The brisk canter to the foothills was a relief. Thence the road climbed, between low, reddish-grey spurs, to the narrow pa.s.s, 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 peac.o.c.k, 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."

Roy smiled at him, sidelong--and said nothing. It _was_ beastly: but it matched the rest. It was in keeping with the dusky rooms, all damp-incrusted, the narrow pa.s.sages and screens of marble tracery; the cloistered hanging garden, beyond the women's rooms, their baths chiselled out of naked rock. And the beastliness was off-set by the beauty of inlay and carving and colour; by the splendour of bronze gates and marble pillars, and slabs of carven granite that served as bal.u.s.trade to the terraced roof, where daylight still lingered and azure-necked peac.o.c.ks strutted, serenely immune.

Seated on a carven slab, they looked downward into the heart of desolation; upward, at creeping battlements and a little temple of Shiva printed sharply on the light-filled sky.

"Can't you _feel_ the ghosts of them all round you?" whispered Roy.

"No, thank G.o.d, I can't," said practical Lance, taking out a cigarette.

But a rustle of falling stones made him start--the merest fraction.

"Perhaps smoke'll keep 'em off--like mosquitoes!" he added hopefully.

But Roy paid no heed. He was looking down into the hollow sh.e.l.l of that which had been Amber. Not a human sound anywhere; nor any stir of life, but the soft ceaseless kuru-kooing doves, that nested and mated in those dusky inner rooms, where Queens had mated with Kings.

"'Thou hast made of a city an heap, of a defenced city a ruin ...Their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there,'" he quoted softly; adding after a pause, "Mother had a great weakness for old Isaiah. She used to say he and the minor prophets knew all about Rajasthan. The owls of Amber are blue pigeons. But I hope she's spared the satyrs."

"Globe-trotters!" suggested Lance.

"Or 'Piffers' devoid of reverence!" retorted Roy. "Hullo! Here come the others."

Footsteps and voices in the quadrangle waked hollow echoes as when a stone drops into a well. Presently they sounded on the stairs near by: Flossie's rather boisterous laugh; Martin chaffing her in his husky tones.

"Great sport! Let's rent it off H.H. and gather 'em all in from the highways and hedges for a masked fancy ball!"

Roy stood up and squared his shoulders. "Satyrs dancing, with a vengeance!" said he; but the gleam of Aruna's sari smote him silent. A band seemed to tighten round his heart....

Before tea was over, peac.o.c.ks and pigeons had gone to roost among the trees that shadowed the Lake; and the light behind the hills had pa.s.sed swiftly from gold to flame-colour, from flame-colour to rose. For the sun, that had already departed in effect, was now setting in fact.

"Hush--it's coming," murmured Thea:--and it came.

Hollow thuds, quickening to a vibrant roar, swelled up from the temple in the courtyard below. The Brahmins were beating the great tom-tom before Kali's Shrine.

It was the signal. It startlingly waked the dead city to discordant life. Groanings and howlings and clashings, as of Tophet, were echoed and re-echoed from every temple, every shrine; an orgy of demoniac sounds; blurred in transit through the empty rooms beneath; pierced at intervals by the undulating wail of ram's horns; the two reiterate notes wandering, like lost souls, through a confused blare of cymbals and bagpipes and all kinds of music.

Flossie, with a bewitching grimace at Martin, clapped both hands over her ears. Roy--standing by the bal.u.s.trade with Aruna--was aware of an answering echo somewhere in subconscious depths, as the discords rose and fell above the throbbing undernote of the drum. It was as if the claimant voices of the East cried out to the blood in his veins: 'You are of us--do what you will; go where you will.' And all the while his eyes never left Aruna's half-averted face.

Sudden and clear from the heights came a ringing peal of bells, as it were the voices of angels answering the wail of devils in torment. It was from the little Shrine of Shiva close against the ramparts, etched in outline, above the dark of the hills.

Aruna turned and looked up at him. "Too beautiful!" she whispered.

He nodded, and flung out an arm. "Look there!"

Low and immense--pale in the pallor of the eastern sky--the moon hung poised above ma.s.sed shadows, like a wraith escaped from the city of death. Moment by moment, she drew light from the vanished sun. Moment by moment, under their watching eyes, she conjured the formless dark into a new heaven, a new earth....

"Would you be afraid--to stroll round a little ... with me?" he asked.

"Afraid? I would love it--if Thea will allow." This time she did not look up.

Vincent and Thea were sitting a little farther along the bal.u.s.trade; Lance beside them, imbibing tales of Rajasthan. Flossie and her Captain had already disappeared.

"_I'm_ going to be frankly a Goth and flash my electric torch into holes and corners," Lance announced as the other two came up. "I bar being intimidated by ghosts."

"We're not going to be intimidated either," said Roy, addressing himself to Thea. "And I guarantee not to let Aruna be spirited away."

Vincent shot a look at his wife. "Don't wander too far," said he.

"And don't hang about too long," she added. "It'll be cold going home."

Though he was standing close to her, she could say no more. But, under cover of the dusk, her hand found his and closed on it hard.

The characteristic impulse heartened him amazingly, as he followed Aruna down the ghostly stairway, through marble cloisters into the hanging garden, misted with moonlight, fragrant with orange trees.

And now there was more than Thea's hand-clasp to uphold him. Gradually there dawned on him a faint yet sure intimation of his mother's presence, of her tenderly approving love--dim to his brain, yet as sensible to his spirit as light and warmth to his body.

It did not last many moments; but--as in all contact with her--the clear after-certainty remained....

Exactly what he intended to say he did not know even now. To speak the cruel truth, yet by some means to soften the edge of it, seemed almost impossible. But nerved by this vivid, exalted sense of her nearness, the right moment, the right words could be trusted to come of themselves....

And Aruna, walking beside him in a hushed expectancy, was remembering that other night, so strangely far away, when they had walked alone under the same moon, and a.s.surance of his love had so possessed her, that she had very nearly broken her little chiragh. And to-night--how different! Her very love for him, though the same, was not quite the same. It seemed to depend not at all on nearness or response. Starved of both, it had grown not less, but more.

From a primitive pa.s.sion it had become a rarefied emotional atmosphere in which she lived and moved. And this garden of eerie lights and shadows was saturated with it; thronged, to her fancy, with ghosts of dead pa.s.sions and intrigues, of dead Queens, in whom the twin flames of love and courage could be quenched only by flames of the funeral pyre.

Their blood ran in her veins--and in his too. _That_ closeness of belonging none could s.n.a.t.c.h from her. About the other, she was growing woefully uncertain, as day followed day, and still no word. Was there trouble after all! Would he speak to-night...?

They had reached a dark doorway, and he was trying the handle. It opened inwards.

"I'm keen to go a little way up the hillside," he said, forcing himself to break a silence that was growing oppressive. "To get a sight of the Palace with the moon full on it. We'll be cautious--not go too far."

"I am ready to go anywhere," she answered; and the fervour of that simple statement told him she was not thinking of hillsides any more than he was--at the back of his mind.

Silence was unkinder than speech; and as they pa.s.sed out into the open, he scanned the near prospect for a convenient spot. Not far above them a fragment of ruined wall, overhung by trees, ended in a broken arch; its lingering keystone threatened by a bird-borne acacia. A fallen slab of stone, half under it, offered a not too distant seat. Slab and arch were in full light; the s.p.a.ce beyond, engulfed in shadow.

Far up the hillside a jackal laughed. Across the valley another answered it. A monkey swung from a branch on to the slab, and sat there engaged in his toilet--a very imp of darkness.

"Not be-creeped--are you?" Roy asked.