All that Eastern taste could devise of beauty,
that Eastern lavishness could fancy of adornment, or voluptuousness
demand of luxury, was brought together and displayed here. But its day
of splendor was not long; and now, instead of furnishing a home to a
court, which, if wicked, was at least magnificent, it is the abode of
demoralized pensioners, who, having lost the reality, retain the pride
and the vices of power. For years it has been utterly given over to
dirt and to decay. Its beautiful halls and chambers, rich with marbles
and mosaics, its "Pearl" _musjid_, its delicious gardens, its
shady summer-houses, its fountains, and all its walks and
pleasure-grounds, are neglected, abused, and occupied by the filthy
retainers of an effete court.
The city stands partly on the sandy border of the river, partly on a
low range of rocks. With its suburbs it may contain about one hundred
and sixty thousand inhabitants, a little more than half of whom are
Hindoos, and the remainder nominally Mahometans, in creed. Around the
wall stretches a wide, barren, irregular plain, covered, mile after
mile, with the ruins of earlier Delhis, and the tombs of the great or
the rich men of the Mahometan dynasty.
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