Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/399

Rh that runs along the cliff from cave to cave is a moat defending the temples from the plain.

It was an ideally fresh and fragrant morning when we started down from the grassy plateau to the plain, but it grew hot as the tongas bumped along the tedious way. As we reached a more cultivated stretch of country, sago- and cocoa-palms rustled their dusty fronds in the rising breeze that soon brought with it a rain-cloud and a cold mist that pierced to the marrow. The rain came in blinding sheets, swept through the tongas, and for two hours trickled down on us and our rolls of bedding. We arrived at the station in time to be partially dried over pans of charcoal as we ate a hurried dinner. The train rumbled in toward nine o'clock, and we rode as far as Kalyan, where we waited from four to seven o'clock, when the Poona train picked us up. We had the first new car we had seen, a shining, highly varnished contrast to the ancient, unswept, unwashed cars in which we had been jolted over India. Peacock-blue glass in the windows gave an unearthly look to the red, scorched landscapes we rode through in ascending the. By twenty-one tunnels and many loops and zigzags we rose two thousand feet in seventeen miles, the train halting at several reversing stations, where the engine switched past to join the other end of the train. We had eagle views out and down to rocky cañons as bare, dry, and roughly sculptured by the elements as any in our arid regions of the Southwest, even the familiar cactus of Arizona deserts flourishing in the wastes of rock and sand.