earlier times for their Hindu rajas.  By the mere force of a civilisation in many ways superior to that of their conquerors, these builders imposed upon them, even in the very mosques which they built for them, many of the most characteristic features of Hindu architecture.  To obtain, for instance, in a mosque the greater elevation required by the Mahomedans, to whom the dim twilight of a Hindu shrine is repugnant, they began by merely superimposing the shafts of two pillars, joining them together with blocks to connect the base of the upper with the capital of the lower shaft; and this feature in a less crude shape was permanently retained in the Indo-Mahomedan architecture of Gujerat.  Nowhere better than at Ahmedabad can the various stages be followed through which this adaptation of a purely Hindu style to Mahomedan purposes has passed.  It was at first somewhat violent and clumsy.  The earliest mosque in Ahmedabad, that of Ahmed Shah, is practically a Hindu temple with a Mahomedan facade, and the figures of animals and of idols can still be traced on the interior pillars.  The octagonal tomb of Ganj Bakhsh, the spiritual guide of Ahmed Shah, just outside the city at Sarkhij, marks an immense stride, and the adjoining mosque, of which all the pillars have the Hindu bracket capitals and all the domes are built on traditional Hindu lines, retains nevertheless its Mahomedan character.  Still more wonderful is the blend achieved in the mosque and tomb of Ranee Sepree, the consort of Mahmud Bigarah, who was perhaps the most magnificent of the Mahomedan kings of Gujerat.  It was completed in 1514, just a hundred years after the foundation of the Ahmed Shahi dynasty, and it shows the distance travelled in the course of one century towards something like a fusion of Hindu and Mahomedan ideals in the domain at least of architecture.

In Bijapur alone, of all the great Mahomedan cities of that period which I have seen, did the proud austerity of Mahomedan architecture shake itself free from the complex and flamboyant suggestions of Hindu art—­perhaps because the great days of Bijapur came after it had taken its full share of the spoils of Vijianagar, the last kingdom in Southern India to perish by the sword of Islam.  Having laid low the Hindu “City of Victory,” the conquerors determined to make the Mahomedan “City of Victory” eclipse the magnificence of all that they had destroyed.  The Gol Kumbaz, the great round dome over the lofty quadrangular hall in which Sultan Mahomed Adil Shah lies under a plain slab of marble, is an almost perfect hemisphere, which encloses the largest domed space in the world, and it dominates the Deccan tableland just as the dome of St. Peter’s dominates the Roman Campagna.  To such heights Hindu architecture can never soar, for it eschews the arched dome; and beautiful as the Hindu cupola may be with its concentric mouldings and the superimposed circular courses horizontally raised on an octagonal architrave which rests on symmetrical