Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/384

 336 DRAVIDIAN STYLE, BOOK III. eight piers that surrounded these four were free-standing or attached as pilasters to thick external walls. What stopped the completion of this and the other raths, we shall never learn. They are certainly very like Buddhist buildings, as we learn to know them from the early caves, and it seems hardly to admit of doubt that we have here petrifactions of the later forms of Buddhist architecture, 1 and of the first forms of that of the Dravidians. The want of interiors in these raths makes it sometimes difficult to make this so clear as it might be. We cannot, for instance, tell whether the apsidal rath, called Sahadeva and Nakula's, to the west of the line of the others, and forming the fifth of the group, was intended to reproduce a chaitya hall or a vihara like that in Woodcut No. 63. Though small, it is one of the most interesting of the whole ; but like the others, it is very unfinished, especially on the east side. Its dimensions are 18 ft. in length north and south, by ii ft. across, and about 16 ft. in height. It faces north, on which side there is a small pro- jecting portico (Woodcut No. 193), supported by P Rath! Sa (F a rom a a two pillars, and within is a small empty cell. Ex- Drawing by Mr. ternally the back end is apsidal, and so perhaps, 1 '] if on a larger scale, its interior might have been : 1 -i, in. as it is, it is too small, and the square form is more convenient in such an apartment. The interest of this rath lies in the fact that it represented, on a small scale, the exterior of one of those chaitya halls, which form so important a feature in the western groups of Buddhist caves, of which, until the discovery of the Chezarla and Ter structures, we had no other instance from which to judge of what the external appearance may have been of the structural chaityas, from which the cave-temple examples were copied. But this rath being in several storeys, and the whole so con- ventionalised by the different uses to which they are applied for the purposes of a different religion, that we must not stretch analogies too far. 2 1 Among the remains found at Bharaut is a bas-relief representing a building so exactly like the long rath here, that there can be no doubt that such buildings were used in the north of India two centuries at least before Christ, but to what purpose they were applied is not so clear. The one at Bharaut seems to have con- taineH the thrones or altars of the four last Buddhas. 2 Among the sculptures of the Gan- dhara monasteries are several representing faades of buildings. They may be cells or chaitya halls, but, at all events, they are almost exact reproductions of the fafade of this rath (see Woodcut No. 123, page 216). Being used as frame- works for sculpture, the northern examples are, of course, conventional- ised ; but it is impossible to mistake the identity of intention.