Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/97

Rh The palm-tree was our Christmas-tree that day, and the villagers, having already stripped it of gifts, pierced the green cocoanuts and gave us reviving drinks. The Tamil cup ids folded palm-leaves into drinking-cups and drank such portions as their elders gave them. It was a pretty, primitive scene, purely and ideally Indian, when around the rock came a British tourist in a pith helmet, a lady in a helmet, too, with streaming green veil ends. They looked at the churn, they looked at the temple on which we sat, but they saw us no more than they would see canal-boat No. 1350 at anchor beside their splendid budgery-boat. We opened more cocoanuts and drank to the merry day, to the Superior Person, to the Pharisee wherever he may find himself. "Peace on earth—good will to men." Blessed is the Christmas spirit and the Briton's sense of decorum. Alas, that we had no letters of introduction with us!

Slowly we walked up over a great scarped rock—and it was like walking across a hot stove—and descended steps in its front to see the carving known as Arjuna's Penance—a rock-front, thirty-seven feet high and ninety feet long, carved all over with life-sized figures and animals in high relief, a whole picture-book of earliest mythology. The wicked cat who stole the gopi's lump of butter was triumphantly pointed out, standing on its hind legs in penance, while mice ran about its feet. "Really," said Daniel, "he is waiting for the sea to dry that he may eat all the fish in it." This gigantic bas-relief sculpture, beside which Thorvaldsen's lion at Lu-