Page:The Civilian's South India-Some Places and People in Madras.djvu/96

92 some curious trees which had been a garden. One of them had a right-angled twist in the middle where it had turned out to avoid a balcony that was no longer there. The only part that really remained was a temple, and the Civilian will record his gratitude to the builders and maintainers thereof, since but for it, standing white and clear on the bluff of the old fort wall, he could not have found his way about the Lake at all. But conceive any one building a fort in the middle of the Colair Lake! It belonged to some family away over on the Haiderabad side, and the Civilian thinks they must have kept it as a quiet and suitable place whither to send those undesired members of the reigning house with whom it was held expedient to make away. The Civilian thought that it must be full of grim and unpleasant stories, and he has no doubt that there were ghosts, but he did not see any. He found it enough to sit on the westward wall of the fort and look out over an endless sea of reeds that went right away into a very red sunset and a row of ghostly hills that were really in another world altogether; with nothing moving anywhere, and not a sound but the pigeons on the temple behind, and far away the tireless drums of the island villagers beating to the glory and propitiation of some cold and thankless god.

In the course of time, however, the Civilian came to a place even more ghostly than this, when he slept a night in the old palace at Kondapalle. Kondapalle is famous nowadays because its residents make comic and diverting toys, but in the old days