“A few more steps brought us to the door of the armoury.  This is small and badly arranged, which seems a pity, as there were some lovely things.  Chain armour and inlaid suits lay about the floor in heaps; and we were shown the saddle used by Akbar during the last siege of Chitor.  The most remarkable things, however, were the Rajput shields, of which there were some beautiful specimens.  They are circular, not large, and made, some of tortoiseshell, some of polished hippo hide, &c.  One was inlaid with great emeralds, a second had bosses of turquoise, and a really lovely one was inlaid with fine Jaipur enamel in blue and green.  There were swords simply encrusted with jewels—­one with a hilt of carved crystal; another was a curiously-modelled dog’s head in smooth silver, and I noticed a beauty in pale jade.  Altogether it was a most fascinating collection, different from, but in its way quite as interesting, as the fine armoury at Madrid.”

Thus did Jane triumph over me with her description of what she had seen and what I had missed; and I had been trying to delineate the Temple of Jagganath, and had been disastrously defeated, for it is indeed a complicated piece of drawing, and the children, both large and small, crowded round me to my great hindrance.  Therefore, it was not until I had been soothed with an excellent lunch, and the contents of a very long tumbler, that I felt strong enough to take an intelligent interest in the contents of the Maharana’s curiosity-shop!

Monday, October 30.—­The more we see of Udaipur the more we are charmed with it.  The whole place is so absolutely unspoilt by modernism, is so purely Eastern—­and ancient Eastern at that—­that we feel as though we were in a little world far apart from the great one where steam and electricity shatter the nerves, and drive their victims through life at high pressure.

Ringed in by a rampart of arid hills, beyond which the scrub-covered desert stretches for miles, the peaceful city of Udaipur lies secluded in an oasis, whose centre is a turquoise lake.  High in his palace the Maharana rules in feudal state, and, like Aytoun’s Scottish Cavalier,

  “A thousand vassals dwelt around—­all of his kindred they,
  And not a man of all that clan has ever ceased to pray
  For the royal race he loves so well.”

For to his subjects the Maharana is little less than a divinity, for is he not a direct descendant of the Sun?  Likewise is he not the chief of the only royal house of Rajputana, who disdained to purchase Mogul friendship at the price of giving a daughter in marriage to the Mohammedan?