The First Part Is Inhabited By The Poorer Classes, And Appeared Very Wretched.

In the two other parts the tradespeople and the gentry reside; they have an incomparably better aspect.

The principal street, although uneven and stony, is sufficiently wide to allow carriages, and ponderous beasts of burden, to pass without hindrance.

The architecture of the houses is in the highest degree original. The smallness of the windows had already attracted my notice in Benares, here they are so narrow and low that it is hardly possible to put the head out; they are for the most part closed with finely worked stone lattice, instead of glass. Many of the houses have large alcoves; in others there are spacious saloons on the first floor, which rest on pillars and occupy the whole front of the house; many of these halls were separated by partition walls into smaller open saloons. At both corners of the hall were decorated pavilions, and at the further end, doors leading to the interior of the house. These halls are generally used as shops and places of business; also as the resort of idlers, who sit upon mats and ottomans, smoking their hookas and watching the bustle in the streets. In other houses, again, the front walls were painted in fresco, with terrible-looking dragons, tigers, lions, twice or thrice as large as life, stretching their tongues out, with hideous grimaces; or with deities, flowers, arabesques, etc., without sense or taste grouped together, miserably executed, and bedaubed with the most glaring colours.

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Words from 110268 to 110523 of 187810