If once I began to quote from it I should never
stop; and therefore I pass on, merely remarking that when you have
finished the travels of M. Tavernier, the travels of M. Bernier, another
contemporary French observer, await you. And I hold you to be envied.
The Palace in the Fort is now but a fraction of what it was in the time
of Aurungzebe and his father, but enough remains to enable the
imaginative mind to reconstruct the past, especially if one has read my
two annalists. One of Bernier's most vivid passages describes the Diwan-
i-Am, or Hall of Public Audience, the building to which, after leaving
the modern military part of the Fort, one first comes, where the Moguls
sat in state during a durbar, and painted and gilded elephants, richly
draped, took part in the obeisances. Next comes the Hall of Private
Audiences, where the Peacock Throne once stood. It has now vanished, but
in its day it was one of the wonders of the world, the tails of the two
guardian peacocks being composed of precious stones and the throne
itself being of jewelled gold. It was for this that one of Shah Jahan's
poets wrote an inscription in which we find such lines as--
By the order of the Emperor the azure of Heaven
was exhausted on its decoration....
The world had become so short of gold on account of
its use in the throne that the purse of the Earth
was empty of treasure.
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