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206 lahka," every part of the carved labyrinth a scene for melodrama. There was one great five-story pavilion, strangely like Akbar's tomb in design, each pillared and open hall of fairy lightness, with a row of fantastic bell-cupolas on top. There the zenana women took the air, and near by was Akbar's great -board inlaid in a court pavement, where he played the game with his vizier, using slave-girls for pawns, and the successful one keeping the beauties he won. On the seat overlooking this checker-board, Akbar doubtless flourished his famous bon-bon box, with its harmless delights in one compartment, perfumed poison in the other. After having dealt death to many courtiers deliberately, he accidentally took the wrong sugar-plum himself one day, and ended his life in the most satisfactory, retributive, story-book way.

Our guide finally led us through the inlaid gate to the court of the mosque, and was about to launch full-lunged on his ancestors of honorable burial when our eyes fell upon the little white marble tomb of Selim Chisti, the hermit saint and local genius, whose prophecies led Akbar to build this palace and city on the arid plain. The saint's tomb is the most exquisite thing of its kind in India, a tiny marble jewel-box, hardly larger than an elephant's howdah, a filigree reliquary, with fine lattice walls, fantastic brackets, and a domed roof shining in the sunlight. The ebony doors admit one to the tomb, where ostrich eggs hang and ebony panels are inlaid with mother-of-pearl. One looks through the marble screens, as fine as basketry, at the Indian sky, as