Kutb Minar by Esther Singleton

I. G. W. STEEVENS

Delhi is still seamed with the scars of her spoilers, and still / jewelled with remnants of the gems they fought for. If you take them in / order, you will go first, not into the city, but eleven miles south, / to the tower Kutb Minar. Through the dust of the road, rising out of / the springing wheat, among the mud-and-mat huts before which squat the / brown-limbed peasants, you see the country a litter of broken walls, / tumbling towers, rent domes. There are fragments of seven cities built / by seven kings before the present Delhi was. Eleven miles of them bring / you to the tower and mosque of Kutb.

Kutb-ed-Din was a slave who raised himself to Viceroy of Delhi when / the Mussulmans took it, then to Emperor of Hindustan and founder of a / dynasty. Whether he or his son or the last of the Hindu kings built the / tower, antiquaries are undecided and others careless. It is enough that / here is one landmark in Delhi's history, one splendid monument reared / for a symbol of triumph by a victor whom now nobody can certainly / identify. It is a colossal, five-storied tower, two hundred and forty / feet high, of nearly fifty feet diameter at the base, and tapering / to nine feet at the top. Tiny balconies with balustrades mark the / junctions of the stories: the three lower are red stone, the two / upper -- dwarfed just under the sky -- faced with white marble. All the red / part is fluted into alternate semicircles and right angles, netted all / over with tracery, and belted with inscriptions under the balconies. / But the details strike you little: the vertical lines of the fluting / only give the impression that this is one huge pillar with a red / shaft and a white capital -- a pillar that might form part of the most / tremendous temple in the world, yet stands quite seemly alone by reason / of its surpassing bigness.

Pant to the top. It will do you good, though the view is nothing. The / country is an infinite green-and-brown chess-board of young corn and / fallow, dead-flat on every side, ugly with the complacent plainness of / all very rich country. Beyond the sheeny ribbon of the Jumna, north, / south, east, west, into the blurred horizon, you can see only land and / land and land -- a million acres with nothing on them to see -- except the / wealth of India and the secret of the greatness of Delhi.

Then look down past your toes and you will see the evidence of some of / Delhi's falls. From the ground you will have noticed ruins about you; / but there the Kutb Minar dwarfs everything. Now you see that you stand / above a field of broken arches, solitary pillars, stumps of towers, and / in the middle of what must once have been a town of mosques and tombs. / Before it was that, it was a town of Hindu temples and palaces. In the / court of the ruined mosque stands a solid wrought-iron pillar -- little / enough to look at, but curious, because it is at least fifteen hundred / years old, and there is nothing else quite like it in the world. It / bears a Sanskrit inscription to the effect that this is "the Arm of / Fame of Raja Dhava, who conquered his neighbours and won the undivided / sovereignty of the earth."

Poor Raja Dhava! The temples of generations that had already forgotten / him are swept utterly away; the mosque of their conquerors stands now / only as a few shattered red arches and pillars with defaced flowers / wilting on them. Beyond that is the base of what was once to be a tower / more than twice as high as the Kutb Minar, but was never even finished. / The very tower you stand on has been buffeted by earthquake, and great / part of it is mere restoration. And Delhi, which in the year One / stood here, has drifted away almost out of sight from the summit and / left these forlorn fragments to decay without even the consolation of / neighbourhood.

II. ANDRÉ CHÉVRILLON

I take a carriage to visit the Kutb Minar, the great tower that rears / itself up about ten miles from Delhi.

This is Asia's Appian Way. Ruins from every century, left by three / races and three religions, are scattered over a large and dismal plain. / The remains of ancient Hindu Delhi, of Afghan Delhi, and of Mogul / Delhi, cover a dead expanse of seventy square miles. Slowly, during the / flow of centuries, the city has changed its site, as a river changes / its bed. As far as the eye can reach, dilapidated domes and broken / columns reveal themselves in the midst of the dry brushwood. These / yellowish hillocks are the ruins of Indra-Partha, the city of Indra, / for which the five brothers of Mahabarata fought three thousand years / ago. Farther away a granite pillar, covered with Pali characters, / proclaims the edicts of the Buddhist King Asoka. Everywhere, like / tombs in a cemetery, the _débris_ of Mongolian art, monumental / mausoleums and domes surrounded by kiosks are heaped together, all / corroded by time and merged into the uniform tint of the sad and dry / vegetation that Nature provides. Several tombs are as large as those of / Akbar at Secundra and rise up solitary upon the arid steppe. The blue / peacocks that are roaming about are the only living things that haunt / the place. Generations have swarmed here and of their living past / this almost imperceptible residue is all that is left, just as ancient / forests have had to exist in order to make a little piece of coal. The / Vedic age, the Brahmanical age, the Buddhist age, the first Mussulman / dynasties, the Mogul Empire, -- each historical period has left here a / small deposit.