Word: agra
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...survived past threats. In the second half of the 18th century, it was looted of precious stones, gold panels and two silver doors. The elements have also taken their toll. But these earlier assaults may pale beside the damage that could come from the industrialization of Agra (pop. 1,250,000), which creates great clouds of pollutants. Worse still, the Taj is located in the valley of the Yamuna River, where atmospheric inversions trap corrosive agents for days at a time...
...Baber, the founder of the Mogul dynasty. Inspired by his journals, Elizabeth went back to India in hopes of finding the site of his fabled lotus garden. With the aid of a village wise man, she discovered a Mogul-style well and an octagonal pool 37 miles south of Agra. "I was jumping out of my skin," she says. Back home last week, Elizabeth proudly discussed her find: "It's as if in America we found a new Mount Vernon that Washington had built, or in England a new castle built by William the Conqueror...
...holy terror, a Low Church Anglican minister who tried to flog the hell out of his sons. Grandfather Thomas French, in Fitzgerald's words, "was a saint ... and as exasperating as all saints," a gifted linguist and longtime missionary to India who would squat in the marketplace of Agra reading the Bible to lepers. But when Edmund Knox, sire of the four brothers, took the cloth, it was of a different cut. The tireless worker for his soot-stained Midlands flocks eventually became Bishop of Manchester. But he remained a gregarious and joyful man who loved to trot...
...nervousness, though, was justified: two towns in the area had been bombed with a large loss of life as Pakistani air force planes zipped repeatedly across the border. Included in their attacks was the city of Amritsar, whose Golden Temple is the holiest of holies to all Sikhs. At Agra, which was bombed in the Pakistanis' first blitz, the Taj Mahal was camouflaged with a forest of twigs and leaves and draped with burlap because its marble glowed like a white beacon in the moonlight...
Great Peril. As usual, the two sides offered substantially differing accounts -and both barred newsmen from the battlefronts. According to Indian sources, the Pakistani attack came at 5:47 p.m., just as dusk was falling. The sites seemed selected for their symbolic value as much as their strategic importance: Agra, site of the Taj Mahal; Srinagar, the beautiful capital of Kashmir; Amritsar, holy city of the Sikhs, India's bearded warriors. Forty-five minutes after the air attack, Pakistani troops shelled India's western frontier and were reported to have crossed the border at Punch in the state...