Humayon's [Humayun's] Tomb, Delhi

The Mexican Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz (1914-1998) served as his country's Ambassador to India in the 1960s, and just before he died left behind a memoir of the country, In Light of India (1995) which has a beautiful description of Humayun's Tomb: "No less beautiful [than the Qutb Minar], but more serene, as if geometry had decided to transform itself into running water and colonnades of trees, is the mausoleum of Emperor Humayun. Like other Muslim mausoleums, nothing about it makes one think of death. The soul of the deceased had disappeared, gone to the other world, and his body has become a small heap of dust. Everything has been transformed into a construction made of cubes, hemispheres, and arcs: the universe reduced to its essential geometric elements. The abolition of time turned into space, space turned into a collection of shapes that are simultaneously solid and light, creations of another space, made of air. Buildings that have lasted for centuries that seem to be a split second of fantasy. What Baudelaire called "the vegetal irregular," a proliferation of the organic, an order that has disappeared, except as stylization for decorating walls. The mausoleum is like a poem made not of words but of trees, pools, avenues of sand and flowers: strict meters that cross and recross in angles that are obvious but no less surprising rhymes" (Harcourt Brace, 1995, p. 19).