There was feasting in the streets for a week before the great inauguration ceremony.  Tables were set in every side-street, where whoever cared to might eat his fill of fabulous free rations.  Each night the streets were illuminated with colored lights, and fireworks blazed and roared against the velvet sky at intervals, dowering the ancient trees and temple-tops with momentary splendor.

All day long there were performances by acrobats, and songs, and story-telling whenever there was room for a crowd to gather.  Faquirs as gruesome and fantastic as the side-shows at a Western fair flocked in to pose and be gaped at, receiving, besides free rations and tribute of small coin, gratification to their vanity in return for the edifying spectacle.

There were little processions, too, of princes arriving from a distance to be present on the great day, their elephants of state loaded with extravagant gifts and their retainers vying with peacocks in efforts to look splendid, and be arrogant, and claim importance for their masters.  Never a day but three or four or half-a-dozen noble guests arrived; and nobody worked except those who had to make things easy for the rest; and they worked overtime.

One accustomed spectacle, however, was omitted.  Utirupa would have none of the fights between wild animals in the arena that had formed such a large part of Gungadhura’s public amusement.  But there was ram-fighting, and wrestling between men such as Sialpore had never seen, all the best wrestlers from distant parts being there to strive for prizes.  Hired dancers added to the gaiety at night, and each incoming nobleman brought nautch girls, or acrobats, or trained animals, or all three to add to the revelry.  And there was cock-fighting, and quail-fighting, of course, all day long and every day, with gambling in proportion.

When the day of days at last arrived the city seemed full of elephants.  Every compound and available walled space had been requisitioned to accommodate the brutes, and there were sufficient argumentative mahouts, all insisting that their elephants had not enough to eat, and all selling at least half of the pr-vided ration, to have formed a good-sized regiment.  The elephants’ daily bath in the river was a sight worth crossing India to see.  There was always the chance, besides, that somebody’s horses would take fright and add excitement to the spectacle.

Up in the great palace Utirupa feasted and entertained his equals all day long, and most of the night.  There was horse-racing that brought the crowd out in its thousands, and a certain amount of tent-pegging and polo, but most of the royal gala-making was hidden from public view.  (Patali, for instance, reckless of Gungadhura’s fall and looking for new fields to conquer, provided a nautch by herself and her own trained galaxy of girls that would not have done at all in public.)

Yasmini kept close in her own palace.  She, too, had her hands full with entertaining, for there were about a dozen of the wives of distant princes who had made the journey in state to attend the ceremony and watch it from behind the durbar grille—­to say nothing of the wives of local magnates.  But she herself kept within doors, until the night before the night of full moon, the day before the ceremony.