could form no idea of the fine effect when King and Court in all their
splendour were gathered in it on a ceremonial day. I tried to accept his
assurances, but it was not easy to imagine such forlorn dinginess changed
into dazzling splendour. Just over the throne, and in the centre of the
Palace and of the city, rose in gracefully diminishing stages of fantastic
woodcarving a tapering _phya-sath_ or spire similar to those surmounting
sacred buildings, and crowned with the gilded _Htee_, an honour which
royalty alone shared with ecclesiastical sanctity. The spire, like
everything else, had been gilt, but it was now sadly tarnished and had
lost much of its brilliancy of effect.

Having looked at the hall of audience we strolled through the Palace
esplanade. A wall parted this off from the private apartments and the
pleasure grounds occupying the western section of the Palace enclosure. A
series of carved and gilded gables roofed with glittering zinc plates was
visible over the wall. The grounds were said to be well planted with
flowering shrubs and fruit trees and to contain lakelets and rockeries.
Built against the outer wall and facing the enclosed space were barracks
for soldiers and gun sheds. The accommodation was as primitive as are the
weapons, and that was saying a good deal. Pio Nono led us across to a big
wooden house, scarcely at all ornamented, which was the everyday abode of
the "Lord White Elephant." His "Palace," or state apartment, was not
pointed out to us. His lordship, in so far as his literal claim to be
styled a white elephant, was an impostor of the deepest dye and a very
grim and ugly impostor to boot. He was a great, lean, brown, flat-sided
brute, his ears, forehead, and trunk mottled with a dingy cream colour.
But he belonged all the same to the lordly race. "White elephants" were a
science which had a literature of its own. According to this science, it
was not the whiteness that was the criterion of a "white elephant." So
much, indeed, was the reverse, that a "white elephant" according to the