which is nothing more terrible than a little spring,
falling into a reservoir, in the side of the hill.

He stumbled across more ruins and passed between tombs of dead Ranis,
till he came to a flight of steps, built out and cut out from rock,
going down as far as he could see into a growth of trees on a terrace
below him. The stone of the steps had been worn and polished by the
terrible naked feet till it showed its markings clearly as agate; and
where the steps ended in a rock-slope, there was a visible glair, a
great snail-track, upon the rocks. It was hard to keep safe footing upon
the sliminess. The air was thick with the sick smell of stale incense,
and grains of rice were scattered upon the steps. But there was no one
to be seen. Now this in itself was not specially alarming; but the
Genius of the Place must be responsible for making it so. The Englishman
slipped and bumped on the rocks, and arrived, more suddenly than he
desired, upon the edge of a dull blue tank, sunk between walls of
timeless masonry. In a slabbed-in recess, water was pouring through a
shapeless stone gargoyle, into a trough; which trough again dripped into
the tank. Almost under the little trickle of water, was the loathsome
Emblem of Creation, and there were flowers and rice around it. Water was
trickling from a score of places in the cut face of the hill; oozing
between the edges of the steps and welling up between the stone slabs
of the terrace. Trees sprouted in the sides of the tank and hid its
surroundings. It seemed as though the descent had led the Englishman,
firstly, two thousand years away from his own century, and secondly,
into a trap, and that he would fall off the polished stones into the
stinking tank, or that the Gau-Mukh would continue to pour water until
the tank rose up and swamped him, or that some of the stone slabs would
fall forward and crush him flat.

Then he was conscious of remembering, with peculiar and unnecessary
distinctness, that, from the Gau-Mukh, a passage led to the subterranean
chambers in which the fair Pudmini and her handmaids had slain
themselves. And, that Tod had written and the Station-master at Chitor
had said, that some sort of devil, or ghoul, or Something, stood at the
entrance of that approach. All of which was a nightmare bred in full day
and folly to boot; but it was the fault of the Genius of the Place, who
made the Englishman feel that he had done a great wrong in trespassing
into the ver