idge is in the
middle of the stream--the floods have raced round either end of it--and
is reached by a steeply sloping stone causeway. From the bridge to the
new town of Chitor, which lies at the foot of the hill, runs a straight
and well-kept road, flanked on either side by the scattered remnants of
old houses, and, here and there, fallen temples. The road, like the
bridge, is no new thing, and is wide enough for twenty horsemen to ride
abreast.

New Chitor is a very dirty, and apparently thriving, little town, full
of grain-merchants and sellers of arms. The ways are barely wide enough
for the elephant of dignity and the little brown babies of impudence.
The Englishman went through, always on a slope painfully accentuated by
Gerowlia who, with all possible respect to her years, must have been a
baggage-animal and no true _Sahib's_ mount. Let the local Baedeker speak
for a moment: "The ascent to Chitor, which begins from within the
southeast angle of the town, is nearly a mile to the upper gate, with a
slope of about 1 in 15. There are two zig-zag bends, and on the three
portions thus formed, are seven gates, of which one, however, has only
the basement left." This is the language of fact, which, very properly,
leaves out of all account the Genius of the Place who sits at the gate
nearest the new city and is with the sightseer throughout. The first
impression of repulsion and awe is given by a fragment of tumbled
sculpture close to a red daubed _lingam_, near the Padal Pol or lowest
gate. It is a piece of frieze, and the figures of the men are worn
nearly smooth by time. What is visible is finely and frankly obscene to
an English mind.

The road is protected on the cliff side by a thick stone wall, loopholed
for musketry, one aperture to every two feet, between fifteen and twenty
feet high. This wall is being repaired throughout its length by the
Maharana of Udaipur. On the hillside, among the boulders, loose stones,
and _dhak_-scrub, lips stone wreckage that must have come down from the
brown bastions above.

As Gerowlia laboured up the stone-shod slope, the Englishman wondered
how much life had flowed down this sluice of battles, and been lost at
the Padal Pol--the last and lowest gate--where, in the old days, the
besieging armies put their best and bravest battalions. Once at the head
of the lower slope, there is a clear run-down of a thousand yards with
no chance of turning aside either to the right or left. Eve