--not all of them fat, but every single one fat-smiling--sunned
themselves, or waited in the shade until they could have audience; no
priest of any Hindoo temple had to wait long to be admitted to that
Rajah's presence, and there was an everlasting chain of them, each with
his axe to grind, coming and going by day and night.

Color rioted in the blazing sun and deep, dark shadows lurked in all
the thousand places where the sun could never penetrate. It was India
in essence--noise and blaze and flouted splendor, with a back-ground and
underground of mystery. Any but the purblind British could have told at
half a glance, merely by the attitude of Howrah's armed sepoys, that a
concerted movement of some kind was afoot--that there was a tight-held
thread of plan running through the whole confusion; but no man--not
even a native--could have guessed what secret plotting might be going on
within the acres of the straggling palace.

From the courtyard there was no least hint obtainable even of the
building's size; its shape could only have been marked down from a
bird's-eye view aloft. Even the roof was so uneven, and so subdivided by
traced and deep-carved walls and ramparts, that a sentry posted at one
end could not have seen the next man to him, perhaps some twenty feet
away. Building had been piled on building--other buildings had been
added end to end and crisscrosswise--and each extension had been walled
in as new centuries saw new additions, until the many acres were a maze
of bricks and stone and fountain-decorated gardens that no lifelong
palace denizen could have learned to know in their entirety.

Within--one story up above the courtyard din--in a spacious, richly
decorated room that gave on to a gorgeous roof-garden, the Maharajah sat
and let himself be fanned by women, who were purchasable for perhaps a
tenth of what any of the fans had cost. Another woman, younger than the
rest, played wild minor music to him on an instrument not much unlike
a flute; they were melancholy notes--beautiful--but sad enough to sow
pessimism's seed in any one who listened.

His divan--carved, inlaid, and gilded--faced the wide, awning-hung
opening to the garden. Round him on all three sides was a carved stone
screen through whose interstices came rustlings and whisperings that
told of the hidden life which sees and is not seen. The women with the
fans and flute were mere court accessories; the real nerves of Asia--the
veiled intrigu