66

He was a saintly mortal, Ganj Baksh : he was free from the sensualities to which our race is prone; his heart was ever with Alla (whose name be praised), and his thoughts with Muhammad (blessings upon our holy prophet); his life was one of Virgin purity; his death that of the beatified, Alla il Alla, etc.; kings of the earth were admonished by him; the holiest found him a friend. Wealth was profusely scattered at his feet, but he saw it not, received it not. Alla was his all. Before he passed from this world to the Paradise of our hopes, he built this roza. The labourers and artificers employed by him were daily paid their hire, and the good genii who supplied the funds deposited the exact quota to be appropriated beneath the carpet of the holy Ganj Baksh. Thus was built this delightful mausoleum to the memory of a saint whose virtues we can still revere, if our imperfections prevent a close pursuit upon his footsteps, Alla il Alla, etc."

Ganj Baksh did not erect the roza. It was begun the year the saint died (1445) by Sultan Ahmed's son Muhammad II., and completed six years later by Ahmed's grandson, Jalal Khan, better known as Kitub-ud-din. It is certainly a delightful mausoleum. The trellis work which encloses the tomb is wrought with lavish luxuriance of imagination and incredible perfection of detail. The brass lattice windows around the shrine also bear testimony to the power of the Hindu designer. The buildings possess two characteristics peculiarly their own, their pure Hindu style and their redundant richness. To the west of the Mausoleum is a large quadrangle with a mosque on its western face. It illustrates how during the twenty-five years that had rolled on since the building of the Jumma Mosque the architect had advanced in Muhammadan simplicity. It has the five domes of the Jumma Mosque but the pillars, as Fergusson points out, are fewer in number, more widely spaced and better arranged. "Except the Motee Musjid at Agra,” he

writes, no mosque in India is more remarkable for simple elegance than this." The southern face of the quadrangle overlooks the great lake which Mahmud Begada excavated and surrounded with gigantic flights of steps and built on its border a splendid palace and harem. In a handsome tomb enclosed like the sepulchre of the Saint with well wrought trellis work lies Mahmud Begada and his sons, and a porch rich in carved niches supported by three pillars, miracles of size and perfection, separate it from the tomb of his Queen.

We had our dinner in the ruins of the Harem. The night was cool, and fragrant with orange blossoms. The stars shone from the depths of an eastern sky with steady lustre. The moonlight slept on crumbled wall and marble pillars. We reluctantly left the fairy haunt and drove back to the turmoil of the city.

IV

AND AJMER

MOUNT ABU AND

HE journey onward from Ahmedabad will lead us

THE

as its next natural stopping-place to the isolated peak of Mount Abu, "the Saints' Pinnacle," the Rajpoot Olympus. The traveller who, after traversing the richly cultivated plain of Gujarat, mounts that lofty ridge will understand the influence which the physical features and situation of the country spreading out before him have exercised on the races who have lived on it. They are strongly marked. A little to the east of Mount Abu commences the chain of the Arvalis, or "mountains of strength," which stretch away in bold ridges towards Delhi, which has been, and always will be, the capital of India. Running north and south, they form the backbone of Upper India, and on the west lie the arid plains and ever shifting sandhills of Marwar, Jesselmer, and Bikaner; on the east are the forests and plains of black loam furrowed by running streams, of Mewar Bundi, Kotah, Ajmer, and Jeypore. The vast and varied region which extends from the frontier of Sind on the west to the fort of Agra on the east, and from the sandy tracts of the Sutlej on the north to the Vindhya range separating it from the Deccan or "South," is known by the collective and classical denomination Rajasthan, "the abode of princes." " In the familiar dialect of these countries," says Tod, who has done for Rajpootana what the great Wizard of the North has done for Scotland, "it is

termed Rajwarra, by the more refined Raet'hana, corrupted to Rajpootana, the common designation among the British to denote the Rajpoot principalities." Nature meant it to be the abode of chiefs. Tod, in his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, the true Rajpoot epic alike in the vastness of its scope and in the completeness of its execution, has by pen and pencil revealed the beauty and variety of the land where the age of chivalry has not fled. Tod guides us through the Marcosi'hulli, or region of death (the emphatic and figurative name for the desert), to Bikaner, Jodpoor, and Jesselmer and the fair valley of Oodipoor. He conducts us on the east of the range through the Patar (table, pat, mountain, ar), or great Plateau of Central India watered by the Chumbul, the paramount lord of the floods and many a noble stream. "The surface of this extensive plateau," he tells us, "is greatly diversified." There are great rolling waves of country where the protruding rocks present not a trace of vegetation; there are, besides, tracts yellow in harvest-time with ripened wheat and dotted with the roofs of a hardy and valiant yeomanry. There are ranges of rugged hills, while below them spread valleys with low meads, abundantly watered with numerous rills, and cultivation "raised with infinite labour on terraces, as the vine is cultivated in Switzerland and on the Rhine." There are beetling cliffs overhanging the rippling streams, crowned with the fortress-homes of the proud Rajpoot chiefs who claim their descent from the sun or from the moon, and whose ancestors have for ages exercised sovereign power. Every petty Rajpoot chief, and every member of his family or clan, believes with the intensity of an undoubting faith that he is of an ancient, illustrious, and royal descent. Tod tells us that each race has "its genealogical tree, describing the essential peculiarities, religious tenets, and pristine locale of the clan" that every Rajpoot should be able to repeat this creed, and that in point of fact "there is scarcely a chief of character for

knowledge who cannot repeat the genealogy of his line," though in these degenerate days many are satisfied with referring to the family bard or chronicler. These genealogical tables are "the touchstone of affinities, and guardians of the laws of intermarriage." Caste has ever prevented the inferior class of society from being incorporated with this haughty noblesse. Only those of pure blood in both lines can hold fiefs of the crown. The highest may marry the daughter of a Rajpoot, whose sole possession is "a skin of land"; the sovereign himself is not degraded by such alliance. It is his blood, and not the number of his acres, which ennobles the Rajpoot. He does not derive his title from the land, but he gives his name to the land. The State takes the name of the capital which is the residence and stronghold of the chief, and the capital takes the name of the chief who founded it. The Rajpoot considers there are two professions fit for a man-to conquer and to govern. The poorest Rajpoot of this day retains all the pride of ancestry, often his sole inheritance; he scorns to hold the plough or to use his lance but on horseback." When a Rajpoot chief was unable to provide for a younger son he gave him a horse and a lance, and the lad with some companions went forth to serve some sovereign or to found a state. He had learnt in his father's desert home or mountain eyrie the business of war and the craft of government. Thus the Rajpoot spread over the continent of India and influenced its history. It is the desert and the mountain which have influenced the historical process and feudal constitution of Rajpootana, and has enabled the Rajpoot to maintain to this day those social and religious institutions which make Rajpootana one of the most interesting and romantic spots in the continent of India.

66

On the summit of Mount Abu the marble Jain shrines preserve the highest ideals of pure Hindu architecture. And from them may be deduced interesting evidence bearing