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339 legs and sank to the ground, and we climbed up a ladder to the dos-à-dos car or saddle on its back. With earthquake heaves, a rock this way and a lurch that way, it stood erect and lumbered up the steep, flagged path, through six defensive gateways, to the blue-tiled walls of the "painted palace" at the edge of the rock. We penetrated its deserted courts all carved with flat traceries and arabesques and set with enameled tilings and stone latticings, and from the flat roof had an unlimited view over the level yellow plain more than three hundred feet below.

Again our stately transport knelt, we climbed to the red-velvet jaunting-car on its back, and it paced across the flat, table-topped mesa to the half-ruined Jain temples, where conquering Moguls wreaked their fanatic zeal, chipping and mutilating the myriad tiny figures in the bas-reliefs with which walls and columns were covered, and further effacing them with coats of chunam and whitewash. The wealth of intricate ornament lavished on these temples would be incomprehensible were there not the perfect Jain temples at Mount Abu to show what the shrines of Gwalior rock once were in less degree. While we lingered at that angle of the rock's parapet to look down upon the city below us, the yellow-turbaned mahout made his elephant do tricks like any poodle. It picked up and threw stones, waved its spotted ears and trunk as commanded, and nosed up the tiniest coins from grass or gravel and gave them to the mahout. It lumbered after us over the grass as tamely as a kitten, its great soft feet shuffling with a strange barefoot tread as it followed us