He looked down upon the bustle of the Treasury and the stream of
life flowing into and out of the Gate of the Fishes where the big drums
lie. Lifting his eyes, he saw how Boondi City had built itself,
spreading from west to east as the confined valley became too narrow and
the years more peaceable. The Boondi hills are the barrier that
separates the stony, uneven ground near Deoli from the flats of Kotah,
twenty miles away. From the Palace balcony the road to the eye is clear
to the banks of the Chumbul River, which was the Debatable Ford in times
gone by and was leaped, as all rivers with any pretensions to a
pedigree have been, by more than one magic horse. Northward and easterly
the hills run out to Indurgarh, and southward and westerly to territory
marked "disputed" on the map in the present year of grace. From this
balcony the Raja can see to the limit of his territory eastward, his
empire all under his hand. He is, or the Politicals err, that same Ram
Singh who was installed by Tod in 1821, and for whose success in killing
his first deer, Tod was, by the Queen-Mother of Boondi, bidden to
rejoice. To-day the people of Boondi say: "This Durbar is very old; so
old that few men remember its beginning, for that was in our father's
time." It is related also of Boondi that, on the occasion of the Queen's
Jubilee, they said proudly that their ruler had reigned for sixty years,
and he was a man. They saw nothing astonishing in the fact of a woman
having reigned for fifty. History does not say whether they jubilated;
for there are no Englishmen in Boondi to write accounts of
demonstrations and foundation-stone laying to the daily newspaper, and
Boondi is very, very small. In the early morning you may see a man
pantingly chased out of the city by another man with a naked sword. This
is the mail and the mail-guard; and the effect is as though runner and
swordsman lay under a doom--the one to fly with the fear of death always
before him, as men fly in dreams, and the other to perpetually fail of
his revenge.

The warden unlocked more doors and led the Englishman still higher, but
into a garden--a heavily timbered garden with a tank for gold fish in
the midst. For once the impassive following smiled when they saw that
the Englishman was impressed.

"This," said they, "is the Rang Bilas." "But who made it?" "Who knows?
It was made long ago." The Englishman looked over the garden-wall, a
foot-high parapet, and shuddered. There w