Still is their dress most lovely, though their play Has loosed their locks, and washed their dye away, And though the pearls, that went their neck to grace Have slipped, disordered from their resting place." A bullock cart, most primitive of human forms of conveyance, is crossing the stream. " Listen, sisters (streams), kindly to him who praises you, who has come from afar with a waggon and a chariot ; bow down lowlily, become easily fordable. Remain, rivers, lower than the axle (of the wheel) with your currents." Beyond the river the wide white road runs through a great plain with its dim memories dating back before the earliest dawn of history. Here the peasants have lived their rude simple lives for many a century ; and have chanted their hymn for the ploughing season. " May the oxen (draw) happily, the men labour happily, the plough furrow happily." They have sown and reaped their grain, they have picked the snowy flake of cotton, they have planted the sugar-cane, they have cultivated mustard for oil-cakes to feed the oxen, while Rajpoot and Muslim have contended, and conquering races have come and gone.
Hard by the road are the remains of the mighty sepul chres of their conquerors, and from a crumbling wall shoots the sacred fig tree. " The revolving current of life," says one of their ancient hymns meant for all time and all mankind, " resembles the Aswatha, the eternal sacred fig-tree which grows with its roots above and its branches downwards." After driving about three miles across the great plain clothed with groves of mangoes, lofty tamarinds with feathery leaves of bluish green and wide-spreading banyans, we saw in the distance a white dome glistening in the sun. It was the rota of Ganj Baksh, and a few miles further on the terrace on which the tomb stands was reached. Alighting from our carriage we passed through a covered gateway into a large flagged court on the right of which is a fairy kiosk, formed of sixteen slender columns supporting nine domes, and behind it rises the massive and stately tomb of the Saint Shaik Ahmad Khattu Ganj Bakhsh, the friend and spiritual guide of the royal founder of Ahmedabad. He belonged to an austere mendicant fraternity and tradition asserts, says Briggs, that no circumstance would induce him to alter his mode of life, though wealth and every sublunary honour within the gift of a powerful Muslim potentate were offered. There are many stories told of the holy Fakir. The most popular of these is the one told by the custodian to the pilgrims who from all parts of Gujarat resort to his shrine once a year.
" He was a saintly mortal, Ganj Baksh : he was free from the sensualities to which our race is prone ; his heart was ever with Alla (whose name be praised), and his thoughts with Muhammad (blessings upon our holy prophet) ; his life was one of Virgin purity; his death that of the beatified, Alla it Alla, etc. ; kings of the earth were admonished by
him ; the holiest found him a friend. Wealth was pro fusely scattered at his feet, but he saw it not, received it not. Alla was his all. Before he passed from this world to the Paradise of our hopes, he built this roza. The labourers and artificers employed by him were daily paid their hire, and the good genii who supplied the funds deposited the exact quota to be appropriated beneath the carpet of the holy Ganj Baksh. Thus was built this delightful mausoleum to the memory of a saint whose virtues we can still revere, if our imperfections prevent a close pursuit upon his foot steps, Alla it Alla, etc." Ganj Baksh did not erect the roza. It was begun the year the saint died (1445) by Sultan Ahmed's son Muhammad II., and completed six years later by Ahmed's grandson, Jalal Khan, better known as Kitub-ud-din. It is certainly a delightful mausoleum. The trellis work which encloses the tomb is wrought with lavish luxuriance of imagination and incredible perfection of detail. The brass lattice windows around the shrine also bear testimony to the power of the Hindu designer. The buildings possess two characteristics peculiarly their own, their pure Hindu style and their re dundant richness. To the west of the Mausoleum is a large quadrangle with a mosque on its western face. It illus trates how during the twenty-five years that had rolled on since the building of the Jumma Mosque the architect had advanced in Muhammadan simplicity. It has the five domes of the Jumma Mosque but the pillars, as Fergusson points out, are fewer in number, more widely spaced and better arranged. Except the Motee Musjid at Agra," he writes, " no mosque in India is more remarkable for simple elegance than this." The southern face of the quadrangle overlooks the great lake which Mahmud Begada excavated. and surrounded with gigantic flights of steps and built on its border a splendid palace and harem. In a handsome tomb enclosed like the sepulchre of the Saint with well wrought trellis work lies Mahmud Begada and his sons, and a porch rich in carved niches supported by three pillars, miracles of size and perfection, separate it from the tomb of his Queen.
We had our dinner in the ruins of the Harem. The night was cool, and fragrant with orange blossoms. The stars shone from the depths of an eastern sky with steady lustre. The moonlight slept on crumbled wall and marble pillars. We reluctantly left the fairy haunt and drove back to the turmoil of the city.