Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/148

138 precious stones, representing flowers, executed with such wonderful perfection that the forms wave as in nature, and the hues and shades of the stems, leaves, and flowers appear as real almost as the beauties which they represent.

These ornamental designs are so carefully and exquisitely executed that several of the flowers have as many as eighty different stones entering into their composition, all polished uniform with the marble, into which they are so delicately inserted that you can hardly trace their joinings. They seem as though they had grown there, instead of being separately prepared and placed in their positions by the hands of the “cunning workman,” who designed and executed this imperishable and magnificent memorial of human love.

But the richest work of all is on the cenotaph of the Empress within the screen. Upon her tomb—according to universal Mohammedan usage—is a slate or tablet of marble, while on the Emperor's is a small box representing a pen-holder. These always distinguish a man's or a woman's grave among these people; the idea being that a woman's heart is a tablet on which lordly man can write whatever pleases him best. And this mark of feminine inferiority was not spared even the beloved occupant of the Taj Mahal.

But her tomb—how beautiful! The snow-white marble is inlaid with flowers so delicately formed that they look like embroidery on white satin, so exquisitely is the mosaic executed in carnelian, blood-stone, agates, jasper, turquoise, lapis lazuli, and other precious stones. Thirty-five different specimens of carnelian are employed in forming a single leaf of a carnation; and in one flower, not larger than a silver dollar, as many as twenty-three different stones can be counted. Yet these are but specimens of the beauties that are spread in unparalleled profusion over this entire chamber. Indeed, Long asserts that he found one flower upon her tomb to be composed of no less than three hundred different stones.

Her name and date of death, with her virtuous qualities, are recorded in the same costly manner, in gems of Arabic—the sacred