Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/95

Rh December morning. Slowly, quite slowly, we strolled out past great lily-ponds, through sandy commons and underbrush, for a mile and a half to the sculptured raths of Mahabalipur, the boulder-temples of the once great city of Bali.

When the pious ones of that place, whether in the sixth century or still earlier, wished to build a temple they took a boulder of the desired size, carved it outwardly until it looked as if built by masons' hands, block by block and course by course, and then hollowed the interior into chambers, even one and two stories of pillared and vaulted chambers. Five such monolithic raths, or temples, remain in this lonely strand, with guardian lions, elephants, and bulls hewn from lesser boulders before them. Two of the raths are mere sentry-box shrines, or image-cells, eleven feet square and twenty feet high, carved with a wealth of exterior and interior ornament. The largest rath is the Split Temple, forty-two feet in length, with an impressive interior hall. All the raths stand empty and deserted, as if touched by the enchanter's wand, miraculously turned to stone. There was no moving thing, no sound but the distant moan of the surf and the rustling clash of palm-branches. The seven-o'clock sun already burned the sands and was reflected scorchingly from the rock masses, whose burned, yellow-brown tones seemed the very expression of heat. Very slowly we walked for a mile through a plantation of young fir-trees, proof that the government of India considers the welfare of this region, whose long-denuded sands are being reforested