Ajmere, the winter capital of the governor general of Rajputana, is one of the oldest and most beautiful cities of western India, having been founded only a hundred years after the beginning of the Christian era, and occupying a picturesque position in an amphitheater made by the mountains, 3,000 feet above the sea.  It is protected by a stone wall, with five gateways; many of the residences and most of the buildings are of stone, with ornamental facades, and some of them are of great antiquity.  In the olden days it was the fashion to build houses to last forever.  Ajmere has a population of about 70,000.  It is surrounded by a fertile country, occupied by an industrious, wealthy, and prosperous people.  The city is commanded by a fortress that crowns a noble hill called “The Home of the Stars,” possesses a mosque that is one of the most successful combinations of Hindu and Saracenic architecture of which I have spoken, the conception of some unknown genius, combining the Mohammedan ideas of grandeur with Hindu delicacy of taste and prodigality of detail.  In its decorations may be found some of the most superb marble embroidery that the imagination can conceive of.  One of the highest authorities dates its erection as far back as the second century before Christ, but it is certainly of a much later date.  Some architects contend that it belongs to the fourteenth century; it is however, considered the finest specimen of early Mohammedan architecture in existence.  The mosque can be compared to a grand salon, open to the air at one side, the ceiling, fifty feet high, supported by four rows of columns, eighteen in each row, which are unique in design, and no two of them are alike.  The designs are complex and entirely novel, and each is the work of a different artist, who was allowed entire liberty of design and execution, and endeavored to surpass his rivals.

There are several other mosques and temples of great beauty in Ajmere, and some of them are sacred places that attract multitudes of pilgrims, who are fed daily by the benevolence of rich contributors.  Enormous rice puddings are cooked in eight enormous earthen caldrons, holding several bushels each, which are ready at noon every day.  The composition contains rice, butter, sugar, almonds, raisins and spices, and to fill all of the eight pots costs about $70.  The moment the pudding is cooked a bell is rung, and the pilgrims are allowed to help themselves in a grab-game which was never surpassed.  Greedy creatures scald themselves in the pudding so badly that they sometimes carry the marks for life.  It is counted a miracle caused by the intercession of the saints that no lives have ever been lost in these scrambles, although nearly every day some pilgrim is so badly burned that he has to be taken to a hospital.  The custom is ancient, although I was not able to ascertain its origin or the reason why the priests do not allow the pudding to cool below the danger point before serving it.