"It was the great Mohammedan festival, which is sacred to the memory of Hosein, the son of Ali. The history of Islam contains nothing more touching than the event which gave rise to that solemnity. The mournful legend relates how the chief of the Fatimites, when all his brave followers had perished round him, drank his latest draught of water and uttered his latest prayer; how the assassins carried his head in triumph; how the tyrant smote the lifeless lips with his staff; and how a few old men recollected with tears that they had seen those lips pressed to the lips of the Prophet of God. After the lapse of twelve centuries, the recurrence of this solemn season excites the fiercest and saddest emotions in the bosoms of the devout Moslems of India. They work themselves up to such agonies of rage and lamentation, that some, it is said, have given up the ghost from the mere effect of mental excitement."
Such was the celebration that we witnessed in Delhi. The martyrdom of these Moslem saints is commemorated by little shrines in their houses, made of paper and tinsel, and on the great day of the feast they go in procession out of the city to a cemetery five miles distant, and there bury them in hundreds of newly-opened graves. As we drove out of Delhi, we found the procession on its march; men, women, and children by tens of thousands on foot, and others in bullock-carts, or mounted on horses, camels, and elephants. Immense crowds gathered by the roadside, mounting the steps of old palaces, or climbing to the tops of houses, to see this mighty procession pass, as it went rolling forward in a wild frenzy to its Golgotha--its place of a skull. There they lay down these images of their saints as they would bury their dead. We went into the cemetery, and saw the open graves, and the little shrines garlanded with flowers, that were laid in the earth, not (so far as we saw) with weeping and wailing, but rather with a feeling of triumph and victory.
Leaving this scene of wild fanaticism, we rode on a few miles farther to the Kootub Minar, the loftiest isolated tower in the world, that has stood there six hundred years, looking down on all the strange scenes that have passed within its horizon, since watchers from its summit saw the armies of Tamerlane march by. We rode back through a succession of ruins, stopping at several royal tombs, but most interested in one where the sons of the aged king of Delhi took refuge after the fall of the city, and from which they were taken out by Captain Hodson, and shot in the presence of their deluded followers, and their bodies exposed in the Chandney Chook, to the terror of the wretched people, who had seen the cruelty of these young princes, and were awed to see the retribution that overtook those who had stained their hands with blood.