Note 14 — The Ninth New Year’s Feast after my auspicious Accession.

There is a ravine in the neighbourhood of Ajmir that is very beautiful. At the end of this ravine a spring appears which is collected in a long and broad tank, and is the best water in Ajmir. This valley and spring are well known as Ḥāfiz̤ Jamāl. When I crossed over to this place I ordered a suitable building to be made there, as the place was good and fit for developing. In the course of a year a house and grounds were made there, the like of which those14 who travel round the world cannot point out. They made a basin 40 gaz by 40, and made the water of the spring rise up in the basin by a fountain. The fountain leaps up 10 or 12 gaz. Buildings are laid on the edge of this basin, and in the same way above, where the tank and fountain are, they have made agreeable places and enchanting halls and resting-rooms pleasant to the senses. These have been constructed and finished off in a masterly style by skilled painters and clever artists. As I desired that it should be called by a name connected with my august name, I gave it the name of Chas͟hma-i-Nūr, or ‘the fountain of light.’ In short, the one fault it has is this, that it ought to have been in a large city, or at a place by which men frequently pass. From the day on which it was completed I have often passed Thursdays and Fridays there. I ordered that they should think out a chronogram for its completion. Saʿīdā Gīlānī, the head of the goldsmiths, discovered it in this clever hemistich:—