Riding quickly through new Chitor—­a dirty little town, fast asleep—­he reached the fortified gateway:  was challenged by sleepy soldiery; gave his name and passed on—­into another world; a world that grew increasingly familiar with every hundred yards of ascent.

At one point he halted abreast of two rough monuments, graves of the valiant pair who had fought and died, like Rajputs, in that last terrible onslaught when the hosts of Akbar entered in, over the bodies of eight thousand saffron-robed warriors, and made Chitor a place of desolation for ever.  One—­a mere boy of sixteen—­was the only son of his house.  Beside him, lance in hand, fought his widowed mother and girl wife; and in death they were not divided.  The other, Jaimul of Bednore, was a far-away ancestor of his own mother.  How often she had told him the tale—­adding proudly that, while Rajasthan endured, the names of those two would shine clear in the firmament of time, as stars in the firmament of space.

Through gateway after gateway—­under the lee of a twenty-foot wall, pierced for musketry,—­he passed, a silent shadow.  And gradually there stole over him afresh the confused wonder of his dream,—­was it he himself who rode—­or was it—­that other, returning to the sacred city after long absence?  For the moment he could hardly tell.  But—­what matter?  The astonishing thrill of recognition was all....

Round about the seventh gateway clustered the semblance of a village; shrouded, slumbering forms strewn around in the open;—­ghosts all.  The only instant realities were himself and Suraj and Chitor, and the silence of the sleeping earth, watched over by unsleeping stars.  Within, and about him, hovered a stirring consciousness of ancient, unchanging India; utterly impervious to mere birds of passage from the West; veiled, elusive, yet almost hideously real.  So real, just then, to Roy, that—­for a few amazing moments—­he was unaware that he rode through a city forsaken by man.  Ghosts of houses and temples slid by on either side of him, as he spurred Suraj to a canter and made unerringly for the main palace.  There was news for the Rana—­news of Akbar’s army—­that did not brook delay....

Not till Suraj stopped dead—­there where the Palace had once stood in its glory—­did he come to himself, as abruptly as when he waked in the French bedstead an hour ago.

Gone was the populous city through which he had ridden in fancy; gone the confusion of himself with that other self—­how many centuries old?  But the familiar look of the palace was no dream; nor the fact that he had instinctively made his way there at full speed.  Bastioned and sharply domed, it stood before him in clear outline; but within sides it was hollow as a skull; a place of ghosts.  Suddenly there came over him the old childish dread of dark, that he had never quite outgrown.  But dread or no, explore it he must....

As his foot touched earth, a low hiss warned him he was trespassing, and clutching Terry’s collar, he stood rigid, while the whip-like shadow of death writhed across a strip of moonlight—­and disappeared.  There was life,—­of a sort, in Chitor.  So Roy trod warily as he passed from room to room; dread of dark forgotten in the weird fascination of foreknowledge verified without fail.