You can gather this history around the Kutb: four old Hindu forts, still quite recognizable, once surrounded a large city and some Buddhist temples where the monks in yellow robes with shaven heads walked about peacefully; there remains a large iron post charged with some Sanskrit inscriptions. About the year 1000, over the wall of the Himalayas overflowed the first hordes of the Mussulmans. The city was razed and from the stones of the great temple a mosque was built, the ruins of which now lie around us. Here is a triple colonnade where you recognize the old Buddhist pillars, and the patient, complicated, confused work of the poor Hindu workman, with all of its childish indecency. They are deeply worked, overcharged with chisellings that time has made almost illegible; here and there, figures of a symbolical obscenity appear, a few mutilated by the moral superiority of the conqueror. Little by little, you accustom yourself to read what the eaten away stone has to say, the lines form themselves afresh. You recognize processions of gods surrounded by guards and faithful followers, animals, tigers, lewd monkeys and elephants, which, from a very early period, occupy the Hindu mind. These thousands of stones, which ought to be arranged in irregular chapels and leafy roofs, the Mussulmans have erected into columns, rectangular galleries, or in geometrical and simple rows. Upon the great bare walls, cabalistic numbers and letters that look like the tracks of birds are directed against the unbelievers. Above all, dominating the immense cemetery-like plain, inviolate through time, the Kutb throws its straight rocket of red stone and white marble, two hundred and fifty feet into the sky. Six centuries ago, from its top the sharp chant of the Muezzin broke the silence of the great plain when the sun dropped behind the horizon. KENILWORTH CASTLE SIR JAMES D. MACKENZIE