Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 2.djvu/240

 198 INDIAN SARACENIC ARCHITECTURE. BOOK VII. subjects were capable of executing. Nothing could be more successful than the results. There is a largeness and grandeur about the plain simple outline of the Muhammadan arches which quite overshadows the smaller parts of the Hindu fanes, and at the same time the ornamentation, though applied to a greater extent than in any other known examples, is kept so flat as never to interfere with or break the simple outlines of the architectural construction. There may be other examples of surface-decoration as elaborate as this, but hardly anywhere on such a scale. Some parts of the interior of Sta. Sophia at Constantinople are as beautiful, 1 but they are only a few square yards. The palace at Mashita, if completed, might have rivalled it, but it is a fragment ; 2 and there may be certainly were examples in Persia between the times of Khosroes and Harun a/-Rashid, which may have equalled these, but they have perished, or at least are not known to us now ; and even if they ever existed, must have been unlike these mosques. In them we find a curious exemplification of some of the best qualities of the art, as exhibited previously by the Hindus, and practised afterwards by their conquerors. DELHI. Of the two mosques at Old Delhi and at Ajmir, the first named is the earlier, having been begun some seven or eight years before the other, and is also very much the larger. 3 It is, besides, associated with the Qutb Minar, and some of the most beautiful tombs of the age, which altogether make up a group with which nothing at Ajmir can compare. The situation, too, of the Delhi ruins is singularly beautiful, for they stand on the gentle slope of a hill, overlooking a plain that had once apparently been a lake, but which afterwards became the site of three successive capitals of the East In front are the ruins of Tughlaqabad, the gigantic fort of an old Pathan chief; and further north the plain is still covered with the ruins of Firozabad and Indrapat, the capitals of the later Pathans and earlier Mughals. Beyond that, at the distance of about 1 ' History of Ancient and Medieval | Altamsh, who was the real builder of Architecture,' vol. i. pp. 440 et scqq. both, the screen of arches at Delhi had 2 Ibid. vol. i. pp 401 et scqq, 3 Gen. Cunningham's ' Archaeological Reports,' vol. ii. p. 260. But though the inner court the Quwat-ul-Islam at Delhi was the whole mosque as origin- ally designed ; yet before the death of been extended to 380 ft. as compared with the 200 ft. at Ajmir, and the court- yards of the two mosques are nearly in the same proportion, their whole super- ficial area being 72,000 ft. at Ajmir, as compared with 152,000 ft. at Delhi.