Gwalior

Man Mandir Palace, Gwalior fort. Terror. It started as just claustrophobia. The guides there were adolescent tearaways who thankfully were easily distracted by their preferred pastime of hurling stones off the battlements onto what or whoever might coincide with their trajectory a hundred metres below, so when we declined their services they didn’t follow us and lurk. The Mughal Emperor Babur described the place as "the pearl amongst the fortresses of Hind," and the fortifications, stretching around a three kilometre long plateau are wild, ruined, melancholy and largely deserted, just the odd group or family here or there, strolling up on a crumbling wall above a colonnade of a hundred arches, picnicking by the scrub-filled remains of a tank while the kites and shikras turn on the warm upcurrents. A place full of Chirico shadows and ghosts.
The Palace in one corner of the fort is Fifteenth Century, and the upper floors are like in other Rajput palaces, cool and airy with carved sandstone screens. But there were subterranean wonders as well, and we had to shuffle about in the dark among the bats to find the way, which was down narrow curving steps within the ten metre thick walls, right angle turns, flights of steps dividing from flights of steps, one ascending, one going down. We weren’t alone, there were courting couples and families here and there, also finding their way, but encounters were sporadic, there were giggles and little suppressed screams and more muddled cave noise. Then we came to a round chamber of grey stone entered through an arch, with a big central dome supported by a circle of heavy pillars. Somewhere off it we found another flight of stairs, very narrow, leading upwards. At the top was a chamber identical to the one below. It should have been all right. I’m not susceptible to claustrophobia, and as is clear in the photograph there is an aperture in the outside wall, so you always know which way you’re facing. The narrow flights of stairs, dark and too low, would have been the place for needing to get out. And yet there in that spacious chamber I felt first anxiety, then terror. It wasn’t an overpowering terror, I didn’t feel the need to scream or run madly is several directions, in fact I could note it as terror and deal with it; but it was definitely terror and nothing else.
Our retreat was easy. There were other steps upwards, and soon we were back among the bats in the nether halls of the upper palace.
Why the terror? The last Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb had probably murdered one of his brothers there, though I didn’t know that at the time, and there would have been torture, but of what medieval fort or palace anywhere in the world is that not true. And I really do not believe in fluences, presences, hauntings. I think it was something specific, the leaving of one chamber that was aesthetically impressive, and yet can have had no humane purpose, and the unforeseen arrival in another, vertically above it, and identical. A part of the brain assumes that you have made the walking in a circle mistake and ended up where you started. But the body remembers that you have climbed dark steps and descended none, so you can’t be in the same place. And then the mind body synthesis, that it is rationally impossible that you are in the place you started, and yet you are - and the inevitable subconscious hypothesis, that however many stairs you climb or descend, and despite the fact that you know which way you are facing because of the stab of light through the outer wall, each flight will always end up in this round pillared chamber, until you die.