certain workmen appeared; for it seems that the
Maharaja keeps the old palace of his forefathers in good repair, but
they were modern and mercenary, and with great difficulty were detached
from the skirts of the traveller. A somewhat extensive experience of
palace-seeing had taught him that it is best to see palaces alone, for
the Oriental as a guide is undiscriminating and sets too great a store
on corrugated iron roofs and glazed drain-pipes.

So the Englishman went into this palace built of stone, bedded on stone,
springing out of scarped rock, and reached by stone ways--nothing but
stone. Presently, he stumbled across a little temple of Kali, a gem of
marble tracery and inlay, very dark and, at that hour of the morning,
very cold.

If, as Viollet-le-Duc tells us to believe, a building reflects the
character of its inhabitants, it must be impossible for one reared in an
Eastern palace to think straightly or speak freely or--but here the
annals of Rajputana contradict the theory--to act openly. The cramped
and darkened rooms, the narrow smooth-walled passages with recesses
where a man might wait for his enemy unseen, the maze of ascending and
descending stairs leading nowhither, the ever-present screens of marble
tracery that may hide or reveal so much,--all these things breathe of
plot and counter-plot, league and intrigue. In a living palace where the
sightseer knows and feels that there are human beings everywhere, and
that he is followed by scores of unseen eyes, the impression is almost
unendurable. In a dead palace--a cemetery of loves and hatreds done with
hundreds of years ago, and of plottings that had for their end, though
the greybeards who plotted knew it not, the coming of the British
tourist with guide-book and sun-hat--oppression gives place to simply
impertinent curiosity. The Englishman wandered into all parts of the
palace, for there was no one to stop him--not even the ghosts of the
dead Queens--through ivory-studded doors, into the women's quarters,
where a stream of water once flowed over a chiselled marble channel. A
creeper had set its hands upon the lattice there, and there was dust of
old nests in one of the niches in the wall. Did the lady of light virtue
who managed to become possessed of so great a portion of Jey Singh's
library ever set her dainty feet in the trim garden of the Hall of
Pleasure beyond the screen-work? Was it in the forty-pillared Hall of
Audience that the order went forth