ajas. 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 Sul