T IS THE COSTLIEST TOMB ever built. Baghdad sent its carnelian, Ceylon its lapis lazuli, the Punjab its jasper, Persia its amethyst, Tibet its turquoise, Yemen its agate, and other parts of the world their sapphire and diamonds. Bloodstones and sardonyx and chalcedony and moss agates are as common as though they were pebbles. It's a sculptured hosanna! Lyrics and elegies in marble! Masonry as of supernatural hands! A mighty doxology in stone. I shall see nothing equal to it till I see the great white throne. It's the pride of India.

And especially of Islam. In 1857 Islam threatened an insurrection at Agra, about two hours south of New Delhi by bus. The representative of the English government aimed the guns of the fort at this mausoleum and said, "You make insurrection, and that same day we will blow your monument to atoms." The threat ended the disposition for mutiny.
Sheer Magnificence

You ask: What building would evoke such awesome power? The answer: the Taj Mahal.

The building complex is outside Agra. At every jolt of the bus expectation rises. At last, after winding through a maze of hovels, an elaborate gateway of red sandstone! A four-domed entrance so high, so arched, so graceful, so painted and chiseled and scrolled that you come very gradually upon the Taj, still one eighth of a mile beyond. Up the staircase of this majestic entrance, past stalls offering postcards and curios, and there it is—a structure grand enough to intoxicate the eye and stun the imagination. It seemed not so much built up from earth as let down from heaven.

Following a momentary pause to regain composure after such a visual assault of concentrated beauty, you descend upon a stream of water where fountains rise and bend and arch themselves to fall in showers of pearl in basins of snowy whiteness. Beds of every imaginable flora greet the nostril before they do the eye, and seem to roll in waves of color as you advance toward the vision of what human architectural genius did when it did its best: moonflowers, lilacs, marigolds, tulips, and almost everywhere the lotus; thickets of bewildering bloom; on each side trees from many lands bend their arborescence over your head, or seem with convoluted branches to reach out their arms toward you in welcome. On and on you go amid tamarind and cypress and poplar and oleander and yew and sycamore and banyan and palm and trees of such novel branch and leaf and girth you cease to ask their name and nativity.

Then, rising up before you, a mountain of white marble! Never such walls faced each other with such exquisiteness. The building is only a grave, but what a grave! Blocks of alabaster. Congregations of precious stones. Great arched windows, at each corner. And at each of its four corners stands a minaret 137 feet high; to the west, a splendid mosque of red sandstone, and to the east, a twin building.

To Remember Her
More than three centuries has the Taj stood, and yet not one wall is cracked, nor a mosaic loosened, nor an arch sagged, nor a panel faded. The storms of more than 300 winters have not marred its marble, nor have the heats of 300 summers disintegrated it. There's no story of age written by mosses on its white surface.

It was built for a queen, Mumtaz Mahal. She was beautiful, and it was the desire of Shah Jahan, the king, that all the centuries of time would know it. She was married when she was about 20 and died in her late 30s. Her life ended as another life began; as the rose bloomed the rosebush perished. Twenty thousand men, unpaid slaves, were more than 20 years in building the monument. Some of the jewels have been picked out of the wall by iconoclasts or conquerors, and substitutes of less value have taken their places; but the vines, the traceries, the arabesques, the spandrels, the entablatures are so wondrous that you feel like dating the rest of your life from the day you first saw them.

In letters of black marble the whole of the Koran is spelled out in and on this august pile. The king sleeps in the tomb beside the queen, although he intended to build a palace as black as this was white, on the opposite side of the river, for himself to sleep in. Instead of windows to let in the light upon the two tombs, there is trelliswork of marble, marble cut so delicately thin that the sun shines through it as easily as through glass. Look the world over, and you will never find so much translucency—canopies, traceries, lacework, embroideries of stone.

I had heard of the wonderful resonance of this place, and so I tried it. I suppose there are more sleeping echoes in that building, waiting to be wakened by the human voice, than in any other building ever constructed. I uttered one word, evoking descending invisible choirs in full chant, the reverberation lasting long after one would have expected it to cease. When a line of a hymn was sung, there were replying aerial sopranos and basses—soft, high, deep, tremulous—commingling. It was like an antiphony of heaven.

The Taj has all moods, all complexions, all grandeurs. It has one at sunrise, another at sunset, another by moonlight. It never seems the same. From its top, more than 200 feet high, springs a golden spire.

On Reflection
I sat in the shade of the red sandstone stairway leading out, and reflected. All this to cover a handful of dust! Could the resources that combined to build this mausoleum have been better spent for the living? What hospitals for the sick, what houses for the homeless, what schools for the uneducated might have graced this desperate country of impoverished and undernourished humanity! By comparison, what improvement our century has made to honor the departed—memorial churches, hospitals, universities.

By all possible means, let us keep the memory of departed loved ones fresh in mind; but there is a dividing line between reasonable commemoration and wicked extravagance. The Taj Mahal has its uses as an architectural achievement, eclipsing all other architecture; but as a memorial of a departed wife and mother it expresses no more than the plainest slab in many a country graveyard.

The best monument that can be built for any of us when we're gone is in the memory of those whose sorrows we have alleviated, in the wounds we have healed, in the kindnesses we have done, in the ignorance we have enlightened, in the recreants we have reclaimed, in the souls we have saved. Such a monument is built out of material more lasting than marble or bronze, and will stand amid the eternal splendors long after the Taj Mahal of India shall have gone down in the ruins of a world of which it was the costliest adornment.

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Rex D. Edwards is associate vice president and director of religious studies for Griggs University in Silver Spring, Maryland.