i98 



DELHI. 



Delhi. of their marble ornaments and pavements. The fort 

 "— "V™"' gf Selim Ghur communicates with the palace by a 

 bridge of stone built over an arm of the river : it is 

 now entirely in ruins. 



The royal gardens, begun in the fourth year of the 

 reign of Shah Jehan, and finished in the thirteenth, 

 were laid out with admirable taste, and are said to 

 have cost the enormous sum of a million sterling. These 

 o-ardens contained the Dewaun Khana, or hall of au- 

 dience ; an Ivaun, or open hall, with apartments ad- 

 joining, the interior of which is decorated with a beau- 

 tiful border of white and gold painting, upon a ground 

 of the finest chunam ; on each side of the Ivaun are the 

 apartments of the haram inclosed by high walls. These 

 gardens, about a mile in circumference, still abound 

 Avith trees of a large size, and very old. 



Delhi contains the remains of many splendid palaces 

 belonging formerly to the great Omrahs of the empire. 

 The plans of all these palaces are nearly the same. All 

 of them are surrounded by high walls, and take up a 

 considerable space of ground. The entrances to all of 

 them are through lofty arched gateways, at the top of 

 which are the galleries for music ; and before each is a 

 spacious court-yard for the elephants, horses, and at- 

 tendants of the visitors. Each has a Mahal, or seraglio, 

 separated by a partition-wall from the great hall, with 

 which it communicates by means of private passages. 

 All of them had gardens, with capacious reservoirs of 

 stone, and fountains in the centre. Round each palace 

 extended an ample ten-ace ; and within the walls were 

 houses and apartments for servants and followers, be- 

 sides stabling for horses, elephants, and every thing 

 appertaining to a nobleman's suite. Each palace was 

 likewise provided with a handsome set of baths, and a 

 Teh Khana under ground. 



The environs of Delhi to the north and west are 

 crowded with remains of spacious gardens and country 

 houses of the nobility, which were abundantly supplied 

 with water by means of a canal dug by Ali Merdan 

 Khan, and which formerly entered from above the city 

 of Panniput down to Delhi, where it joined the Jumna, 

 fertilizing a tract of more than nine miles. There 

 was another aqueduct at Delhi, begun by order of Fee- 

 i-oze Shah, to supply with water a hunting seat at Sufe- 

 doom. This canal, which conveyed the water from 

 Khizinabad, where it left the Jumna, was about sixty 

 miles long, and was continued sixty miles more, by 

 Shan Jehan, to his new capital of Delhi. These canals 

 are now choked up with rubbish, to the great sorrow of 

 the inhabitants, • whose incessant prayer is that they 

 may be cleared by the liberality of the British govern- 

 ment. 



This city is adorned with many beautiful mosques, 

 the most remarkable of which is the Jama Musjid, or 

 great cathedral. This elegant structure stands about a 

 quarter of a mile from the Royal Palace, upon a rocky 

 eminence, scarped on purpose. Four long and fine 

 streets corresponding to the four sides of the mosque, 

 terminate in the terrace on which it is built. This 

 terrace is a square of about 1400 yards of red-stone ; 

 in the centre is a fountain lined with marble, for ena- 

 bling the votaries to perform the necessary ablutions 

 before prayer. The ascent is by a flight of stone steps, 

 thirty-five in number, through a handsome gateway of 

 red-stone. The large doors of this gateway are cover- 

 ed with plates of brass, exquisitely wrought. An arch- 

 ed colonnade of red-stone surrounds the terrace, which 



is adorned with octagon pavilions. The mosque is of Delhi. 

 an oblong form, two hundred and sixty-one feet in **■ "~Y"""" 

 length ; it is surrounded at the top by three magnificent 

 domes of white marble, intersected with black stripes, 

 and flanked by two minarets of black marble and red 

 stone alternately, rising to the height of ISO feet. Each 

 of these minarets has three projecting galleries of white 

 marble, and their summits are crowned with light oc- 

 tagon pavilions "of the same. The whole front of the 

 building is faced with large slabs of beautiful white 

 marble ; and along the cornice are ten compartments, 

 each four feet long, and two and a half wide, inlaid 

 with inscriptions in black marble, and said to contain 

 the greater part, if not the whole of the Koran. The 

 floor of the mosque is paved with large slabs of white 

 marble, decorated with a black border j its walls and roof 

 are lined with plain white marble. Near the Kibla * is 

 a handsome Taak, or niche, adorned with a profusion 

 of frieze work ; and close to this is a Mimber, or pul- 

 pit, of marble, which has an ascent of four steps balus- 

 traded. The ascent to the minarets is by a winding 

 staircase of 130 steps of red stone; and at the top, the 

 spectator is gratified by a noble view of the city, and 

 of the opposite bank of the Jumna. The domes are 

 crowned with cullises of copper richly gilt. This su- 

 perb edifice, worthy of being, the great cathedral of the 

 empire of Hindostaun, was begun by the Emperor 

 Shah Jehan, in the fourth year of his reign, and com- 

 pleted in the tenth : The expence of its erection is said 

 to have amounted to ten lacks of rupees. The other 

 mosques worthy of mention, are the Roshun Al Dowla, 

 from which Nadir Shah beheld the massacre of the un- 

 fortunate inhabitants ; and Zeenut Al Musajid, or the 

 ornament of mosques, erected by Zeenut Al Nissa, a 

 daughter of Aurengzebe. In a corner of the terrace 

 on which this mosque is situated, that princess caused a 

 sepulchre of white marble to be built, in which she was 

 interred in the year of the Hegira 1122, (A. D. 1710). 

 Besides these mosques, there are in Delhi and its envi- 

 rons above forty others, inferior in size and beauty, 

 though all built in a similar style. 



The other objects in Delhi which attract attention, 

 are the Mudirussa, or college, erected by Gazoodeen 

 Cawn, now uninhabited ; and the tombs of Malika Ze- 

 mani, queen of the Emperor Mahmud Shah, and of 

 Jehanarah Begum, eldest daughter of the Emperor 

 Shah Jehan — a princess no less famous for her wit, 

 gallantly, and beauty, than for the noble proof which 

 she gave of filial attachment, in undergoing a volunta- 

 ry confinement of ten years with her father in the castle 

 of Agrah. 



From the account of these splendid structures, our 

 readers are not to imagine, that Delhi presents an ap- 

 pearance of uniform magnificence. Here, as in all the 

 Indian cities, the streets are narrow and irregular; and 

 the houses, built without order, of brick, mud, or bam- 

 boos and mats, and generally covered with thatch, re- 

 semble a motley group of villages, rather than an ex- 

 tensive town. In Delhi, indeed, there were formerly 

 two very noble streets, the one leading from the pa- 

 lace gate through the city to the Delhi gate, in a di- 

 rection north and south ; the other entering in the 

 same manner, from the palace to the Lahore gate, ly- 

 ing cast and west. The inhabitants have spoiled the 

 beauty of both these streets, by running a line of houses 

 down the centre, and in other places across the street, 

 so that it is difficult to discover their former position. 



• The Kibla is a small excavation m the wall of Mahommedan mosquesy-so situated as to look towards the eity of Mecca. 



