Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 2.djvu/258

 214 INDIAN SARACENIC ARCHITECTURE. BOOK VII. looks like an afterthought, and the production of an unpractised hand working in an unfamiliar style. Wherever and whenever minars were afterwards introduced, preparations for them were always made from the foundations, and their lines are always carried down to the ground, in some shape or other, as in true art they ought to be. This solecism, if it may be so called, evidently arose from the architects being Hindus, unfamiliar with the style ; and to this also is due the fact that all the arches are constructed on the horizontal principle. There is not a true arch in the place; but, owing to their having the command of larger stones than were available at Delhi, the arches are not here crippled, as they were there before the repairs. It is neither, however, its dimensions nor design that makes this screen one of the most remarkable architectural objects in India, but the mode in which it is decorated. Nothing can exceed the taste with which the Kufi and Tughra inscriptions are interwoven with the more purely architectural decorations, or the manner in which they give life and variety to the whole, without ever interfering with the constructive lines of the design. As before remarked, as examples of surface-decoration, these two mosques of Altamsh at Delhi and Ajmir are probably unrivalled. Nothing in Cairo or in Persia is so exquisite in detail, and nothing in Spain or Syria can approach them for beauty of surface-decoration. Besides this, they are unique. Nowhere else would it be possible to find Muhammadan large- ness of conception, combined with Hindu delicacy of ornamenta- tion, carried out to the same extent and in the same manner. If to this we add their historical value as the first mosques erected in India, and their ethnographic importance as bringing out the leading characteristics of the two races in so distinct and marked a manner, there are certainly no two buildings in India that better deserve the protecting care of Government ; the one has received its fair share of attention ; the other has, till quite lately, been most shamefully neglected, and most barbarously ill-treated. 1 LATER PATHAN STYLE. After the death of 'Alau-d-Din (A.D. 1316) a change seems to have come over the spirit of the architects of the succeeding Tughlaq Shahi and Sayyid dynasties, and all their subsequent buildings, down to the time of the Afghan Sher Shah, A.D. 1 Owing to the Muhammadan part being better built and with larger materials, the mosque is not in the same ruinous condi- tion as that at the Qutb was before the repairs of some thirty-five years ago. There is, so far as I can judge, no building in India more worthy of the attention of Government than this.