orth
east of this place. This time we got there speedily and safely. I
mention this place because some time later I witnessed in its vicinity a
most curious sight, offered by the branch of the numerous Indian rites,
which is generally called "devil worship."

Mandu is situated on the ridge of the Vindhya Mountains, about two
thousand feet above the surface of the sea. According to Malcolm's
statement, this town was built in A.D. 313, and for a long time was the
capital of the Hindu Rajas of Dhara. The historian Ferishtah points to
Mandu as the residence of Dilivan-Khan-Ghuri, the first King of Malwa,
who flourished in 1387-1405. In 1526 the town was taken by Bahadur-Shah,
King of Gujerat, but in 1570 Akbar won this town back, and a marble slab
over the town gate still bears his name and the date of his visit.

On entering this vast city in its present state of solitude (the natives
call it the "dead town") we all experienced a peculiar feeling, not
unlike the sensation of a man who enters Pompeii for the first time.
Everything shows that Mandu was once one of the wealthiest towns of
India. The town wall is thirty-seven miles long. Streets ran whole
miles, on their sides stand ruined palaces, and marble pillars lie on
the ground. Black excavations of the subterranean halls, in the coolness
of which rich ladies spent the hottest hours of the day, peer from under
dilapidated granite walls. Further on are broken stairs, dry tanks,
waterless fountains, endless empty yards, marble platforms, and
disfigured arches of majestic porches. All this is overgrown with
creepers and shrubs, hiding the dens of wild beasts. Here and there a
well-preserved wall of some palace rises high above the general wreck,
its empty windows fringed with parasitic plants blinking and staring at
us like sightless eyes, protesting against troublesome intruders. And
still further, in the very centre of the ruins, the heart of the dead
town sends forth a whole crop of broken cypresses, an untrimmed grove
on the place where heaved once so many breasts and clamoured so many
passions.

In 1570 this town was called Shadiabad, the abode of happiness. The
Franciscan missionaries, Adolf Aquaviva, Antario de Moncerotti, and
others, who came here in that very year as an embassy from Goa to seek
various privileges from the Mogul Government, described it over and over
again. At this epoch it was one of the greatest cities of the world,
whose magnificent streets a