Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/462

454 tom-toms, they formed a semicircle, and one of them advanced close to us. With rounded arms, and her veil floating, she turned herself slowly round with a gentle quivering of the body, so as to make her bells resound. The music, soft and languishing, seemed to lull her senses, and with eyes half closed, she seemed to be clasping in her amorous embrace some invisible being. All thus played their parts in succession; one feigning herself a serpent-charmer or a lute-player; another, ardent and impassioned, bounding, and whirling round with rapidity; while another, adorned with an elegant cap, embroidered with pearls, addressed us with strange gestures, and followed the music with a coquettish movement of the body. They concluded their performance with an animated round dance accompanied by songs and clapping of hands. In all this I saw nothing of that gross immorality which, from all I had previously been told, I expected to find in the pantomime exhibited by these women. Their demeanour was correct, though with some little spice of provocation, and their costume was more modest than that of women in general.

We must pass hastily over the remaining reminiscences of Bombay; the melancholy visit to the European Cemetery, where was at last discovered the grave—"marked by a single stone, on which may with some difficulty be read his name"—of the French traveller Jacquemont, whose account of India contains much that may even now be usefully considered by those who take interest in its welfare; the financial collapse of 1864-65, which took place while M. Rousselet was in Bombay, and to which he refers in terms of well-merited reprobation; and the exploration, commenced in September, when the rains began to abate, of the caves of Elephanta, the Buddhist caves of Kennery and Magatani, the beautiful Brahmun caves of Jygeysir and Monpezir, and the remains of the ancient Portuguese town of Mahim, "which was an important port when Bombay was only a village." These explorations were cut short by jungle-fever, which brought him "very near death's door," and from which he did not recover till the beginning of December, when he made a hasty excursion into the Kandesh district, visiting, en route, the hill-sanitarium of Matheran, and there witnessing, for the first time, some feats of the Indian jugglers, which, extraordinary as they were, appear to have been fairly eclipsed by performances before the Prince of Wales at Madras, where, without apparatus, without apparent means of hiding anything, and almost without clothing, one man produced eggs from nothing, and live pigeons from eggs; and another took out of his mouth live scorpions, and handled them with impunity, spat out stones as large as plums one after the other, and then "evolved from depths unknown a carpenter's shop, full of nails, large and small, and coils of string, till there was a pile of his products before the prince."

M. Rousselet, after spending some weeks at Poona, historically interesting as long the seat of a native government at one time exceedingly powerful in western India, and as the spot on which was, in 1817, fought the battle that finally broke the peishwa's power, and brought the whole Mahratta country under British rule, went on to visit the celebrated cave-temples at Ellora and Adjunta. These extraordinary works are very well described. The great temple of Kaïlas at Adjunta is a grand edifice, consisting of domes, columns, spires, and obelisks, carved out of a single rock, covered with bas-reliefs, representing thousands of different figures and forming a magnificent whole, so full of symmetry, power, and grandeur, that one may well marvel at the genius that devised and successfully carried out a work of which not the least extraordinary feature is that "one defect, one vein, one gap in the mass of basalt, and this achievement of giants would have been but an abortive attempt." To Adjunta, however, M. Rousselet awards the palm. There he found, not roughly-hewn caverns, covered with strange and mystic sculpture, but elegant palaces, gracefully adorned with admirable paintings, which form "a complete museum "—frescoes which, not less in their colouring than in their conception, are simply marvellous. Nearly two thousand years have rolled by, and yet some of these colours, of extraordinary vividness and beauty, remain as though they were the work of yesterday. For the rest M. Rousselet shall speak for himself:—

The columns are ornamented with garlands of flowers, masks, and geometrical designs of exquisite taste; the ceilings are covered with rosework, where persons and animals are intermingled with the delicate outlines of the arabesques; and the walls are divided into panels portraying various scenes illustrative of the types, costumes, and manners of those bygone ages—Buddhist monks preaching to the people, who listen to them admiringly, princes and nobles adoring the sacred emblems, processions where the king is seen on horseback surrounded by his court, elephants bearing the relics, and the whole retinue