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376 gray soup served everywhere, and reckless flights of the imagination in trying to describe the flavoring were borne out by that scene. A very meek and deprecatory khansamah served that dinner of plain chops and potatoes with the inevitable cauliflower, cringing as he offered any dish, backing away quickly at each sound, and keeping one eye fearfully turned upon us and the door of escape as he moved about.

Early the next morning we returned to the temples, climbed the steps, and passed through the rock screen or gateway of the Kailas, fearing lest it be a dream of the night. We sought vainly for some vantage-point in the contracted court where a camera could cover the whole mass of the Kailas. From the galleried chambers surrounding the court we saw the central temple best, and by a pitch-dark stairway we happened into an upper chamber where the finest bas-reliefs at Ellora covered the walls, and the ornamental capitals of the columns were pierced and chiseled out in the free and bold designs of a wood-carver. Even there the hand of Alamgir and his fanatics had fallen, and the tiny figures and the ornaments were defaced. The caves are still places of pilgrimage, and at the great festivals of Shiva crowds troop through the Kailas, and the images are smeared with ocher and hung with garlands. The tread of these thousands of bare feet for centuries has given that peculiar, greasy polish to the stone floors that no other treatment bestows. In the rainy season, waterfalls stream over the front of the cliff, the courts and halls are flooded, and the path