Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/62

RAJGIR: AN ANCIENT BABYLON 43 head of an old stupa lying in the dust a few feet away.

Passing through the gate and standing at the opening of the theatre-like valley, we find that the river which flows out of the city as one, is made up of two streams which between them encircle the royal city as a moat, even within its girdle of mountains and its enclosing walls. They join at this point. Leaving unexplored that which flows towards us from the left part of the garden of Ambapali, the Indian Mary Magdalene, and past the abodes of many of the characters who figure in the narrative of Buddha's life, we may turn to that branch which comes to us from the right.

A world of discoveries awaits us here ! The path leads us across to the water, but this is easily forded by stepping-stones which may still be detected as fragments of an ancient bathing ghdt. Evidently bathing and the bathing-^/ii^/ were as prominent in the Indian civilisation twenty-five centuries ago as they are to-day. Then the road follows the streamside at a distance of some fifty yards more or less from the line of mountains on the right. About midway through the city the face of this mountain is pierced by a great cave, known to-day to the peasants of the countryside as the Sonar Bhandar or Golden Treasury. The interior of this cave is polished, not carved. There stands in it, as if some party of robbers had been interrupted in an aj:tempt to carry it away, the earliest stupa I have ever