Free A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal by Michael Preston Diana Preston Page B

Some garden historians think that the gardens of the Taj Mahal were originally much lower than they are today, to the extent that those walking along the raised water channels would have been so high above the gardens that they would have been able to pluck the luscious fruit from the trees with ease.
    When the French doctor François Bernier visited the Taj Mahal he found the gardens ‘full of flowers’ . Unfortunately he did not name them, but they probably included roses (so essential to the attar of roses invented by Mumtaz’s grandmother), as well as irises, crown imperials and other spring bulbs featured in the tomb’s inlay work. As regards other flowers, Jahangir mentions, among his favourite bushes, jasmine – another source of perfume – and the flowers of the pagoda tree. Among the fruit trees would have been the mango and the orange. The Moghuls also loved apples and pears. Although easier to cultivate in the more temperate climate of Kashmir, they grew in Agra, if carefully watered, for the dry three quarters of the year. *
    As everyone who has ever visited a construction site knows, the actual planting of the Taj Mahal’s garden would have had to await the completion of the remainder of the complex and the removal of all the rubble, scaffolding and other building paraphernalia. However, the architects would have drawn up the detailed plans for the gardens at the same time as those for the rest of the complex, not only because the garden was an integral part of the overall concept but also to allow the builders to construct the garden features, such as platforms and paths, and, in particular, the system for supplying water to the Taj’s pools and fountains from the Jumna River.
    The scale and sophistication of these waterworks, which were built to the west of the site and are currently being excavated and restored, again show that the Taj was an immense engineering achievement as well as an artistic one. West of the Taj, where the land slopes down to the Jumna, the builders diverted the river’s waters into a settlement tank where silt and other debris would sink to the bottom and then into a channel parallel to the western wall of the Taj and some 250 feet from it. Alongside this channel’s western edge the workers constructed a tall arched brick aqueduct. They made the top of the aqueduct wide enough to contain not only another water channel but also a system of thirteen purs to raise the water up to it.
    Each pur consisted of a roller placed at the edge of the aqueduct, overlooking the water channel below. A leather bucket was attached to a rope wound around the roller and water was raised by an attendant leading a pair of oxen away from the roller down a gentle slope. (The buckets were made from the skins of oxen tied together at the four extremities – an ominous indication to the oxen of their eventual fate.) The Moghuls had continued to use the system of purs native to India, despite Babur’s condemnation of it as ‘laborious and filthy … it takes one person to lead the ox and another to empty the water from the bucket. Every time the ox is led out to pull up the bucket and then led back, the rope is dragged through the ox’s path which is sullied with ox urine and dung.’ Presumably attendants washed the roof down regularly.
    Once the purs had raised the water to the aqueduct, it flowed along the channel into a storage tank and then onwards into another. Alongside the southern end of this latter tank the builders constructed a final aqueduct, some thirty feet high, at right angles to the other one and to the Taj’s western wall. When a second series of purs had raised the water to this level, a channel conducted it to a series of three connecting tanks built into the end of the aqueduct close to the wall of the Taj complex by the western pavilion at the terminus of the Taj’s main east–west water channel. The first tank – the one farthest from the Taj wall – was four and a half