Descending at a foot’s pace, the chill of emptiness and of oncoming twilight seemed to close like icy fingers on Roy’s heart; though the death of Amber was as nothing to the death of Chitor—­the warrior-queen, ravished and violently slain by Akbar’s legions.  Amber had, as it were, died peacefully in her sleep.  But there remained the all-pervading silence and emptiness:—­her sorrowful houses, cleft from roof to roadway; no longer homes of men, but of the rock-pigeon, the peacock, and the wild boar; stones of her crumbling arches thrust apart by roots of acacia and neem; her streets choked with cactus and brushwood; her beauty—­disfigured but not erased—­reflected in the unchanging mirror of the Lake.

If Roy and Lance had talked little before, they talked less now.  From the Lake-side they rode up, by stone pathways, to the Palace of stone and marble, set upon a jutting rock and commanding the whole valley.  There, in the quadrangle, they left the horses with their grooms, who were skilled in cutting corners and had trotted most of the way.

Close to the gate stood a temple of fretted marble—­neither ruined nor deserted; for within were the priests of Kali, and the faint, sickly smell of blood.  Daybreak after daybreak, for centuries, the severed head of a goat had been set before her, the warm blood offered in a bronze bowl....

“Pah!  Beastly!” muttered Lance.  “I’d sooner have no religion at all.”

Roy smiled at him, sidelong—­and said nothing.  It was beastly:  but it matched the rest.  It was in keeping with the dusky rooms, all damp-incrusted, the narrow passages and screens of marble tracery; the cloistered hanging garden, beyond the women’s rooms, their baths chiselled out of naked rock.  And the beastliness was off-set by the beauty of inlay and carving and colour; by the splendour of bronze gates and marble pillars, and slabs of carven granite that served as balustrade to the terraced roof, where daylight still lingered and azure-necked peacocks strutted, serenely immune.

Seated on a carven slab, they looked downward into the heart of desolation; upward, at creeping battlements and a little temple of Shiva printed sharply on the light-filled sky.

“Can’t you feel the ghosts of them all round you?” whispered Roy.

“No, thank God, I can’t,” said practical Lance, taking out a cigarette.  But a rustle of falling stones made him start—­the merest fraction.  “Perhaps smoke’ll keep ’em off—­like mosquitoes!” he added hopefully.

But Roy paid no heed.  He was looking down into the hollow shell of that which had been Amber.  Not a human sound anywhere; nor any stir of life, but the soft ceaseless kuru-kooing doves, that nested and mated in those dusky inner rooms, where Queens had mated with Kings.

“’Thou hast made of a city an heap, of a defenced city a ruin ...Their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there,’” he quoted softly; adding after a pause, “Mother had a great weakness for old Isaiah.  She used to say he and the minor prophets knew all about Rajasthan.  The owls of Amber are blue pigeons.  But I hope she’s spared the satyrs.”