Message #5: The Swell Well

(Message sent Thu, 02 Nov 2006 08:39:19 -0700)

Hello everyone. I am in Jaipur in Rajasthan state at the moment, hoping to embark on some kind of desert adventure (although I haven't yet decided what form that will take).

As an experiment, I have hired my own car and driver for a few days. This is a common mode of getting about in this state, but there are problems with it. My driver Raju and I basically can't communicate, which makes things tricky. He also has a tendency to take me to carpet sellers and the like, which makes me very grumpy. And you wouldn't like me when I'm grumpy. But still he's friendly and enthusiastic, and this mode of travel means I can get to places I might otherwise not be able to.

Today for example I was intrigued by a brief comment in a guidebook, and so after much asking of directions and bumping about on rural roads we arrived at the place to see the feature - a well. Yes, a well. Now wells are not normally on my must-see list, but this one is just extraordinary (note how I use that word a lot here :-)) and its like I've not seen or even heard of before.

Picture a pyramid-shaped hole in the ground, starting at about 50 metres square at the top, reducing to about five metres square at the bottom where the water actually is. Three sides of this empty pyramid shape take the form of ten or so giant steps. Then there are dozens of flights of human-sized stairs to get you from level to level of the giant steps. Finally, on the fourth side you have a weird vertical palace type thing, which is a stack of rooms from ground level down to water level. This apparently was a place for the well-to-do to cavort about in using water hauled up from the bottom of the well. Or something. The thing I found most strange was that I couldn't see any reason to have so many flights of stairs. There's just no point in having around 50 flights to take you from level one to level two when there are only five to take you from level nine to level ten. It was one crazy mixed-up well, and I liked it hugely. (That funny noise you can hear in the background is just two monkeys fighting outside my hotel room.) It was in a tiny village well south of nowhere, so I doubt Google Earth has the area covered with enough resolution to see it, but it might be worth a crack: 27 00.427 N 076 36.377 E.

The other site I visited today was Fatehpur Sikri (27 05.790 N 077 39.890 E). This is a city built by decree by Emperor Akbar in 1571, only to be abandoned 14 years later. (And *that* noise is a brightly-lit wedding procession going past.) It's a wonderful site to wander around, with all sorts of interesting buildings that no-one is quite sure what they were for. (For example, one large structure is thought by some to have been stables, and by others to have been servants' quarters - interesting comment on the plight of the workers that it's not easy to tell the difference!)

The site's most famous feature is very strange indeed. There is a small two-storied building in a courtyard. Inside it is all one space. In the center of the room is a massive, highly-decorated column which stops in mid-air and is then connected to the walls by four stone catwalks. The story goes that Akbar would sit on the central column and debate the issues of the day with experts standing on the catwalks, but the feature is so strange that I bet its real purpose has been lost to us.

There were two aspects of the Fatehpur Sikri architecture that really appealed to me. Firstly, everything is built out of a dull-red stone, which gives everything an exotic look. Secondly, they liked galleries of columns, and they liked to stack them, gallery upon gallery, two and three and in one place five stories high. The five-story structure also has each tier smaller than the one below, making the building look like a wedding cake. I guess it makes good sense to build like this in a hot climate, but I don't recall seeing the style before and it certainly makes for a fascinating, exotic site.

Hope everyone is well. By for now.