Page:Picturesque Nepal.djvu/285

 forest, hundreds of large fish disport themselves, and are fed by the people who visit this place as a pilgrimage. Great fat Asiatic carp most of them, wallowing about in the sunlit water, and taking on lovely combinations of colour as the light falls on their undulating sides; some with bronze body and pure purple fins and tail, others an exquisite olive green all over, while a few are a shimmering black, as they float about deep down among the reflections in rainbow-tinted shoals. Below the terrace of fishponds, the architect of this refreshing retreat has devised an exceedingly picturesque idea. Out of the castellated and buttressed retaining wall, charmingly relieved by niches containing deities, over twenty makara-headed spouts project, throwing out streams of water which fall, coolly splashing, into a tank beneath. The entire scheme fully coincides with Bacon's classical views on an ideal garden, especially where he states "that the water be in perpetual motion fed by a water higher than the pool, and delivered into it by fair spouts, and then discharged away under ground by some equality of bores, that