Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/57

40 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY engineering. It would seem as if the fame of the hot springs must have been the original cause of the royal settlement in this natural fortress, and the artificial development of its streams the main occupation of the kingly line thereafter. Even now below our own walled and moated manor lies an empty tank that two thousand years ago most likely held lotuses in a park. Even now the river that runs through the valley, though naturally one, is divided in parts into two and even three streams, forming a network that is enough to show us the attention that must have been paid in ancient India to the problems of irrigation, in order to give birth to so marvellous a degree of hydraulic science. Far away in Central India is a monumental building, of an age some two hundred years later than that of Old Rajgir, which shows by its ornamental cascades the same engineering genius, and the same royal idea of beauty. and magnificence as we find here. Well may the Indian people glory in the ancestry which already lived in this splendour, while that of Northern apd Western Europe went clad in painted woad.

There can be a few places in the world so old as Rajgir, about which so much is definitely known and so much safely to be inferred. It was in all probability about the year 590 B.C. — in a world in which Babylon and Phoenicia and Egypt and Sheba were of all facts most living and important — it was a,bout the year 590 B.C. that there came along the road leading into the valley yonder, one