Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/178

168 “records its own history in a deeply-cut Sanscrit inscription of six lines on its western face.” Antiquaries have read the characters, and the pillar has been made out to be “the arm of fame—Kirtibhuja—of Rajah Dhava.” He is stated to have been a worshiper of Vishnu, and a monarch who “had obtained with his own arm an undivided sovereignty on the earth for a long period.” The letters upon the triumphal pillar are called “the typical cuts inflicted on his enemies by his sword, writing his immortal fame.” “It is a pity that posterity can know nothing more of this mighty Rajah Dhava than what is recorded in the meager inscription upon this wonderful relic of antiquity. The characters of the inscription are thought to be the same as those of the Gupta inscriptions, and the success alluded to therein is supposed to have been the assistance which that Rajah had rendered in the downfall of the powerful sovereigns of the Gupta dynasty. The age in which he flourished is, therefore, concluded to have been about the year 319 A. D., the initial point of the Balabhi or Gupta era.”

Antiquarians have tried very earnestly to solve the mystery of this metallic monument. The most probable conclusion is, that it marked the center of the great Rajah's city, and stood in a splendid temple. But on the invasion and conquest of Delhi by the Mohammedan power the Emperor chose that center for his own purposes, and threw his great mosque across the very site of that temple, taking its marble columns for his colonnades, permitting the Iron Pillar to remain, but erecting the Minar near it, forever to dwarf its proportions and interest. But all are alike in ruin now—their rage, contention, and emulation in the dust, while the Pillar and the Minar alone remain.

How little did either the proud Rajah or the fierce Emperor anticipate what a wreck the Ruler of heaven and earth would make of their hopes, and that where they built and embellished, and set forth their glory, would yet be as naked as ruin itself, and that the wild beasts of the forest would howl in their desolate palaces!

That desolation is the more marked, when we remember that very probably, after all these high anticipations, carried out so