The principal apartment is a vaulted hall, some 24 ft. wide by twice that length, and 24 ft. in height, flanked by buttresses massive enough to support a vault four times its section. Across the end of the hall is a range of apartments three storeys in height, and the upper ones adorned with rude, bold, balconied windows. Beyond this is a long range of vaulted halls, standing in the water, which were apparently the living apartments of the palace. Like the rest of the palace they are bold, and massive to a degree seldom found in Indian edifices, and produce a corresponding effect.
On the brink of the precipice overlooking the valley of the Nerbudda is another palace, called that of Baz Bahadur, of a lighter and more elegant character, but even more ruined than the northern palace, and scattered over the whole plateau are ruins of tombs and buildings of every class and so varied as almost to defy description. In their solitude, in a vast uninhabited jungle, they convey as vivid an impression of the ephemeral splendour of these Mahomedan dynasties as anything in India, and, if illustrated, would alone suffice to prove how wonderfully their builders had grasped the true elements of architectural design.
CHAPTER VII.
BENGAL.
CONTENTS.
Kudam ul Roussoul Mosque, Gaur—Adinah Mosque, Maldah.
Capital—Gaur.
It is not very easy to understand why the architects of Malwa should have adopted a style so essentially arcuate as that which we find in the capital, while their brethren, on either hand, at Jaunpore and Ahmedabad, clung so fondly to a trabeate form wherever they had an opportunity of employing it. The Mandu architects had the same initiation to the Hindu forms in the mosques at Dhar; and there must have been innumerable Jaina temples to furnish materials to a far greater extent than we find them utilised, but we neither find them borrowing nor imitating, but adhering steadily to the pointed-arch style, which is the essential characteristic of their art in foreign countries. It is easy to understand, on the other hand, why in Bengal the trabeate style never was in vogue. The country is practically without stone, or any suitable material for forming either pillars or beams. Having nothing but brick, it was almost of necessity that they employed arches everywhere, and in every building that had any pretensions to permanency. The Bengal style being, however, the only one wholly of brick in India Proper, has a local individuality of its own, which is curious and interesting, though, from the nature of the material, deficient in many of the higher qualities of art which characterise the buildings constructed with larger and better materials. Besides elaborating a pointed-arched brick style of their own, the Bengalis introduced a new form of roof, which has had a most important influence on both the Mahomedan and Hindu styles in more modern times. As already mentioned in describing the chuttrie at Alwar (ante, p. 474), the Bengalis, taking advantage of the elasticity of the bambu, universally employ in their dwellings a curvilinear form of roof, which has become so familiar to their eyes, that they consider it beautiful ([Woodcut No. 310]). It is so in fact when bambu and thatch are the materials employed, but when translated into stone or brick architecture, its taste is more questionable. There is, however, so much that is conventional in architecture, and beauty depends to such an extent on association, that strangers are hardly fair judges in a case of this sort. Be this as it may, certain it is, at all events, that after being elaborated into a feature of permanent architecture in Bengal, this curvilinear form found its way in the 17th century to Delhi, and in the 18th to Lahore, and all the intermediate buildings from, say A.D. 1650, betray its presence to a greater or less extent.
