ght, with its eerie
enchantment, would be oven more beautiful and fitting; but the pleasure
of anticipation was shadowed by his resolve.

He had spoken of it only to Thea; asking her, when tea was over, to give
him a chance:--and now he was heartily wishing he had chosen any other
place and time than this....

The brisk canter to the foothills was a relief. Thence the road climbed,
between low, reddish-grey spurs, to the narrow pass, barred by a
formidable gate, that swung open at command, with a screech of rusty
hinges, as if in querulous protest against intrusion.

Another gateway,--and yet another: then they were through the triple
wall that guards the dead city from the invader who will never come,
while both races honour the pact that alone saved desperate, stubborn
Rajputana from extinction.

Up on the heights, it was still day; but in the valley it was almost
evening. And there--among deepening shadows and tumbled fragments of
hills--lay Amber: her palace and temples and broken houses crowding
round their sacred Lake, like Queens and their handmaids round the
shield of a dead King.

Descending at a foot's pace, the chill of emptiness and of oncoming
twilight seemed to close like icy fingers on Roy's heart; though the
death of Amber was as nothing to the death of Chitor--the warrior-queen,
ravished and violently slain by Akbar's legions. Amber had, as it were,
died peacefully in her sleep. But there remained the all-pervading
silence and emptiness:--her sorrowful houses, cleft from roof to
roadway; no longer homes of men, but of the rock-pigeon, the peacock,
and the wild boar; stones of her crumbling arches thrust apart by roots
of acacia and neem; her streets choked with cactus and brushwood; her
beauty--disfigured but not erased--reflected in the unchanging mirror of
the Lake.

If Roy and Lance had talked little before, they talked less now. From
the Lake-side they rode up, by stone pathways, to the Palace of stone
and marble, set upon a jutting rock and commanding the whole valley.
There, in the quadrangle, they left the horses with their grooms, who
were skilled in cutting corners and had trotted most of the way.

Close to the gate stood a temple of fretted marble--neither ruined nor
deserted; for within were the priests of Kali, and the faint, sickly
smell of blood. Daybreak after daybreak, for centuries, the severed head
of a goat had been set before her, the warm blood offered in a bronze
bowl....