Fish was the Quarter-Guard barracks, a dark and dirty room, and here, in a chamber hollowed out in a wall, were stored the big drums of State, the _nakarras_. The appearance of the Englishman seemed to be the signal for smiting the biggest of all the drums, and the dull thunder rolled up the Palace _chowk_, and came back from the unpierced Palace walls in hollow groaning. It was an eerie welcome--this single, sullen boom. In this enclosure, four hundred years ago, if the legend be true, a son of the great Rao Bando, who dreamed a dream as Pharaoh did and saved Boondi from famine, left a little band of Haras to wait his bidding while he went up into the Palace and slew his two uncles who had usurped the throne and abandoned the faith of their fathers. When he had pierced one and hacked the other, as they sat alone and unattended, he called out to his followers, who made a slaughter-house of the enclosure and cut up the usurpers’ adherents. At the best of times men slip on these smooth stones; and when the place was swimming in blood, foothold must have been treacherous indeed. An inquiry for the place of the murder of the uncles--it is marked by a staircase slab, or Tod, the accurate, is at fault--was met by the answer that the Treasury was close at hand. They speak a pagan tongue in Boondi, swallow half their words, and adulterate the remainder with local _patois_. What can be extracted from a people who call four miles variously _do kosh_, _do kush_, _dhi khas_, _doo-a koth_, and _diakast_, all one word? The country-folk are quite unintelligible; which simplifies matters. It is the catching of a shadow of a meaning here and there, the hunting for directions cloaked in dialect, that is annoying. Foregoing his archæological researches, the Englishman sought the Treasury. He took careful notes; he even made a very bad drawing, but the Treasury of Boondi defied pinning down before the public. There was a gash in the brown flank of the Palace--and this gash was filled with people. A broken bees’ comb with the whole hive busily at work on repairs, will give a very fair idea of this extraordinary place--the Heart of Boondi. The sunlight was very vivid without and the shadows were heavy within, so that little could be seen except this clinging mass of humanity huggling like maggots in a carcase. A stone staircase ran up to a rough verandah built out of the wall, and in the wall was a cave-like room, the guardian of whose snowy-carpeted depths was one of the refined financial classes, a man with very small hands and soft, low voice. He was girt with a sword, and held authority over the Durbar funds. He referred the Englishman courteously to another branch of the department, to find which necessitated a blundering progress up another narrow staircase crowded with loungers of all kinds. Here everything shone from constant contact of bare feet and hurrying bare shoulders. The staircase was the thing that, seen from without, had produced the