Page:Historic Landmarks of the Deccan.djvu/106

94 eight months. Since this period the history of Gulbarga has been uneventful.

The most striliing of all the buildings of Gulbarga is the great mosque, built, as an inscription tells us, in A. H. 769 (A.D. 1367) in the reign of Muhammad Shah, the second king of the Bahmani dynasty, by Rafi bin Shams bin Mansur, Qazvirii. This building is unique among Indian mosques, which usually consist of a large courtyard and a relatively small building, towards which the worshipper prays. What should be the courtyard of the Gulbarga mosque is all covered in. The building has a large dome in the centre of the western end and four others, slightly smaller, at the corners. The spacious roof consists of seventy-five small domes and twenty-seven gabled roofs. The front of the mosque consists of a range of eleven arches, and on each side is a range of fourteen arches, the last three towards the western end being closed. In the interior the effect of the long colonnades with their arches and vaulted ceilings is very striking. Meadows Taylor says that this building is a replica of the great mosque at Cordova, but this is not the case. Apart from radical differences of style the relative dimensions of the two buildings do not correspond, and the Gulbarga mosque could not compare with that of Cordova in point either of size or of richness of materials or wealth of decoration. The bazar consists of an arcade of sixty arches on either side with elaborately ornamented buildings at either end. The tombs of seven of the Bahmani kings who are buried here are unpretentious square buildings surmounted by domes. The tomb of Shaikh Gisu Daraz is more imposing. This is a large domed building with two ranges of arches, one above the other, running round it. But the doorway is small and mean, and the tomb has no pretensions to architectural beauty. To the west of the town is a large domed building standing on high ground and said to have been built by a money-lender and offered by him to Shaikh Gisu Daraz, who, however, refused to accept a building which had been erected with rtioney gained by usury. It subsequently became the headquarters of a gang of robbers, from whom it received the name of Chor Gumbas, which it retains to this day. The fort is interesting and picturesque in its decay. The citadel built by Bahman Shah is a square building of brick, eighty-five feet in height. It covers but a very small area and has