tone staircase
ran up to a rough verandah built out of the wall, and in the wall was a
cave-like room, the guardian of whose depths was one of the refined
financial classes, a man with very small hands and soft, low voice. He
was girt with a sword, and held authority over the Durbar funds. He
referred the Englishman courteously to another branch of the department,
to find which necessitated a blundering progress up another narrow
staircase crowded with loungers of all kinds. Here everything shone from
constant contact of bare feet and hurrying bare shoulders. The staircase
was the thing that, seen from without, had produced the bees' comb
impression. At the top was a long verandah shaded from the sun, and here
the Boondi Treasury worked, under the guidance of a grey-haired old man,
whose sword lay by the side of his comfortably wadded cushion. He
controlled twenty or thirty writers, each wrapped round a huge, country
paper account-book, and each far too busy to raise his eyes.

The babble on the staircase might have been the noise of the sea so far
as these men were concerned. It ebbed and flowed in regular beats, and
spread out far into the courtyard below. Now and again the
_click-click-click_ of a scabbard tip being dragged against the wall,
cut the dead sound of tramping naked feet, and a soldier would stumble
up the narrow way into the sunlight. He was received, and sent back or
forward by a knot of keen-eyed loungers, who seemed to act as a buffer
between the peace of the Secretariat and the pandemonium of the
Administrative. _Saises_ and grass-cutters, mahouts of elephants,
brokers, mahajuns, villagers from the district, and here and there a
shock-headed aborigine, swelled the mob on and at the foot of the
stairs. As they came up, they met the buffer-men who spoke in low voices
and appeared to filter them according to their merits. Some were sent to
the far end of the verandah, where everything melted away in a fresh
crowd of dark faces. Others were sent back, and joined the detachment
shuffling for their shoes in the _chowk_. One servant of the Palace
withdrew himself to the open, underneath the verandah, and there sat
yapping from time to time like a hungry dog: "The grass! The grass! The
grass!" But the men with the account-books never stirred. And they bowed
their heads gravely and made entry or erasure, turning back the rustling
leaves. Not often does a reach of the River of Life so present itself
that it ca