The Bronze Bell

by Louis Joseph Vance

Now figure the city to yourself, seeing it as Sophia was later to see it in the light of day; then drench it with blue Indian night and stud it with a myriad eyes of fire—lamps, torches, candles, blue-white electric arcs, lights running up and down both hillsides and fringing the very star-sheeted skies, clustering and diverging in vast, bewildering, inconsequent designs, picking out the walls and main thoroughfares, shining through coloured globes upon the palace terraces, glimmering mysteriously from isolate windows and balconies; and add to these the softly illuminated walls of a hundred silken state marquees and a thousand meaner canvas tents arrayed south of the city…. And that is Kuttarpur as it first revealed itself to Amber and Sophia Farrell.

But for a moment were they permitted to gaze in wonderment; Ram Nath had little patience. When he chose to, he applied his whip, and the ponies stretched out, the tonga plunging on their heels down the steep hillside, like an ungoverned, ungovernable thing, maddened. Within a quarter of an hour they were careering through the city of tents on the parked plain before the southern wall. In five minutes more they drew up at the main city gate to parley with the Quarter Guard.

Here they suffered an exasperating delay. It appeared that the gates were shut at sundown, in deference to custom immemorial. Between that hour and sunrise none were permitted to pass either in or out without the express sanction of the State. The commander of the guard instituted an impudent catechism, in response to which Ram Nath discovered the several identities and estates of his charges. The commander received the information with impartial equanimity and retired within the city to confer with his superiors. After some time a trooper was sent to advise the travellers that the tonga would be permitted to enter with the understanding that the unaccredited Englishman (meaning Amber) would consent to lodge for the night in no other spot than the State rest-house beyond the northern limits of the city.

Amber agreed. The trooper saluted with much deference and withdrew. And for a long time nothing happened; the gates remained shut, the postern of the Quarter Guard irresponsive to Ram Nath's repeated summons. His passengers endured with what patience they could command; they were aware that it was necessary to obtain from some quarter official sanction for the opening of the gates, but they had understood that it had already been obtained.

Abruptly the peace of the night was shattered, and the hum of the encampment behind them with the roar of the city before them was dwarfed, by a dull and thunderous detonation of cannon from a terrace of the palace. The tonga ponies, reared and plunged, Ram Nath mastering them with much difficulty. Sophia was startled, and Amber himself stirred uneasily on his perch.

"What now?" he grumbled. "You'd think we were visitors of state and had to be durbarred!"

Far up on the heights a second red flame stabbed the night, and again the thunder pealed. Thereafter gun after gun bellowed at imperative, stately intervals.

"Fifteen," Amber announced after a time. "Isn't this something extraordinary, Miss Farrell?"

"Perhaps," she suggested, "there's a native potentate arriving at the northern gate. They're very punctilious about their salutes, you know."

Another crash silenced her. Amber continued to count. "Twenty-one," he said when it seemed that there was to be no more cannonading. "Isn't that a royal salute?"