mbassador at Jahangir's Court, describes "the long
walk of four hundred miles, shaded by great trees on both sides,"
and adds, "this is looked upon by the travellers who have found the
comfort of that cool shade as one of the rarest and most beneficial
works in the whole world."

II. Humayun.

Humayun, who succeeded Babar, had many of his father's amiable
qualities, but none of his genius as a leader of men. He utterly
failed in the attempt to consolidate the great empire which Babar had
left him, and in 1539, or nine and a half years after his accession,
he was completely defeated at Kanauj by Shere Khan Sur, an Afghan
nobleman, who had submitted to Babar, but revolted against his
son. Humayun found himself a fugitive with only a handful of men,
and was eventually driven not only out of Hindustan, but even from the
kingdom of Kabul. He then took refuge with the Shah of Persia. Shere
Khan Sur, under the title of Shere Shah, ruled at Agra until he died,
five years afterwards. His son, Salim Shah, or Sultan Islam, succeeded
him, and reigned between seven and eight years, but on his death the
usual quarrels between his relatives and generals gave Humayun, who
in the mean time had got back Kabul with the aid of a Persian army,
the opportunity to recover his position in Hindustan. This occurred
in 1555, but Humayun's unfortunate reign terminated the same year
through a fatal fall from a staircase in his palace at Delhi.

Humayun left no memorial of himself at Agra, but he is to be remembered
for two circumstances; the first, that he was the father of the great
Akbar, who succeeded him; and the second, that the plan of his tomb
at Delhi, built by Akbar, was the model on which the plan of the Taj
was based.

Interregnum: Shere Shah.

Shere Shah was a great builder, and a most capable ruler. In his short
reign of five years he initiated many of the great administrative
reforms which Akbar afterwards perfected. Fergusson, in his
"History of Indian Architecture," mentions that in his time there
was a fragment of a palace built by Shere Shah in the Fort at Agra,
"which was as exquisite a piece of decorative art as any of its class
in India." This palace has since been destroyed to make room for a
barrack, but probably the two-storied pavilion known as the Salimgarh
is the fragment to which Fergusson refers. The only other building
of Shere Shah's time now remaining in Agra is the half-buried mosque
of Alawal Bilawal