been finished a month; and struck, as I passed it, with so
noble a work, apparently new, and under such a government, I alighted
from my horse, went in, and read the inscription, which told me the
date of the building and the name of the founder. There is no stucco-
work over any part of it, nor is any required on such beautiful
materials; and the stones are all so nicely cut that cement seems to
have been considered useless. It has the usual two minarets or
towers, and over the arches and alcoves are carved, as customary,
passages from the Koran, in the beautiful Kufic characters.[14] The
court and camp of the chief extends out from the southern end of the
hill for several miles.

The whole of the hill on which the fort of Gwalior stands had
evidently, at no very distant period, been covered by a mass of
basalt, surmounted by a crust of indurated brown and red iron clay,
with lithomarge, which often assumes the appearance of common
laterite. The boulders of basalt, which still cap some part of the
hill, and form the greater part of the glacis at the bottom, are for
the most part in a state of rapid decomposition; but some of them are
still so hard and fresh that the hammer rings upon them as upon a
bell, and their fracture is brilliantly crystalline. The basalt is
the same as that which caps the sandstone hills of the Vindhya range
throughout Malwa. The sandstone hills around Gwalior all rise in the
same abrupt manner from the plain as those through Malwa generally;
and they have almost all of them the same basaltic glacis at their
base, with boulders of that rock scattered over the top, all
indicating that they were at one time buried, in the same manner
under one great mass of volcanic matter, thrown out from their
submarine craters in streams of lava, or diffused through the ocean
or lakes in ashes, and deposited in strata. The geological character
of the country about Gwalior is very similar to that of the country
about Sagar; and I may say the same of the Vindhya range generally,
as far as I have seen it, from Mirzapore on the Ganges to Bhopal in
Malwa--hills of sandstone rising suddenly from alluvial plain, and
capped, or bearing signs of having been capped, by basalt reposing
immediately upon it, and partly covered in its turn by beds of
indurated iron clay.[15]

The fortress of Gwalior was celebrated for its strength under the
Hindoo sovereigns of India; but was taken by the Muhammadans after a
long siege,