Qutb Minar

Crane your neck back as far as it will go, and the tall tower still seems to climb forever above you. Bands of red stone spiral upward, ring above ring, growing narrower as they rise toward the sky. Lines of carved letters wind around it like a long ribbon of writing. At its foot, the ground lies scattered with old stones and the broken shapes of arches. The wind moves softly through the open ruins.

This is the Qutb Minar, the tallest brick tower of its kind anywhere in the world. It stands about seventy-three meters high, which is roughly the height of a building with twenty floors stacked one upon another. From the base, leaning back, you cannot quite take in the very top in a single glance. It tapers as it climbs, which makes it seem even taller than it is.

The tower was begun in 1199 by a ruler named Qutb-ud-din Aibak. He had come from Central Asia and founded a new line of sultans here in Delhi. He raised only the first level, the lowest and widest, before he died. The work he started was then carried on, level by level, by the ambitious rulers who came after him over the following years.

His successor, a sultan named Iltutmish, added three more levels to the growing tower. Much later, in the fourteenth century, a bolt of lightning struck and damaged the top. A ruler named Firoz Shah Tughlaq repaired that harm and added the uppermost section, using pale marble as well as stone. So the tower you see today was built across many years, by many different hands.

Look closely at the surface of the stone. The lower levels are carved from deep red sandstone, shaped into ridges that run up and down, some rounded and some sharply angled. Higher up, pale marble joins and softens the red. Each level ends in a balcony that rings the whole tower. Carved brackets, shaped a little like honeycomb, reach out to support each of these balconies.

Bands of flowing Arabic writing wrap around the shaft at several heights. These carry verses from holy scripture and lines of praise for the rulers who raised the tower. The carving is remarkably deep, crisp, and precise, the work of skilled hands. Seen from the ground far below, the winding script looks almost like fine lace wound carefully around the great column of stone.

Inside the tower, hidden from view, a tight spiral stair of more than three hundred and seventy steps climbs all the way to the summit. For reasons of safety, visitors are no longer allowed to go up. But you can imagine the narrow, winding climb through the dark, lit only by thin slits in the wall, leading at last to the open balcony high above the plain.

The great tower does not stand alone. Spread around its base are the ruins of an early mosque, said to be one of the first ever built in this whole region. Rows of carved stone columns still stand among the grass. Many of them were taken from older temples and reused here, so you may notice much older patterns and figures mixed quietly into the stone.

Near the mosque stands a strange and famous object, a slender iron pillar. It is more than fifteen hundred years old, far older even than the tower beside it. For all those long centuries, out in the open air, it has barely rusted at all. The remarkable skill of the ancient ironworkers who forged it still puzzles and impresses scientists who study it today.

Why was such a tower built in the first place? The true reasons are not fully certain, even now. It may have been raised to mark a great victory. It may have served as a tall place from which to call the faithful to prayer. It may well have been meant as both at once. Over time, it became above all a lasting symbol of the new rulers and their power.

In 1993, the whole site was named a World Heritage Site. Great care is taken now to protect the old, weathered stone from the harm of weather and the press of large crowds. The open ground all around the tower is kept clear and tidy, so that visitors can walk freely among the scattered ruins and feel, in the silence, the great age of the place.

Find a place to sit in the cool shade of an old arch. Look up once more at the tower standing sharp against the bright sky. For more than eight hundred years it has held its place here, through fierce storms, through earthquakes, and through the slow turning of one empire into the next. It has quietly outlasted nearly everyone who ever doubted that it could.