The outer courtyard swarmed with a mob of beggars, panders, traders,
servants, and idlers, through which occasionally a ramshackle carriage
drawn by galled ponies, their broken harness tied with rope, and conveying
some Palace official, made its way with difficulty. Sometimes the vehicle
was closely shuttered or shrouded with white cotton sheets and contained
some high-caste lady or brazen, jewel-decked wanton of the Court.

On one side were the tumble-down stables, near which a squealing white
stallion with long, red-dyed tail was tied to a _peepul_ tree. Its rider, a
blue-coated _sowar_, or cavalryman, with bare feet thrust into heelless
native slippers, sat on the ground near it smoking a hubble-bubble. A
chorus of neighing answered his screaming horse from the filthy stalls,
outside which stood foul-smelling manure-heaps, around which mangy pariah
dogs nosed. In the blazing sun a couple of hooded hunting-cheetahs lay
panting on the bullock-cart to which they were chained.

The Palace stood in the heart of the city of Lalpuri, a maze of narrow,
malodorous streets off which ran still narrower and fouler lanes. The
gaudily-painted houses, many stories high, with wooden balconies and
projecting windows, were interspersed with ruinous palm-thatched bamboo
huts and grotesquely decorated temples filled with fat priests and hideous,
ochre-daubed gods, and noisy with the incessant blare of conch shells and
the jangling of bells. Lalpuri was a byword throughout India and was known
to its contemptuous neighbours as the City of Harlots and Thieves. Poverty,
debauchery, and crime were rife. Justice was a mockery; corruption and
abuses flourished everywhere. A just magistrate or an honourable official
was as hard to find as an honest citizen or a virtuous woman.

Like people, like rulers. The State had been founded by a Mahratta
free-booter in the days when the Pindaris swept across Hindustan from