I felt the full force of the sentiment of our heart-stricken Byron:
there is a power
And magic in the ruined battlement,
For which the palace of the present hour
Must yield its pomp, and wait till ages are its dower.
Ages have rolled away since these were raised, and ages will yet roll on, and find [727] them immovable, unchanged. The immense blocks are piled upon, and closely fitted to, each other without any cement, the characteristic of all the Etruscan cities termed Cyclopean. We might indeed smuggle a section of Mandor into the pages of Micali,[[21]] amongst those of Todi or Volterra, without fear of detection. The walls, following the direction of the crest of the ridge, are irregular; and having been constructed long before artillery was thought of, the Parihar or Pali engineer was satisfied with placing the palace on the most commanding eminence, about the centre of the fortress. The bastions or towers are singularly massive, and like all the most antique, their form is square. Having both fever and ague upon me, I was incapable of tracing the direction of the walls, so as to form any correct judgement of the space they enclose; but satisfied with gaining the summit, I surveyed the ruin from the site of the palace of the Parihars. The remains, though scanty, are yet visible; but the materials have been used in the construction of the new capital Jodhpur, and in the cenotaphs described. A small range of the domestic temples of the palace, and some of the apartments, are yet distinctly to be traced; the sculptured ornaments of their portals prove them to have been the work of a Takshak or Buddhist architect. Symbolical figures are frequently seen carved on the large blocks of the walls, though probably intended merely as guides to the mason. These were chiefly Buddhist or Jain: as the quatre-feuille, the cross; though the mystic triangle, and triangle within a triangle ✡[[22]] (a sign of the Saivites, only, I believe), was also to be seen. The chief memorials of the Parihara are a gateway and magnificent Toran, or triumphal arch, placed towards the south-east angle of the castle. It is one mass of sculpture; but the pencil was wanting, and I had not leisure even to bring away a rude resemblance of this memento of some victory of the ancient lords of Mandor.
Thāna Pir.
Let us now descend by the same causeway to the glen of Panchkunda, where there is much to gratify both the lover of the picturesque and the architectural antiquary. At the foot of the causeway, terminated by a reservoir of good water, are two gateways, one conducting to the gardens and their palaces erected by the Rathors; the other, to the statues of the Paladins of the desert. Leaving both for a moment, I pursued the ‘serpentine’ rivulet to its fountain, where
Couched among fallen columns, in the shade
Of ruined walls that had survived the names