ct in the wilds, and that is all. You
stay as long as you please and when you leave not even a gift to the
khansamah is permitted.

I had been staying in Ranipur of the plains while I considered the
question of getting to Upper Kashmir by the route from Simla along the
old way to Chinese Tibet where I would touch Shipki in the Dalai
Lama's territory and then pass on to Zanskar and so down to Kashmir--a
tremendous route through the Himalaya and a crowning experience of
the mightiest mountain scenery in the world. I was at Ranipur for the
purpose of consulting my old friend Olesen, now an irrigation official
in the Rampur district--a man who had made this journey and nearly lost
his life in doing it. It is not now perhaps so dangerous as it was, and
my life was of no particular value to any one but myself, and the plan
interested me.

I pass over the long discussions of ways and means in the blinding heat
of Ranipur. Olesen put all his knowledge at my service and never uttered
a word of the envy that must have filled him as he looked at the
distant snows cool and luminous in blue air, and, shrugging good-natured
shoulders, spoke of the work that lay before him on the burning
plains until the terrible summer should drag itself to a close. We had
vanquished the details and were smoking in comparative silence one night
on the veranda, when he said in his slow reflective way;

"You don't like the average hotel, Ormond, and you'll like it still less
up Simla way with all the Simla crowd of grass-widows and fellows out
for as good a time as they can cram into the hot weather. I wonder if I
could get you a permit for The House in the Woods while you re waiting
to fix up your men and route for Shipki."

He explained and of course I jumped at the chance. It belonged, he said,
to a man named Rup Singh, a pandit, or learned man of Ranipur. He had
always spent the summer there, but age and failing health made this
impossible now, and under certain conditions he would occasionally allow
people known to friends of his own to put up there.

"And Rup Singh and I are very good friends," Olesen said; "I won his
heart by discovering the lost Sukh Mandir, or Hall of Pleasure, built
many centuries ago by a Maharao of Ranipur for a summer retreat in the
great woods far beyond Simla. There are lots of legends about it here in
Ranipur. They call it The House of Beauty. Rup Singh's ancestor had been
a close friend of the Maharao and was with