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The only fort of this city of mystics, an alone excursion place and unique archaeological heritage edifice has been started crumbling, telling the story of neglect and apathy while the entire site become dark in evening due to lack of electric polls presenting a deserted look of devastation.
Visitors say the Multan fort and other important historical places of Multan deteriorating slowly and sadly turned into ruins.
The foundations of a canopy or sunshade, a beautiful sitting place lacked with lights can present a marvellous view of the city starts crumbling and visible cracks have appeared there. The canopy situates adjacent to 'Damdama', which is about 20 feet above the Multan fort ground level and overall 100 feet above the city level that makes it the highest place in the city.
Walls of Qasim Bagh cricket stadium have also collapsed after failing to bear the pressure of rain was received in the city a few couple of days backs while the retaining wall of the fort near the eastern side of the shrine of Hazrat Shah Rukne Aalam that had been badly damaged due to erosion.
Multan fort located on an 80-foot-high mound in city's heart. Terrace gardens as they used to be during the Mughal reign and British rule and construction of walk ways there. Centuries old shrines of Hazrat Bahauddin Zakariya and Hazrat Shah Rukne Alam are also situated at the fort.
The Multan fort was built on a detached, rather, high mound of earth separated from the city by the bed of an old branch of the river Ravi. The British Garrison, which was stationed there for a long time, destroyed it but the entire site is known as the fort.
The fort site now looks as a part of the city because instead of the river a road, which looks more like a bazar and remains crowded throughout the day, now separates it. When it was intact its circuit was 6,800 feet or, say, about one and a half mile with 46 bastions including two flanking towers at each of the four gates named as the De, the Sikki. The Hareri and the Khizri Gate but all of them have disappeared. The Khizri Gate was called so because it led directly to the river, which was considered to be under the protection of the saint Khawaja Khizer.
The fort stands on the highest part of the mound on which the town is built and surrounded by an ancient hexagonal wall from forty to seventy feet high has also disappeared due to lack of proper care and protection. The longest side of that wall faced the north-west and extends for 600 yards, and which isolates it from the town but today all the signs have amalgamated in dust.
A ditch twenty-five feet deep and forty feet wide is on the fort side of the wall, behind which is a glacis exhibiting a face of some eighteen feet high, and so thick as to present an almost impregnable rocky mound. Within the fort, and on a very considerable elevation, stands the citadel, in itself of very great strength. The missing signs of walls were flanked by thirty towers, and enclose numerous houses, mosques, a Hindu temple of high antiquity, and a Khan's palace, the beauty of which was severely damaged by the battering it got from the guns of Ranjeet Singh in 1818.
A journalists' pen cannot describe the variety of wealth displayed to the inquisitive eyes. Once this was the position of the Multan fort but during the British occupation everything was lost and finished forever.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2006

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