shadow of
death writhed across a strip of moonlight--and disappeared. There was
life,--of a sort, in Chitor. So Roy trod warily as he passed from room
to room; dread of dark forgotten in the weird fascination of
foreknowledge verified without fail.

Through riven walls and roofs, moonlight streamed: its spectral
brightness intensifying every patch or streak of shadow. And there,
where Kings and Princes had held audience--watched by their womenfolk
through fretted screens--was neither roof nor walls; only a group of
marble pillars, as it were assembled in ghostly conference. The stark
silence and emptiness--not of yesterday, but of centuries--smote him
with a personal pang. From end to end of the rock it brooded; a haunting
presence,--tutelary goddess of Chitor. There is an emptiness of the open
desert, of an untrodden snowfield that lifts the soul and sets it face
to face with God; but the emptiness of a city forsaken is that of a body
with the spark of life extinct:--'the silver cord loosed, the golden
bowl broken, and the pitcher broken at the fountain ...'

Terry's sharp bark, a squawk and a scuffle of wings, made him start
violently and jarred him all through. It seemed almost profane--as if
one were in a cathedral. Calling the marauder to heel, he mounted and
rode on toward the Tower of Victory. For the moon was dipping westward;
and he must see that vast view bathed in moonlight. Then the dawn....

Once more deserting Suraj; he confronted Khumba's Tower; scatheless as
the builder's hand left it four centuries ago. Massive and arrogant, it
loomed above him; scarcely a foot of stone uncarven, so far as he could
see--exploring the four-square base of it with the aid of the moon and
his torch. Figures, in high relief, everywhere--animal, human and
divine; a riot of impossible forms, impossibly intertwined; ghoulish in
any aspect, and in moonlight hideously so:--bewildering, repellent,
frankly obscene. But even while his cultured eye rejected it all, some
infinitesimal fragment of himself knew there was symbolic meaning in
that orgy of sculpture, could one but find the key.

Up and up, round and round the inner spiral staircase he climbed, in a
creepsome darkness, invaded by moonbeams, hardly less creepsome,
admitted through window-like openings set in every face of every storey.
With each inrush of light, each flash of his torch, in deepest darkness,
those thronging figures, weirdly distorted, sprang at him afresh