They followed the Maharaja’s soft footsteps down the winding halls of Umaid Bhawan until he stopped by a particularly old sandstone wall. With one hand he loosened a stone and slid it out. He reached in with the other and pulled out an enormous sapphire, and proceeded to tell us a story. His grandfather had commissioned the construction of the palace to offer employment during the great famine of the 1920s, and during the first day of construction a worker had found this stone in the bedrock. Instead of keeping it to himself, the only request of this honest peasant was for the palace to be built around it.