Out of India Author:Rudyard Kipling Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. RAJPUTANA, THE COCK-PIT OF INDIA—SOMETHING ABOUT THE HISTORY OF JEYPORE—THE GLOBE TROTTER SEES THE SIGHTS. If any part of a land strewn w... more »ith dead men's bones have a special claim to distinction, Rajputana, as the cock-pit of India, stands first. East of Suez men do not build towers on the tops of hills for the sake of the view, nor do they stripe the mountain sides with bastioned stone walls to keep in cattle. Since the beginning of time, if we are to credit the legends, there was fighting—heroic fighting—at the foot of the Aravalis, and beyond in the great deserts of sand penned by those kindly mountains from spreading over the heart of India. The " Thirty-six Royal Races" fought as royal races know how to do, Chohan with Rahtor, brother against brother, son against father. Later—but excerpts from the tangled tale of force, fraud, cunning, desperate love and more desperate revenge, crime worthy of demons and virtues fit for gods, may be found, by all who care to look, in the book of the man who loved the Rajputs and gave a life's labors in their behalf. From Delhi to Abu, and from the Indus to the Chambul, each yard of ground has witnessed slaughter, pilhige and rapine. But, to-day, the capital of the State, that Dhola Rae, son of Soora Singh, hacked out morethan nine hundred j'ears ago with the sword from some weaker 'ruler's realm, is lighted with gas, and possesses many striking and English peculiarities which-wJU -be- sUowfl-4n-tlreTrproper-p) ace;" " Dhola Rae was killed in due time, and for nine hundred years Jeypore, torn by the intrigues of unruly princes and princelings, fought Asiatically. When and how Jeypore became a feudatory of British power and in what manner we put a slur upon Rajput honor—punctilious as the honor of the Pathan—are ma...« less