On a rock on the right hand side, thirty-four great vultures were gathered over the carcase of a steer. And this was an evil omen. They made unseemly noises as the tonga passed, and a raven came out of a bush on the right and answered them. To crown all, one of the hide and skin castes sat on the left hand side of the road, cutting up some of the flesh that he had stolen from the vultures. Could a man desire three more inauspicious signs for a night’s travel? Twilight came, and the hills were alive with strange noises, as the red moon, nearly at her full, rose over Chitor. To the low hills of the mad geological formation, the tumbled strata that seem to obey no law, succeeded level ground, the pasture lands of Mewar, cut by the Beruch and Wyan, streams running over smooth water-worn rock, and, as the heavy embankments and ample waterways showed, very lively in the rainy season. In this region occurred the last and most inauspicious omen of all. Something had gone wrong with a crupper, a piece of blue and white punkah-cord. The Englishman pointed it out, and the driver, descending, danced on that lonely road an unholy dance, singing the while:--“The _dumchi_! The _dumchi_! The _dumchi_!” in a shrill voice. Then he returned and drove on, while the Englishman wondered into what land of lunatics he was heading. At an average speed of six miles an hour, it is possible to see a great deal of the country; and, under brilliant moonlight, Mewar was desolately beautiful. There was no night traffic on the road--no one except the patient sowar, his shadow an inky blot on white, cantering twenty yards behind. Once the tonga strayed into a company of date-trees that fringed the path, and once rattled through a little town, and once the ponies shyed at what the driver said was a rock; but it jumped up in the moonlight and went away. Then came a great blasted heath whereon nothing was more than six inches high--a wilderness covered with grass and low thorn; and here, as nearly as might be midway between Chitor and Udaipur, the Wheel of Fate, which had been for some time beating against the side of the tonga, came off, and Her Majesty’s Mails, two bags including parcels, collapsed on the way side; while the Englishman repented him that he had neglected the omens of the vultures and the raven, the low caste man and the mad driver. There was a consultation and an examination of the wheel; but the whole tonga was rotten, and the axle was smashed and the axle-pins were bent and nearly red-hot. “It is nothing,” said the driver, “the mail often does this. What is a wheel?” He took a big stone and began hammering the wheel proudly on the tyre, to show that that at least was sound. A hasty courtmartial revealed that there was absolutely not one single “breakdown tonga” on the whole road between Chitor and Udaipur.