"Do you take much interest in politics?"
"No more than the every-day Englishwoman; it's one of our staples of conversation, when we've exhausted the weather, you know. But I'm not in the least advanced, if that's what you mean; I hunger after fashion-papers and spend more time than I ought, devouring home-made trash imported in paper-covers. I only feel what I feel by instinct—as I said awhile ago."
Perhaps if he had known less about the girl, he would have attached less importance to her statements. As it was, she impressed him profoundly. He pondered her words deeply, storing them in his memory, remembering that another had spoken in the same manner—one for whose insight into the ways of the native he had intense respect.
As the slow afternoon dragged out its blazing hours, their spirits languished, and they fell silent, full weary and listless. Towards the last quarter of the journey their road forsook the spacious, haggard plain and again entered a hilly country, but this time one wherein there was no lack either of water or of life: a green and fertile land parcelled into farms and dotted with villages.
Night overtook the tonga when it was close upon Kuttarpur, swooping down upon the world like a blanket of darkness, at the moment that the final relay of ponies was being hitched in. The sun dipped behind the encircling hills; the west blazed with the lambent flame of fire-opal; the wonderful translucent blue of the sky shaded suddenly to deep purple lanced by great shafts of mauve and amethyst light, and in the east stars popped out; the hills shone like huge, crude gems—sapphire, jade, jasper, malachite, chalcedony—their valleys swimming with mists of mother-of-pearl…. And it was night, the hills dark and still, the sky a deeper purple and opaque, the ruddy fires of wayfarers on the roadside leaping clear and bright.
With fresh ponies the tonga took the road with a wild initial rush soon to be moderated, when it began to climb the last steep grade to the pass that gives access to Kuttarpur from the south. For an hour the road toiled up and ever upward; steep cliffs of rock crowded it, threatening to push it over into black abysses, or to choke it off between towering, formidable walls. It swerved suddenly into a broad, clear space. The tonga paused. Voluntarily Ram Nath spoke for almost the first time since morning.
"Kuttarpur," he said, with a wave of his whip.
Aloof, austere and haughty, the City of Swords sits in the mouth of a ravine so narrow that a wall no more than a hundred yards in length is sufficient to seal its southerly approach. Beneath this wall, to one side of the city gate, a river flows from the lake that is Kuttarpur's chiefest beauty. Within, a multitude of dwellings huddles, all interpenetrated by streets and backways so straitened and sinuous as scarcely to permit the passage of an elephant from the Maharana's herd; congested in the bottom of the valley, the houses climb tier upon tier the flanking hillsides, until their topmost roofs threaten even the supremacy of that miracle in white marble, the Raj Mahal.
Northwards the palace of Khandawar's kings stands, exquisite, rare, and marvellous, unlike any other building in the world. White, all white, from the lake that washes its lowest walls to the crenellated rim of its highest roof, it sweeps upward in breath-taking steps and wide terraces to the crest of the western hill, into which it burrows, from which it springs; a vast enigma propounded in white marble without a note of colour save where the foliage of a hidden garden peeps over the edge of a jealous screen—a hundred imposing mansions merged into one monstrous and imperial maze.
Impregnable in the old days, before cannon were brought to India, Kuttarpur lives to-day remote, unfriendly, inhospitable. Within its walls there is no room for many visitors; they who come in numbers, therefore, must perforce camp down before the gates.