years after the event, penned his famous passage in which
he declared that nothing in history or in fiction, not even the story
which Ugolino told in the sea of everlasting ice, approached the
horrors of the Blackhole, he wrote before the worst horrors of Indian
history had yet become portion and parcel of our own history. But even
those who write to-day, more than a century and a quarter after that
time; those in whose minds the memories are fresh of the butcher's well
at Cawnpore and the massacre on the river-bank; those to whom the names
of Nana Sahib and Azimoolah Khan sound as horridly as the names of
fiends--even those can still think of the Blackhole as almost
incomparable in horror, and of Surajah Dowlah as among the worst of
Oriental murderers. It is true that certain efforts have been made to
reduce the {267} measure of Surajah Dowlah's guilt. Colonel Malleson,
than whom there is no fairer or abler Indian historian, thinks there
can be no doubt that Surajah Dowlah did not desire the death of his
English prisoners. Mr. Holwell, one of the few survivors of that awful
night, the man whose narrative thrilled and still thrills, horrified
and still horrifies, the civilized world, does give testimony that goes
towards clearing the character of Surajah Dowlah from direct complicity
in that terrible crime. "I had in all three interviews with him," he
wrote, "the last in Darbar before seven, when he repeated his
assurances to me, on the word of a soldier, that no harm should come to
us; and, indeed, I believe his orders were only general that we for
that night should be secured, and that what followed was the result of
revenge and resentment in the breasts of the lower jemidars to whose
custody we were delivered for the number of their order killed during
the siege." Yet these words do not go far to cleanse Surajah Dowlah's
memory. What had occurred? The English prisoners were brought before
the triumphant Nabob, bullied and insulted, and finally left in charge
of the Nabob's soldiery, while the Nabob himself retired to slumber.
The soldiery, whether prompted by revenge or mere merciless cruelty,
forced the prisoners, one hundred and forty-six in number, into the
garrison prison--a fearful place, only twenty feet square, known as the
Blackhole. The senses sicken in reading what happened after this
determination was carried out. The death-struggles of those unhappy
English people crowded in that narrow space, wit