The ancient city of Chitor lies crumbling and desolate on the back of a long, level-topped hill, which rises solitary to the height of some five hundred feet above the far-stretching plain.  Kipling likens it to a great ship, up the sides of which the steep road slopes like a gangway.  At the foot lies the modern village, squalid but picturesque.

As we toil, perspiring, up the long ramp which for a weary mile slopes sidelong up the scarped flank of the mountain, and pass through the seven gates which guarded the way, and every one of which was the scene of many a grim and bloody struggle, I will try to sketch the outline of the history of the famous fort, for many centuries the headquarters of the royal race of Mewar.

The Gehlotes, or (as they were afterwards styled) the Sesodias, claim descent from the Sun through Manu, Icshwaca, and Rama Chandra, as indeed do the other Rajput potentates of Jaipur, Marwar, and Bikanir, the Rana of Mewar, however, taking precedence owing to his descent from Lava, the eldest son of Rama.

The ancient dynasty of Mewar has fallen from its high estate, but the history of its rise is lost in the mists of grey antiquity.

“We can trace the losses of Mewar, but with difficulty her acquisitions....  She was an old-established dynasty when all the other States were in embryo.”  Long before Richard of the Lion-heart fared to Palestine to wrest the Holy City from the infidel, “a hundred kings, its (Mewar’s) allies and dependants, had their thrones raised in Chitor,” to defend it against the sword of the Mohammedan; while overhead floated the banner displaying the golden sun of Mewar on a crimson field.

Some centuries later the Crusaders brought to Europe from the plains of Palestine the novel device of armorial bearings.

Chitor itself appears to have been in possession of the Mori princes until, in A.D. 728, it was taken by Bappa, who, though of royal race, was brought up in obscurity by the Bhils as an attendant on the sacred kine.  This shepherd prince, ancestor of the present Rana of Mewar, became a national hero, and many legends are still current concerning him and his romantic deeds.  The story of his “amazing marriage,” by which he succeeded in wedding six hundred damsels all at once, is one of the most curious.  Bappa, while still a youth, was appealed to, one holiday, by the frolicsome maidens of a neighbouring village, who, led by the daughter of the Solankini chief of Nagda, in accordance with the custom upon this particular saint’s day, had come out to indulge in swinging, but who had forgotten to supply themselves with a swinging-rope.  Bappa agreed to get them one if they would play his game first.  This the young ladies readily agreed to do; whereupon, all joining hands, he danced with them a certain mystic number of times round a sacred tree.

  “Regardless of their doom, the little victims played,”

and finally dispersed to their homes, entirely unconscious that they were all as securely married to Bappa as though they had visited Gretna Green with him.