After a few days’ more travelling over the hot dry plains of Malwa we reached its capital, Indore, where we spent some days at the hospitable mansion of the Resident, and paid a visit to the Rajah, whose palace is situated in the centre of that large and populous town.  During our visit a most extraordinary scene occurred.  It happened that a sort of carnival was going on; but the bonbons and bouquets of Italy are here represented by little balls containing red, purple, or yellow dust, which burst the moment they strike the object at which they are thrown, and very soon after the row commences two-thirds of the population are so covered with red dust that they present the most extraordinary appearance; but it is not the dust-balls which contribute so much to the dyeing of the population as the squirts full of similar coloured liquids, which are to be seen playing in every direction.  Woe to the luckless individual who incautiously exhibits himself in the streets of Indore during the “Hoolie;” not that we ran any risk upon the occasion of our visit to the Rajah, as we were on that account tabooed, and could laugh at our ease at the rest of the claret-coloured world.  Here a woman passed spotted like a coach-dog:  she had just come in for a spent discharge, and had escaped the deluge, which her puce-coloured little boy had received so fully that his whole face and person seemed to partake of the prevailing tint; while yonder old greybeard is dusting his moustache from the red powder which tinges it in strong contrast to the rest of his sallow countenance.

After going through the ceremony of squatting on the floor of the Durbar—­our seven pair of unruly legs all converging to a common centre, from our inability to double them under us, as his Majesty did—­we adjourned to the hall below to witness the “Hoolie” in safety.  On each side of the court-yard was a sort of garden-engine, one filled with a purple and the other with a light-red fluid.  The King’s body-guard were now marched in and divided into two parties, each sitting under one of the garden-engines.  At the main gateway of the court-yard stood two elephants, with tubs of coloured liquid before them.  At a given signal the gallant troops were exposed to a most murderous cross-fire, which they were not allowed to return:  both garden-engines began playing upon them furiously, and the elephants, filling their trunks, sent the contents far and wide over the victims, who crouched down and bore in patience the blood-red storm.  At the same moment that a dexterously-applied squirt whisked off some individual’s turban, a fountain from the other side playing into his eyes and mouth prevented him from recovering it until some more fortunate neighbour, suffering perhaps from ear-ache, received the claret-coloured salvo with such violence that, if it failed to drive away the pain altogether, it must have rendered him a martyr to that complaint for the rest of his life.