THE north-eastern approach to Agra is through a waste of land at the same time flat and broken. Formless hillocks and ditches, colourless sand and dead turf, the whole scene was mean and depressing. I raised my eyes, and there, on the edge of the ugly prairie, sat a fair white palace with domes and minarets. So exquisite in symmetry, so softly lustrous in tint, it could hardly be substantial, and I all but cried, "Mirage!" It was the Taj Mahal.

And now we were clanking over an iron bridge above a dark-green river that filled barely a quarter of its sandy bed; deep, broad staircases stepped down to its further bank with pillared pleasure-houses overlooking them. Now on the right rose a great mosque, its bellying domes zigzagged with red and white; dawn from the left frowned the weather-worn battlements of a great red fortress. This was the city of Shah Jehan, emperor and devotee, artist and lover.

And this, in a few words, is the passionate story of Shah Jehan. He was the grandson of Akbar the Great, the first Mogul Emperor of Hindustan. While yet Prince Royal, conquering India for the Moguls, he married the beautiful Persian, Arjmand Banu, called Mumtaz-i-Mahal, the chosen of the palace, and loved her tenderly beyond all his wives for fourteen years. But only a year after he became Sultan she died in travail of her eighth child. Shah Jehan in his grief swore that she should have the lovest tomb the world ever beheld, and for seventeen years he built the Taj Mahal. Also he built the palace of Agra, the fort and palace of Delhi, and the great mosque of Agra; he took to wife many fair ladies, and lived in all luxuriousness, ministering abundantly to every sense, till he had reigned thirty years. Then his son Aurungzebe rose up and dethroned him, and kept him a close prisoner in his own private mosque, which he had built within the palace of Agra. There he lived seven years more, attended by his daughter Jehanara, who would not leave him, till at last, in 1645, being grown very feeble, he begged to be laid in a chamber of the palace wherefrom he could see the Taj Mahal. This was granted him, so that he died with his eyes upon the tomb of the love of his youth. There they buried him beside her. And his daughter, when her time came, wrote a Persian stanza begging that no monument should be set up to "the humble transitory Jehanara," and praying only for her father's soul.

Agra is the mirror of Shah Jehan. In the fort and palace you can read all the story of the warrior and the lover — in the fort so nakedly grim without and the palace so richly voluptuous within. Under the brow of the sheer sandstone walls you are dwarfed to a pigmy. Before and beneath the great gateway stands a double curtain of loophole and machicolation and tower: you go in through cavernous guard-houses, up a ramp between sky-closing walls. Only thus do you reach the real entrance — the great Elephant Gate — two jutting octagon towers supporting spacious chambers thrown across the passage. On the lower storey all is closed, and only white plaster designs relieve the savage masses of the sandstone; in the upper balconies are windows and recesses, all decked with white, and above all runs a gallery crowned with cupolas.

Under this arch you go, a dome above, deep and lefty recesses on either hand; now you are past the sternness. Shah Jehan is soldier no longer but artist and amorist at large. You come to the Pearl Mosque. There is a Pearl Mosque at Delhi, sandstone slabs without, marble within, as this is; but the Delhi mosque is a bauble to this. This is a broad court, paved with slabs of marble, veined with white and blue, grey and yellow. This is all marble — marble walls with moulded panels, marble cloisters of multi-foliate arches, marble gateways breaking three walls of the square, marble columns supporting bell-cupolas above them and at each corner, a marble basin in the centre of the court, a marble sundial beside it. Along the west side of the court shines the glorious face of the mosque itself — only a roofed quarter of the whole space, a mere portico, but colonnaded with three rows of seven pillars apiece, each branching to right and left, to front and back, with eight-pointed, nine-leaved arches. Along the entablature above runs a Persian inscription in mosaic of black marble; on the roof, over each pillar of the front row, is a cupola with four columns, and at each corner a cupola with eight columns. Three domes fold their broad white wings behind and above all.

Three steps for the mullah to preach from, and that is all the catalogue. No altar or shrine or image: there is no god but God. No carving or lattice-work: but the simple pillars and arches, the few cupolas and domes, are yet the richest of ornamentation. No paint or gems — only the clear harmonious veining of the marble. Only space and proportion, form and whispers of colour — and it is so beautiful that you can hardly breathe for rapture. The radiant marble ripples from shade to shade — snow-white, pearl-white, ivory-white — till it seems half alive. The bells and pinnacles are so light that they seem to float in the air. It cannot be a building, you whisper: it is enchantment.

But now go on to the palace. It has been battered and sacked — the Jats of Bhurtpur carried away the precious stones from the walls; but through the restorations you can dream of some of its delights when it held the houris of Shah Jehan. Dream this and it is all enchantment; you have arrived at last — at last, after so many years, after so many leagues — in the dear country of your earliest dreams, and the Arabian Nights are come to life. Under this pillared hall the ambassadors of Shiraz and Samarkand are making their obeisance and displaying rich gifts. Above, in the marble alcove festooned with flowers and tendrils in pietra dura, reclines the Sultan of the Indies on a couch of white marble. Up the stairs — and here, enclosed by a colonnade of two storeys, is the fish-pond; on the upper terrace under that canopy, which is one block of creamy marble embossed with flowers, sits the lovely favourite Schemselnihar, and makes believe to angle. She rises and follows the other lights of the harem into the little square court and portico that miniature the great Pearl Mosque without. But some of the beauties turn aside to the gallery, where, below, is an enclosed bazaar; handsome young merchants of Baghdad tempt them with silks and brocades — and with looks that sigh and languish. They had best be prudent: eyes as fathomless as theirs have grown dim in the dungeons under the terraces, below the water. From lust to cruelty is only a step; and when the Sultan raised the marble and the gems he sank the dungeon, remote in a labyrinth of tunnels. Across it is a beam with a noose for soft necks and a shoot for frail bodies that tumbles them into the Jumna.

The Sultan has risen from his audience: he walks round the terrace, through the delicious Hall of Private Audience, whose walls are marble, whose pillars are festooned with creepers in agate and jasper, jade and cornelian, whose ends are profound and graceful recesses, half-arch, half-dome. He passes to the heavy slab of the black marble throne on the riverside brink of the quadrangle; in the pit below they let out buffaloes and tigers to fight before him; on the white seat behind him sits the court jester to make him merry.

And now — it is the full moon that rises from an arch of the pavilion to the right — the full moon, though it is still broad day? It is the Sultaness-in-Chief looking out at the fight from her abode in the Jasmine Tower. She has grown tired of throwing the dice, while her handmaidens stand for pieces on the pachisi-board that is let into her marble pavement — there, behind those duenna screens, the gauze of lattice-work that encloses her courtyard. She has grown tired of dabbling in the fountain that tinkles on the shallow basin of figured marble, weary of her bower of marble inlaid with gems. The Sultan rises, and it is the signal for the bath — the bath in the dark Mirror Palace, lighted with a score of flambeaux and walled with a million tiny mirrors, that reflect . . . No we must not think of it — nor of the feast in the Private Palace, under the ceiling emblazoned with blue and crimson and gold — nor yet of the disrobing in the Golden Pavilion, where the ladies thrust their jewels into holes in the Wall too narrow for a man's arm to follow them. . . . No; you should not listen to what the Jester is saying now.

But if you envy Shah Jehan, look again later into the tiny Gem Mosque and the cupboard at the side, too small to turn in, where he is the uncrowned prisoner of his son. No Mirror Palace now: the ceiling is black where they heat the water for his bath, in a hole of a cistern where he cannot stretch out his limbs. Look again into the little gilt-domed cupola, where he lies dying, and Jehanara's voice sounds suddenly far away; and the very Taj, though he knows every angle and curve of it, swims in a grey-white blur; and nothing is left clear save the voice and face of the beautiful Persian, Arjmand Banu, whose palankeen followed all his campaigns in the days when empire was still a-winning, whose children called him father — Arjmand Banu, silent and unseen now for four-and-thirty years, the wife of his youth.

Now follow him to the Taj. Under the great gateway of strong sandstone ribbed with delicate marble, its vaulted red arch cobwebbed with white threads, and then before you — then the miracle of miracles, the final wonder of the world. In chaste majesty it stands suddenly before you, as if the magical word had called it this moment out of the earth. On a white marble platform it stands exactly four-square, but that the angles are cut off; nothing so rude as a corner could find place in its soft harmonies, Seen through the avenue, it looks high rather than broad; seen from the pavement below it, it looks broad rather than high; you doubt, then conclude that its proportions are perfect. Above its centre rises a full white dome, at each corner of whose base nestles a smaller dome, upheld on eight arches. The centre of each face is a lofty-headed gateway rising above the line of the roof; within it is again a pointed caving recess, half arch, half dome; within this, again, a screen of latticed marble. On each flank of these, and on the facets of the cut-off angles, are pairs of smaller, blind recesses of the same design, one above the other. From each junction of facets rises a slim pinnacle. Everywhere it is embellished with elaborate profusion. Moulding, sculpture, inlaid frets and scrolls of coloured marbles, twining branches and garlands of jade and agate and cornelian — here is every point of lavish splendour you saw in the palace combined in one supreme embodiment — superb dignity matched with graceful richness.

But it is vain to flounder amid epithets; the man who should describe the Taj must own genius equal to his who built it. Description halts between its mass and its fineness. It makes you giddy to look up at it, yet it is so delicate you feel that a brick would lay it in shivers at your feet. It is a rock temple and a Chinese casket together — a giant gem.

Nothing jars; for if the jewel were away the setting would still be among the noblest monuments on earth. The minarets at the four corners of the platform are a moment's stumbling-block: they look irreverently like the military masts of a battleship, and the hard lines where the stones join remind you of a London subway. But look at the Taj itself, and the minarets fall instantly into place; they set off its glories, and, standing like acolytes, seem to be challenging you not to worship it. At each side, below the Taj, is a triple-domed building of sandstone and marble; the hot red throws up the pearl-and-ivory softness of the Taj. The cloisters round the garden, the lordly caravanserai outside the gate, the clustering domes and mosaic texts from the Koran on the great gate itself--all this you hardly notice; but when you do, you find that every point is perfection. As for the garden, with shady trees of every hue, from sprightly yellow to funereal cypress, with purple blossoms cascading from the topmost boughs, with roses and lilies, phloxes and carnations — and the channel of clear water with twenty fountains that runs through the garden, and the basin with the goldfish.....It is pure Arabian Nights! You listen for the speaking bird and the singing tree. And was it not hither that Prince Ahmed, leaving his brother Ali to cuddle Nuronnihar in the palace, followed his arrow? And is not that the fairy Peri-Banu coming out of the pleasure-house to welcome him? Surely man never made such a Paradise: it must be the fabric of a dream wafted through gates of silver and opal.

O Shah Jehan, Shah Jehan, you are bewitching a respectable newspaper-correspondent. The thought of you is strong wine. Shah Jehan, with your queens and concubines without number, their amber feet mirrored in marble, their ivory limbs mirrored in quicksilver; Shah Jehan, who starved them in the black oubliettes, and hung them from the mouldy beam, and sluiced their beautiful bodies into the cold river; Shah Jehan, with elephants and peacocks; Shah Jehan, returning from the conquered Dekhan, dismounting in the Armoury Square, hastening through the Grape Garden, hastening past the fair ones in the Golden Pavilion to the fairest within the Jasmine Tower!

Shah Jehan — Grape Garden — Golden Pavilion — Jasmine Tower — there is dizzy magic in the very names. And when I turn aside in your garden, shunning your fierce black-and-scarlet petals to bring back my senses with English stocks and pansies, the sight of your Taj through the trees sends my brain areel again. I go in and stand by your tomb. The jewel-creepers blossom more luxuriantly than ever in the trellised screen that encloses it, and the two oblong cenotaphs are embowered in gems. But here it is dark and cool: light comes in only through double lattices of feathery marble. You look up into a dome, obscure and mysterious, but mightily expansive, as it were the vault of the heaven of the dead. It is very well; it is the fit close. In this breathless twilight, after his battles and buildings, his ecstasies and torments, his love and his loss, Shah Jehan has come to his own again for ever.