noon
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 .