imb up and up and up, till you see,
spread like a map below, the lake and the Palace and the City, hemmed in
by the sea of hills that lies between Udaipur and Mount Abu a hundred
miles away. Then take your seat in a comfortable chair, in a fine
two-storied Grand Stand, with an awning spread atop to keep off the sun,
while the Rawat of Amet and the Prime Minister's heir--no less--invite
you to take your choice of the many rifles spread on a ledge at the
front of the building. This, gentlemen who screw your pet ponies at
early dawn after the sounder that vanishes into cover soon as sighted,
or painfully follow the tiger through the burning heats of Mewar in May,
this is shooting after the fashion of Ouida--in musk and ambergris and
patchouli.

It is demoralising. One of the best and hardest riders of the Lahore
Tent Club in the old days, as the boars of Bouli Lena Singh knew well,
said openly: "This is a first-class scheme," and fell to testing his
triggers as though he had been a pot-hunter from his birth. Derision and
threats of exposure moved him not. "Give me an arm-chair!" said he.
"This is the proper way to deal with pig!" And he put up his feet on the
ledge and stretched himself.

There were many weapons to choose from the double-barrelled '500
Express, whose bullet is a tearing, rending shell, to the Rawat of
Amet's regulation military Martini-Henri. A profane public at the
Residency had suggested clubs and saws as amply sufficient for the work
in hand. Here they were moved by envy, which passion was ten-fold
increased when--but this comes later on. The beat was along a deep gorge
in the hills, flanked on either crest by stone walls, manned with
beaters. Immediately opposite the shooting-box, the wall on the upper or
higher hill made a sharp turn downhill, contracting the space through
which the pig would have to pass to a gut which was variously said to be
from one hundred and fifty to four hundred yards across. Most of the
shooting was up or down hill.

A philanthropic desire not to murder more Bhils than were absolutely
necessary to maintain a healthy current of human life in the Hilly
Tracts, coupled with a well-founded dread of the hinder, or horse, end
of a double-barrelled '500 Express which would be sure to go off both
barrels together, led the Englishman to take a gunless seat in the
background. Then a silence fell upon the party, and very far away up the
gorge the heated afternoon air was cut by the s