IN THE EAST INDIES. D3 
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great emperors and splendid royal tombs. We had 
tiffin at the government rest house and came back 
in the afternoon. In the evening we took a train for 
this place where we arrived this morning at half 
past ten, three hours overdue. We drove to see the 
Taj Mahal at midday. It is furiously hot here, one 
of the two hottest places in India, but very dry, so 
one hardly notices it at all. The Taj is absolutely 
indescribable. To say that it is the finest building 
in the whole world is to belittle it. It has been said 
that the Moguls designed like Titans and finished 
like jewelers and this was certainly so. Shah Jehan 
and his favorite wife are buried here. Twenty thous- 
and men worked twenty-four years on the Taj and 
its costs was Rs.31,748,026, not including the materi- 
al, which the shah obtained gratis as gifts from 
neighboring Hindu rajahs who wanted to curry 
favor with their Mohammedan conqueror. The whole 
interior is a mass of flowers inlaid in pure white 
marble with hundreds of thousands, probably mil- 
lions, of selected pieces of semi-precious stones and 
some precious stones as well. The marble tracery of 
the great screens about the splendid cenotaph and the 
window sereens is simply beyond belief. The whole 
outer and inner surface for hundreds of square feet 
is inlaid with Arabie inscriptions, taken from the 
Koran, in black Jhodpur marble ona surface of 
marble, white as ivory. The Taj is splendidly situ- 
ated in a magnificent garden with ponds symmetrical- 
ly arranged in marble basins, a perfect setting for 
this splendid jewel. The cathedrals of Europe and 
any other building in the world which once seemed 
glorious in one’s memory fade to insignificance when 
