DELHI the Empress of Indian cities. She has often been sacked and left naked and desolate. But she could not be despoiled of the incomparable situation which marks her for the metropolis of a great Empire. Standing on her high battlements, the eye can sweep over a wide expanse of yellow country scarred by ravines and dotted with trees and gardens till it reaches a long range of barren hills bathed in orange and lilac. Scattered over this wild stretch of land are surviving ruins, remnants of mighty edifices, tombs of warriors and saints, which convey a more impressive sense of magnificence than Imperial Rome. They are memorials not of a single city but of supplanted nations. Eight centuries before the Latins settled on the plains of Latium and Campania a band of Aryans drove from here aboriginal savages and founded on the left bank of the Jumna the city of Indrapastha, which grew into a mighty kingdom. Then the Muslim appeared on the scenes, and Hindu civilization disappeared in smoke and ruin, and of all that it contained there is nothing left but an iron pillar which records that Raja Dhava, who erected it, " tained with his own arm an undivided sovereignty on the earth for a long period." An old prophecy declared that the Hindu sovereigns should endure as long as the pillar stood. Quamdiu stabit Colyseus stabit et Roma, quando cadit Colyseus cadit Roma " While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand, When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall." When Delhi first became the capital of a Muhammadan Empire (1206) the founder Kutb-ud-Din (the Pole-star of religion), originally a Turki slave, was told the prophecy, but he showed his contempt for it by allowing the pillar to remain, for it was more gratifying to the pride of the Muslim conqueror to allow the idolater's pillar to stand in the courtyard of a great mosque built with the spoils of innumerable Hindu shrines. The great mosque is now in ruins, but the remaining arches, with their granite pillars, covered with inscriptions in the florid Cufic character, Bishop Heber considered to be " as fine in their way as any of the details of York Minster." Ibn Batuta, the Tangier
traveller who saw the mosque little more than a century after its erection, describes it as having no equal either for beauty or extent. The Turki slave, not contented with erecting a mosque from the materials of the infidel temples, determined to build a tower which should mark the triumph of Islam over the foul worship that prevailed in them, and from whose summit the Faithful should hear the Muezzins (criers) proclaim the Ezan or public invitation to prayer in the name of God and His prophet. Far over the ruins of Delhi soars the tapering shaft which bears his name. By sublime massiveness and subtle alterations of proportion the architect has created a transcendent building. The purplish red of the sandstone at the base is finely modulated through a pale pink in the second story to a dark orange at the summit, which harmonizes with the blue of an Indian sky. Dark bands of Arabic writing round the three lower stories contrast with the purple red. The Hindus whom the Muslim conquerors employed to erect and embellish their buildings wrought cunningly and with knowledge. His great aim, as Ram Raz points out in his work on Hindu architecture, was to produce beauty by geometrical pro portion. The height of the column (238 feet i inch) is exactly five times the diameter, and that of the lower story twice the diameter. The plinth is a polygon of twenty sides : the basement story has the same number of faces formed into convex flutes which are alternately angular and semicircular, the next has semicircular flutes, and in the third they are all angular. Then rises a plain story, and above it soars a partially fluted story, whose shaft is adorned with bands of marble and red sandstone. A bold projecting balcony, richly ornamented, runs round each story and affords relief to the eye. After six centuries the column stands as fresh as on the day it was finished.