168 
THE ORIENTAL ANNUAL. 
speedily secured to the new city a flourishing com- 
mercial population ; and the nobles vied with each 
other in the magnificence of their palaces and gardens. 
The prince also founded several elegant mosques, 
schools, hospitals, baths, and other public buildings, 
including a bridge over the Moosa, and set apart a 
large fund for their maintenance. 
The most splendid of those erections is the Char 
Minar (four minarets), a beautiful quadrangular 
mosque raised upon four gateways and standing in 
the centre of the city, so as to open upon each of the 
four principal streets by a gigantic archway. From 
the angles of the base spring four stupendous 
minarets, two hundred and twenty feet in height, 
and of great solidity. The gateways are covered in 
by a shallow dome, upon which a superstructure is 
raised, forming a commodious mosque, with its 
reservoir of water, all handsomely decorated with 
Saracenic sculpture. In the quadrangle below there 
is also a large basin of water, from the centre whereof, 
on grand occasions, a copious fountain throws up a 
spout of water almost to the vaulted roof, which 
falling on all sides in a thick shower, creates a 
refreshing coolness, highly attractive to thes treet- 
loungers and gossips. In each of the minarets are 
apartments appropriated to the use of the professors 
and students of the college; facetiously said, by 
Farishta, to have been allotted to them that they 
might be enabled to look down upon the pomp and 
