rmies of
sculptured figures, the mad profusion of design splashed as impartially
upon the undersides of the stone window-slabs as upon the door-beam of
the threshold--add, most abhorrent of all, the slippery sliminess of the
walls always worn smooth by naked men, and you will understand that the
tower is not a soothing place to visit. The Englishman fancied
presumptuously that he had, in a way, grasped the builder's idea; and
when he came to the top storey and sat among the pigeons his theory was
this: To attain power, wrote the builder of old, in sentences of fine
stone, it is necessary to pass through all sorts of close-packed
horrors, treacheries, battles, and insults, in darkness and without
knowledge whether the road leads upward or into a hopeless _cul-de-sac_.
Kumbha Rana must many times have climbed to the top storey, and looked
out toward the uplands of Malwa on the one side and his own great Mewar
on the other, in the days when all the rock hummed with life and the
clatter of hooves upon the stony ways, and Mahmoud of Malwa was safe in
hold. How he must have swelled with pride--fine insolent pride of life
and rule and power--power not only to break things but to compel such
builders as those who piled the tower to his royal will! There was no
decoration in the top storey to bewilder or amaze--nothing but
well-grooved stone-slabs, and a boundless view fit for kings who traced
their ancestry--

"From times when forth from the sunlight, the first of our Kings
came down,
And had the earth for his footstool, and wore the stars for his
crown."

The builder had left no mark behind him--not even a mark on the
threshold of the door, or a sign in the head of the topmost step. The
Englishman looked in both places, believing that those were the places
generally chosen for mark-cutting. So he sat and meditated on the
beauties of kingship and the unholiness of Hindu art, and what power a
shadowland of lewd monstrosities had upon those who believed in it, and
what Lord Dufferin, who is the nearest approach to a king in this India,
must have thought when aide-de-camps clanked after him up the narrow
steps. But the day was wearing, and he came down--in both senses--and,
in his descent, the carven things on every side of the tower, and above
and below, once more took hold of and perverted his fancy, so that he
arrived at the bottom in a frame of mind eminently fitted for a descent
into the Gau-Mukh,