Read Ebook: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 17 No. 099 March 1876 by Various

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A transition, indeed, from this to coal and iron--from a concord of sweet sounds to the rumble into hold, car and cart of thirty-five millions of tons of coal and two and a half millions of iron, the yearly product at that time of England! She has since doubled that of iron, and nearly trebled her extract of coal, whatever her progress in the harvest of good music and good pictures. Forced by economical necessity and assisted by chemistry, she makes her fuel, too, go a great deal farther than it did in 1851, when the estimate was that eighty-one per cent. of that consumed in iron-smelting was lost, and when the "duty" of a bushel of coal burnt in a steam-engine was less than half what it now is. The United States have the benefit of these improvements, at the same time that their yield of coal has swelled from four millions of tons at that time to more than fifty now, and of iron in a large though not equal ratio. The Lake Superior region, which rested its claims on a sample of its then annual product of one hundred tons of copper, now exports seven hundred thousand tons of iron ore.

Steel, now replacing iron in some of its heaviest uses, appeared as almost an article of luxury in the shape of knives, scissors and the like. The success of the Hindus in its production was quite envied and admired, though they had probably advanced little since Porus deemed thirty pounds a present fit for Alexander; their rude appliances beating Sheffield an hour and a half in the four hours demanded by the most adroit forgers of the city of whittles for its elimination from the warm bath of iron and carbon. Bessemer, with his steel-mines, as his furnaces at the ore-bank may be termed, was then in the future. The steel rails over which we now do most of our traveling were undreamed of. Bar iron did duty on all the eighty-eight hundred miles of American and sixty-five hundred of British railway; not many, if at all, more than are now laid, in this country at least, with steel. This poetic and historic metal has become as truly a raw product as potatoes. The poets will have to drop it. The glory of Toledo--of her swords bent double in the scabbard, of her rapiers that bore into one's interior only the titillating sensation of a spoonful of vanilla ice, and of her decapitating sabres that left the culprit whole so long as he forbore to sneeze--is trodden under foot of men.

In crude materials the Union is at home. It was so in 1851, and is still; but then it was not so much at home in anything else as now. We have advanced in that field too, since we sent no silver, and from Colorado no gold, no canned fruits, meats or fish, and no wine but some Cincinnati Catawba, thin and acid, according to the verdict of the imbibing jury. We adventured timidly into manufacturing competition with the McCormick reaper, which all Europe proceeded straightway to pirate; ten or twelve samples of cotton and three of woolen goods; Ericsson's caloric-engine; a hydrostatic pump; some nautical instruments; Cornelius's chandeliers for burning lard oil--now the light of other days, thanks to our new riches in kerosene; buggies of a tenuity so marvelous in Old-World eyes that their half-inch tires were likened to the miller of Ferrette's legs, so thin that Talleyrand pronounced his standing an act of the most desperate bravery; soap enough to answer Coleridge's cry for a detergent for the lower Rhine; and one bridge model, forerunner of the superb iron erections that have since leaped over rivers and ravines in hundreds.

Meagre enough was the display of our craftsmen by the side of that made by their brethren of the other side. It could have been scarce visible to Britannia, looking down from a pinnacle of calico ready for a year's export over and above her home consumption, long enough, if unrolled, to put a girdle thirty times round the globe, though not all of it warranted to stand the washing-test that would be imposed by the briny part of the circuit.

And yet there were visible in the American department germs of original inventions and adaptations, the development and fructification of which in the near future were foreseen by acute observers. Our metallic life-boats were then unknown to other countries, those of England being all of wood. The screw-propeller was quite a new thing, though the Princeton had carried it, or been carried by it, into the Mediterranean ten years before. Engines designed for its propulsion attracted special attention. The side-wheel reigned supreme among British war-steamers, although some of the altered liners which cut such an imposing figure till the Sebastopol forts in '55 checked, and iron-clads in '62 finished, their career, were under way. A model of one of them, The Queen, was exhibited as the highest exemplification of "the progress of art as applied to shipbuilding during the last eighteen centuries"--a progress entirely eclipsed by that of the subsequent eighteen years.

And this brings us to art. One out of thirty in the programme, it was, as it always will be on these occasions, nearer thirty to one in the estimation of assembled sight-seers. The dry goods and machinery, even the bald, shadeless and ugly model cottages of the inevitable Prince Albert, failed to draw like the things which flattered the lust of the eye; as the pigs and pumpkins of an "agricultural horse-trot" attract but a wayside glance from the procession to the grand stand. We are all dwellers in a vast picture-gallery, with frescoed dome above and polychromed sculpture and mosaic pavement on the floor below. Its merits we perceive, enjoy and interpret according to our individual gifts and education. But it makes amateurs in some sort of every mother's son or daughter, of us; and we hasten to plunge, confident each in his particular grammar of the beautiful, into the study of what imitative gallery may be offered us. Though the financial idea may have been uppermost in the minds of the devotees of the Mountain of Light, and their pleasure in the march past that of a stroll through the vaults of the Bank of England, they also expected to see in it the combined brilliance of all diamonds. Not finding that, we dare say few of them paid it a second visit, but, led by a like craving for dazzle, sought more legitimate intoxication in marble, canvas, porcelain and chased and cast metals.

There they saw the diamond put into harness by the Hindus and used for drilling gems as it is now for drilling railway tunnels. In the carpets and shawls of the same region was to be traced an exact and unfaltering instinct for color, the tints falling into their proper places like those of the rainbow--the result not a picture, any more than the rainbow is a picture, but a blotted study rubbed up with the palette-knife, or what in music would be a fantasia.

From the Asiatic display, more complete by far than any before known, the eye passed to the works of the more disciplined hand and fancy and the more scholastic color-notions of Europe. There was young Munich with M?ller's lions and the anti-realistic figures of Schwanthaler; Austria with Monti's veiled heads, henceforth to be credited to Lombardy; Prussia with Rauch; and Denmark with Thorwaldsen--all pure form, copied without color from Nature, from convention and from the antique. Then came design and color united in ceramics--in the marvelously delicate flowers of Dresden, purified in the porcelain-furnace as by fire; in the stately vases of S?vres, just but varied in proportion, unfathomable in the rich depths of their ground-shadows, and exact and brilliant in the superimposed details; the more raw but promising efforts of Berlin, marked, like the jewelry from the same city, by faithful study of Nature; and, blending the decorative with the economic, the works of the English Wedgwoods and Mintons, infinite in variety of style and utility, and often pleasing in design. Italy, though supplying from her ancient stores so many of the models and so much of the inspiration of the countries named, seems to have forgotten Faenza and Etruria, and to prefer solid stone as a material to preparations of clay and flint. Her Venetian glass has markedly declined, at the same time that glass elsewhere--notably, the stained windows of Munich and the smaller objects of France and Bohemia--shows a great advance in perfection of manufacture and manageability for art purposes.

In that debatable land where the artistic and the convenient meet at the fire-side and the tea-table, English invention, enterprise and solicitude for the comfort and presentability of home shone conspicuous. Domestic art finds in the island a congenial home, and helps to make one for the islanders. English interiors, often incongruous and sombre in their decorations, at least produce the always pleasant sensation of physical comfort, the attainment of which the average Briton will class among the fine arts. Lovely as the Graces are, they need a little editing to harmonize them with a coal fire.

This halfway house of the nineteenth century, the house of glass in which it boldly ensconced itself to throw stones at its benighted relations, will ever be a landmark to the traveler over the somewhat arid expanse of industrial and commercial history. Its humblest statistics will be preserved, and coming generations will read with interest that 42,809 persons visited it, on an average, each day, that these rose on one day to 109,915, and that there were at one time in the building 93,224, or six thousand more than Domitian's most tempting and sanguinary bill of theatrical fare could have drawn into the Coliseum. Its length, by the way, was exactly equal to the circumference of the Flavian amphitheatre--1848 feet.

A new home ! who'll follow? "I," quoth New York. The British empire had taken three years in preparation: New York was ready with less than two. Not quite ready, either, we are apt to say now, but most creditably so for the time and the means of a few enterprising private men bestowed upon it. And up to this time the display of '53 under the Karnak-like shadow of the Croton Reservoir has not been equaled on our soil.

Architecturally, the building was superior to that of London, and showed itself less cramped by the peculiarities of the novel material. The form was that of a Greek cross, with a central dome a hundred and forty-eight feet high, and eight towers at the salients of seventy feet. The space, including galleries, did not reach a third of that afforded by its prototype, but proved equal to the demand.

Considering the absence of any formal public character in the movement and the brief notice, foreign exhibitors came forward in tolerable force. They could not expect to address through this display each other's commercial constituencies, as very few visitors would traverse the Atlantic: they could reach only the people of the United States. This difficulty must interfere--though much less now than twenty years ago, when the means of ocean-travel were but a fraction of what they are at present--with the strictly international complexion of any exposition in this country. If, however--as we are already assured beyond peradventure will be the case with the Centennial--our neighbors over the way send us a full representation of their products, and a delegation of visitors from their most intelligent classes, not inferior in numbers, for example, to the Germans who went to London, and the English who repaired in '73 to Vienna, we shall claim a cosmopolitan character for our exposition, and hold that it well fills its place in the line of progress.

The general result of the exhibition was to encourage our manufacturers, without giving them a great deal of food for higher ambition; while our artists and the taste of their patrons, actual and possible, were disappointed of the instruction they had reason to expect, and which the ateliers of Europe will supply in fuller measure this year.

The succeeding years present us with an epidemic of expositions, most of them, often on the slenderest grounds, arrogating the title of "international." The sprightly little city of Cork was one year ahead of New York. Then came Dublin in '53, Munich in '54, Paris in '55, Manchester in '57 , Florence in '61, London again in '62, Amsterdam in '64; and in '65 the mania had overspread the globe, that year witnessing exhibitions dubbed "international" in Dublin, New Zealand, Oporto, Cologne and Stettin, with perhaps some outliers we have missed. Then ensued a lull or a mitigation till the moribund empire of France and the remodeled empire of Austro-Hungary flared up into the magnificent demonstrations of '67 and '73. To these last we shall devote the remainder of this article, with but a glance at the second British of 1862.

This, held upon the same ground with its forerunner of eleven years previous, affords a better measure of progress. It developed a manifest advance in designs for ornamental manufactures. The schools of decorative art were beginning to tell. Carpets, hangings, furniture, stuffs for wear, encaustic tiles, etc. showed a sounder taste; and this in the foreign as well as the British stalls. French porcelain was more fully represented than before, and in finer designs. The Paris exhibition of '55, more extensively planned, though less of a financial success, than the London one it followed, was not without effect on the industry and art-culture of France. The United States also showed that they had not been idle. Our fabrics of vulcanized rubber and sewing-machines were boons to Europe she has not been slow to seize. The latter are now sold in England, with trifling modifications and new trademarks, at from one-third to one-half the price our people have to pay.

The secret of making money out of these great fairs seemed to have been lost. Although England's second took in much more than the first, and four times as much as the first French, four hundred and sixty thousand pounds having entered its treasury, it failed to leave any such profitable memorials of profit.

Nothing could be more conclusive; but to take a bond of fate it was determined to imitate England in trying a second display, and supplement '53 with '67 more effectively than Albion had '51 with '62. In what gallant style this determination was carried out we all remember. France did put forth her strength. She illustrated the Second Empire with an outpouring of her own genius and energy the variety and comprehensiveness of which no other nation could pretend to equal; and she called together the nearest approach to a rally of the nations that had yet been seen.

The pavilion consisted of seven concentric ovals, the arcs and their radii effecting the duplicate division of objects and countries. Outside, under the eaves and in the surrounding area, the peoples were encamped around their possessions. The gastric fluid being the universal solvent, the festive board was assigned the position nearest the building, a continuous shed protecting the restaurants of all nations, each with its proper specialty in the way of viands and service. Necessarily, there was in the carrying out of the latter idea a good deal of the sham and theatrical. But that gave the thing more zest, and the saloons were by no means the least effective feature of the appliances for introducing the races to each other. Tired of the tender intercourse of chopsticks, forks and fingers, they could exchange visits in their drawing-rooms; most of the known styles of dwelling-place, if we except the snow-huts of the Esquimaux, the burrows of the Kamtchadales and the boats of Canton, having representatives.

The United States government took particular interest in this exposition, and published a long and detailed report made by its commissioners. Our contributions were not worthy of the country, and showed but little novelty. Implements of farming and of war, pianos, sewing-machines and locomotives attracted chief attention. The pianos were "unreservedly praised." The wines, California having come to the rescue, were pronounced an improvement on previous specimens. The only trait of our engines that was admired or borrowed appears to have been that which had least to do with the organism of the machine--the cab. In cars our ideas have fruited better, and Pullman and Westinghouse have gained a firm foothold in England, with whose endorsement their way is open across the Channel. In the arts we are credited with seventy-five pictures, against a hundred and twenty-three from England and six hundred and fifty-two from France.

Here France was at home, and felt it. The works of Dubray, Triquetti, Yvon, Giraud, G?r?me, Dubufe, Toulmouche, Courbet, Troyon, Rosa Bonheur and others exhibited the route toward the naturalistic taken by her modern school, so different from that pursued by the Pre-Raphaelites in England. The D?sseldorf school has been drawn into the same path--France's one conquest from Prussia, who made at the same time a stout struggle in defence of the classic manner through Kaulbach. The drawings and paintings of art-students maintained by the French government in Italy attested an enlightened liberality other governments, general or local, would do well to imitate. The cost of supporting a few score of pupils in Rome could in no way be better bestowed for the promotion of commerce, manufactures and education. Taste has unquestionably a high economic value. But this is only one of France's ways of recognizing the fact. The government ?cole des Beaux Arts at Paris contained, in 1875, a hundred and seventy-two students of architecture, a hundred and eighty-three of painting, forty of sculpture and two hundred and fifty of engraving.

In agricultural machinery all civilized exhibitors had gone to school to our artisans.

One of our specialties, a postal-car, appeared under the Prussian flag. So did things more legitimately the property of the nascent empire. The Krupp gun cast its substance, as well as its shadow, before. A locomotive destined for India made Bull rub his eyes. Chemicals in every grade of purity spoke the potency of the German alembic.

The probability that the production of beetroot-sugar would before many years attain a position among the industries of this country gave interest in the eyes of American visitors to the display of European machinery employed so successfully in that business. Labor-saving machinery we have not generally been in the habit of borrowing. Neither, on the other hand, has Europe been accustomed to draw from us crude material for the finest manufactures; and the balance was set even by the admirable quality of the glass made from American sand and the porcelain moulded in American kaolin. The latter substance, a silicate of alumina, is not found in England, and at but few points on the Continent. We have it in abundance and of the finest quality.

Since 1851 a new commercial cement had come into operation in the adoption by neighboring powers of the French metrical system. England and America still hold out against the m?tre and the gramme; and the press of both occasionally levels at it the old jokes of making the spheres weigh a pound of butter and the polar axis measure a yard of calico. With the innovation, however, our merchants have become perforce familiar, a large share of their imported commodities being invoiced in accordance with it. Its immense superiority to our complicated and arbitrary weights and measures, in the tables whereof the same word often has half a dozen meanings, is beyond argument. In the United States it has earned a quasi-official adoption, but the force of habit among the people has yet to be overcome.

We may here give, in evidence of the increasing hold these expositions have upon the popular mind, the gradual multiplication of the numbers exhibiting. At London, in '51, the exhibitors were 13,937; at Paris, '55, 23,954; at London, '62, 28,653; and at Paris, '67, 50,226.

Austria, with admirable spirit, determined to anticipate her turn to enter the lists of peace. Undismayed by Solferino and Sadowa, she had found her Antaeus in Andrassy. Her capital city was advancing with immense strides in beauty and extent. Geographically and ethnically it was, like the empire itself, a meeting-ground of north and south, east and west. Isolated from the sea, it offered for the transport of heavy articles a system of railways proved by the event to be sufficiently effective. It was decided that the march of progress should be more than kept up, and that the building, with its appendages, should be an improvement on all its predecessors in extent, in architectural effect and in solidity of material. The dimensions are so variously stated, owing largely to difference of opinion as to what should be embraced within the admeasurement, that we are at a loss how to give them. To the main building, however, was assigned a capacity of seventy-three thousand five hundred and ninety-three square m?tres. Sixty-three hundred and eighty of these were awarded to France, ten m?tres less to England; and thirteen hundred and sixty to the United States. The marquee-like rotunda rose to a height of two hundred and fifty feet, with a diameter at base of three hundred and fifty-four. The principal entrance, with piers and arches of cut stone profusely decorated with statues and reliefs, was in highly satisfactory contrast to the fragile shells of glass and cast iron that sheltered the earlier exhibitions.

Perhaps in all this solid work the demands of time had not been duly considered. Certainly, the display was not punctual to the appointed period of opening. Exceptionally bad weather was another drawback, and the greed of the Viennese hotel-keepers a third. For such, among other reasons, the enterprise was financially a failure--a fact which little concerns those who went to study and learn, and those who three years later have to describe. If the darkening of the imperial exchequer prove more than a passing shadow, and an ultimate loss on the speculation cease to be matter of question, the few millions it cost may be recovered by the disbanding of a regiment or two. For one brigade, out of half a million soldiers, to bring the world and its wealth to the seat of government, is doing better than the usual work of the bayonet.

In that land of music concerts could not fail to be a leading feature. The Boston improvement of emphasizing the bass with discharges of distant artillery, or its equivalent, the slamming of cellar-doors nearer by, was not attained. Noise and harmony were kept at arm's length apart.

The illustration of homes was made a specialty. As at Paris, the peoples brought their dwellings, or, more often, the dwellings came without their occupants. The four-footed and feathered live-stock were of more indubitable authenticity. The display of all the European breeds of cattle and horses--English Durhams, Alderneys and racers, Russian trotters, Holstein cows and Flemish mares, the gray oxen of Hungary and the buffaloes of the Campagna, the wild red pigs of the Don and the razor-backs of Southern France--was calculated to amuse, if but moderately to edify, our breeders of Ohio, Kentucky and New York. A thousand horses and fifteen hundred horned cattle comprised this congress, while two hundred and fifty pigs were deemed enough to represent the grunters of all nations.

In turning to other provinces, we find that England was foremost in machinery, the United States, "the only rival," says a British critic, "from whom we had anything to fear," being feebly represented, as we were in other respects, thanks to certain irregularities in the management of our commissioners sufficiently discussed at the time. The British carpets out-shone the display of any competitor, the influence of her new schools of decorative design being unmistakably marked.

The Aubusson carpets of France still maintained their position, as did the velvet, fa?ence, tapestry, engravings, books, marine photographs, etc. of the same country. Italy made her usual contribution in the arts. Among the Austrian objects of this class the opals of Hungary were prominent.

India was unexpectedly complete in her collection: not only her modern industry, but her antiquities, had abundant specimens.

Much criticism has been expended upon the alleged lavish and indiscriminate distribution of medals and diplomas at Vienna. But, however numerous the undeserving who obtained them, the deserving must at the same time have had their share: the shower that fell on the unjust could not have missed the just. Therefore we note that, despite our slender show, one hundred and seventy-eight medals for Merit and sixty-nine for Progress, two for the Fine Arts and five for Good Taste, came to America. The National Bureau of Education, the Lighthouse Board and the State of Massachusetts obtained "Grand Diplomas of Honor" for documents. The like honor was awarded to the city of Boston and the Smithsonian Institution, and to four private exhibitors for the more palpable contributions of tool-making machinery, steam-machinery, mowing-machines and dentistry. This list does not teach us much. The prizes are, unless awarded with the most intelligent and conscientious precision, valuable chiefly as advertisements to the recipients, who can earn, and generally have earned, better advertisements in other shapes.

Thus have the chief powers of Western and Central Europe displayed their mettle in peaceful tourney. The visor of a young and unknown knight is now barred for the fray. He has, like the rest in these days of modern chivalry, to be his own herald and blow his own preliminary blast. It is a tolerably sonorous one. Let the event show that he speaks not through brass alone.

SKETCHES OF INDIA.

On a rock at the summit of a hill commanding this interesting city stands the fort of Fatehgarh, built by a certain Afghan adventurer, Dost Mohammed Khan, who, in a time when this part of India must have been a perfect paradise for all the free lances of the East, was so fortunate as to win the favor of Aurungzebe, and to receive as evidence thereof a certain district in Malwa. The Afghan seems to have lost no time in improving the foothold thus gained, and he thus founded the modern district of Bhopal, which was formerly divided between Malwa and G?ndwana, one gate of the town standing in the former and one in the latter country. Dost Mohammed Khan appears, indeed, to have been not the only adventurer who bettered his fortunes in Bhopal. It is a curious fact, and one well illustrating the liberality which has characterized much of the more modern history of the Bhopal government, that no long time ago it was administered by a regency consisting of three persons--one a Hindu, one a Mohammedan, and the other a Christian. This Christian is mentioned by Sir John Malcolm as "Shahzed Musseah, or Belthazzar Bourbona" , and is described by that officer, to whom he was well known, as a brave soldier and an able man. He traced his lineage to a certain Frenchman calling himself John of Bourbon, who in the time of Akbar was high in favor and position at Delhi. His widow, the princess Elizabeth of Bourbon, still resides at Bhopal in great state, being possessed of abundant wealth and ranking second only to the Begum. She is the acknowledged head of a large number of descendants of John of Bourbon, amounting to five or six hundred, who remain at Bhopal and preserve their faith--having a church and Catholic priest of their own--as well as the traditions of their ancestry, which, according to their claim, allies them to the royal blood of France.

No mention of Bhopal can fail to pay at least a hasty tribute in commemoration of the forcible character and liberal politics of the Begum, who has but of late gone to her account after a long and sometimes trying connection with the administration of her country's affairs. After the death of her husband--who was accidentally killed by a pistol in the hands of a child not long after the treaty with the English in 1818--their nephew, then in his minority, was considered as the future nawab, and was betrothed to their daughter, the Begum being regent during his minority. When the time came, with his majority, for the nuptials, the Begum refused to allow the marriage to take place, for reasons which need not here be detailed. After much dispute a younger brother of the nephew was declared more eligible, but the Begum still managed in one way or another to postpone matters, much to his dissatisfaction. An arbitration finally resulted in placing him on the throne, but his reign was short, and he died after a few years, leaving the Begum again in practical charge of affairs--a position which she improved by instituting many wise and salutary reforms and bringing the state of Bhopal to a condition of great prosperity. The Pearl Mosque , which stands immediately in front of the palace, was built at her instance in imitation of the great cathedral-mosque of Delhi, and presents a charming evidence of her taste, as well as of the architectural powers still existing in this remarkable race.

The town proper of Bhopal is enclosed by a much--decayed wall of masonry some two miles in circuit, within which is a fort, similar both in its condition and material to the wall. Outside these limits is a large commercial quarter . The beautiful lake running off past the town to the south is said to be artificial in its origin, and to have been produced at the instance of Bho Pal, the minister of King Bohoje, as long ago as the sixth century, by damming up the waters of the Bess River, for the purpose of converting an arid section into fertile land. It is still called the Bhopal Tal.

"If you judge by the heels of the former and the beards of the latter, it is true," he said.

Then the driver changed the relationship, with an access of tenderness in voice and in adjuration. "Go, my son," he entreated. But the son stood as immovable as if he were going to remain a monument of filial impiety to all time.

"Go, my grandson, my love." This seemed entirely too much for the animal, and produced apparently a sense of abasement in him which was in the highest degree uncomplimentary to his human kinsman and lover. He lay down. In so doing he broke several portions of the ragged harness, and then proceeded, with the most deliberate absurdity, to get himself thoroughly tangled in the remainder.

"I think I should be willing," I said to my companion, "to carry that horse to Jhansi on my own shoulders if I could have the pleasure of seeing him blown from one of the rajah's cannon in the, fort."

But the driver, without the least appearance of discomposure, had dismounted, and with his long deft Hindu fingers soon released the animal, patched up his gear, replaced him between the shafts and resumed his place.

Another round of consanguinities: the animal still remained immovable, till presently he lunged out with a wicked kick which had nearly obliterated at one blow the whole line of his ancestry and collateral relatives as represented in the driver. At this the latter became as furious as he had before been patient: he belabored the horse, assistants ran from the stables, the whole party yelled and gesticulated at the little beast simultaneously, and he finally broke down the road at a pace which the driver did not suffer him to relax until we arrived at the bungalow where we intended to stop for supper.

A venerable old Mohammedan in a white beard that gave him the majesty of Moses advanced for the purpose of ascertaining our wants.

"Cherisher of the humble! no."

"Any beefsteak?"

"Nourisher of the poor! no."

In a twinkling the cook caught the chicken: its head was turned toward Mecca. Bismillah! O God the Compassionate, the Merciful! the poor fowl's head flew off, and by the time we had made our ablutions supper was ready.

One does not wonder that the hills and forests of such a land became the hiding-places of the strangling Thugs, the home of the poisoning Dacoits, the refuge of conspirators and insurgents and the terror of Central India.

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