The next stopping-place that day was at the shrine of Nizam-ud-din-Aulia, a holy man who died early in the fourteenth century. High diving from a roof-top into an unclean water tank failed to interest me greatly, but the tomb of Amir Khusran, a poet, within the same enclosure as that of the saint, delighted me as a perfect monument of dignified respect. Quiet and peaceful it looked in the cool shadow. The walls were marble screens fretted with close patterns, and the entrance door was of brass in four upright strips, so that the two halves folded back upon themselves. Outside, heavy-quilted purdahs hung over the marble to keep out dust, and the whole was surrounded by an outer wall of pierced sandstone, which had been whitewashed. At one end of the grave a copy of the Koran lay open upon a wooden reading-desk, and ostrich eggs, covered with written texts, hung from the ceiling.
Close to this poet's tomb is that of a daughter of Shah Jehan, named Jehanara, in a tiny enclosure, with bare earth over the place of sepulture and one upright marble slab with Persian verses inlaid in black marble.
Driving on past domes and ruined walls for some miles farther I came at last to the great Tower of Victory, the famed Kutab Minar, and to the ruins of a magnificent mosque with a series of superb arches, and a courtyard of cloisters divided by Jain pillars.
THE KUTAB MINAR AND THE IRON PILLAR, FATEHPUR SIKRI.
In height the red sandstone monument, called the Kutab Minar, is less than a fourth of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, less than half the Washington Column, or Cologne Cathedral, and not much over half of the Great Pyramid. It was built in the early Pathan period, before 1320, and a few decades earlier than Giotto's Campanile in Florence. The latter never received the addition of its intended spire, but as it stands is already fifty feet higher than the Kutab. This actual height is largely discounted in appearance by the close proximity of Brunelleschi's tremendous dome, and the Campanile becomes as was intended but an apanage of the Cathedral. Near the Kutab Minar no rival enters the vast arena of the upper air, and neither the noble arches of the adjacent mosque, gigantic though they are, nor its cloisters with their richly-ornamented pillars taken from the Jain buildings the Mohammedans replaced, do more than dignify the splendid monument of Victory. It gives an impression of soaring strength unrivalled in any building I have seen, an impression practically impossible to be received from pictures or photographs or any representations upon a diminished scale.
By successive storeys banded with balconies and the decorative characters of Arabic inscriptions, the red sandstone building rises up and up, ceasing at last in two tiers of white marble, which seem to the beholder at its base rather entering Heaven than ending anything. From the roof of the mosque the lowest band of inscription can be seen with sufficient clearness to make out its intricate beauty and perfection of decorative design.