Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/179

THE ANCIENT ABBEY OF AJANTA 135 It is this quality which seems somewhat to have lost its intensity in certain instances in Cave Two.

My own favourite amongst the caves is Four. But it is unfinished, and appears never to have been painted inside. Its proportions are wonderful — wide, lofty, vast. " This might have been our Westminster Abbey!" sighed an Indian fellow- guest, as we entered it for the first time. And the words exactly express it. It might have been India's Westminster Abbey.

But as they stand, it is Cave One that contains the masterpiece. Here on the left of the central shrine is a great picture, of which the lines and tints are grown now dim but remain still delicate. A man — young, and of heroic size — stands gazing, a lotus in his hand, at the world before him. He is looking down and out into the vihara. About him and on the road behind him stand figures of ordinary size. And in the air are mythical beings, kinnaras and others, crowding to watch. This fact marks the central personage as Buddha. But the ornaments that he wears as well as his tall crown show that we have here Buddha the prince, not Buddha the ascetic. A wondrous compassion pervades his face and bearing, and on his left — that is, to the spectator's right — stands a woman, curving slightly the opposite way, but seeming in every line to echo gently the feeling that he more commonly expresses. This picture is perhaps the greatest imaginative presentment of Buddha that the world ever saw. Such a conception could hardly occur