The place was naturally fire-proof
and naturally cool--as far as any building can be cool in Central
India. It was a first-class, ideal powder-magazine, if useless as
a granary; and the last new conquerors of India had hastened to
adopt it as a means of storing up the explosive medicine with which
they kept their foothold.
Naturally, none but White soldiers, and a very few of the more trusted
natives, had ever been allowed to go inside the powder-magazine.
The secret passages beneath it had never been intended for public
convenience or information. They had been designed as a means of
rushing defenders secretly into the granary, and they connected with
a tunnel underneath the palace that had just been burned. They also
connected with the outer wall in such a way that defenders from the
ramparts might be rushed there too, if wanted in a hurry. But, since
there never had been corn kept in the granary, and nobody had ever
had the slightest need to force an entrance, the knowledge even of
the existence of the passages had become barely a memory, and there
was not a man living in Jailpore who knew exactly where they began
or where they ended.
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