From Sea to Sea; Letters of TravelKipling, Rudyard
General
From Sea to Sea; Letters of Travel
Kipling, Rudyard
Asia -- Description and travel; Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936 -- Travel; United States -- Description and travel; Voyages and travels
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 was only the flat side of the
Palace, and a drop on to the stones of the zigzag scores of feet below.
Above him was the riven hillside and the decaying wall of Taragarh, and
behind him this fair garden, hung like Mahomet's coffin, but full of the
noise of birds and the talking of the wind in the branches. The warden
entered into a lengthy explanation of the nature of the delusion,
showing how--but he was stopped before he was finished. His listener did
not want to know "how the trick was done." Here was the garden, and
there were three or four storeys climbed to reach it. At one end of the
garden was a small room, under treatment by native artists who were
painting the panels with historical pictures, in distemper. Theirs was
florid polychromatic art, but skirting the floor was a series of
frescoes in red, black, and white, of combats with elephants, bold and
temperate as good German work. They were worn and defaced in places; but
the hand of some bygone limner, who did not know how to waste a line,
showed under the bruises and scratches, and put the newer work to shame.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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