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378 From Lonauli station a very trim dog-cart carried us through a model settlement toward the open fields. Our guide to the caves of Karli was Dhoond Dhu, a cheerful little barelegged turban of thirteen, who spoke good English with the chirpy voice of a young robin, and made every point tell by the appeal of his deep, dark eyes. He fought valiantly to make a good bargain for us with the chair-bearers at work in a cactus-strewn field, when the cart had stopped at the end of wheel tracks in a plowed ground. They were decrepit chairs with makeshift poles tied to them—carrying-chairs only, as one decrepit leg and then another fell out if one attempted to sit in them while they rested on the ground. The path led steeply along the side of a hill that became a precipice in places, the chairs creaking and momently threatening collapse. We remembered our bogus Nawab at Jeypore when three fraudulent priests assumed to do the honors of the great Buddhist cave at Karli. Blackened columns and a lofty entrance recessed in the rock are an imposing preparation for the great chaitya hall, a chamber one hundred and twenty-four feet long, forty-two feet wide, and forty-six feet high. A row of ornamental columns rises on either side to the ribbed teak roof, and at the far end, in the nave, a massive dagoba, despoiled of its bas-reliefs, images, and ornaments, is claimed as their sacred emblem by the Shivaites who have so long held the place. Dating from the beginning of the Christian era or earlier, this cave shows the first and purest form of Buddhist temples, and is the largest and finest cave-temple of its kind in India.