pressed in a crook of a branch, as a man holds down a
fallen enemy under his elbow, shoulder, and forearm. In another place, a
strange, uncanny wind sprung from nowhere, was singing all alone among
the pillars of what may have been a Hall of Audience. The Englishman
wandered so far in one palace that he came to an almost black-dark room,
high up in a wall, and said proudly to himself: "I must be the first man
who has been here;" meaning no harm or insult to any one. But he tripped
and fell, and as he put out his hands, he felt that the stairs had been
worn hollow and smooth by the thread of innumerable naked feet. Then he
was afraid, and came away very quickly, stepping delicately over fallen
friezes and bits of sculptured men, so as not to offend the Dead; and
was mightily relieved when he recovered his elephant and allowed the
guide to take him to Kumbha Rana's Tower of Victory.

This stands, like all things in Chitor, among ruins, but time and the
other enemies have been good to it. It is a Jain edifice, nine storeys
high, crowned atop--was this designed insult or undesigned repair?--with
a purely Mahometan dome, where the pigeons and the bats live. Excepting
this blemish, the Tower of Victory is nearly as fair as when it left
the hands of the builder whose name has not been handed down to us. It
is to be observed here that the first, or more ruined, Tower of Victory,
built in Alluji's days, when Chitor was comparatively young, was raised
by some pious Jain as proof of conquest over things spiritual. The
second tower is more worldly in intent.

Those who care to look, may find elsewhere a definition of its
architecture and its more striking peculiarities. It was in kind, but
not in degree, like the Jugdesh Temple at Udaipur, and, as it exceeded
it in magnificence, so its effect upon the mind was more intense. The
confusing intricacy of the figures with which it was wreathed from top
to bottom, the recurrence of the one calm face, the God enthroned,
holding the Wheel of the Law, and the appalling lavishness of
decoration, all worked toward the instilment of fear and aversion.

Surely this must have been one of the objects of the architect. The
tower, in the arrangement of its stairways, is like the interior of a
Chinese carved ivory puzzle-ball. The idea given is that, even while you
are ascending, you are wrapping yourself deeper and deeper in the tangle
of a mighty maze. Add to this the half-light, the thronging a