Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III A NATIVE STATE The town and palaces of Udaipur, the capital of Mewar, stand on a beautiful lake. Within the town long strings of camels pass; sacred cattle take their quiet and honoured walk; great dogs fight with each other in clouds of dust; within the palace boundaries—as large as the city—you meet huge elephants very much at their ease, and green parrots are on nearly every roof; there are rows of stables of fine horses. Grey monkeys leap from branch to branch above the pillared tombs of the kings. On the distant side of the lake we saw last night just before sunset the wild pigs fed. Specially ferocious boars are kept in cells in the tower which overlooks the curious dust-enshrouded scene (such as Dante might have looked at in the Inferno); and in that tower is a hugh pit, with a guarded balcony above, from which one on occasion can survey the local royalsport of a tiger-and-boar fight. There is no lack of tigers on the hills close to Udaipur. The Maharana has a few cages of large leopards, tigers, and lions in the pretty public park. With such manifold varieties of animal life, the vivid and blazing colours worn by the people in turbans or robes, many of whom carry their long swords (as we bare umbrellas at home), from custom, or more correctly, as a hereditary Eajput right, make me despair of bringing home to you the kaleidoscopic brilliancy of life under the bright December sun, except by asking you to imagine a fancy dress carnival held by day in a zoological garden, with nearly all the animals loose! And above all the dust rises the height upon height of the sovereign's marble palaces, tier upon tier, colonnaded, shining, with the blue glittering lake beneath, dotted with green islets, each with a marble hall or summer quiet resting place, rich in orange ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.