From the veranda, then, its stony spine split by a road like a parting, it trended southwest, so giving room between it and the river for the rose-lit, lilac-shaded mass of the town, with the big white bubble of the Jumma mosque in its midst; the delicate domes fringing the palace gateways showing like strings of pearls on the blue sky. And beyond them, a dazzle of gold among the green of the Garden of Grapes, marked that last sanctuary of a dead dynasty upon the city's eastern wall.
The cantonments lay to the back of the house on the western slope of the Ridge and on the plain beyond. This also was a widening wedge of green wooded land cut off from the rest of the plain by a tree-set overflow canal. The Ridge, therefore, formed the backbone of a triangle protected by water on two sides. On the third was the city and its suburbs. But--to carry out the image of the lizard--a natural outwork lay like a huge paw on either side of the head; on the river side the spur of Ludlow Castle, on the canal side the General's mound.
A brisk breeze was fluttering the flag on the tower cresting the ridge, a few hundred yards from the house, and as Major Erlton stepped into the veranda, a puff of white smoke curled cityward, and the roll of the time-gun reverberated among the rocks.
"By Jingo! I must hurry up if I'm to have breakfast before church," he exclaimed, as the circle of gift-bringers, who had been waiting nearly half an hour, rose simultaneously with salaams and good wishes. The sudden action made a white cockatoo perched in the corner raise its flame-colored crest and begin to prance.
"Naughty Poll! Bad Poll!" came Sonny's mellifluous lisp from the Major's shoulder. "Zoo mufn't make a noise and interrupt."
The admonition made the bird smooth its ruffled temper and feathers. Not that there was much to interrupt; the Major's halting acknowledgments being of the briefest; partly because of breakfast, partly from lack of Hindustani, mostly from the inherent insular horror of a function.
"Thank God! that's over," he said piously, when the last tray had been emptied on the miscellaneous pile, round which the servants were already hovering expectantly, and the last well-wisher had disappeared. "Still it was nice of them to remember Freddy," he added, looking at the toys--"Wasn't it, wife?"
She looked up almost scared at the title. "Very," she replied, with a faint quiver in her voice. "We must send some home to him, mustn't we?"
The pronoun of union made the Major, in his turn, feel embarrassed. He sought refuge once more in Sonny.
"You must have your choice first, jackanapes!" he said, swinging the child to the ground again. "Which is it to be? A box of soldiers or a monkey on a stick?"