elids, another
beast, and the two together snapped at a cigar-butt--the only reward for
their courtesy. Then, disgusted, they sank stern first with a gentle
sigh. Now a _mugger's_ sigh is the most suggestive sound in animal
speech. It suggested first the zenana buildings overhead, the walled
passes through the purple hills beyond, a horse that might clatter
through the passes till he reached the Man Sagar Lake below the passes,
and a boat that might row across the Man Sagar till it nosed the wall
of the Palace-tank, and then--then uprose the _mugger_ with the filth
upon his forehead and winked one horny eyelid--in truth he did!--and so
supplied a fitting end to a foolish fiction of old days and things that
might have been. But it must be unpleasant to live in a house whose base
is washed by such a tank.

[5] crocodiles.

And so back through the chunamed courts, and among the gentle sloping
paths between the orange trees, up to an entrance of the palace, guarded
by two rusty brown dogs from Kabul, each big as a man, and each
requiring a man's charpoy to sleep upon. Very gay was the front of the
palace, very brilliant were the glimpses of the damask-couched, gilded
rooms within, and very, very civilised were the lamp-posts with Ram
Singh's monogram, devised to look like V. R., at the bottom, and a
coronet at the top. An unseen brass band among the orange bushes struck
up the overture of the _Bronze Horse_. Those who know the music will see
at once that that was the only tune which exactly and perfectly fitted
the scene and its surroundings. It was a coincidence and a revelation.

In his time and when he was not fighting, Jey Singh, the second, who
built the city, was a great astronomer--a royal Omar Khayyam, for he,
like the tent-maker of Nishapur, reformed a calendar, and strove to
wring their mysteries from the stars with instruments worthy of a king.
But in the end he wrote that the goodness of the Almighty was above
everything, and died, leaving his observatory to decay without the
palace-grounds.

From the _Bronze Horse_ to the grass-grown enclosure that holds the
Yantr Samrat, or Prince of Dials, is rather an abrupt passage. Jey
Singh built him a dial with a gnomon some ninety feet high, to throw a
shadow against the sun, and the gnomon stands to-day, though there is
grass in the kiosque at the top and the flight of steps up the
hypotenuse is worn. He built also a zodiacal dial--twelve dials upon one
platform--