Ajmer

Ajmer sits in a gap in the Aravallis guarded by Taragarh hill, and every power in north India has wanted it: Ajayaraja Chauhan founded it in the twelfth century, Prithviraj Chauhan ruled from here, Akbar built a palace and walked from Agra to pray, and the British ran their Rajputana Agency and Mayo College from its streets. The Dargah of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, the Sufi saint who died here in 1236, is the heart of the city. Through the Nizam Gate and the Buland Darwaza you pass the two enormous degs, iron cauldrons that cook rice for thousands, to reach the marble tomb where qawwals sing after evening prayers; on the Urs in the month of Rajab, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims come.

A few minutes away, Adhai Din ka Jhonpra, a mosque built in 1199 from the pillars of a Sanskrit college, has a screen of carved arches that is among the oldest Islamic architecture in India. Ana Sagar, the lake dug by Arnoraja Chauhan in the 1130s, has Shah Jahan's white marble Baradari on its shore and Jahangir's Daulat Bagh behind. The Soniji ki Nasiyan Jain temple's gilded hall holds a model of the Jain cosmos in gold leaf, and the Government Museum occupies Akbar's palace, where Sir Thomas Roe was received by Jahangir in 1616.

Eat sohan halwa on the way out; the shops below the dargah sell it in tins made to travel.