when it was being built so modern a masterpiece as _Hamlet_ was
being written and played. Those interested in the Great Moguls ought
really to visit Fatehpur-Sikri before Delhi or Agra, because Akbar was
the grandfather of Shah Jahan. But there can be no such chronological
wanderings in India. Have we not already seen Humayun's Tomb, outside
Delhi?--and Humayun was Akbar's father.

They say the leopard and the jackal keep
The courts where Akbar gloried....

--this adaptation of FitzGerald's lines ran through my mind as we passed
from room to room and tower to tower of Fatehpur-Sikri. There is nothing
to compare with it, except perhaps Pompeii. And in that comparison one
realises how impossible it is at a hazard to date an Indian ruin, for,
as I have said, Fatehpur-Sikri is from the days of Elizabeth, while
Pompeii was destroyed in the first century, and yet Pompeii in many ways
seems less ancient.

The walls of Fatehpur-Sikri are seven miles round and the city rises to
the summits of two steep hills. It was on the higher one that Akbar set
his palace. Civilisation has run a railway through the lower levels; the
old high road still climbs the hill under the incredibly lofty walls of
the palace. The royal enclosure is divided into all the usual courtyards
and apartments, but they are on a grander scale. Also the architecture
is more mixed. Here is the swimming bath; here are the cool, dark rooms
for the ladies of the harem in the hottest days, with odd corners where
Akbar is said to have played hide-and-seek with them; here is the hall
where Akbar, who kept an open mind on religion, listened to, and
disputed with, dialecticians of varying creeds--himself seated in the
middle, and the doctrinaires in four pulpits around him; here is the