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Passage Illustrated: The Installation of the Moonstone at Somnath

The crowd detained us as we drew near to the place of celebration. By the time we reached the hill the moon was high in the heaven. My Hindoo friends possessed some special privileges which enabled them to gain access to the shrine. They kindly allowed me to accompany them. When we arrived at the place, we found the shrine hidden from our view by a curtain hung between two magnificent trees. Beneath the trees a flat projection of rock jutted out, and formed a species of natural platform. Below this, I stood, in company with my Hindoo friends.

Looking back down the hill, the view presented the grandest spectacle of Nature and Man, in combination, that I have ever seen. The lower slopes of the eminence melted imperceptibly into a grassy plain, the place of the meeting of three rivers. On one side, the graceful winding of the waters stretched away, now visible, now hidden by trees, as far as the eye could see. On the other, the waveless ocean slept in the calm of the night. People this lovely scene with tens of thousands of human creatures, all dressed in white, stretching down the sides of the hill, overflowing into the plain, and fringing the nearer banks of the winding rivers. Light this halt of the pilgrims by the wild red flames of cressets and torches, streaming up at intervals from every part of the innumerable throng. Imagine the moonlight of the East, pouring in unclouded glory over all — and you will form some idea of the view that met me when I looked forth from the summit of the hill.

A strain of plaintive music, played on stringed instruments, and flutes, recalled my attention to the hidden shrine.

I turned, and saw on the rocky platform the figures of three men. In the central figure of the three I recognised the man to whom I had spoken in England, when the Indians appeared on the terrace at Lady Verinder’s house. The other two who had been his companions on that occasion were no doubt his companions also on this.

One of the spectators, near whom I was standing, saw me start. In a whisper, he explained to me the apparition of the three figures on the platform of rock.

They were Brahmins (he said) who had forfeited their caste in the service of the god. The god had commanded that their purification should be the purification by pilgrimage. On that night, the three men were to part. In three separate directions, they were to set forth as pilgrims to the shrines of India. Never more were they to look on each other's faces. Never more were they to rest on their wanderings, from the day which witnessed their separation, to the day which witnessed their death.

As those words were whispered to me, the plaintive music ceased. The three men prostrated themselves on the rock, before the curtain which hid the shrine. They rose — they looked on one another — they embraced. Then they descended separately among the people. The people made way for them in dead silence. In three different directions I saw the crowd part, at one and the same moment. Slowly the grand white mass of the people closed together again. The track of the doomed men through the ranks of their fellow mortals was obliterated. We saw them no more. — "Epilogue. The Finding of the Diamond. III: The Statement of Mr. Murthwaite (1850)," instalment thirty-two, p. 503.

Commentary: Who is Mr. Murthwaite?

If in The Moonstone Ezra Jennings represents the advances of modern science, the celebrated Eastern traveller, Mr. Murthwaite, presents the balanced perspective of a sympathetic but objective observer of both Eastern (religion-dominated) and Western (politically and materially dominated) cultures. Of course, he represents, too, an enormously convenient plot device for Wilkie Collins as with his privileged position in Hindu society he is able to attend and observe the ceremony at Somnath in which the devotees of the Moon God reinstall the sacred diamond and bid farewell to the three priests who effected the restoration of the Moonstone.

Readers of the 1868 serial last encountered the celebrated Eastern traveller at Rachel Verinder's eighteenth birthday dinner, a ritual not without argument as Franklin Blake derided the western practice of medicine, much to Dr. Candy's chagrin, an incident illustrated in "And whispered to the company, confidentially, 'Please to change your mind, and try it; for I know it will do you good'" (Part 5: 1 February 1868). Although the knowledgeable Murthwaite is decidedly a plot convenience for Collins, Collins probably based him on an actual Eastern explorer, the famous English archeologist who unearthed ancient Nineveh in Mesopotamia, Sir Austen Layard (1817-94), a traveller throughout the exotic and dangerous East whom Collins and Dickens actually encountered in Italy in 1853. Layard must have seemed a dashing adventurer in late 1849 when he published Nineveh and Its Remains after his discovery of Sennacherib's Palace at Koujunjik in the Fertile Crescent. "By chance, Murthwaite is present at the ritual ceremony" (Reed, 285) at which the Hindu worshippers of the Moon God re-install the third eye of their deity, the Moonstone, in the Temple of the Moon at Somnath. The year prior to publication, Collins consulted John Wyllie, a well-travelled member of the Indian Civil Service, from whom he received suggestions as to which Indian cities he should mention in the book — places he had obviously been.

The prominent personage among the guests at the dinner party I found to be Mr. Murthwaite.

On his appearance in England, after his wanderings, society had been greatly interested in the traveller, as a man who had passed through many dangerous adventures, and who had escaped to tell the tale. He had now announced his intention of returning to the scene of his exploits, and of penetrating into regions left still unexplored. This magnificent indifference to placing his safety in peril for the second time, revived the flagging interest of the worshippers in the hero. The law of chances was clearly against his escaping on this occasion. It is not every day that we can meet an eminent person at dinner, and feel that there is a reasonable prospect of the news of his murder being the news that we hear of him next. — Third Narrative, Chapter 3, p. 325.

Leighton and Surridge assume that the European traveller in an eastern encampment in the uncaptioned vignette for 23 May 1868 is once again the celebrated explorer Mr. Murthwaite, whom Mr. Bruff encounters at a dinner towards the end of his narrative. However, the activity of the traveller, who is smoking a pipe, suggests that the subject of the vignette is in fact Franklin Blake, who is about to receive a letter in which Mr. Bruff informs him of his father's death. His smoking a pipe with the desert Arabs may be an oblique reference to his addiction to cigars in the early chapters. Rather, Mr. Murthwaite is associated with entry into rituals and sites on the Indian subcontinent forbidden to Europeans. Apparently he originated the way in which the Brahmins would murder Ablewhite — by suffocation, rather than stabbing or garrotting.

The Indians in these illustrations are gaunt, grasping, apparently worthy of loathing—utterly different from their depiction in Part 1 or indeed from the depiction of their return to India at the novel's end. It is, then, for their cultural boundary crossing that they are vilified — and we suggest that the novel’s illustrations indict them far more strongly than does the letterpress. We note too that the text's illustrations do not condemn similar boundary crossing by Murthwaite, who (in the extradiegetic chapter head to Part 21) appears calmly smoking a hookah in an Asian scene. — Leighton and Surridge, p. 230.

The European smoking the pipe is, however, not bearded or even middle-aged, and is therefore more likely Franklin Blake, whose tobacco addiction and his attempt to eschew it without tapering off led to his insomnia and thence to Dr. Candy's intervention with opium. Steve Farmer in his introduction to the Broadview edition praises Collins's thoroughness in creating such minor characters as Murthwaite, partly as a vehicle for effecting the story's dénouement, and partly as a means of enlisting the reader's sympathy for the Brahmins who, generation after generation, have devoted their lives to guarding and then re-claiming the Moonstone:

The enigmatic and elegant world traveller Mr. Murthwaite, at one point unfairly labelled a "semi-savage" by an unenlightened and judgmental Gabriel Betteredge, is obviously a favourite of Collins, who spent a great deal of energy and time researching his character. Murthwaite's patient explanations of the mysterious Brahmin priests who steal into England to retrieve their diamond, as well as his encyclopedic understanding of the cultures of the East, earn from the reader a deserved sympathy. His is an impressive character, one who goes some distance toward showing readers that Collins's social sympathies lay outside the narrow boundaries of English social propriety. [21]

In this final illustration, the Brahmins are hardly blood-thirsty foreigners bent on shedding the blood of the infidel. Rather, the trio enact a ballet of despair, for the three Brahmins, have been commanded by their deity to purify themselves of the taint of their experiences in the West by separating forever. No longer savage killers or thugs, they acknowledge in their pious gestures and solemn expressions the tragic necessity of living apart after so many years together in the devoted service to the Hindu moon-god. The individual in foreground with the long moustache is the leader, the same man who, in European garb, visited Mr. Bruff to ascertain the length of the loan on the Moonstone. The illustration is effective, then, in eliciting the American reader's sympathy for the priests who, in disguising themselves as jugglers, have lost caste, and have blood on their hands, albeit hardly "innocent" blood.

Images of Brahmins and Their Destination by Sharp, 1946

Left: William Sharp's recreation of the (imagined) scene in which the Brahmins take ship for India, The Three Brahmins Depart (uncaptioned: 1946). Right: William Sharp's depiction of the temple at Somnath, Uncaptioned Tail-piece (1946). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]

Related Materials

Related Materials

• The Moonstone and British India (1857, 1868, and 1876)
• Detection and Disruption inside and outside the 'quiet English home' in The Moonstone
• Illustrations by F. A. Fraser for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone: A Romance (1890)
• Illustrations by John Sloan for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone: A Romance (1908)
• Illustrations by Alfred Pearse for The Moonstone: A Romance (1910)
• The 1944 illustrations by William Sharp for The Moonstone (1946).

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Last updated 21 September 2016