"Buck up, Lance," he said abruptly; for Desmond, who saw no ghosts, was keenly interested. "Let's quit this place of skulls and empty eye-sockets. Amber's dead; but not utterly decayed."
He knew. He had ridden out alone one morning, in the light of paling stars, to watch the dawn steal down through the valley and greet the sleeping city that would never wake again—half hoping to recapture the miracle of Chitor. But Amber did not enshrine the soul of his mother's race. And the dawn had proved merely a dawn. Moonlight, with its eerie enchantment, would be oven more beautiful and fitting; but the pleasure of anticipation was shadowed by his resolve.
He had spoken of it only to Thea; asking her, when tea was over, to give him a chance:—and now he was heartily wishing he had chosen any other place and time than this....
The brisk canter to the foothills was a relief. Thence the road climbed, between low, reddish-grey spurs, to the narrow pass, barred by a formidable gate, that swung open at command, with a screech of rusty hinges, as if in querulous protest against intrusion.
Another gateway,—and yet another: then they were through the triple wall that guards the dead city from the invader who will never come, while both races honour the pact that alone saved desperate, stubborn Rajputana from extinction.
Up on the heights, it was still day; but in the valley it was almost evening. And there—among deepening shadows and tumbled fragments of hills—lay Amber: her palace and temples and broken houses crowding round their sacred Lake, like Queens and their handmaids round the shield of a dead King.
Descending at a foot's pace, the chill of emptiness and of oncoming twilight seemed to close like icy fingers on Roy's heart; though the death of Amber was as nothing to the death of Chitor—the warrior-queen, ravished and violently slain by Akbar's legions. Amber had, as it were, died peacefully in her sleep. But there remained the all-pervading silence and emptiness:—her sorrowful houses, cleft from roof to roadway; no longer homes of men, but of the rock-pigeon, the peacock, and the wild boar; stones of her crumbling arches thrust apart by roots of acacia and neem; her streets choked with cactus and brushwood; her beauty—disfigured but not erased—reflected in the unchanging mirror of the Lake.
If Roy and Lance had talked little before, they talked less now. From the Lake-side they rode up, by stone pathways, to the Palace of stone and marble, set upon a jutting rock and commanding the whole valley. There, in the quadrangle, they left the horses with their grooms, who were skilled in cutting corners and had trotted most of the way.
Close to the gate stood a temple of fretted marble—neither ruined nor deserted; for within were the priests of Kali, and the faint, sickly smell of blood. Daybreak after daybreak, for centuries, the severed head of a goat had been set before her, the warm blood offered in a bronze bowl....
"Pah! Beastly!" muttered Lance. "I'd sooner have no religion at all."