This range of buildings, extending 1600 ft. east and west, divided the palace into two nearly equal halves. In the northern division of it were a series of small courts, surrounded by buildings apparently appropriated to the use of distinguished guests; and in one of them overhanging the river stood the celebrated Dewanni Khas (D), or private audience hall—if not the most beautiful, certainly the most highly ornamented of all Shah Jehan’s buildings. It is larger certainly, and far richer in ornament than that at Agra, though hardly so elegant in design; but nothing can exceed the beauty of the inlay of precious stones with which it is adorned, or the general poetry of the design. It is round the roof of this hall that the famous inscription runs: “If there is a heaven on earth it is this, it is this,” which may safely be rendered into the sober English assertion, that no palace now existing in the world possesses an apartment of such singular elegance as this.
Beyond this to the northward were the gardens of the palace, laid out in the usual formal style of the East, but adorned with fountains and little pavilions and kiosks of white marble, that render these so beautiful and so appropriate to such a climate.
The whole of the area between the central range of buildings to the south, and eastward from the bazaar, measuring about 1000 ft. each way, was occupied by the hareem and private apartments of the palace, covering, consequently, more than twice the area of the Escurial, or, in fact, of any palace in Europe. According to the native plan I possess, which I see no reason for distrusting, it contained three garden courts, and some thirteen or fourteen other courts, arranged some for state, some for convenience; but what they were like we have no means of knowing. Not one vestige of them now remains. Judging from the corresponding parts of the palace at Agra, built by the same monarch, they must have vied with the public apartments in richness and in beauty when originally erected, but having continued to be used as an abode down to the time of the mutiny, they were probably very much disfigured and debased. Taste was, no doubt, at as low an ebb inside the walls of the palace during the last hundred years as it was outside, or as we find it at Lucknow and elsewhere; but all the essential parts of the structure were there, and could easily have been disencumbered from the accretions that had been heaped upon it. The idea, however, of doing this was far from entering into the heads of our governors. The whole of the hareem courts of the palace were swept off the face of the earth to make way for a hideous British barrack, without those who carried out this fearful piece of Vandalism thinking it even worth while to make a plan of what they were destroying, or preserving any record of the most splendid palace in the world.
Of the public parts of the palace all that now remains is the entrance hall, the Nobut Khana, the Dewanni Aum and Khas, and the Rung Mehal—now used as a mess-room—and one or two small pavilions. They are the gems of the palace, it is true, but without the courts and corridors connecting them they lose all their meaning and more than half their beauty.[557] Being now situated in the middle of a British barrack-yard, they look like precious stones torn from their settings in some exquisite piece of Oriental jeweller’s work and set at random in a bed of the commonest plaster.[558]
Taje Mehal.
It is a pleasure to turn from this destroyed and desecrated palace to the Taje Mehal, which even more, perhaps, than the palace was always the chef-d’œuvre of Shah Jehan’s reign ([Woodcut No. 337]). It, too, has been fortunate in attracting the attention of the English, who have paid sedulous attention to it for some time past, and keep it now, with its gardens, in a perfect state of substantial repair.
No building in India has been so often drawn and photographed as this, or more frequently described; but, with all this, it is almost impossible to convey an idea of it to those who have not seen it, not only because of its extreme delicacy, and beauty of material employed in its construction, but from the complexity of its design. If the Taje were only the tomb itself, it might be described, but the platform on which it stands, with its tall minarets, is a work of art in itself. Beyond this are the two wings, one of which is a mosque, which anywhere else would be considered an important building. This group of buildings forms one side of a garden court 880 ft. square; and beyond this again an outer court, of the same width but only half the depth. This is entered by three gateways of its own, and contains in the centre of its inner wall the great gateway of the garden court, a worthy pendant to the Taje itself.[559] Beautiful as it is in itself, the Taje would lose half its charm if it stood alone. It is the combination of so many beauties, and the perfect manner in which each is subordinated to the other, that makes up a whole which the world cannot match, and which never fails to impress even those who are most indifferent to the effects produced by architectural objects in general.
The plan and section (Woodcuts Nos. [338], [339]) explain sufficiently the general arrangement and structural peculiarities of the tomb or principal building of the group. The raised platform on which it stands is 18 ft. high, faced with white marble, and exactly 313 ft. square. At each corner of this terrace stands a minaret 133 ft.
