Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/390

 342 DRAVIDIAN STYLE. BOOK III. it can hardly, however, be doubted that it belongs to about the 8th century. There is one other antiquity at a place called Saluvan- kuppam, half a mile north of Mamallapuram village, which deserves notice as a descendant of the tiger cave at Udayagiri near Katak (Woodcut No. 272). Here, not one, but a dozen tiger or lion heads welcome the anchorite to his abode, or rather, the devotee to his shrine (Woodcut No. 198). Here, too, they are conventionalised as we always find them in Chalukyan art ; and this example serves, like every other, to show how the Hindu imagination in art runs wild when once freed from the trammels of sober imitation of natural things, which we found to be its characteristic in the early stages of Buddhist art. Here is an inscription in two different alphabets of King Atiranachanda, who has also the birudas or epithets of Atyanta- kama, etc., from which he appears to be identical with the Rajasimha-Narasimha who executed the Dharmaraja rath and probably most of the excavated shrines at Mamallapuram. KAILAS, ELtJRA. From the raths at Mamallapuram to the Kailas at Elura the transition is easy, but the step considerable. At the first- named place we have manifest copies of structures intended originally for other purposes and used at Mamallapuram in a fragmentary and disjointed manner. At Elura, on the contrary, the whole is welded together, and we have a perfect Dravidian temple, as complete in all its parts as at any future period, and so far advanced that we might have some difficulty in tracing the parts back to their originals without the fortunate possession of the examples on the Madras shore. Independently, however, of its historical or ethnographical value, the Kailas is itself one of the most singular and interesting monuments of architectural art in India. Its beauty and singu- larity always excited the astonishment of travellers, and, in consequence, it is better known than almost any other structure in that country, from the numerous views and sketches of it that have been published. Unlike the Buddhist excavations we have hitherto been describing, it is not a mere interior chamber cut in the rock, but is a model of a complete temple, such as might have been erected on the plain. In other words, the rock has been cut away, externally as well as internally. The older caves are of a much more natural and rational design than this temple, because, in cutting away the rock around it to provide an exterior, the whole has necessarily been placed in a pit. In the cognate temples at Mamallapuram (Woodcut No. 185) this dim"-