t shook; where a firm if selfish mouth had once smiled merrily
beneath a pointed black mustache, a mouth still smiled, but meanly; the
selfishness was there, but the firmness had faded.

His eyes, though, were his most marked feature. They were hungry eyes,
pathetic as a caged beast's and as savage. No one could see them without
pitying him, and no man in his senses would have accepted their owner's
word on any point at all. A man looks as he did when the fire of a
burning velt has circled him and there is no way out. There was fear
behind them, and the look of restless search for safety that is nowhere.

In one of the many-columned courtyards of the palace was a chained,
mad elephant whose duty was to kneel on the Rajah's captive enemies. In
another courtyard was a big, square tank with a weedy, slippery stone
ramp at one end; in the tank were alligators; down the ramp other of the
Rajah's enemies, tight-bound, would scream and struggle and slide from
time to time. But they were only little enemies who died in that way;
the greater ones, who had power or influence, lived on and plotted,
because the owner of the execution beasts was afraid to put them to
their use.

Below, in damp, unlit dungeons, there were silken cords suspended from
stone ceilings; their ends were noosed, and the nooses hung ten feet
above the floor; those told only, though, of the fate of women who had
schemed unwisely--favorites of a week, perhaps, who had dared to sulk,
listeners through screens who had forgotten to forget. No men died ever
by the silken cord, and no tales ever reached the outside world of who
did die down in the echoing brick cellars; there was a path that led
underground to the alligator tank and a trap-door that opened just
above the water edge. Night, and the fungus-fouled long jaws, and slimy,
weed-filled water--the creak of rusty hinges--a splash--the bang of
a falling trap--a swirl in the moonlit water, and ring after heavy,
widening ring that lapped at last against the stone would write
conclusion to a tragedy. There would be no record kept.

Howrah was childless. That, of all the hell-sent troubles that beset
him, was the worst. That alone was worse than the hoarded treasure whose
secret he and his brother and the priests of Siva shared. Only in India
could it happen that a line of Rajahs, drag-net-armed--oblivious to the
duties of a king and greedy only of the royal right to tax--could pile
up, century by century, a h