Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/151

Rh begging-bowl and a glory of six cubits height extending around his head. Brown fields stretched on either hand; brown hills bounded the view; and narrow streams loitered here and there among the stones of the broad, sandy river-bed. A few bare- footed people moved by in silence, and the brown monotony, the comforting warmth of the hot midday sun, and the quivering heat-rays in the air, soon gave an eerie, unreal look to things, a strange, hazy, hypnotic effect, a sense of dreamy spell.

We turned from the Gaya road to a massive white gateway, where sheeted Brahmans and turbaned folk lay in leisured wait for us, and noble white bullocks rested beside tilted carts that had brought priestly visitors to this Sannyasi or Shivaite college of Buddha-Gaya. A much-marked Brahman, with the sacred white thread across his shoulder, led us off by a sandy path toward the pinnacle of a temple roof just showing beyond some tree-tops, when suddenly all Mahabodhi, the Place of Great Intelligence, was revealed to us. The sunken courtyard of the Sacred Bo-tree lay at our feet, and a great nine-storied, pyramidal temple soared one hundred and sixty feet in air, seemingly perfect in every line, from foundation-stone to the gilded pineapple pinnacle,—precisely the temple built in the second or in the sixth century, as may some time be agreed upon, but certainly the great temple that Hiouen Thsang saw. There was, at the first glance, nothing ruinous or hoary or venerable about the apparently well-preserved monument. The good repair was too disenchantingly obtrusive and conspicuous, and for sen-