Akbar into the deserts of the Indus, and only ended with the shrinking northward of the Mughal Empire.

The Rajputs of Chitor, of all rulers in India, have the right to produce feudal impressions, since they still gravely trace their descent from the sun, and can boast that they alone of all the Rajput stock were too proud, even in their most desperate days, to give a daughter in marriage to a Mughal Emperor. The very shape of the city also favours the feudal sense, climbing, as it does, from the huts of the sweepers and the dust of the bazar, up by devious streets and zigzag alleys, with houses hoisted on each other's shoulders and the great white Palace standing on the heads of them all. That is one way of seeing it; not the most striking, but perhaps the most suggestive. From the lake the Palace seems, folding the whole town under its heavy wing, to put it aside with a sort of disdainful tolerance. But seen from the city it seems uplifted with a kind of triumph. As you climb the steep glaring streets you cannot see it, you have only the sense of its mass above you, the knowledge that up to it and to it only everything leads, till your way is barred by massive granite walls, and passing through the Great Gate you cross the court where the Royal elephants trumpet, under whose arches past Maharanas have been weighed for largesse against gold and silver, and, mounting still, enter

by a further archway to find at last the white height of it rising from beside you into the sky. White and almost blank its walls are mercifully empty of ornament in a country which never knows where to stay its decorating hand-all the tracery being kept for the topmost storeys, which lie, exquisitely chased, like a crown of old carven ivory, above the front of its colourless determination. Coming upon it so, aloof, silent, impenetrable, it seems to breathe the haughty spirit of Rajput valour, which six hundred years ago, at the first Mughal capture of Chitor, caused a Rajput queen and thirteen thousand of her women to seek death by burning that their men should be free to fight their way through the foe.

But for a certain overpowering picturesqueness it is from the lake that the Palace should be seen, if only because there is nothing quite to match it in all India. Where on the land side was the climbing town here is only a sheer precipice of wall; wall of shorn granite and of inbuilt marble, with its foot set deep in the lake water, and all of it washed to one dazzling whiteness, so that there is no telling masonry from the solid rock. From this, the oldest part, the rest leans back from the lake, rising by bastions, terraces, and winding stairs to the crest of the hill, which is crowned by the Palace along the whole lifted length of it. It is all of marble-whitewashed; and yet one does not wish the whitewash away. Marble would have taken