Such scorching sunshine and piercing winds were never experienced together as in Jeypore. One needed an umbrella as protection from the sun and fur wraps as protection from the wind at the same time. We tiffined in the icy dining-room and took coffee on the scorching terrace, where merchants of arms gathered daily to display their ancient weapons—cast-iron stuff made to order in England to furnish the "cozy corners" of Christendom, to hang on the walls, and to prop up the divan draperies of so-called Oriental rooms.
It was on one of the most brilliantly sunny and piercingly cold days that we drove across the city and out to the flat country beyond, where abandoned gardens, crumbling tombs, lone minarets, and domes lined the road, and alligators basked by neglected tanks where green scum floated. As we drove into a courtyard, a weary old elephant with a painted face sadly in need of retouching saluted us with foot and trunk. It knelt, and we climbed to a rickety charpoy, or string-bed frame, covered with doubtful razais. After the noble beast at Gwalior, with its splendid trappings and comfortable jaunting-car, this ill-pacing, moth-eaten, tourist elephant of the Raja of Jeypore was a disappointment; and after it had lurched and lumbered along a few miles that we might have done more comfortably in the carriage, our disgust was unbounded. We were disenchanted before the creature began the steep ascent to the deserted palace of Amber, delighted that the elephant is fast being relegated to the background, a creature for shows and ceremonials only,
