[8] Bishop Heber, in his journal, also mentions the wonder of his Bengali servants on their first sight of a piece of ice in Himalaya, and their regret on finding that they could not carry it home to Calcutta as a curiosity.

The national theatres were now open for the winter, and the Khan paid a visit to Covent-Garden; but he gives no particulars of the performances which he witnessed, though he was greatly struck by the splendour of the lighting and decoration, and still more by the almost magical celerity with which the changes of scenery were effected.  The scanty notice taken of these matters, may perhaps be partly accounted for by the extraordinary fascination produced in the mind of the khan by the charms of one of the houris on the stage—­whose name, though he does not mention it, our readers will probably have no difficulty in supplying; and it may be doubted whether the warmest panegyrics of the most ardent of her innumerable admirers ever soared quite so high a pitch into the regions of hyperbole as the Oriental flights of the khan, who exhausts, in the praise of her attractions, all the imagery of the eastern poets.  She is described as “cypress-waisted, rose-cheeked, fragrant as amber, and sweet as sugar, a stealer of hearts, who unites the magic of talismans with loveliness transcending that of the peris! When she bent the soft arch of her eyebrows, she pierced the heart through and through with the arrows of her eyelashes; and when she smiled, the heart of the most rigid ascetic was intoxicated!  She was gorgeously arrayed, and covered all over with jewels—­and the tout-ensemble of her appearance was such as would have riveted the gaze of the inhabitants of the spheres—­what, then, more can a mere mortal say?"[9]

[9] The sober prose of the Parsees presents, as usual, an amusing contrast with the highflown rhapsodies of the Moslem; their remarks on the same lady are comprised in the pithy observation—­“We should not have taken her for more than twenty-six years of age; but we are told she is near fifty.”

At Rundell and Bridge’s, to a view of the glittering treasures of whose establishment the Khan was next introduced, he was not less astonished at the incalculable value of the articles he saw exhibited, “where the precious metals and magnificent jewellery of all sorts were scattered about as profusely as so many sorts of fruit in our Delhi bazars”—­as surprised at being informed that many of the nobles, and even of the royal family, here deposited their plate and jewels for safe custody; and that, “though all these valuables were left without a guard of soldiers, this shop has never been known to be attacked and plundered by robbers and thieves, who not unfrequently break into other houses.’  Among the models of celebrated gems here shown him, he particularizes a jewel which, for ages, has been the wonder of the East—­“the famous Koh-in-Noor, (Mountain of Light,) now in the possession of the ruler