Page:Aurangzíb and the Decay of the Mughal Empire.djvu/60

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54
AURANGZÍR

seventy-six. The Emperor hastened to Agra to pay respect to his obsequies, and the body was laid in a tomb near the beautiful Táj, which the late sovereign had set up in memory of his wife.

The Princess Royal, who had shared his captivity with more than a daughter's devotion, was allowed to keep her state, in splendid seclusion, unmolested by the brother she had consistently opposed. 'She died with the fame of her past beauty still fresh, unmarried, at the age of sixty-seven. Her grave lies close to a saint's and to a poet's, in that campo santo of marble lattice work, near the Hall of the Sixty Four Pillars, beyond the Delhi walls. But only a piece of pure white marble, with a little grass piously watered, marks the Princess's grave. "Let no rich canopy surmount my resting-place," was her dying injunction, inscribed on the headstone. "This grass is the best covering for the grave of a lowly heart, the humble and transitory Ornament of the World, the disciple of the Holy Man of Chist, the daughter of the Emperor Sháh-Jahán[1]."' Her public memorials are the great rest-house for travellers at Delhi, and the splendid mosque of Agra.

The fate of the other princes must be told in few words. The day after Sháh-Jahán had been safely locked up, Aurangzíb, who had been in camp till now, entered Agra, occupied Dárá's house, seized his trea-

    ceivable that the death should have been kept secret for more than a year, as Mr. Wheeler would have it; or that Aurangzíb should have waited six years to perpetrate so obvious a political execution.

  1. Sir W. W. Hunter, in 'Nineteenth Century,' May, 1887.