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IV.
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THE KOH-I-NUR.
T
HE Koh-i-nur is the most ancient, the most illustrious, and the most traveled of all our diamonds. It is what is called a white diamond,
but its, color would be of the deepest crimson, if only one thousandth
part of the blood which has been shed for it could have tinted its
rays. It looms through the mist of ages until the mind refuses to trace
further backwards its nebulous career.
It
is to an emperor that we owe the first contemporary account of the
imperial gem. In 1526 Baber, the Mogul conqueror, speaks of it as among
the captured treasures of Delhi. But that was by no means the first
time that it mingled in the affairs of men. It was already '' The
famous diamond " in Baber's time and a 79
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