ch blue sky and the horizon was shaken and tremulous. "It's
very bad in summer. Would knock you--oh yes--all to smash, but _we_ are
accustomed to it." A rock-strewn hill, about half a mile, as the crow
flies, from the Fort was pointed out as the place whence, at the
beginning of this century, the Pretender Sowae besieged Raja Maun for
five months, but could make no headway against his foe. One gun of the
enemy's batteries specially galled the Fort, and the Jodhpur King
offered a village to any of his gunners who should dismount it. "It was
smashed," said the Brahmin. "Oh yes, all to pieces." Practically, the
city which lies below the Fort is indefensible, and during the many wars
of Marwar has generally been taken up by the assailants without
resistance.

Entering the Fort by the Jeypore Gate, and studiously refraining from
opening his umbrella, the Englishman found shadow and coolth, took off
his hat to the tun-bellied, trunk-nosed God of Good-Luck who had been
very kind to him in his wanderings, and sat down near half a dozen of
the Maharaja's guns bearing the mark, "A. Broome, Cossipore, 1857," or
"G. Hutchinson, Cossipore, 1838." Now rock and masonry are so curiously
blended in this great pile that he who walks through it loses sense of
being among buildings. It is as though he walked through
mountain-gorges. The stone-paved, inclined planes, and the tunnel-like
passages driven under a hundred feet height of buildings, increase this
impression. In many places the wall and rock runs up unbroken by any
window for forty feet.

It would be a week's work to pick out even roughly the names of the dead
who have added to the buildings, or to describe the bewildering
multiplicity of courts and ranges of rooms; and, in the end, the result
would be as satisfactory as an attempt to describe a nightmare. It is
said that the rock on which the Fort stands is four miles in circuit,
but no man yet has dared to estimate the size of the city that they call
the Palace, or the mileage of its ways. Ever since Ras Joda, four
hundred years ago, listened to the voice of a _Jogi_, and leaving
Mundore built his eyrie on the "Bird's nest" as the Hill of Strife was
called, the Palaces have grown and thickened. Even to-day the builders
are still at work. Takht Singh, the present ruler's predecessor, built
royally. An incomplete bastion and a Hall of Flowers are among the works
of his pleasure. Hidden away behind a mighty wing of carved red
san