has been called "The Pink City," either because the
maharaja owns all the property on the business streets and himself sees
that every building is painted of a pink color, or because he compels
every private owner to conform to his fixed rules of construction and
decoration. At any rate, the wide streets of Jaipur are laid out like
those of the homeland, and are lined with pink structures of only one
type of architecture and only one type of ornamentation. Even Paris can
present no better illustration of the value of supervision in building.
There are no sky-scrapers. There are long rows of shops and residences,
with arcades in front of them, and with many variations in plan and
decoration, while at the same time one tone of pink, together with the
sky-line and the arcade-line is preserved without important change; the
Oriental type of building is preserved; and there is a uniform style of
architecture from one end of the street to the other. No city in the
world so well illustrates Mrs. Humphrey Ward's quotation of the poet's
words,

A rose-red city, half as old as Time.

It is not the city of Jaipur, however, which merits our chief attention,
though the maharaja's town-palace and his quaint astronomical
observatory are both of them deeply interesting. This observatory has no
tower and no telescope. It shows what can be done by sun-dials and
structures almost level with the ground to mark the movements of the
heavenly bodies, and thus demonstrates that primitive stargazers might
even thus early acquire a very considerable knowledge of astronomy. The
scientific and literary tastes of this Oriental monarch are also
indicated by a noble public library of his own foundation, which
contains a priceless collection of books and manuscripts in all the
languages of the East.

But it is Amber that constitutes the chief attraction of a visit to
Jaipur. Amber is the original metropolis and the ancient seat of
government, five miles distant from the present Jaipur, and even now the
summer residence of the maharaja, though the old city which once lay
around the rocky fortress has become a waste of ruin. The palace at
Amber is situated on a hilltop several hundred feet above the level of
the plain, and commanding magnificent views of the surrounding
country. Next to the sight of river or sea from a mountain summit, the
view of broad and level plains stretching far away is most beautiful,
and such a view the Indian ruler secur