One meets with these divers continually, wherever there is a pool sacred or otherwise; but some actually leap into the water and do not merely drop. At the shrine of the Saint Nizam-ud-din, near Humayun's Tomb, I found them--but there they were healthy-looking youths--and again at Fatehpur-Sikri. But for this sporadic diving, the wrestling bouts which are common everywhere, the Nautch and the jugglers, India seems to have no pastimes.
The returning traveller from India is besieged by questioners who want to know all about the most famous of the jugglers' performances. In this trick the magician flings a rope into the air, retaining one end in his hand, and his boy climbs up it and disappears. I did not see it.
All the Indian cities that I saw seemed to cover an immense acreage, partly because every modern house has its garden and compound. In a country where land is cheap and servants are legion there need be no congestion, and, so far, the Anglo-Indian knows little or nothing of the embarrassments of dwellers in New York or London. To every one in India falls naturally a little faithful company of assistants to oil the wheels of life--groom, gardener, butler and so forth--and a spacious dwelling-place to think of England in, and calculate the variable value of the rupee, and wonder why the dickens So-and-so got his knighthood. Agra seemed to me to be the most widespreading city of all; but very likely it is not. In itself it is far from being the most interesting, but it has one building of great beauty--the Pearl Mosque in the Fort--and one building of such consummate beauty as to make it a place of pilgrimage that no traveller would dare to avoid--the Taj Mahal. Whether or not the Taj Mahal is the most enchanting work of architecture in the world I leave it to more extensive travellers to say. To my eyes it has an unearthly loveliness which I make no effort to pass on to others.
The Taj Mahal was built by that inspired friend of architecture, Shah Jahan, as the tomb of the best beloved of his wives, Arjmand Banu, called Mumtaz-i-Mahal or Pride of the Palace. There she lies, and there lies her husband. I wonder how many of the travellers who stand entranced before this mausoleum, in sunshine and at dusk or under the moon, and who have not troubled about its history, realise that Giotto's Tower in Florence is three centuries older, and St. Peter's in Rome antedates it by a little, and St. Paul's Cathedral in London is only twenty or thirty years younger. Yet so it is. In India one falls naturally into the way of thinking of everything that is not of our own time as being of immense age, if not prehistoric.