CHAPTER XVI
DELHI
T was in the regular order of discomfort that we should leave Agra late at night and reach Delhi at four o'clock in the morning; the last straw lay in the fact that we departed in a pouring rain and made the midnight change at Tundla Junction in a cloud-burst. Fires had warmed the rooms (which we reached by a roof or terrace) when we arrived at the much commended Delhi hotel, and we fell asleep to dream of Madura noondays until an unusual hour of the morning. Then we found that the rooms had no windows, so that when the doors were closed and the fire-places heaped with wood, we had easily enjoyed the climate of the tropics. That hotel, named for a great viceroy, was by far the worst, the most forlorn, run-down, and dilapidated of any we found up-country. The drawing-room was a muddle of broken furniture, of dusty and disorderly draperies, the dining-room infragrant and time-stained, and the manager—there are no landlords or innkeepers in British realms any more—a listless, depressed, poor white creature, a definite failure in life, who
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