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AGRA
195

lovely Mumtaz-i-Mahal lived in these rooms around the fountain court, all their surface a maze of precious inlay, the floor of the court a marble pachisi-board, the walls of the inner chambers fitted with long, sunken pockets for jewels that only a woman's slender hand and wrist could reach into. A staircase leads down to the Shish Mahal, or Hall of Mirrors, a cool grotto of a bath set with tiny mirrors in carved plaster, where a cascade once tinkled down a stepped arrangement over colored lights. Overhead is the tiny Gem Mosque, where the women prayed the Prophet to grant them souls; this exquisite marble cell being afterward the prison place of Shah Jahan. Shah Jahan, the accepted Great Mogul of Europeans, and contemporary of Cromwell, was deposed by his son, Jahangir, but cheered in his seven years' captivity by his faithful daughter, Jahanira. Another passage leads along above the battlements from the Jasmine Tower to the Diwan-i-Khas, another private audience-hall with an inner decoration of white on white in low relief, the outer pillars and arches inlaid with color. A considerable annual outlay is required to keep these inlaid walls in order, to replace the bits of carnelian, jade, jasper, amethyst, agate, and lapis lazuli dug out by vicious tourists and idling hooligans of soldiers. This audience-hall fronts upon a terrace flush with the battlements, and there at close of day the Great Mogul used to lounge on a black marble throne, watching the domes and minarets of the Taj grow beneath the hands of the thousands of workmen. When the marauding Jats captured the fort they