CHAPTER XIII
LUCKNOW
HERE was a truly Oriental hotel at Lucknow—a great, long, low, white palace of a building, with an arcaded front upon which the rooms opened. There was a noble drawing-room, strewn with the myriad little tables, dwarf chairs, and knickknacks of British middle-class esthetic fashion, but glorified by a great display of marigolds. The dinner-table was such another feast of marigolds that one forgave, or forgot, what came on the plates. The bedchambers were vast, cavernous, sunless caves, with their ceilings lost in remote shadows; the beds high, hard catafalques in the center of each such town hall. We spread rugs, blankets, and razais on these state couches, and, although the bundles of bedding had grown until they covered the top of a gharry, not all of them could soften or level those beds.
A typical, listless, shiftless, incompetent poll-parrot of a guide undertook to show us Lucknow. The most meager idea of the Mutiny, only the set phrases of local incident, had ever entered his head, along with a sordid idea of profit. "Two rupees a day,
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