Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/149

Rh language of the Mohammedans—on the side of her tomb. There are other inscriptions upon it, which we will hereafter refer to when we come to examine who this lady was that was thus honored in death beyond all her sex.

The Emperor's tomb is plainer than the other, has no passages from the Koran, but merely a similar mosaic work of flowers, and his name, with the date of his death, upon it.

Over all this richness and beauty rises the magnificent dome, which is so constructed as to contain an echo more pure, and prolonged, and harmonious than any other in the world, so far as known. A competent judge has declared, “Of all the complicated music ever heard on earth, that of a flute played gently in the vault below, where the remains of the Emperor and his consort repose, as the sound rises to the dome amid a hundred arched alcoves around, and descends in heavenly reverberations upon those who sit or recline on the cenotaphs above, is perhaps the finest to an inartificial ear. We feel as if it were from heaven, and breathed by angels. It is to the ear what the building itself is to the eye; but unhappily it cannot, like the building, live in our recollections. All that we can in after life remember is, that it was heavenly and produced heavenly emotions.” An enthusiast thus more glowingly describes it: “Now take your seat upon the marble pavement beside the upper tombs, and send your companion to the vault underneath to run slowly over the notes of his flute or guitar. Was ever melody like this? It haunts the air above and around. It distills in showers upon the polished marble. It condenses into the mild shadows, and sublimes into the softened, hallowed light of the dome. It rises, it falls; it swims mockingly, meltingly around. It is the very element with which sweet dreams are builded. It is the melancholy echo of the past—it is the bright, delicate harping of the future. It is the atmosphere breathed by Ariel, and playing around the fountain of Chindara. It is the spirit of the Taj, the voice of inspired love, which called into being this peerless wonder of the world, and elaborated its symmetry and composed its harmony, and, eddying around its young minarets