International studio (80.1925)

mceRHACionAL,

may see a curtain or a throne from Amber by
taking the subway to the Brooklyn Museum.

The section of a painted curtain reproduced is
one-sixth of the whole curtain. It shows figures
clothed in English costumes of the seventeenth
century. A visitor to the Brooklyn Museum, after
studying this particular section carefully, went to
the curator of ethnology and assured him solemnly
that he recognized among the figures on it one of
his own ancestors. The curator kindly warned
him not to persist in his assertions as they were
likely to bring upon him such unpleasant conse-
quences as incarceration. It did seem a little
beyond the range of probability that a resident of
Brooklyn should see on a curtain painted in a
remote corner of India about three hundred years
ago one of his English forbears; but the visitor
persisted and in the end he convinced the doubting
curator that he spoke the truth. The aim of the
artist or artists who painted this curtain had been
to depict as many different races of men as pos-
sible; and the presence of Englishmen upon it is
accounted for by the fact that Sir Thomas Roe,
first official ambassador from the court of England
to India, was in Agra in the early seventeenth
century. It is not strange therefore that he and his
suite should have been a highly welcome addition
to the variety of races painted on this curtain.

The treasures looted from Amber do not leave
it bare. The buildings themselves, the fairy
palaces and temples, still stand; and within them
are many beauties that cannot easily be moved.
Tlie palace itself, with its marble turrets and
gilded balconies, stands almost a hundred feet
above the level of the lake. In one of its buildings
there are walls paneled with sandalwood and
inlaid with ivory and silver. Its apartments have
marble troughs through which water once flowed
into basins decorated with designs of flowers, fish
and sea monsters. Some of these designs are of
white marble circled with lapis lazuli or green
marble; others illustrate mythological and his-
torical scenes. There are royal baths once equipped
with ingenious warming devices, furnished with
stone chairs and tables and fitted with bronze
conduits for the water. The zenana or palace for
the wives of the rajah has fallen into greater ruin
than the other buildings. Its walls, unpierced by
windows, shut in gloomy interiors. It is more like
a prison than a palace. It consists of a block of
buildings surrounding a central court, one being
reserved for each of the rajah's wives. Each
compartment could be completely shut off from the
rest of the building at the royal pleasure. Visitors
were once forbidden access to this scries of build-
ings because it was "likely to inspire unpleasant

reflections on the social conditions of the women
of the country."

Doors in the palace were usually made of
blackwood with ivory and ebony inlays. The door
frames were of marble or stone carved in elaborate
designs. They were usually fitted with a pivot at
the top and bottom on which they could swing.
Most of the rooms were small and dark and the
passages narrow; and there is a perfect mass of
stairways that seem to lead nowhere. Screens of
marble tracery, inlays of precious stones in a per-
fect riot of varied design, and brilliant frescoes are
everywhere. Such was the splendor of the palace
and the city that Jey Singh II bade his people
abandon for the ordered ugliness of Jeypore! So
well have his successors consummated the plans
he made that visitors to Jeypore are shown, as the
greatest sight of the vicinity, the Maharajah's
cotton press with its twenty-seven per cent, profit,
its two fifty-horsepower engines and its hydraulic
press, all under a neat corrugated roof. And only
five miles away, as the elephant goes, is Amber,
the sleeping beauty who has been under a spell
for two hundred years.

The curtains on the walls of her palaces are
rotting away and the inlaid doors are decaying in
their marble frames. The royal residences are
kept in repair, but the rest of Amber is falling
into ruin. Monkeys run through the women's
quarters; trees grow in the city's walls; windows
are filled with brushwood and the streets are rank
with cactus. The days when the apartments of
the rajah were completely lined—walls, ceiling
and floor—with painted cloths that royalty might
not touch anything unclean, are no more. The
little temple of Kali, a perfect gem of marble
tracery and inlay, no longer knows its daily
human sacrifice. When this quaint custom had
fallen into decay for some years, Jey Singh II had
a dream in which the goddess asked him why her
altars had so long been dry. Jey Singh, although
not especially averse to the shedding of human
blood, suggested to the goddess that although
men were plentiful, it might be better, for the sake
of public sentiment, to substitute a goat and the
goddess was apparently appeased with the shed-
ding of blood, whether that of man or beast.

At the last one turns to the problems presented
by that indefatigable monarch, the problem of
science versus art. Naturally Jey Singh II did
not think of it as a problem at all, nor did he
think of Amber as "art." Amber was simply the
old home, out of date, inaccessible and badly
equipped for scientific research. Did he not, after
all, serve the cause of beauty more by withholding
his hand from adding further to the glories of

FEBRUARY I 9 2 j

three eighty-Jive