Storia do Mogor 168: My Return to the Mogul Country.

168

Finding myself without means and very ill, I made up my mind to return, on recovering my health, to the Mogul country and try my fortune once more. Thus when I had got well I left Bandora with a friar in my charge, whose name out of respect I will not disclose, and Antonio Machado, a man well known for his bravado and talk, which led to his murder at Goa. God alone knows what I endured with this fellow-traveller, who, looking on the Mahomedans of Hindustan as being the same as the Portuguese, tried to carry everything off by bravado. He ignored the fact that Hindustani Mahomedans are very touchy, and possess sense and judgment just like any other nation. If I wanted to write here the foolish acts done on the road by those two men, my story would become a very long one. On arrival in Agrah, I left behind me the friar, who stayed on account of some business. The other man wished to come with me as far as Dihli; then he attempted by force to take up his quarters in my house. But I declined, and he was forced to search for a home elsewhere. He encountered all that I had prognosticated, for I was fairly acquainted with the Mogul country. It wanted very little more for this man to have brought the fathers of the society (the Jesuits) to perdition; for in his desperation, having nothing to eat, he tried to denounce them to the qazi of Agrah. He said that the only object of the fathers' stay in the Mogul realm was to buy Qurans and transmit them to Europe. There on a fixed day in each year a festival took place, when they burnt the image of Muhammad. This was quite enough to have caused the fathers to be burnt alive; and, seeing themselves in such danger, they collected as an alms the sum of five hundred rupees [for him], and were thus delivered from a great peril. For, being a man of little understanding, he was capable of doing such a silly thing. He wandered hither and thither, and then quitted Mogul territory, I giving him his expenses to take him as far as Surat.