low, furnished with a French bedstead, and nothing else; in the
verandah place an embarrassed Englishman, smiling into the open mouth of
an idiotic female elephant. But Gerowlia could not live on smiles alone.
Finding that no food was forthcoming, she shut her mouth, and renewed
her attempts to get into the verandah, and ate more thatch. To say "Hi!"
to an elephant is a misdirected courtesy. It quickens the pace, and if
you flick her on the trunk with a wet towel, she curls the trunk out of
harm's way. Special education is necessary. A little breechless boy
passed, carrying a lump of stone. "Hit her on the feet, Sahib," said he;
"hit her on the feet." Gerowlia had by this time nearly scraped off her
pad, and there were no signs of the _mahout_. The Englishman went out
and found a tent-peg, and returning, in the extremity of his wrath
smote her bitterly on the nails of the near forefoot.

Gerowlia held up her foot to be beaten, and made the most absurd
noises--squawked in fact, exactly like an old lady who has narrowly
escaped being run over. She backed out of the verandah, still squawking,
on three feet and in the open held up near and off forefoot alternately
to be beaten. It was very pitiful, for one swing of her trunk could have
knocked the Englishman flat. He ceased whacking her, but she squawked
for some minutes and then fell placidly asleep in the sunshine. When the
_mahout_ returned, he beat her for breaking her tether exactly as the
Englishman had done, but much more severely, and the ridiculous old
thing hopped on three legs for fully five minutes. "Come along, Sahib,"
said the _mahout_. "I will show this mother of bastards who is the
driver. Fat daughter of the Devil, sit down. You would eat thatch, would
you? How does the iron taste?" And he gave Gerowlia a headache, which
affected her temper all through the afternoon. She set off, across the
railway line which runs below the rock of Chitor, into broken ground cut
up with _nullahs_ and covered with low scrub, over which it would have
been difficult to have taken a sure-footed horse, so fragmentary and
disconnected was its nature.

XI.

PROVES CONCLUSIVELY THE EXISTENCE OF THE DARK TOWER VISITED BY CHILDE
ROLANDE, AND OF "BOGEY" WHO FRIGHTENS CHILDREN.

The Gamberi River--clear as a trout-stream--runs through the waste round
Chitor, and is spanned by an old bridge, very solid and massive, said to
have been built before the sack of Ala-ud-din. The br