hand, and, on his left, five hundred Abyssinian girls.  Profligate succeeded profligate, and the degeneracy of his Mahomedan rulers was the Hindu’s opportunity.  The power passed into the hands of Hindu officers, who were even suffered to take unto themselves mistresses from among the Mahomedan women of the court.  The end came, after many vicissitudes, with Baz Bahadur, chiefly known for his passionate devotion to the fair Hindu, Rup Mati, for whom he built on the very crest of the hill, so that from her windows she might worship the waters of the sacred Nerbudda, the only palace now surviving in Mandu which bears a definite impress of Hinduism.  Baz Bahadur surrendered to the Emperor Akbar in 1562.

At Ahmedabad, on the other hand, the Ahmed Shahi Sultans of Gujerat found themselves in presence of an advanced form of Hindu civilisation as soon as they entered into possession of the kingdom which they snatched from the general conflagration.  Whether Ahmedabad, which is still the modern capital of Gujerat and ranks only second to its neighbour, Bombay, as a centre of the Indian cotton industry, occupies or not the exact site of the ancient Karn[=a]vati, Gujerat was a stronghold of Indian culture long before the Mahomedan invasions.  Architecture especially had reached a very high standard of development in the hands of what is usually known as the Jaina school.  This is a misnomer, for the school was in reality the product of a period rather than a sect, though Jainism probably never enjoyed anywhere, or at any time, such political ascendancy as in Gujerat under its Rashtrakuta and Solanki rulers from the ninth to the thirteenth century, and seldom has there been such an outburst of architectural activity as amongst the Jains of that period.  To the present day the salats or builders, mostly Jains, have in their keeping, jealously locked away in iron-bound chests in their temples, many ancient treatises on civil and religious architecture, of which only a few abstracts have hitherto been published in Gujerati, but, as may be seen at Ahmedabad, in the great Jaina temple of Hathi Singh, built in the middle of the last century at a cost of one million sterling, they have preserved something of the ancient traditions of their craft.

Firishta described Ahmedabad as, in his day, “the handsomest city in Hindustan and perhaps in the world,” and very few Indian cities contain so many beautiful buildings as those with which Ahmedabad was endowed in the course of a few decades by its Ahmed Shahi rulers.  No one can fail to admire the wealth of ornamentation and the exquisite workmanship lavished upon them, though they are not by any means the noblest monuments of Mahomedan architecture in India.  In fact—­and herein lies their peculiar interest—­they are Hindu rather than Mahomedan in spirit.  For they were built by architects of the Jaina school, who were just as ready to work for their Moslem rulers as they had been to work in