Page:Narrative of a journey through the upper provinces of India etc. (Volume III.).djvu/406

364 A remote antiquity is, with better reason, claimed for some idols of black-stone, and elegant columns of the same material, which have been collected in different parts of the districts of Rhotas, Bulnem, &c. These belong to the religion of a sect (the Buddhists) of which no remains are now found in those provinces. But I have myself seen images exactly similar in the newly-erected temples of the Jains, a sect of the Buddhists, still wealthy and numerous in Guzerât, Rajpootana, and Malwah: and in a country where there is literally no history, it is impossible to say how long since or how lately they may have lost their ground in the more eastern parts of Gundwana. In the wilds which I have lately been traversing, at more particularly, there are some very beautiful buildings, of which the date was obviously assigned at random, and which might be 500 or 1000, or 150 years old, for all their present guardians know about the matter. But it must always be borne in mind, that 1000 years are as easily said as ten, and that in the mouth of a Cicerone they are sometimes thought to sound rather better. The oldest things which I have seen, of which the date could be at all ascertained, are some detached blocks of marble, with inscriptions, but of no appalling remoteness; and two remarkable pillars of black mixed metal, in a Patan fort near Delhi, and at, in the same neighbourhood; both covered with inscriptions, which nobody can now read, but both mentioned in Mussulman history as in their present situation, at the time when the