ce of the Queen of the Pass, and when once
this is realised, the eye wonders that it could have ever believed in
the life of her. She is the city "whose graves are set in the side of
the pit, and her company is round about her graves," sister of Pathros,
Zoan, and No.

Moved by a thoroughly insular instinct, the Englishman took up a piece
of plaster and heaved it from the palace wall into the dark streets. It
bounded from a house-top to a window-ledge, and thence into a little
square, and the sound of its fall was hollow and echoing, as the sound
of a stone in a well. Then the silence closed up upon the sound, till in
the far-away courtyard below the roped stallions began screaming afresh.
There may be desolation in the great Indian Desert to the westward, and
there is desolation on the open seas; but the desolation of Amber is
beyond the loneliness either of land or sea. Men by the hundred thousand
must have toiled at the walls that bound it, the temples and bastions
that stud the walls, the fort that overlooks all, the canals that once
lifted water to the palace, and the garden in the lake of the valley.
Renan could describe it as it stands to-day, and Verestchaguin could
paint it.

Arrived at this satisfactory conclusion, the Englishman went down
through the palace and the scores of venomous and suggestive little
rooms, to the elephant in the courtyard, and was taken back in due time
to the Nineteenth Century in the shape of His Highness, the Maharaja's
Cotton-Press, returning a profit of twenty-seven per cent, and fitted
with two engines, of fifty horse-power each, an hydraulic press, capable
of exerting a pressure of three tons per square inch, and everything
else to correspond. It stood under a neat corrugated iron roof close to
the Jeypore Railway Station, and was in most perfect order, but somehow
it did not taste well after Amber. There was aggressiveness about the
engines and the smell of the raw cotton.

The modern side of Jeypore must not be mixed with the ancient.

IV

THE TEMPLE OF MAHADEO AND THE MANNERS OF SUCH AS SEE INDIA. THE MAN BY
THE WATER-TROUGHS AND HIS KNOWLEDGE. THE VOICE OF THE CITY AND WHAT IT
SAID. PERSONALITIES AND THE HOSPITAL. THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL OF JEYPORE AND
ITS BUILDERS.

From the Cotton-Press the Englishman wandered through the wide streets
till he came into an Hindu temple--rich in marble stone and inlay, and a
deep and tranquil silence, close to the Public Library of