One evening when the glow-worms had lit their lamps under every bush, the Mogul and his Empress were in the garden. Their eldest daughter, best beloved of his children because she most resembled her mother, was playing at their feet.
“Dearest Queen,” exclaimed Shah-Jehan, “here are some flowers that I have just plucked. How happy should I be if you could not die! You are lovely as these roses, and I fear some day you will fade as they do. Allah allows a little worm to destroy a shawl that it has taken a life-time to make—if some unseen enemy should take your life, there would be nothing left me but a kingdom whose sun had set.”
The Queen replied: “I will never leave this earth as long as Allah will let me stay.”
“Jehanara,” she continued to her daughter, “if the Angel of Death should take me from your father, comfort and watch over him, and be all that your mother is to the great and good Emperor.”
“Promise, my lord,” she said, “if I should die, never to marry again; and place a tomb over my grave, grand as a palace, and beautiful as these flowers covered with diamond dew, that the whole world may know how the greatest of earthly monarchs loved his Moomtazee Mahal.”
“I promise,” said her husband, with trembling voice, “if you should leave me, no one shall ever fill your place, and the world has never seen so grand a monument as I will raise over the loveliest of women.”
Soon after the Queen became ill. The Emperor was distracted when she said to him, “Remember my two requests; now I must leave you.”
All the doctors and wise men in the Kingdom were summoned, but they were so afraid their heads would be cut off, they did not know what to do; they suggested so many things that of course the poor Queen stood very little chance. All the love and power of her husband could not save her any more than if she had been the wife of her meanest slave.
She died—the palace was dumb with grief. No official dared to speak to the Emperor and tell him of his loss. Jehanara put her arms softly around her father’s neck and sobbed into his ear, “The Light of the World has gone out.”
The funeral was scarcely over, when Shah-Jehan began to build the tomb of his wife.