"a people who paint their cows pink with green spots, and their houses orange or bright red, should be the authors of the Pearl Mosque or the Taj. It would be too wonderful." It is easier to credit the plans to the Frenchman Austin de Bordeaux or to any of the master masons or carvers who came from Bagdad, Constantinople, Samarkand, and from every Moslem center of note, and worked here during the same years that the Pilgrim Fathers were building their first log-house on Plymouth Bay.
Driving through the great fortress gate, we saw first the red palace of Akbar, sandstone prelude to the jeweled marble halls of Shah Jahan, the greatest builder of all the Moguls. The first or private audience-hall, the Khas Mahal, lies across the Grape Garden, its windows set in the solid battlemented walls that rise sheer from the moats. It is a dream in white—arches and walls of pure white marble carved in scrolls, traceries, and flowers in low relief, the windows filled with marble lattices. The scheme of white on white is offset by a ceiling of gold and colors, and the Khas Mahal is a model for architects and decorators for all time. By an open terrace on the battlements, and a series of marble halls with walls inlaid with graceful Persian arabesques and flowers in colored stones, we came to the Jasmine Tower, Shah Jahan's finest construction. The rounded balcony of the tower projects beyond the walls and commands the moats below, the long curve of the Jumna, and the white bubbles of the Taj beyond a flat, green foreground of river bottom mosaiced over with the washermen's white patches. The
