Jaisalmer Fort

	Jaisalmer Fort
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Every part of Jaisalmer fort, from its outer walls to the palace, temples and houses within, is made of soft yellow Jurassic sandstone. The narrow winding streets are flanked with carved sandy facades, and from the barrel-sided bastions, some of which still bear cannons, you can see the thick walls that drop almost 100m to the town below. Two thousand people live inside it; seventy percent of them are brahmins and the rest predominantly Rajput caste.

A paved road punctuated by four huge gateways winds up to the fort, built when the city was founded in 1156. By the second gate stands a "death well", down which traitors and criminals were thrown to their doom back in days of yore.

The fourth gateway leads into Main Chowk , which these days becomes a crowded mass of color and life during festive celebrations, but was once the scene of the gathering of troops, marriage parties, horse sacrifices (arsha puja) and the terrible act of johar when women chose death rather than dishonor for themselves and their children after their husbands left for the battlefield.

The chowk is dominated by the old palace of the Maharawal (daily 10am-3pm), whose five-storey facade of balconies and windows displays some of the finest masonry work in Jaisalmer, while the interior is painted and tiled in typical Rajput style. The monarch would address his troops and issue orders from the large ornate marble throne to the left of the palace entrance.

Although the fort holds temples dedicated to Surya, Lakshmi, Ganesh, Vishnu and Shiva, none are as impressive as the Jain temples (daily 7am-noon; free, Rs25 extra for camera, Rs50 extra for video; usual restrictions on leather and menstruation apply), built between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries in the familiar Jurassic sandstone, with their yellow and white marble shrines. Walls, ceilings and pillars bear exquisite sculpted motifs, and small corridors and stairways connect one temple to another. In a vault beneath the Sambhavnath temple, the Gyan Bhandar (daily 10-11am) contains Jain manuscripts, paintings and astrological charts dating back to the eleventh century, among them one of India's oldest surviving palm-leaf books, a copy of Dronacharya's Oghaniryaktivritti (1060). It was saved, along with most of the rest of the library's contents, from Muslim iconoclasts in 1443.