Historic buildings : $b as seen and described by great writers
History
Historic buildings : $b as seen and described by great writers
Architecture -- History; Art -- Study and teaching; Historic buildings
Delhi is still seamed with the scars of her spoilers, and still
jewelled with remnants of the gems they fought for. If you take them in
order, you will go first, not into the city, but eleven miles south,
to the tower Kutb Minar. Through the dust of the road, rising out of
the springing wheat, among the mud-and-mat huts before which squat the
brown-limbed peasants, you see the country a litter of broken walls,
tumbling towers, rent domes. There are fragments of seven cities built
by seven kings before the present Delhi was. Eleven miles of them bring
you to the tower and mosque of Kutb.
Kutb-ed-Din was a slave who raised himself to Viceroy of Delhi when
the Mussulmans took it, then to Emperor of Hindustan and founder of a
dynasty. Whether he or his son or the last of the Hindu kings built the
tower, antiquaries are undecided and others careless. It is enough that
here is one landmark in Delhi’s history, one splendid monument reared
for a symbol of triumph by a victor whom now nobody can certainly
identify. It is a colossal, five-storied tower, two hundred and forty
feet high, of nearly fifty feet diameter at the base, and tapering
to nine feet at the top. Tiny balconies with balustrades mark the
junctions of the stories: the three lower are red stone, the two
upper--dwarfed just under the sky--faced with white marble. All the red
part is fluted into alternate semicircles and right angles, netted all
over with tracery, and belted with inscriptions under the balconies.
But the details strike you little: the vertical lines of the fluting
only give the impression that this is one huge pillar with a red
shaft and a white capital--a pillar that might form part of the most
tremendous temple in the world, yet stands quite seemly alone by reason
of its surpassing bigness.
[Illustration: THE KUTB MINAR, INDIA.]
Pant to the top. It will do you good, though the view is nothing. The
country is an infinite green-and-brown chess-board of young corn and
fallow, dead-flat on every side, ugly with the complacent plainness of
all very rich country. Beyond the sheeny ribbon of the Jumna, north,
south, east, west, into the blurred horizon, you can see only land and
land and land--a million acres with nothing on them to see--except the
wealth of India and the secret of the greatness of Delhi.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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