We changed horses half-way near Mowgwa, a grey village on a low grey hill, where I watched a squirrel collecting material for his big nest hanging high up in a tree.
Rather over twelve miles from Agra there is an old isolated gateway of red sandstone which my driver (for whose accuracy I cannot vouch) declared "is a city gate of Agra brought here broken."
Among mango trees Naggra, another village, nestled on the left and then one called Kirowdi on the right, and all this road was bordered with beautiful shade-giving trees. At last I could distinguish a long line of crenelated wall, and we reached a gateway choked with a crowd of donkeys laden with dung-cake fuel. Within, roads diverged and we followed one that led direct to a second gate called Naubathkana, the musician gate, where drums were always beaten in token of respect whenever the king entered the palace precincts. Here I left the gharry and walked into the open quadrangle in front of the Diwan-i-Am, the great court of public audience. From the cloisters along the wall projects the king's place of judgment, a building with five open arches on a highly-raised basement and a hand-rail over low stone-carved screens. At my feet as I stood on the other side of the quad a stone was bedded deep in the ground with a circular hole cut through it, which everyone is told was the elephant ring to which the four-footed executioner was fastened conveniently for trampling condemned prisoners.
More celebrated is the Diwan-i-Khas, the private audience-hall, square in plan with stairs in the walls leading to galleries which cross the building at the second floor level to the capital (elaborately bracketed) of a central column. Cut on the floor of one of these galleries I noticed a stone-mason's mark, in the form of a bow and arrow, the arrow being fitted in place across the strung bow. The huge head of the centre column is a very king of capitals, and although it appears much out of proportion if considered solely in relation to the column, it does not seem so when properly regarded as part of the whole conception of this curious hall.
The short massive crossing arms of the gallery, which the column supports, give the feeling that they themselves help to hold up that huge cluster of stone brackets below them, and our eyes are affected as if its weight were partly borne by the shaft beneath it and partly by the crossing bars above.
It is in that central space at the crossing of the galleries that Akhbar is reputed to have sat discussing religions and philosophies, and nothing I have heard more convinced me of his tolerant disposition than the choice of such a very restricted space for argument.
Another privileged seat was that called the Grukimundi, under a small stone canopy outside one corner of a building known as the Ankh Michauli. This seat was allotted to a Hindoo teacher who, said Riaz Ahmad, instructed Akhbar in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. Then there was the pachisi-board in large squares on which girls stood as pawns in the game played from a blue stone cross on the centre of the pavement. I was indeed shown by the assiduous Riaz Ahmad all the many sights of this dead city of Akhbar's court—House of Miriam with its garden and its bath—Palace of Birbal with its rich intricate and elaborate carving—Palace of Jodh Bai with an exquisitely latticed room projecting over Miriam's garden, and the Panch Mahal with its five colonnaded storeys on the first floor of which there are fifty-six pillars, each differently carved.
The court ladies used the Panch Mahal as a kind of playground, and I walked along part of a covered passage way which led thence to the Khawbgah. Then there was the great mosque, very lofty, and the Dargah Mosque with the tomb of Salim Chisti exquisitely beautiful with white marble screens of the most delicate fretted tracery, shutting in the tomb itself under a domed roof.
Salim Chisti himself was the hermit saint whose prophecies led Akhbar to build a city in that very arid neighbourhood, and Riaz Ahmad was of his family.