A STEP BACK IN TIME

摘要

A lack of ready access to water has long sparked ingenuity among civil engineers. (Consider the Roman Empire's aqueducts and the pumps that fed the elevated Alhambra citadel in Spain.) One solution, the stepwell, dates to the 3rd century B.C. and now risks being swallowed up by time. Unique to the Indian subcontinent, where the climate oscillates from arid to monsoon, stepwells descend deep into the earth to a cistern at the water table.