March 18 Wednesday – The Clemens party arrived in Lahore at 5 a.m. [NB 36 TS 57]. Parsons writes,
The next jaunt was to Lahore, capital of the Punjab. Raised like Troy on the rubble of its dead selves, Old Lahore had monuments and bases of Hindu temples and Mohammedan mosques which had sunk under a seven to twelve foot encrustation of time. It was a travel commonplace that the best way to see these antiquities and the native city’s threadbare, serpentining streets was regally. The Lieutenant Governor obliged with the loan of an elephant (on Mar. 19). Thus the Occidental humorist looked down from a swaying howdah on the flashing, scurrying life, peeped through top floor windows at family huddles, and noted the works of dead hands [“MT India” 92].
At 9:30 p.m. Sam Gave his “At Home” (No. 1) lecture at the Railway Theatre in Lahore. The Lahore Civil and Military Gazette published a review of this and the Mar. 19 lecture on Mar. 20 [Ahluwalia 19].