that the Chief of Birjooghar was to
be slain, and from what wall did the King look out when the horsemen
clattered up the steep stone path to the palace, bearing on their
saddle-bows the heads of the bravest of Rajore? There were questions
innumerable to be asked in each court and keep and cell; but the only
answer was the cooing of the pigeons.

If a man desired beauty, there was enough and to spare in the palace;
and of strength more than enough. With inlay and carved marble, with
glass and colour, the Kings who took their pleasure in that now desolate
pile, made all that their eyes rested upon royal and superb. But any
description of the artistic side of the palace, if it were not
impossible, would be wearisome. The wise man will visit it when time and
occasion serve, and will then, in some small measure, understand what
must have been the riotous, sumptuous, murderous life to which our
Governors and Lieutenant-Governors, Commissioners and Deputy
Commissioners, Colonels and Captains and the Subalterns, have put an
end.

From the top of the palace you may read if you please the Book of
Ezekiel written in stone upon the hillside. Coming up, the Englishman
had seen the city from below or on a level. He now looked into its very
heart--the heart that had ceased to beat. There was no sound of men or
cattle, or grind-stones in those pitiful streets--nothing but the cooing
of the pigeons. At first it seemed that the palace was not ruined at
all--that soon the women would come up on the house-tops and the bells
would ring in the temples. But as he attempted to follow with his eye
the turns of the streets, the Englishman saw that they died out in wood
tangle and blocks of fallen stone, that some of the houses were rent
with great cracks, and pierced from roof to road with holes that let in
the morning sun. The drip-stones of the eaves were gap-toothed, and the
tracery of the screens had fallen out so that zenana-rooms lay
shamelessly open to the day. On the outskirts of the city, the
strong-walled houses dwindled and sank down to mere stone-heaps and
faint indications of plinth and wall, hard to trace against the
background of stony soil. The shadow of the palace lay over two-thirds
of the city and the trees deepened the shadow. "He who has bent him o'er
the dead" _after_ the hour of which Byron sings, knows that the features
of the man become blunted as it were--the face begins to fade. The same
hideous look lies on the fa