Summary
November 21st.—I would not be Bainie Madho for all the land in Byswarra, nor for all the Begums in Oude. Our troops are indeed bitter against him, and I must confess I begin to share their animosity. Just as I was going to lie down last night for a comfortable sleep, I was informed that the tents were going to be struck immediately, and the tap-tapping of the kelassees confirmed the fact. At 1 o'clock this blessed morning our tents were struck, and the whole column set out upon its way once more. We are now bound for a place called Bochraon, where the Rana is confidently and trustfully, they say, abiding our coming. In about half-an-hour after we started, the column, which defiled through the streets of Roy Bareilly, was jammed, as it appeared, inextricably for the time, and could neither get backwards nor forwards. It was bright moonlight, and the stillness of the deserted streets of this wondrous old town, with its high decaying houses, and battlemented walls and square keeps, rising up like baronial mansions at the angles of the tortuous highways, in the waste of uninhabited places, was rendered all the more striking by the confusion which prevailed in the narrow stream-like procession of guns, elephants, horses, and men, now suddenly dammed up in front. Some few trembling inhabitants sat on the house-tops watching us in fear and wonder.
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- My Diary in India, in the Year 1858–9 , pp. 336 - 361Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010First published in: 1860