arth. For there is no night life in the streets of Jaipur.
Travellers had passed on and out. Merchants had stowed away their
muslins and embroideries, their vessels of brass and copper and
priceless enamels. Only the starving lay in huddled heaps as
before--ominously still; while above them vultures and eagles circled,
expectant, ink-black against the immense radiance beyond. Grey,
deepening to black, were flat roofs, cornices, minarets and massed
foliage, and the flitting shadows, with lifted tails, that careered
along the house-tops; or perched on some jutting angle, skinny elbows
crooked, absorbed in the pursuit of fleas. For sunset is the monkey's
hour, and the eerie jibbering of these imps of darkness struck a bizarre
note in the hush that shrouded the city.

Roy knew, now, why Thea had stayed his impatience; and he blessed her
sympathetic understanding. But just then--steeped in India at her most
magical hour--it was hard to believe in the Residency household; in
English dinner-tables and English detachment from the mediaeval medley of
splendour and squalor, of courage and cruelty and dumb endurance, of
arts and crafts and all the paraphernalia of enlightened knowledge that
was Jaipur. It seemed more like a week than a few hours since he had
turned in the saddle to salute Aruna and ridden out into another
world:--her world, which was also in a measure his own....

On and on he rode, at a foot's pace, followed by his twin shadows; past
the temples of Maha Deo, still rosy where they faced the west, still
rumbling and throbbing with muffled music; past wayside shrines, mere
alcoves for grotesque images--Shiva, Lord of Death, or Ganesh the
Elephant God--each with his scented garlands and his nickering chiragh;
past shadowy groups round the dinner fires, cooking their evening meal:
on and out through the double fortified gateways into the deserted road,
his whole being drenched in the silence and the deepening dusk.

Here, outside the city, emptiness loomed almost like a presence. Only
the trees were alive; each with its colony of peacocks and parrots and
birds of prey noisily settling to rest. The peacocks' unearthly cry, and
the far, ghostly laugh of jackals--authentic voice of India at
sundown--sent a chill down Roy's spine. For he, who had scarcely known
fear on the battlefield, was ignominiously at the mercy of imagination
and the eerie spirit of the hour.

At a flick of the reins, Suraj broke into a smart cant