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 Everyone
who has seen the Taj Mahal in India would probably agree that it is
indeed a thing of beauty. And it has certainly given joy to millions
of people since its completion in the middle of the seventeenth century.
It is doubtful that any other structure has ever been modeled, painted,
photographed or described as often as the Taj Mahal.
India
is a land of architectural magnificence. having many ornate and exquisite
temples, monuments, and palaces. The best-known of all these is the
beautiful Taj mahal, a tomb built by an emperor in honor of his beloved
wife .It has been called "a poem in marble" and is said
to be the most expensive compliment paid to a woman. Perfect in symmetry,
its beauty has never been surpassed.
The
history connected with the Taj Mahal is a very poignant one. When
the emperor’s wife was about to die, she made two requests of him:
first, that he would never marry again; and second, that he would
build her a tomb that would make her name remembered forever. These
wishes the grief-stricken emperor readily promised to fulfil. And
in the palace during the long, lonely nights that followed her death,
he considered how he could best express in monument his tender feelings
for his wife. He wanted the monument to be as lovely as she was. At
last the idea for the memorial came to him in a dream, and the great
work was begun.
Built of white
marble that shimmers in both sunlight and moonlight the Taj Mahal
stands on an eighteen-foot-high marble platform which has a delicate
minaret on each corner. In the center of the platform stands the tomb
itself, octagonal in shape, crowned with a graceful dome rising high
above it. There are four smaller domes around the central dome which
duplicate it in design, as do the domes on top of the four dainty
minarets. In the moonlight, these lovely domes seem to float like
clouds in a deep-blue sea.
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