knees and the steadiness of your nerves. Round you is
empty space: look down, the pillar bends and totters, and you seem to
rock in air; you shudder, you are falling; and away, away below, far as
the eye can carry, you see the dusty plain, studded with a thousand
tombs and relics of forgotten kings. There is the grim old fortress of
the Toghlaks: there is the singular observatory of the raja astronomer,
Jaya Singh: and there the tomb, Humaioon's tomb, before which Hodson,
Hodson the brave, Hodson the slandered, Hodson the unforgotten, sat, for
two long hours, still, as if man and horse were carved in stone, with
the hostile crowd that loathed and feared him tossing and seething and
surging round him, waiting for the last Mogul to come out and be led
away. The air is thick, and sparkles with blinding dust and glare, and
the wind whistles in your ears. Over the bones of dynasties, the hot
wind wails and sobs and moans. Aye! if a man seeks for melancholy, I
will tell him where to find it--at the top of the old Kutub Minar.

And then, that happened which I had foreseen. We had not gone a mile
upon our homeward way, when one of the horses fell. Therefore,
disregarding the asseverations of my rascally Jehu that the remaining
animal was fully equal to the task alone, I descended, and proceeded on
foot. But a ten mile walk on the Delhi plain in the hottest part of the
day is not a thing to be recommended. After plodding on for about two
hours, I was, like Langland, "wery forwandred," and went me to rest, not
alas! by a burnside, but in the shadow of one of the innumerable little
tombs that stand along the dusty road. There I lay down and fell asleep.

Nothing induces slumber like exertion under an Indian sun. When I
awoke, that sun was setting. A little way before me, the yellow walls of
Delhi were bathed in a ruddy glow; the minarets of the Great Mosque
stood out sharp against the clear unspotted amber sky. And as I watched
them, I suddenly became aware that I was myself observed with interest
by a dusky individual, who was squatted just in front of me, and who
rose, salaaming, when he saw that I was awake. It appeared that I had,
so to say, fallen into a "nest of vipers;" that I had unwittingly
invaded the premises of a snake dealer, who, no doubt for solid reasons,
had made my friendly tomb the temporary repository of his
stock-in-trade.

The Indian snake charmer, _garuda, hawadiga_[3], or whatever else they
call him, is a