of plenty, is thus its symbol, and the scattered rice emblem of an abundance which spreads prosperity about its path.

The Parsis opened to let the Princess pass, and a little further up the Hindu ladies met her with a tray on which spirit-lamps were burning about a little heap of red powder.

With the powder her forehead was to be touched, to express the wish that she might go through life with the brightness of the brightest of colours in front of her. Finally, in the portico at the head of the steps, the Muhammadan ladies wreathed the Princess with garlands of heavyscented flowers, flinging golden-leaved almonds, emblems of peace, before her, and placing a cocoanut, for material plenty, inther hands.

It was all very simply and gently and gracefully done. In the clear darkening twilight, in which the lamps grew bright, the pliant timid charmingly draped figures, flitting with fluttering saris, white and silver, pale greens and mauves, across the great flight of steps, moved like the fitful souls of butterflies about the wondering interested Princess, her Western grace and bearing so different from theirs; her mind so much a greater distance from the nearest of them, than theirsHindu, Muhammadan and Parsi-could ever be from one another.

CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST DURBAR

THE nearest road to Indore, which branches at Khandwa from the main line, has gradients steeper than the Royal train could face, so we crept northward up the coast by Surat and Baroda, then turned due east into the Central India Agency, and again almost due south to Indore. There is nothing to lure any one to Indore, and we were there only because scarcity of water upset the previous arrangements for meeting the Central India Chiefs. About it are sandy tracts like the plains of Northern Germany, covered with rough grass, scantily wooded with pipal, babul, and mimosa, scarred by occasional parched watercourses, like the bleached bones of a river, and with here and there the steep abruptness of a hill, which seems to have thrust its head violently through the level country. Out of this aridness the little station leapt, a sudden rainbow blaze of colour. On the open platform, with red carpet in front of them, all the glory of Central India was seated like a bed of monstrous zinnias flaming in the sun, the glare of their purples and reds and greens actually tempered by the silver and gold which overlaid them.

The Begum of Bhopal was there, the only Muhammadan woman in the world who rules in the strictest purdah, a very small figure, its head shrouded in a lilac and silver embroidered burka reaching nearly to the knees, with two dark slits where eyes should have been showing, and a fantastic crown perched on top of all. Beside her was the young Maharaja Holkar, the ruler of Indore, with half-a-dozen Maharajas more, and double as many Rajas, Raos, and Nawabs, against the scarlet tunics of British officers, like peacocks and flamingoes mixed.

They had in all their splendour, partly perhaps because of it, a certain wasted air, set down there on the flat bare station with Royalty still fifty miles away.

In the dusty space about the station their retainers sported. Footmen, all in crude gamboge and ochre and carmine, looking as if they had been dipped bodily in a pot of dye, carrying bigmouthed blunderbusses, long-stocked jezails, pikes and halberds; and horsemen, in moss-green and silver and mauve, in buff, gold, and crimson, in bronze and purple, in rose and white, with inlaid iron helmets and armour bristling on their chargers' foreheads and clinging to their flanks, the long pennons of their lances fluttering, many hued, above them like a torn field of flowers.

Camp life in India is more completely organised

than anywhere in the world. Ten days before we came to Indore the ground outside the Residency compound was a sandy waste covered with rough tangled grass and a few trees. When we arrived there was a town of close upon a hundred tents, from the big mess marquee, with comfortable drawing-room, ante-room, and smoking-room about it, to the shuldari of the hospital assistants; all pitched beside wide shingled roads, lit with dazzling Kitson lamps, while before each tent was a little garden, edged with dog-toothed bricks, where the ground had been cleared and grass sown, and already, in exchange for unstinted water, an emerald film had formed over the light earth; such magic, given water only, can the sun and the soil work here between them; while, just within the brickwork, planted ferns made the white town look rather like a permanent cantonment than the resting place of a caravanserai which came yesterday and will be gone to-morrow. Yet those responsible for this luxurious air of permanence express regrets that the season of the year prevented so much else being done. November comes between the last flowers that belong here and those that are brought from home to play their excited masque of its being England during the cold weather. There remain still the pale yellow flowers of the tree mallow, the feathery crimson hibiscus, oleanders, scarlet poinsettias, dusty mimosa, and wreaths of the pale magenta bougainvillea. But except for the last

they make no great show of colour; it is a land of autumn, of things over and gone. But into it the English flowers are feverishly coming, straining up their thin green heads as though they could never grow fast enough; and the roses, whose anxiety to bloom the whole year through it is so hard to hinder, are just opening their retarded buds.

At Indore the first durbar of the tour was held. A tent draped in red, pale blue, and gold had been pitched on the parade ground behind the Residency, a square heavy building which still shows the scars of Mutiny bullets, and thither all the ruling Princes and their suites gathered for presentation to the Prince of Wales. Their queer barbaric splendours mixed with modernity -armoured horses in attendance on a Twentieth Century barouche made their arrival worth watching, the Lancers of their escorts galloping up in clouds of dust, out of which the strong hot colours of their trappings grew as the dust subsided. At one end of the tent was a platform carrying the crimson and silver chairs which were used for the King's visit thirty years ago, and of which every curve proclaims the taste of the Sixties. They probably look thereby additionally delectable to the native eye, whose taste is for the worst that Europe can offer it. From the centre of the platform a broad carpeted passage led to the entrance, and on each side of