* * * * *

Ten minutes later, Roy was riding homeward through a changed city; streets and hills and sky wrapped in the mystery of encroaching dusk.

South and west the sky flamed, like the heart of a fire opal, through a veil fine as gauze—­dust no longer; but the aura of Jaipur.  Seen afar, through the coloured gloom, familiar shapes took on strange outlines; moved and swayed, mysteriously detached, in a sea of shadows, scattered, here and there, by flames of little dinner fires along the pavements.  The brilliant shifting crowd of two hours ago seemed to have sunk into the earth.  For there is no night life in the streets of Jaipur.  Travellers had passed on and out.  Merchants had stowed away their muslins and embroideries, their vessels of brass and copper and priceless enamels.  Only the starving lay in huddled heaps as before—­ominously still; while above them vultures and eagles circled, expectant, ink-black against the immense radiance beyond.  Grey, deepening to black, were flat roofs, cornices, minarets and massed foliage, and the flitting shadows, with lifted tails, that careered along the house-tops; or perched on some jutting angle, skinny elbows crooked, absorbed in the pursuit of fleas.  For sunset is the monkey’s hour, and the eerie jibbering of these imps of darkness struck a bizarre note in the hush that shrouded the city.

Roy knew, now, why Thea had stayed his impatience; and he blessed her sympathetic understanding.  But just then—­steeped in India at her most magical hour—­it was hard to believe in the Residency household; in English dinner-tables and English detachment from the mediaeval medley of splendour and squalor, of courage and cruelty and dumb endurance, of arts and crafts and all the paraphernalia of enlightened knowledge that was Jaipur.  It seemed more like a week than a few hours since he had turned in the saddle to salute Aruna and ridden out into another world:—­her world, which was also in a measure his own....

On and on he rode, at a foot’s pace, followed by his twin shadows; past the temples of Maha Deo, still rosy where they faced the west, still rumbling and throbbing with muffled music; past wayside shrines, mere alcoves for grotesque images—­Shiva, Lord of Death, or Ganesh the Elephant God—­each with his scented garlands and his nickering chiragh; past shadowy groups round the dinner fires, cooking their evening meal:  on and out through the double fortified gateways into the deserted road, his whole being drenched in the silence and the deepening dusk.

Here, outside the city, emptiness loomed almost like a presence.  Only the trees were alive; each with its colony of peacocks and parrots and birds of prey noisily settling to rest.  The peacocks’ unearthly cry, and the far, ghostly laugh of jackals—­authentic voice of India at sundown—­sent a chill down Roy’s spine.  For he, who had scarcely known fear on the battlefield, was ignominiously at the mercy of imagination and the eerie spirit of the hour.