In 1526 The
Town Was Taken By Bahadur-Shah, King Of Gujerat, But In 1570 Akbar
Won This Town Back, And A Marble Slab Over The Town Gate Still Bears
His Name And The Date Of His Visit.
On entering this vast city in its present state of solitude (the
natives call it the "dead town") we all experienced a peculiar
feeling, not unlike the sensation of a man who enters Pompeii for
the first time.
Everything shows that Mandu was once one of the
wealthiest towns of India. The town wall is thirty-seven miles long.
Streets ran whole miles, on their sides stand ruined palaces, and
marble pillars lie on the ground. Black excavations of the
subterranean halls, in the coolness of which rich ladies spent
the hottest hours of the day, peer from under dilapidated granite
walls. Further on are broken stairs, dry tanks, waterless fountains,
endless empty yards, marble platforms, and disfigured arches of
majestic porches. All this is overgrown with creepers and shrubs,
hiding the dens of wild beasts. Here and there a well-preserved
wall of some palace rises high above the general wreck, its empty
windows fringed with parasitic plants blinking and staring at us
like sightless eyes, protesting against troublesome intruders. And
still further, in the very centre of the ruins, the heart of the
dead town sends forth a whole crop of broken cypresses, an untrimmed
grove on the place where heaved once so many breasts and clamoured
so many passions.
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