' No existing building within the precincts can be
referred with certainty to an earlier date than that of Akbar. The
erection began in A.H. 972, corresponding to A.D. 1564-5, and the
work continued for eight (or, according to another authority, four)
years, costing 3,500,000 rupees, or about L350,000 sterling. The
walls are of rubble, faced with red sandstone. The best account is
the article by Nur Baksh, entitled 'The Agra Fort and its Buildings',
in _A.S. Ann. Rep._, 1903-4, pp. 164-93.
21. It is difficult to understand how men like the Marquis of
Hastings and Lord William Bentinck could have been guilty of such
barbarous stupidity. But the fact is beyond doubt, and numberless
officials of less exalted rank must share the disgrace of the ruin
and spoliation, which, both at Agra and Delhi, have destroyed two
noble palaces, and left but a few disconnected fragments. Fergusson's
indignant protests (_History of Indian and Eastern Architecture_, ed.
1910, vol. ii, p. 312, &c.) are none too strong. Sir John Strachey,
who was Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces in 1876,
is entitled to the credit of having done all that lay in his power to
remedy the effects of the parsimony and neglect of his predecessors.
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