Page:History of India Vol 4.djvu/58

36 Finch visited it five years after its founder's death he found it "ruinate, lying like a waste district, and very dangerous to pass through at night." Ruinate it has remained ever since, desolate and abandoned. No later ruler of India has ever aspired to dwell in Akbar's Versailles, just as none ever rose to the height of Akbar's ideals. In the empty palaces, the glorious mosque, the pure white tomb, the baths, the lake, at every turn we recognize some memory of the greatest of Indian emperors. We may even enter his bedroom, the Khwabgah, or "home of dreams," and see the very screens of beautiful stone tracery, the same Persian couplets, the identical ornament in gold and ultramarine on which Akbar feasted his eyes in the long sultry afternoons of the Indian plains. We may walk into the houses of Faizi and Abu-l-Fazl, the laureate and the premier of his empire, who sang his glory and chronicled his reign. We may stand in the audience-hall, with its pillar throne and galleries, where the keenest dialectic of Moslem schoolmen, Catholic priests, Pantheists, Zoroastrians, Brahmans, and Buddhists rose in heated battle for their creeds, till quarrels and coarse vituperation called up the bitter sneer of the puritanic Badauni and the regretful contempt of the royal seeker after truth.

Fathpur, with its beauty in desolation, has stirred the poetic vision of a Heber, and compelled the homage of the wisest critic of Indian art. Fergusson wrote of the "Turkish Sultana's House," which still overlooks the Pachisi Court where Akbar is said to have