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To my eyes it has an unearthly loveliness which I make no effort to pass on to others. The Taj Mahal was built by that inspired friend of architecture, Shah Jahan, as the tomb of the best beloved of his wives, Arjmand Banu, called Mumtaz-i-Mahal or Pride of the Palace. There she lies, and there lies her husband.
The inscription in Persian characters over the archway, "Only the Pure in Heart May Enter the Garden of God," is enough to assure one that Arjmand Banu, "The Exalted One of the Palace," whose dust it was built to shelter, was a queen as beautiful in character as she was in form and feature. We know but little about her. "Mumtaz-i-Mahal," they called her "Pride of the Palace."
And seven times Arjmand Banu walked the ancient way of motherhood that way along which woman finds the testing of her soul, the mystic reach and infinite meaning of her existence, as man must find his in some bitter conflict that forever frees him from the bonds of selfishness.
You know how Shah Jehan, grandson of Akbar, first Mogul Emperor of Hindustan, loved and married the beautiful Persian Arjmand Banu, called Mumtaz-i-Mahal, and when she died he, in his grief, swore that she should have the loveliest tomb the world ever beheld, and for seventeen years he built the Taj Mahal?
When grown very feeble, he begged to be laid where he could see the Taj Mahal; and, the request being granted, you know how he died with his face towards the tomb of the beautiful Persian, "whose palankeen followed all his campaigns in the days when Empire was still a-winning, whose children called him father Arjmand Banu, silent and unseen now for four-and-thirty years, the wife of his youth."
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