Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/385

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MOUNT ABU AND AHMEDABAD
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siasm to explore its mosques while burning with the fever of influenza. The air was soft and warm as late spring in the earliest morning, and the sun had a desert scorch at noon at that end of February. By dreary lanes and ruined gates in broken walls, we reached the beautiful mosques whose carved sandstone columns and walls recall those of Fatehpur Sikri. Rani Sipri's mosque, the Queen's mosque, the tombs of Mohammed Chisti and Muhafiz Khan each seemed the perfection of beauty in line and carved ornament, the minarets, arches, and walls covered with such a wealth of arabesques and traceries as vied with the white wonders on Mount Abu. At the Queen's mosque a band of Moslems bore in a sheeted figure bound to a charpoy covered with a rich cloth and garlands of marigolds. All the mourners bathed at the tank, united in standing prayer, lifted the charpoy, and bore it off to the graveyard.

We drove into a dreary, rubbish-strewn common, and, through a breach in an old wall, reached the court behind Sidi Said's desecrated mosque of the palace to look from the outside upon the two famous tracery windows, best known and most beautiful work of that kind in India. Nothing in marble traceries elsewhere approaches them. We drove to Hathi Singh's Jain temple, whose saints in niches and elaborately carved ornament in white marble are in the style of the Mount Abu shrines, and then we went to see the great tanks and green wells surrounded by marble galleries, where luxury-loving rulers sought coolness during the great heat.