In the year 1631, the Emperor Shah Jehan founded the city of New Delhi, on the west bank of the Jumna, and named it Shahjehanabad, but it did not long retain his name. It is about seven miles in circumference, and is surrounded on three sides by a wall of brick and stone, in most beautiful preservation, with, as far as I could judge, not a stone displaced. The wall is furnished with embrasures, and has been more strongly fortified by the English, who surrounded it with a moat. It has seven gates built of freestone, each indicating by its name the direction in which it lies; thus the Lahore gate points to the city of Lahore; the Ajmere gate to the city of Ajmere. The other five gates are named Agra, Turkoman, Delhi, Mohur, and Cashmere. The modern city is built on two rocky eminences. It is divided into two parts, the old and the new; the streets are inferior and narrow, except two, the one leading from the palace to the Delhi gate, which is thirty yards broad, and 1,900 yards long, with an aqueduct along the middle of its whole extent, supplied with water from Ali Merdan Khan's canal, and the other leading from the Lahore gate which is still wider and handsomer, being forty yards in width and a mile in length. Ali Merdan Khan, the Prime Minister, brought the above-named canal from the Jumna, where that river approaches Kurnaul, to Delhi, a distance of more than 100 miles; but it became choked up after the Persian and Affghan invasions; in consequence of which, in 1810, the English undertook to clear and repair it. It was not finished till 1820, and is said to have cost £35,000. It furnishes the inhabitants of Delhi with a supply of fresh water, the water of the Jumna being much impregnated with salt below Kurnaul. And here I would mention, by the way, that it is owing to this circumstance that the overflowing of the Jumna does not improve the soil like the inundation of the Ganges and other Hindoostanee rivers, the deposits of which are of a very fertilizing nature. The restoration of this canal proved an immense benefit, the country around having become scarcely habitable from the deleterious effects of the water.