_photography

Fatephur Sikri, Inida... 18th January, 1996.

...just down from the rather impressive palace is the Hiran Minar, a twenty-one metre high tower covered with stone elephant tusks and built on the grave of the emperor Akbars' favourite elephant.  I climbed the narrow spiral staircase to sit up on top.  Long views over the soft greens of the plain, dark trees dotted here and there, hazy distances eminating that serenity that seems borne out of all Indian landscapes. Apparantly Akbar used to hunt from up here.  He used to order his servants to round up the game and to run it past him in the tower from whence he would survey eagerly I imagine, take aim, and shoot.  Not the most sporting of emperors it would seem. I sat for quite a while, quietly taking it in, imagining what it would have been like here over four hundred years earlier.  Akbar in all his finery, the vista probably not too different to what it is now.  That has been India all through, a richness very easy to open up to  ...very easy to sit down in, dreamily letting it take you away through what it has known in times past, what it knows now...

Copyright Sunda 1997