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
below. 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 upon 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
Vereschagin 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 27 per cent., and fitted with two
engines of fifty horsepower 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._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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