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186 disappoint, but far exceeds all anticipations—a reward for all the distance one may travel to reach it—recompense for all one endures in Indian travel. Well as one knows it from photographs and engravings, the reality is as astonishing, as overwhelming, as if he had never heard of it. Even while he first looks through the arch to the white dome above the cypress-trees, it seems too rarely perfect to be real, too incredibly beautiful to be true. It would not have surprised me if the light had faded, a curtain had fallen; or, still less, if one had found he could not enter, that no foot could touch the garden-path or the white terrace, which is mere pedestal for this marvelous work of art. After watching the entrance of some others, we paused for a first steadfast look, and then, all excitement and exaltation, followed the marble path and mounted the half-way platform that affords the perfect view-point, the white wonder reflected in the long marble canal at their feet.

The Taj on its high platform, with the red sandstone mosque at the west, the complementary building or "Response" on the east, and the whole sky-space over and beyond the river as background, presents the most harmonious and perfectly balanced composition and is the most admirably placed building in India. The eye travels from feature to feature and detail to detail, and the wonder of its perfection continually grows. The bands of low-relief carving, the panels and borders of inlaid work, afford endless study, and one easily accepts the guide's set story that forty varieties of carnelian