boards, writing with agate stylets on tablets of black papier-mache; and
there was a constant flux and reflux of people of all sorts, who appeared
to have nothing to do and who were doing it with a sedulously lounging
deliberation that seemed to imply a gratifying absence of arrears of
official work. We sat down here for a while along with Pio Nono and his
assistant, who busied himself in dictating to a secretary a description of
myself and a catalogue of my presents to be read by the herald to his
Majesty when I should be presented. Then Pio Nono went away and presently
came back, saying that it was intended to bestow upon me some souvenirs of
Mandalay, and that to admit of the preparation of these the audience would
not take place for an hour or so. He invited us in the meantime to inspect
the public apartments of the Palace itself and the objects of interest in
the Palace enclosure. So we got up, and still without our shoes walked
through the suite leading to the principal throne-room or great hall of
audience.

These were simply a series of minor throne-rooms. The first one in order
from the private apartments was close to the _Bya-dyt_. It must be borne
in mind that the whole suite, including the great audience hall, were not
rooms at all in our sense of the word. They were simply open-roofed
spaces, the roofs gabled, spiked, and carved into fantastic shapes, laden
with dingy gold-leaf garishly picked out with glaring colours and studded
with bits of stained glass; the roofs, or rather I should say, the one
continuous roof, supported on massive deep red pillars of teak-wood. The
whole palace was raised from the ground on a brick platform some 10 feet
high. The partitions between the several walls were simply skirtings of
planking covered with gold-leaf. The whole palace seemed an armoury. Some
ten or twelve thousand stand of obsolete muskets were ranged along these
partitions and crammed into the anteroom of the throne-room proper. The
whole suite was dingy, dirty, and uncared-for; but on a great day, with