building in which they will continue to sit until the statelier home to
be built for them in new Delhi is ready to receive them. But Delhi
itself with all its age-long memories was around one to provide the
historic setting for an historic scene, and Delhi still stands under the
sign of the Kutub Minar, the splendid minaret--a landmark for miles and
miles around--which dominates the vast graveyard of fallen dynasties at
its feet and the whole of the great plain beyond where the fate of
India, and not of India alone, has so often been decided.

On that plain were fought out, in prehistoric times, the fierce
conflicts of ancient Aryan races, Pandavas and Kauravas, around which
the poetic genius of India has woven the wonderful epos of the
Mahabharata. Only a couple of miles south of the modern city, the walls
of the Purana Kilat, the fortress built by Humayun, cover the site but
have not obliterated the ancient name of Indraprasthra, or Indrapat, the
city founded by the Pandavas themselves, when Yudhisthira celebrated
their final victory by performing on the banks of the Jumna, in token of
the Pandava claim to Empire, the _Asvamedha_, or great Horse Sacrifice,
originated by Brahma himself. There too, on a mound beyond Indrapat,
stands the granite shaft of one of Asoka's pillars, on which, with a
fine faith that the world has never yet justified, the great Buddhist
Apostle-Emperor of India inscribed over 2000 years ago his edicts
prohibiting the taking of life. At the very foot of the Kutub Minar the
famous Iron Pillar commemorates the victories of the "Sun of Power," the
Hindu Emperor of the Gupta dynasty with whose name, under the more
popular form of Raja Bikram, Indian legend associates the vague memories
of a golden age of Hindu civilisation in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The Pillar was brought there by one of the Rajput princes who founded in
the middle of the eleventh century the first city really known to
history as Delhi. There Prithvi Raja reigned, who still lives in Indian