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.