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Much of it is covered with thin plates of real gold, and the rest, yards and yards of it, is plastered with gold-leaf. Did you see that red glint from the top as the sun caught the htee at an angle? That was probably a real ruby, for it flashed out like a sword blade. There are many real stones set up there, and the htee alone cost £50,000!
At the top is a htee, or umbrella, as there is on the pagodas. The palace is not all one big building, but a number of buildings, or halls, each only one storey, grouped about with courtyards between. We wander in and out of them, treading on polished floors and seeing brilliant bits of colour framed in dark doorways.
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.
It is so wide at the base that it takes quite a long time to walk round it, and then it goes up in a bell-like curve, tapering to a steeple little less than the height of St. Paul's Cathedral. At the very top of all, so high that we can only see it by cricking our necks, is an iron cage called a htee, meaning "umbrella," decorated with swinging bells.
Twilight was gathering behind the trees; only the gold-laced spires of a thousand minarets caught the last light of the sun. On the plateau below the great pillar, that glimmered like a golden sword from base to bell-hung Htee, lay what Fitzgibbon had described as "a little town of piety."
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