Page:Wanderings of a Pilgrim Vol 2.djvu/245

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only added to its grandeur. We roamed through the colonnades, in the court of the beautiful arches, and returned most unwillingly to our tents.

23rd.—Quitted the Kutab without revisiting Tuglukabad, our time not admitting of it; and I greatly regretted not having the power of visiting the tombs that surrounded us on every side the ruins of Ancient Delhi. The extent of these ruins is supposed not to be less than a circumference of twenty miles, reckoning from the gardens of Shalimar, on the north-west, to the Kutab Minār, on the south-east, and proceeding thence along the centre of the old city, by way of the mausoleum of Nizam-al-Deen, the tomb of Humaioon, which adjoins, and the old fort of Delhi, on the Jumna, to the Ajmeer gate of Shāhjahānabad. The environs to the north and west are crowded with the remains of the spacious gardens and country houses of the nobility, which in former times were abundantly supplied with water, by means of the noble canal dug by Ali Merdan Khan.

Franklin remarks,—"Ancient Delhi is said by historians to have been erected by Rajah Delu, who reigned in Hindūstan prior to the invasion of Alexander the Great: others affirm it to have been built by Rajah Pettouvar, who flourished at a much later period. It is called in Sanscrit Indraput, or the Abode of Indra, one of the Hindū deities, and is thus distinguished in the royal diplomas of the Chancery office."


THE OBSERVATORY.

On our road home, about a mile and a half from the present city of Delhi, we stopped to visit the Observatory, Jantr-Mantr, a building well worthy the inspection of the traveller. The name of Jayasinha, the Rajah of Ambhere, or Jayanagar, and his astronomical labours, are not unknown in Europe; but yet the extent of his exertions in the cause of science is little known; his just claims to superior genius and zeal demand some enumeration of the labours of one whose name is conspicuous in the annals of Hindūstan. Jey-sing or Jayasinha succeeded to the inheritance of the ancient Rajahs of Ambhere in the year of Vicramadittya 1750, corresponding to 1693 of the Christian