nk, upon the brink of which the palace stands,
we lunched; afterwards threading our way among the fallen fragments of
many a stately shrine and palace towards the high point on which the great
Jain Tower of Fame rears its deeply-sculptured shaft into the sky.

For a thousand years the innumerable stone gods which encircle the tower
in endless profusion have watched with sightless eyes over the city. Grey
already with age were they when they saw, raised in pristine beauty, the
shattered domes and broken columns which now lie prone in the brushwood
far beneath their feet. What ghastly scenes those stony faces have
surveyed, when, swept by the scathing steel, the city has run red with
blood, and her defenders have fallen to the last man. One crowning horror,
though, they have been always spared, for no maid or matron of Chitor ever
deigned to bow her neck beneath the yoke of the Mogul, but rather dared to
face a fiery death in the bowels of the great cavern beneath the city than
yield her honour to the conqueror.

The Tower of Fame is being repaired by the present Rana, under the
superintendence of our host and a party of native workmen. Masons and most
skilful carvers in stone were busily engaged in the restoration of parts
that had fallen into dangerous decay--an extremely flimsy-looking
scaffolding, made apparently of light bamboos, tied together in wisps, and
forming a fragile-looking ramp, wound spirally up the outside of the tower.
My host seemed to consider it a perfectly safe means of ascent, and as the
workmen did not appear to slip off in any appreciable numbers I felt
constrained to go up. I should like to have done it on all fours! The
climb was well worth undertaking, as it enabled one to inspect the
astonishing and finely-carved figures which encrust the whole exterior of
the column.

From the Tower of Fame we made our way to the other great landmark of
Chitor--the Tower of Victory.

Passing and examining _en route_ many elaborately-carved temples, whose
domes rose amid the strangling masses of desert tree and shrub, we came to
the base of the red tower, whose shaft, four-square and in perfect
preservation, has, with its more venerable brother of Fame, watched for so
many centuries over the fallen fortress of Chitor.

Not far away, the rocky wall on which the city stands is shattered into a
gloomy chasm, half-hidden in rank vegetation, which, clinging with knotted
root to ledge and crevice, hangs darkly o