the side street! Quickly! Jaimihr' rat's nest is one affair,"
he muttered; "Howrah' beehive is another!"

CHAPTER XIX

Now, secrets and things of the Councils of Kings
Are deucid expensive to buy,
For it wouldn't look nice if a Councillor's price
Were anything other than high.
Be advised, though, and note that the price they will quote
Is less at each grade you go deeper,
And--(Up on its toes it's the Underworld knows!)--
The cheapest of all is the Sweeper.

JOANNA--when Alwa forgot about her and loosed her to run just where she
chose--had sneaked, down alleys and over roof-tops, straight for the
mission house. She found there nothing but a desultory guard and an
impression, rather than the traces, of an empty cage. About two
minutes of cautious questioning of neighbors satisfied her where the
missionaries were; nothing short of death seemed able to deprive her of
ability to flit like a black bat through the shadows, and the distance
to Howrah's palace was accomplished, by her usual bat's entry route,
in less time than a pony would have taken by the devious street. Before
Alwa had thundered on Jaimihr's gate Joanna had mingled in the crowd
outside the palace and was shrewdly questioning again.

She arrived too late to see McClean and his daughter seized; what she
did hear was that they were prisoners, and that the Maharajah, Jaimihr,
and the priests were all of them engaged in the secret ceremony
whose beginning was a monthly spectacle but whose subsequent
developments--supposed to be somewhere in the bowels of the earth--were
known only to the men who held the key.

Like a rat running in the wainscot holes, she tried to follow the
procession; like everybody else, she knew the way it took from the
palace gate, and--as few others were--she was aware of a scaling-place
on the outer wall where a huge baobab drooped century-scarred branches
nearly to the ground on either side. The sacred monkeys used that route
and where they went Joanna could contrive to follow.

It was another member of the sweeper caste, lurking in the darkness
of an inner courtyard, who pointed out the bronze-barred door to her
through which the treasure guardians had chanted on their way; it was
he, too, who told her that Rosemary McClean and her father had been
rushed into the palace through the main entrance. Also, he informed her
that there was no way--positively no way practicable even for a monkey