, and sometimes bits of red paper tied to sticks, are encountered by the hundred; mayhap they have come from distant points to gaze upon the beauties of the Taj Mahal, the fame of which resounds to the farthermost corners of India.  They can now see it across the Jumna, resting on the opposite bank, looking more like a specimen of the architecture of the skies than anything produced by mere earthly agency.

A partly dilapidated Mohammedan mosque in the middle of a forty-acre walled reservoir, overgrown with water-lilies, forms a charming subject for the attention of my camera.  The mosque is approached from an adjacent village by a viaduct of twenty arches; a propos of its peculiar surroundings, one might easily fancy the muezzin’s call to prayer taking the appropriate form of, “Come where the water-lilies bloom,” instead of the orthodox, “Allah-il-allah.”

Villages are now rows of shops lining the road on either side, sometimes as much as half a mile in length.  The entrance is usually marked by a shrine containing a hideous idol, painted red and finished off with cheap-looking patches of gold or silver tinsel.  In the larger towns, evidences of English philanthropy loom conspicuously above the hut-like shops and inferior houses of the natives in the form of large and substantial brick buildings, prominently labelled “Ferozabad Hospital” or “Government Free Dispensary.”  A discouraging head-wind blows steadily all day, and it is near sunset when the thirty-seven miles to Sbikarabad is covered.  A mile west of the town, I am told, is the Rohilcund Railway, the dak bungalow, and the bungalow of an English Sahib.  Quite suitable for a one-mile race-track as regards surface is this little side-stretch, and a spin along its smooth length is rewarded by a most comfortable night at the bungalow of Mr. S, an engineer of the Ganges Canal, a magnificent irrigating enterprise, on the banks of which his bungalow stands.  Several school-boys from Allahabad are here spending their vacation, shooting peafowls and fishing.  Wild boars abound in the tall tiger-grass of the Shikobabad district and the silence of the gloaming is broken by the shouting of natives driving them out of their cane-patches, where, if not looked after pretty sharply, they do considerable damage in the night.