Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/175

Rh potter's vessel, and changed their ambition and glory into a tomb and a ruin.

The unfinished Minar to the right hand has twice the dimensions of the Minar here shown. This column was evidently intended for a second mazinah, without which a Mohammedan mosque is essentially defective.

The second Minar—or Minaret, to use the modern phrase—is considerably larger in the base than the one shown in the engraving. It stands at a proper distance from the first, and was carried up about thirty feet above ground, and then discontinued. Antiquarians have been greatly puzzled to account for the variations from the dimensions of the first and finished one; but it is not necessary to trouble the reader with their theories or debates, as Sleeman's solution has been accepted as highly probable and satisfactory.

His explanation is, that the unfinished minaret was commenced first, but upon too large a scale, and with too small a diminution of the circumference from the base upward. It is two fifths larger than the finished minaret in circumference, and much more perpendicular. Finding these errors, when the builders had gone up with it thirty feet from the ground, the royal founder began the work anew, and on qualified and corrected dimensions, and this is the finished one before the reader. Had he lived he would no doubt have carried up the second minaret in its proper place on the same scale, and so completed his mosque; but his death occurring, and being followed by fearful revolutions—so that five sovereigns sat upon the throne of Delhi in the succeeding ten years—works of peace were suspended in the presence of war, while the succeeding monarchs sought renown in military enterprises, and thus the building of the second minaret was never proceeded with.

The great mosque itself, with that exception, seems to have been completed. Nearly all the arches are still standing in a more or less perfect state. They correspond with the magnificent minaret in design, proportion, and execution, it evidently having been the