The Great Mogul E-Book

Louis Tracy

• Herausgeber: Louis Tracy
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Louis Tracy (1863 - 1928) was a British journalist, and prolific writer of fiction. He used the pseudonyms Gordon Holmes and Robert Fraser, which were at times shared with M. P. Shiel, a collaborator from the start of the twentieth century. He was born in Liverpool to a well-to-do middle-class family. At first he was educated at home and then at the French Seminary at Douai. Around 1884 he became a reporter for a local paper - 'The Northern Echo' at Darlington, circulating in parts of Durham and North Yorkshire]; later he worked for papers in Cardiff and Allahabad. During 1892-1894 he was closely associated with Arthur Harmsworth, in 'The Sun' and 'The Evening News and Post'.

Leseprobe

The Great Mogul

Louis Tracy

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER I

"And is there care in Heaven?"

Spenser's Faerie Queens.

"ALLAH remembers us not. It is the divine decree. We can but die with His praises on our lips; perchance He may greet us at the gates of Paradise!"

Overwhelmed with misery, the man drooped his head. The stout staff he held fell to his feet. He lifted his hands to hide the anguish of eye and lip, and the grief that mastered him caused long pentup tears to well forth.

His resigned words, uttered in the poetic tongue of Khorassan, might have been a polished verse of Sa'adi were they not the outpouring of a despairing heart The woman raised her burning eyes from the infant clinging to her exhausted breast.

"Father of my loved ones," she said, "let you and the two boys travel on with the cow. If you reach succor, return for me and my daughter. If not, it is the will of God, and who can gainsay it?"

The man stooped to pick up his staff. But his great powers of endurance, suddenly enfeebled by the ordeal thrust upon him, yielded utterly, and he sank helpless by the side of his wife.

"Nay, Mihrulnisa, sun among women, I shall not leave thee," he cried passionately. "We are fated to die; then be it so. I swear by the Prophet naught save death shall part us, and that not for many hours."

So, to the mother, uselessly nursing her latest born, was left the woful task of pronouncing the doom of those she held dear. For a little while there was silence. The pitiless sun, rising over distant hills of purple and amber, gave promise that this day of late July would witness no relief of tortured earth by the longdeferred monsoon. All nature was still. The air had the hush of the grave. The greenery of trees and shrubs was blighted. The bare plain, the rocks, the boulderstrewed bed of the parched river, each alike wore the dustwhite shroud of death. Faroff mountains shimmered in glorious tints which promised fertile glades and sparkling rivulets. But the promise was a lie, the lie of the mirage, of unfulfilled hope.

These two, with their offspring, had journeyed from the glistening slopes on the northwest, now smiling with the colors of the rainbow under the first kiss of the sun. They knew that the arid ravines and bleak passes behind were even less hospitable than the lowlands in front. Knowledge of what was past had murdered hope for the future. They had almost ceased to struggle. True children of the East, they were yielding to Kismet. Already a watchful vulture, skilled ghoul of desert obsequies, was describing great circles in the molten sky.

The evils of the way were typical of their bygone lives. Beginning in pleasant places, they were driven into the wilderness. The Persian and his wife, Usbeg Tartars of Teherdn, nobly born and nurtured, were now povertystricken and persecuted because one of the warring divisions of Islam had risen to power in Ispahan. "It shall come to pass,' said Mahomet, "that my people shall be divided into threeandseventy sects, all of which, save only one, shall have their portion in the fire!" Clearly, these wanderers found solace in the beliefs held by some of the condemned seventytwo.

Striving to escape from a land of narrowminded bigots to the realm of the Great Mogul, the King of Kings, the renowned Emperor of Indiawhom his contemporaries, fascinated by his gifts and dazzled by his magnificence, had styled Akbar "the Great — the forlorn couple, young in years, endowed with remarkable physical charms and high intelligence, blessed with two fine bqys and the shapely infant now hugged by the frantic mother, had been betrayed not alone by man but by nature herself.

At this season, the great plain between Herat and Kandahiix should be allsufficing to the needs of travelers. Watered by a noble river, the Helmund, and traversed by innumerable streams, it was reputed the Garden of Afghanistan. Pent in the bosom of earth, all manner of herbs and fruits and wholesome seeds were ready to burst forth with utmost prodigality when the rainclouds gathered on the hills and discharged their gracious showers over a soil athirst But Allah, in His exceeding wisdom, had seen fit to withhold the fertilizing monsoon, and the few resources of the exiles had yielded to the strain. First their small flock of goats, then their camel, had fallen or been slain. There was left the cow, whose daily store of milk dwindled under the lack of food.