Chitor and the "shadow of her ancient beauty." The return
journey, past temple after temple and palace upon palace, began in the
failing light, and Gerowlia was still blundering up and down narrow
by-paths--for she possessed all an old woman's delusion as to the
slimness of her waist when the twilight fell, and the smoke from the
town below began to creep up the brown flanks of Chitor, and the jackals
howled. Then the sense of desolation, which had been strong enough in
all conscience in the sunshine, began to grow and grow.

Near the Ram Pol there was some semblance of a town with living people
in it, and a priest sat in the middle of the road and howled aloud upon
his gods, until a little boy came and laughed in his face and he went
away grumbling. This touch was deeply refreshing; in the contemplation
of it, the Englishman clean forgot that he had overlooked the gathering
in of materials for an elaborate statistical, historical, geographical
account of Chitor. All that remained to him was a shuddering
reminiscence of the Gau-Mukh and two lines of the "Holy Grail,"

"And up into the sounding halls he passed,
But nothing in the sounding halls he saw."

_Post Scriptum._--There was something very uncanny about the Genius of
the Place. He dragged an ease-loving egotist out of the French bedstead
with the gilt knobs at head and foot, into a more than usually big
folly--nothing less than a seeing of Chitor by moonlight. There was no
possibility of getting Gerowlia out of _her_ bed, and a mistrust of the
Maharana's soldiery who in the day-time guarded the gates, prompted the
Englishman to avoid the public way, and scramble straight up the
hillside, along an attempt at a path which he had noted from Gerowlia's
back. There was no one to interfere, and nothing but an infinity of
pestilent nullahs and loose stones to check. Owls came out and hooted at
him, and animals ran about in the dark and made uncouth noises. It was
an idiotic journey, and it ended--Oh, horror! in that unspeakable
Gau-Mukh--this time entered from the opposite or brushwooded side, as
far as could be made out in the dusk and from the chuckle of the water
which, by night, was peculiarly malevolent.

Escaping from this place, crab-fashion, the Englishman crawled into
Chitor and sat upon a flat tomb till the moon, a very inferior and
second-hand one, rose, and turned the city of the dead into a city of
scurrying ghouls--in sobriety, jackals. The ruin