which he stands work in couples, and the rear couple always have the appearance, during the ceremony of kneeling, of unjointing in the wrong direction. We dared not express the sympathy we felt when he roared like distant artillery over a phonograph, for it was a dubious sound, and we privately wished the maharaja would invent other means of sending guests out to Amber.

A ladder was placed against the kneeling giant, and there was nothing to do but climb for the top, which we finally reached thankfully, feeling we should be safer and more out of the way on his back than anywhere else in the neighborhood. Once there, the mahout, by another persuasive process which we afterward learned always includes a goad, signified to the kneeling monster that he could rise. The mighty bulk heaved, and the forward part arose like a ship upon a tidal

wave.

We went up and up and up, through dizzy moments where imagination pictured the cords of our gigantic saddle breaking, and its occupants being obliged to obey the laws of gravity through an ever-increasing distance earthward; but this experience was spared us, and we were presently rolling along upon what seemed a species of elevated earthquake of a mild and non-destructive form.

Our big steed was not a "trotter," but moved as became a large body, carefully and slowly, testing the ground before him with an inquisitive trunk before venturing to place a ponderous foot down upon it. It was interesting, when not absorbed in the contemplation of this unique method of locomotion, to see how differently trees appeared when beheld from the level of high boughs, or to peep over the edge of our animated precipice and view people and camels as seen from the top.

We ascended the hill at a snail's pace, and followed a beautifully shaded road down into the valley of Amber, winding along the shores of a clear lake until the majestic ruins of the city and palace rose before us. Birds with strange, sweet notes sang on every side, and silvery fish leaped out of the waters into the sunshine. At a curve of the road, as it nears the deserted city, is a wayside shrine dedicated to Siva and the sacred cow. Passing devotees had made their morning offerings of flowers, and yellow and white garlands hung about the neck of the bovine deity, or were scattered in thick profusion before the goddess and upon her altar.

The sun was at our right, and the lake re

flected, with the absolute fidelity of a mirror, the palace on the western hill, with its white walls, its mighty gateways, its winding, stone-walled roads, and the square, artificial island below. Stately palms and flowering trees grow on this island, and stone summer-houses and elaborate railings, broken now in many places, have been built along its masonry edge. A gorgeous creeper, rioting in bloom, had thrown a thousand purple blossoms over the gray old gaps in the balustrade, and each petal bloomed again in the motionless pool below, as if nature was never tired of repeating so fair a picture.

All the nearly obliterated walls, the foundations of which may yet be traced in little irregular piles of crumbling dust upon the hillside, must have been of far greater antiquity than the city built around one shore of the little lake lying below. Our elephants plodded slowly through these silent streets, the vacant houses of which could relate such wondrous tales if only endowed with speech. Deserted by their rightful owners, a few of them have become the habitation of Pariahs, who have no place or dwelling, whose touch is contamination, and whose shadow is unclean, and who have crept in from their lairs outside the city walls, and taken timid possession with the foxes and the jackals.

Perhaps it is their descendants who form the few inhabitants to-day, to be counted by a score, and who share with ash-strewn hermit or recluse ascetic all the decaying grandeurs of the place.

A road, the crenelated walls of which are broken and falling in places, winds up the slope of the hill, through three massive gateways, stone-curtained, and enters a great deserted courtyard. Grass grows stunted and wiry from the disused ground within, once trampled to fine dust by impatient chargers, and crowded with all the bewildering and dazzling retinue of Oriental state. A hundred horse would hardly fill one corner of this great square, and a thousand horse and a thousand retainers, housed in the ample room accorded to them here, would only people it with life and color, and yet leave room for more.

From the southwest corner of the courtyard a broad flight of stone steps leads to another magnificent gateway in the marble alcoves of which used to sit armed guards with brilliant turbans, for this is the gateway proper to the palace. Huge as are all the buildings on the other three sides of the square, they form only the palace of the

Along this deep gateway two facing files of guards, twenty deep, could stand elbow to elbow. It opens upon a second large court paved with red and white stones. A forest of pillars at the left support a graceful roof, and the open apartment thus formed is the public audience-hall. Its elevated marble floor is surrounded by three steps like those about a dais, and the eastern end opens into a suite of rooms, from the windows of which one may look down upon the lake and the island garden, so far below that birds and sun-doves, circling in the air over them, seem lost in lower space.

A deep colonnade continues from these rooms along the eastern side of the square, with pierced marble windows admitting light and air on one hand, and opening into the court on the other. Another wonderful gateway opens in the center of the southern wall and leads into the mardan, or what Sir Edwin Arnold calls the men's abode. This seems a misnomer, for all the great arches on each side of it, the jutting bays, the recessed nooks, and the roof-walks above, are carefully screened with pierced marble, and give evidence of having been constructed for the housing of the "purdah-hidden" women of the zenana.

This beautiful gateway leads into a garden, the fragrance of which floats outside its walls. Around it are innumerable rooms leading from one to another, decorated with mirror-inlay, the walls and vaulted ceilings of which cast back a thousand sparkles from a single candle.

Each suite on the ground floor fronts upon the garden at the west, and its eastern windows, cunningly carved from marble, open into the air over the quiet lake below and the barren hillside with its little mounds of dust between. Flowers, once loved by fair imprisoned beauty, bloom in this deserted garden, turning it into a sweet jungle where solitude and neglect have not had power to blight.

A high stone screen thickly perforated with little chiseled openings, each one of which forms a tiny skyward chute, admitting only light and air, forms the western wall of the garden, and shuts off its beauties as effectually as a fortress wall. Back of it is a veranda-like room with a little marble-lined miniature canal, perhaps a foot deep and two feet wide, running through it. A great slanting stone carved into huge scales like those of a fish has been set in one side, and

In one of the rooms opening off this place are several small and curious wagons of an antiquated pattern, the sumptuous hangings of which have been worried by the tooth of time. In these toy affairs the poor little ladies of the zenana used to draw one another about, varying by this childish amusement the monotony of an existence the only events of which were new baubles or jewels, or the visits of the lord of the harem.

Here the great Akbar found his Hindu bride, a daughter of the house of Amber, who became the wife of one emperor and the mother of another. She it was whose blameless life gave her the title among her husband's Moslem courtiers of "Mary of the Period," as the purity and beauty of Christ's mother Mary is held in veneration by all Mohammedans. She was the wife of the greatest ruler of a great line; the mother of a man who became illustrious even under the shadow of a sire whom all men down to today unite in calling Akbar the Great; and the grandmother of the Prince of All, the Emperor Shah Jehan, in whose magnificent reign the dynasty reached its height, and to whose taste and generosity the world is indebted for the incomparable buildings at Delhi and Agra.

Amid the ruins of Akbar's palaces at Agra is the one built by him in Hindu style for this princess of Amber, and her tomb, a little way from Akbar's at Secundra, has been turned into a newspaper office, where the click of type and the rattle of printingpresses break a silence which fell three hundred years ago over the ashes of an empress.

And here in this hillside palace the next generation saw another princess of the house, niece to Akbar's empress, grow to maidenhood and become the wife of Akbar's son Sulim, afterward Emperor Jahangir. Perhaps in the happy freedom of her girlhood this little princess sat in the toy chariots, the silken hangings of which were not then given over to moth and mildew, and made merry while their gilded wheels were rolling her noisily to a tragic end. For Prince Sulim, cursed by a violent and ungoverned temper, had bequeathed this quality to his eldest son Khusrau. Plotting against his father Akbar, and being in turn plotted against by his own son, the violence of family quarrels drove the unhappy wife and mother to suicide in the fear that murder would be done by one of them.