r. One--a mere boy of sixteen--was the only son of
his house. Beside him, lance in hand, fought his widowed mother and girl
wife; and in death they were not divided. The other, Jaimul of Bednore,
was a far-away ancestor of his own mother. How often she had told him
the tale--adding proudly that, while Rajasthan endured, the names of
those two would shine clear in the firmament of time, as stars in the
firmament of space.

Through gateway after gateway--under the lee of a twenty-foot wall,
pierced for musketry,--he passed, a silent shadow. And gradually there
stole over him afresh the confused wonder of his dream,--was it he
himself who rode--or was it--that other, returning to the sacred city
after long absence? For the moment he could hardly tell. But--what
matter? The astonishing thrill of recognition was all....

Round about the seventh gateway clustered the semblance of a village;
shrouded, slumbering forms strewn around in the open;--ghosts all. The
only instant realities were himself and Suraj and Chitor, and the
silence of the sleeping earth, watched over by unsleeping stars. Within,
and about him, hovered a stirring consciousness of ancient, unchanging
India; utterly impervious to mere birds of passage from the West;
veiled, elusive, yet almost hideously real. So real, just then, to Roy,
that--for a few amazing moments--he was unaware that he rode through a
city forsaken by man. Ghosts of houses and temples slid by on either
side of him, as he spurred Suraj to a canter and made unerringly for the
main palace. There was news for the Rana--news of Akbar's army--that did
not brook delay....

Not till Suraj stopped dead--there where the Palace had once stood in
its glory--did he come to himself, as abruptly as when he waked in the
French bedstead an hour ago.

Gone was the populous city through which he had ridden in fancy; gone
the confusion of himself with that other self--how many centuries old?
But the familiar look of the palace was no dream; nor the fact that he
had instinctively made his way there at full speed. Bastioned and
sharply domed, it stood before him in clear outline; but within sides it
was hollow as a skull; a place of ghosts. Suddenly there came over him
the old childish dread of dark, that he had never quite outgrown. But
dread or no, explore it he must....

As his foot touched earth, a low hiss warned him he was trespassing, and
clutching Terry's collar, he stood rigid, while the whip-like