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neither time nor the influence of nature nor the heel of conquerors has destroyed. The Pearl Mosque, as it is called, is very beautiful. beautiful. Built on a foundation of the common red sandstone, its domes may be seen in distant views of the fort. There is no ornament to detract from the religious sentiment which should pervade a temple. The God you worship there is the God of Beauty. The bath-room, with its decorations of looking-glass, is curious, but you see the same effect in the palace of the Maharajah of Jeypore. The Hall of Audience is a noble room, but as minor things are lost in the greater, so in your remembrances of the fort nothing takes the place of the Pearl Mosque.

But the Taj! We were to see the most beautiful building in the world. Public opinion all through India unites in this judgment of the Taj. I had my railway-window impressions, and it is rather a habit when a friend tells me he knows or has seen the most beautiful thing in the world, to ask myself whether he has seen all the beauty the world contains and is competent to pass such an opinion. So I said to myself, what our friends mean is that the Taj is the most striking building in India, and they use the phrase about the world in a French sense, a Frenchman saying that all the world has been at church when he means a good many of his friends were there. It was late in the afternoon when we went to the Taj. The ride is a short one, over a good road, and we had for an escort Judge Keene of Agra, who has made the art, the history, and the legends of the Mohammedan domination in India a study, and to whose excellent history of the Taj I am indebted for all my useful facts. It happened to be Sunday, and as we drove along the road there seemed to be a Sunday air about the crowds that drifted backward and forward from the gardens. On our arrival at the gate the General and party were received by the custodians of the building, and as we walked down the stone steps and under the overarching shade trees we had grown to be quite a procession.

The principle which inspires these magnificent and useless tombs is of Tartar origin. The Tartars, we are told, built their

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tombs in such a manner as to "serve for places of enjoyment
for themselves and their friends during their lifetime." While
the builder lives he uses the building as a house of recreation,
receives his friends, gives entertainments. When he dies he is
buried within the walls, and from that hour the building is
abandoned. It is ever afterward a tomb, given alone to the
dead. There is something Egyptian in this idea of a house of
feasting becoming a tomb; of a great prince, as he walks amid
crowds of retainers and friends, knowing that the walls that
resound with laughter will look down on his dust. This will
account for so many of the stupendous tombs that you find in
Upper India. Happily it does not account for the Taj. If the
Taj had been a Tartar idea-a house of merriment to the
builder and of sorrow afterward-it would have lost something
of the poetry which adds to its beauty. The Taj is the expres-
sion of the grief of the Emperor Shah Jehan for his wife, who
was known in her day as Mumtaz-i-Mabal, or the Exalted One
of the Palace. She was herself of royal blood, with Persian
ancestry intermingled. She was married in 1615 to Shah
Jehan, then heir to the throne, and, having borne him seven
children, died in 1629 in giving birth to the eighth child. Her
life, therefore, was in the highest sense consecrated, for she
in the fulfillment of a supreme and holy duty, in it-
up
gave it
self a consecration of womanhood. The husband brought the
body of the wife and mother to these gardens, and entombed it
It was seven-
until the monument of his grief should be done.
teen years before the work was finished. The cost is unknown,
the best authorities rating it at more than two millions of dol-
lars. Two millions of dollars in the time of Shah Jehan, with
labor for the asking, would be worth as much as twenty mil-
lions in our day. For seventeen years twenty thousand men
worked on the Taj, and their wages was a daily portion of corn.
The effect of the Taj as seen from the gate, looking down
the avenue of trees, is grand. The dome and towers seem to
rest in the air, and it would not surprise you if they became
clouds and vanished into rain. The gardens are the perfection
of horticulture, and you see here, as in no part of India that I

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have visited, the wealth and beauty of nature in Hindostan. The landscape seems to be flushed with roses, with all varieties of the rose, and that most sunny and queenly of flowers seems to strew your path and bid you welcome, as you saunter down the avenues and up the ascending slope that leads to the shrine of a husband's love and a mother's consecration. There is a row of fountains which throw out a spray and cool the air, and when you pass the trees and come to the door of the building its greatness comes upon you-its greatness and its beauty. Mr. Keene took us to various parts of the garden, that we might see it from different points of view. I could see no value in one view beyond the other. And when our friend, in the spirit of courteous kindness, pointed out the defects of the building-that it was too much this, or too much that, or would have been perfect if it had been a little less of something else—there was just the least disposition to resent criticism and to echo the opinion of Mr. Borie, who, as he stood looking at the exquisite towers and solemn marble walls, said: "It was worth coming to India to see the Taj." I value that criticism because it is that of a practical business man concerned with affairs, and not disposed to see a poetic side to any subject. What he saw in the Taj was the idea that its founder meant to convey-the idea of solemn, overpowering, and unapproachable beauty.

As you enter you see a vast dome, every inch of which is enriched with inscriptions in Arabic, verses from the Koran, engraved marble, mosaics, decorations in agate and jasper. In the center are two small tombs of white marble, modestly carved. These cover the resting-place of the Emperor and his wife, whose bodies are in the vault underneath. In other days the Turkish priests read the Koran from the gallery, and you can imagine how solemn must have been the effect of the words chanted in a priestly cadence by the echo that answers and again answers the chanting of some tune by one of the party. The more closely you examine the Taj the more you are perplexed to decide whether its beauty is to be found in the general effect of the design, as seen from afar, or the minute and finished decorations which cover every wall. The general idea of

the building is never lost. There is nothing trivial about the Taj, no grotesque Gothic molding or flowering Corinthian columns-all is cold and white and chaste and pure. You may form an idea of the size of the Taj from the figures of the measurement of the Royal Engineers. From the base to the top of the center dome is 1391⁄2 feet; to the summit of the pinnacle, 243% feet. It stands on the banks of the river Jumna, and it is said that Shah Jehan intended to build a counterpart in black marble in which his own ashes should rest. But misfortunes came to Shah Jehan-ungrateful children, strife, deposition-and when he died his son felt that the Taj was large enough for both father and mother. One is almost glad that the black-marble idea never germinated. The Taj, by itself alone, is unapproachable. A duplicate would have detracted from its peerless beauty.

But such a view

We remained in the gardens until the sun went down, and we had to hurry to our carriages not to be caught in the swiftly descending night. The gardener came to Mrs. Grant with an offering of roses. Some of us, on our return from Jeypore, took advantage of the new moon to make another visit. We had been told that the moonlight gave a new glory even to the Taj. It was the night before we left Agra, and we could not resist the temptation, even at the risk of keeping some friends waiting who had asked us to dinner, of a moonlight view. a new moon, which made our view imperfect. as was given added to the beauty of the Taj. The cold lines of the marble were softened by the shimmering silver light. The minarets seemed to have a new height, and the dome had a solemnity as became the canopy of the mother and queen. We strolled back, now and then turning for another last view of the wonderful tomb. The birds were singing, the air was heavy with the odors of the rose-garden, and the stillness-the twilight stillness-all added to the beauty of the mausoleum, and combined to make the memory of our visit the most striking among the many wondrous things we have seen in Hindostan.

Among Indian princes there is none who stands better in the eyes of the government than the Maharajah of Jeypore. I

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nothing in India. Accordingly our programme was revised; a day was taken from Agra, a day from Delhi, a day from Cawnpore, and so it became possible for us to come. So we took to reading about his d learned several facts. The prince is thus inhe chronicles: His Highness Siramadi Rajahai Raj Rajender; Sri Maharajah Dhiraj Sewae, Sir Bahadur, Knight Grand Commander of the Most er of the Star of India. He enjoys a personal enty-one guns-the highest salute given to any

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