and cheap, he had gone about building the thing on the most thoroughly unpractical and most pretentious plan that he and his architects could figure out.  It was big enough to hold about ten times as much grain as the province could grow in any one year of plenty.  And, since that was the least practical and most ungranary-like shape, he had caused it to be built like an enormous beehive, with a tiny platform at the top.

Winding round and round the huge stone dome, and on the outside, was a six-foot-wide trail, which was the elevator.  Up this, each with a sack or a basket on his head, the population was to have been induced to run in single file, dumping its hard-won corn into the granary through an opening at the top until the granary was full.

The emperor died—­by poison—­before he could see his cherished project put into execution, but he had been a very thorough calculator, and a builder who believed in permanency.  He had foreseen that when the granary was full, and the screw-jacks were turned beneath the cost of living, there would probably be efforts made by unwashed, untutored, unenlightened mobs to rape his storehouse.  So he had made the little platform at the top a veritable fortress of a place, such as a handful of men could hold against a hundred thousand.

There was no known entrance to the granary above ground, except on the ground level, where a huge stone gateway frowned above a teak-and-iron door.  Above that door there were galleries, and fortalices and cunningly invented battlements in miniature, from behind whose shelter a resolute defending-party could pour out a hundred different kinds of death on a hungry crowd.  The place was naturally fire-proof and naturally cool—­as far as any building can be cool in Central India.  It was a first-class, ideal powder-magazine, if useless as a granary; and the last new conquerors of India had hastened to adopt it as a means of storing up the explosive medicine with which they kept their foothold.

Naturally, none but White soldiers, and a very few of the more trusted natives, had ever been allowed to go inside the powder-magazine.  The secret passages beneath it had never been intended for public convenience or information.  They had been designed as a means of rushing defenders secretly into the granary, and they connected with a tunnel underneath the palace that had just been burned.  They also connected with the outer wall in such a way that defenders from the ramparts might be rushed there too, if wanted in a hurry.  But, since there never had been corn kept in the granary, and nobody had ever had the slightest need to force an entrance, the knowledge even of the existence of the passages had become barely a memory, and there was not a man living in Jailpore who knew exactly where they began or where they ended.  There was a man outside who knew, but none inside.