THE PALACE.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE
"This butter is uneatable, Ramaswamy."
"I wash him, Master."
He takes away the dish of nasty, yellow, tinned butter and presently returns with it fresh and white, with much of the disagreeable taste and smell gone. Good! Now we know.
We are sitting on a broad verandah of dark wood with a roof overhead. It is so wide that it is just like a room, only the outer sides are open. We look out over a moat filled with water and covered with leaves and pink flowers. These are the celebrated lotus flowers, or lilies. Behind rise red walls, with here and there quaint little maroon-coloured towers, all pinnacles and angles, showing up like fretwork against the sky. The moat is crossed by bridges of dazzling white. It is nearly midday, the hottest and stillest time of all the day, and we are lunching in the Circuit House at Mandalay, the old capital of the kings of Burma.
Everyone knows Mandalay by name from Kipling's poem, even if they know nothing of the rest of Burma. We came up here from Rangoon by train,—it took a night,—and by special permission of His Excellency were allowed to stay in this house, which is usually reserved for Government officials, instead of going to the rest-house intended for visitors, and not nearly so nice.
From where we sit we can look through into the wooden unpapered bedrooms behind, with the little string beds on which our own bedding lies in heaps. Ramaswamy has not had time to put it out yet, for he has been busy cooking our tiffin. In these houses the keeper, or derwan, will do everything for you if you like, and you pay him so much for his trouble, but if you prefer your own servant to do it you can make that arrangement and borrow the pots and pans. Ramaswamy has given us already buttered eggs, some cutlets which tasted goaty, with some excellent little vegetables called bringals, as well as a dish of mixed curry, and he has now put some fruit on the table, and is bringing in coffee. He cooks out there behind in the compound. I saw him just now bending over a handful of sticks. However he manages to get the things hot I don't know. These natives have marvellous ways.
We must rest a while this afternoon and have an early tea before starting out to see the palace which lies inside that brick wall.