Imagine a file of elephants marching through such a crevice of a street and scraping the paint off both sides of it with their hides.  How big they must look, and how little they must make the houses look; and when the elephants are in their glittering court costume, what a contrast they must make with the humble and sordid surroundings.  And when a mad elephant goes raging through, belting right and left with his trunk, how do these swarms of people get out of the way?  I suppose it is a thing which happens now and then in the mad season (for elephants have a mad season).

I wonder how old the town is.  There are patches of building—­massive structures, monuments, apparently—­that are so battered and worn, and seemingly so tired and so burdened with the weight of age, and so dulled and stupefied with trying to remember things they forgot before history began, that they give one the feeling that they must have been a part of original Creation.  This is indeed one of the oldest of the princedoms of India, and has always been celebrated for its barbaric pomps and splendors, and for the wealth of its princes.

CHAPTER XLV.

It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

Out of the town again; a long drive through open country, by winding roads among secluded villages nestling in the inviting shade of tropic vegetation, a Sabbath stillness everywhere, sometimes a pervading sense of solitude, but always barefoot natives gliding by like spirits, without sound of footfall, and others in the distance dissolving away and vanishing like the creatures of dreams.  Now and then a string of stately camels passed by—­always interesting things to look at—­and they were velvet-shod by nature, and made no noise.  Indeed, there were no noises of any sort in this paradise.  Yes, once there was one, for a moment:  a file of native convicts passed along in charge of an officer, and we caught the soft clink of their chains.  In a retired spot, resting himself under a tree, was a holy person—­a naked black fakeer, thin and skinny, and whitey-gray all over with ashes.

By and by to the elephant stables, and I took a ride; but it was by request—­I did not ask for it, and didn’t want it; but I took it, because otherwise they would have thought I was afraid, which I was.  The elephant kneels down, by command—­one end of him at a time—­and you climb the ladder and get into the howdah, and then he gets up, one end at a time, just as a ship gets up over a wave; and after that, as he strides monstrously about, his motion is much like a ship’s motion.  The mahout bores into the back of his head with a great iron prod and you wonder at his temerity and at the elephant’s patience, and you think that perhaps