The gates of Lalpore were shut, and all about her walls the yellow sandy plains stretched silent and empty.

There did not seem to be so much as a pariah dog outside.

Some pipal-trees looked over the walls, and a couple of very antiquated cannon looked through them, but nothing stirred.

It made a splendid picture at broad noon, the blue sky and the old red-stone city on her little hill, holding up her minarets and the white marble bubbles of her temples, and then the yellow sand drifting up; but one could not look at it long.
Colonel Starr, from the door of his tent, half a mile away, had looked at it pretty steadily for two hours, so steadily that his eyes, red and smarting with the dust of a two hundred mile ride, watered copiously, and made him several degrees more uncomfortable than he had been before.
I doubt whether any idea of the beauty of Lalpore had a place in the Colonel's mind, it was so full of other considerations.

He thought more, probably, of the thickness of its walls than of their colour, and speculated longer upon the position of the arsenal than upon the curves of the temples.