.

The warden returned to the Chutter Mahal to pick up a lost key. The
brass table of the planets was sighing softly to itself as it swung to
and fro in the wind. That was the last view of the interior of the
Palace, the empty court, and the swinging, sighing astrolabe.

About two hours afterwards, when he had reached the other side of the
valley and seen the full extent of the buildings, the Englishman began
to realise first that he had not been taken through one-tenth of the
Palace; and secondly, that he would do well to measure its extent by
acres, in preference to meaner measures. But what made him blush hotly,
all alone among the tombs on the hillside, was the idea that he with his
ridiculous demands for eggs, firewood, and sweet drinking water should
have clattered and chattered through any part of it at all.

He began to understand why Boondi does not encourage Englishmen.

XVIII

OF THE UNCIVILISED NIGHT AND THE DEPARTURE TO THINGS CIVILISED. SHOWING
HOW A FRIEND MAY KEEP AN APPOINTMENT TOO WELL.

"Let us go hence my songs, she will not hear. Let us go hence together
without fear." But Ram Baksh the irrepressible sang it in altogether a
baser key. He came by night to the pavilion on the lake, while the
sepoys were cooking their fish, and reiterated his whine about the
devildom of the country into which the Englishman had dragged him. Padre
Martum Sahib would never have thus treated the owner of sixteen horses,
all fast and big ones, and eight superior "shutin-tongas." "Let us get
away," said Ram Baksh. "You are not here for _shikar_, and the water is
very bad." It was indeed, except when taken from the lake, and then it
only tasted fishy. "We will go, Ram Baksh," said the Englishman. "We
will go in the very early morning, and in the meantime here is fish to
stay your stomach with."

When a transparent piece of canvas, which fails by three feet to reach
ceiling or floor, is the only bar between the East and the West, he
would be a churl indeed who stood upon invidious race distinctions. The
Englishman went out and fraternised with the Military--the four-rupee
soldiers of Boondi who guarded him. They were armed, one with an old
Tower musket crazy as to nipple and hammer, one with a native-made
smooth-bore, and one with a composite contrivance--English sporting
muzzle-loader stock with a compartment for a jointed cleaning-rod, and
hammered octagonal native barrel, wire-fastened, a tuft of cotton on t