done. The structures we have been traversing are, in their way, works
of art--very worthy, if not the choicest conceivable, blossoms of
our century-plant. For fitness, the quality that underlies beauty
throughout Nature from the plume to the tendril and the petal, they
have not been surpassed in their kind. Every flange, bolt, sheet and
abutment has been well thought out. Whatever the purpose, to bind or
to brace, to lift or to support, everything tells.




SKETCHES OF INDIA.

IV.--CONCLUSION.


The Koutab Minar, which I had first viewed nine miles off from one
of the little kiosquelets crowning the minarets of the Jammah
Masjid, improved upon closer acquaintance. One recognizes in the word
"minaret" the diminutive of "minar," the latter being to the former
as a tower to a turret. This minar of Koutab's--it was erected by the
Mussulman general Koutab-Oudeen-Eibeg in the year 1200 to commemorate
his success over the Rajpút emperor Pirthi-Raj--is two hundred and
twenty feet high, and the cunning architect who designed it managed to
greatly intensify its suggestion of loftiness by its peculiar shape.
Instead of erecting a shaft with unbroken lines, he placed five
truncated cones one upon another in such a way that the impression
of their successively lessening diameters should be lengthened by the
four balconies which result from the projection of each lower cone
beyond the narrower base of the cone placed on it--thus borrowing, as