History of Mediaeval Hindu India (being a History of India from 600 to 1200 A.D.) v3.c33.s4.19

v3.c33.s4.19

"They had built one thousand castles which they had made idol-temples and in the midst of the city they had built a temple higher than all, to delineate the beauty and decoration of which the pens of all writers and the pencils of all painters would be powerless. In the memoir which the Sultan wrote of this journey he thus declares that if any one should undertake to build a fabric like that, he would expend thereon one hundred thousand packets of a thousand dinars and would not complete it in two hundred years with the assistance of the most ingenious masters. And among the mass of idols there were five idols made of pure gold of the height of five cubits; and one had a jacinth arranged on it which the Sultan would have bought in the bazar gladly for fifty thousand dinars; and another had a sapphire of azure water of one solid piece weighing four hundred miskāls. From the feet of that idol they got 400, miskals weight of gold. Of silver the idols were so many that they who estimated their weights took a long time in