Page:On the Coromandel Coast.djvu/346

334 pure gold and solid throughout, a heavy bar of the precious metal.

He passed the night in the hermit's cave, and at sunrise he rose and looked at the golden figure to see if it were really true or only a dream. There was the body shining in the rays of the newly risen sun, and wonderful to relate the arm had grown again. Here was an inexhaustible source of wealth, and the Naick made good use of it. He built the temple and the great fort that subsequently became one of the most important strongholds in South India. When the building was finished and the treasury filled to overflowing, the wonderful image of gold, whole and unblemished, was thrown into the tank inside the fort, where it is said to be still lying.

Gingee passed from the hands of one ruler to another, and then was captured by that prince of robbers and freebooters, Sivajee, who held it for twenty-two years, and who put in a Mahratta Rajah as Governor. It was about this period that the two English officers were carried off from Fort St. David and imprisoned there. Aurungzebe's troops wrested it from the Mahratta Prince (1698) and occupied it for a time. The French attacked and took it in 1750, but it proved very unhealthy for the Europeans. During the eleven years that it remained in their possession they lost twelve hundred men out of the garrison. It was taken by the English (1761), since which date it has been without a garrison. The fort has one of those horrible places of torture such as found favour with Oriental rulers in the old days, and would be used again were European influence removed. That at Gingee is in the form of a huge boulder which has a natural well-like hollow. Into this living tomb prisoners were lowered to die of starvation. There is a similar kind of oubliette at Trichinopoly in the form of a cleft of considerable depth in the living rock. No one who was lowered into the