I t was here, at Patna, in the centre of the rich
province of Bahar, where, at the outbreak of the
mutiny in 1857, the Wahabees, a fanatical sect of
Puritan Mohamedans, were the arch-intriguers, and
it was fortunate indeed- for the Government, that
in Mr. William Taylor, the Commissioner of the
district, it possessed one of its most sagacious and
energetic servants. He, as soon as he had discovered
the plot, without hesitation arrested the chief Mulvis
of the sect, whom he placed under supervision, notwithstanding
the favour they stood in with the
Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. They were eventually
tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged,
but the High Commissioner commuted the sentence
to imprisonment for life on the Andaman Islands.
Here Ahmed-Ulla, one of them, was under nominal
confinement when Lord Mayo was assassinated by a
Mohamedan, and only the year before, in 1871, the
Chief Justice of Calcutta had been stabbed by a
Wahabee fanatic on the steps of his own court I
Colonel Meadows Taylor, author of the I Story of
my Life, mentions an earlier case of the murderous
excesses of the sect in Southern India, where in 1833,
a horrible plot, said to have been of their contrivance,
was discovered to kill all Europeans at Bangalore and
sell the women as slaves.
At an early hour on a very cold morning I found
myself crossing the Hooghly in a steamer for Calcutta,
speculating upon the comfort I should enjoy at
Wilson’s or Spencer’s large hotel, but alas! my
thoughts had been wasted, for both were full, and
it was only after an hour’s search that I secured
rooms at a lodging house. My first care was to find
out how, when and where I should proceed on leaving
the Bengal capital, the city of palaces and whatever
other appellation people give it, since it did not
take me long to discover that it was not a place of
my abiding longer than absolutely necessary.
I had Burmah in my mind, with distant visions of
Mandalay and Bhamo, but friends dissuaded me from
gomg there, “ nothing to be seen and steamers
uncomfortable,” and very sorry I am to this day that
I listened to the croakers, especially since reading
Lieutenant-General Fytche’s interesting account of the
country. Next I thought of visiting the famous
“ Black Pagoda” and the temple of Juggernauth
at Puri, good specimens of the Indo-Aryan style, distinguished
by its square ground-plan and curvilinear
sikra or tower; they are about three hundred miles
down the coast, but here again I was baffled no
direct steam communication,” and on learning that
there were similar pagodas in the Madras presidency,