Page:History of India Vol 4.djvu/138

102 now see it, which is perhaps unequalled by any building in the world for that mysterious fascination which we express by the single short word 'charm.'"

The Taj Mahal was finished in 1648, nearly eighteen years after the death of the queen, who was interred, meanwhile, in a tomb in the garden. Tavernier saw it, while it was being built, and says that twenty thousand workmen were continuously employed. Long before this the other buildings which Shah Jahan carried out at Agra were complete. The palaces in the Fort were erected between 1628 and 1637, the great Mosque in 1644-50, and the Moti' Masjid, or "Pearl Mosque," was completed in 1653. But the Taj was to be the supreme masterpiece dedicated to a supreme love, and there was to be no haste, but yet no rest, about its elaborate and stately growth.

Whatever the glories of Agra, the capital of Babar and Akbar enlarged and enriched by Shah Jahan, they were eclipsed by the splendour of the new city which the prince of Moghul builders laid out at Delhi. Agra is full of his noble works, but New Delhi, or Shahjahanabad as he named it and as it is still called, was his creation. It was begun about the time that Mandelslo was in India, and ten years later, in 1648, it was finished, when, according to all accounts, it must have been the most magnificent royal residence in the world. The learned French physician Bernier, the pupil of Gassendi and school-fellow of Molière, who lived at the court for many years in the succeeding reign of Aurangzib, has left a graphic description of the new capital,