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 44 THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY. [February, 1873. dhist caves that abound in the hills all round the present city, and at about an equal distance from it. This looks as if there had been some¬ where near its site an object serving as a centre to them all—e. g. a bazar where the monks could beg. The best-known is the group called the Ganesa Lena, situated south of the Kfikrt, and about three miles from the city, in the steep face of a hill which the Hindus call Ganesa Pahar, and the Musalmans Takht-i- Sulairnan. The Sulaiman in question was not the son of David, but a fakir who lived on the top in former days. This hill is the north¬ east point of the Hattakeswar range, to be hereafter described. The caves are cut in a ledge of hard rock on its north face, and are in two groups, altogether about a dozen in number. The chief group contains one large vihara about the size of a three-table billiard-room, one end of which is uow occupied by an image of Gana- pati, or, as a pert young Brahman once put it in my hearing—“ Yes; we have set up our Apollo there” ! This Apollo—not of Belvedere, nor yet of Delos—gives to the hill and the caves the name of Ganesa Pahar and GaneSa Lena respectively, and to the neighbouring camping- ground that of Ganesa Mai. He is rather a fashionable deity in Junnar, and in my time used to be an object of pilgrimage from con¬ siderable distances. East of the large vihara is a beautiful little chaitya, having pillars carved in the Karld style, but with more spirit and execution. The figures are elephants and tigers. The roof has horse-shoe ribs of stone, cut in the living rock ; and this, with the supe¬ riority of the carving, indicates, I should think, a later date than that of KarlA The other caves are not in any way specially remarkable, unless that one of them contains a spring of very good water, which the pujaris of Ganapati try to pre¬ vent chance visitors from drinking. There is a good flight of steps part of the way up to this group, and a rough path the rest of it. The other half of the Ganesa Lena lies about half a mile further east, in a gorge, and is remark¬ able for the carving of one doorway (in a chaitya), and for the utter inaccessibility of some of the caves. Whether they were originally approached by means of ropes and ladders, or whether the steps have been destroyed by time, I cannot say. At any rate they are a great comfort to birds and bees. There are some inscriptions in these and the other caves, but they have all, I believe, been recorded by Dr. Bhaa Daji, and most of them by other people too. The next group of caves is called the Tulsi Lena, and is situated about three miles south-west of the town. They are, as far as I understand the matter, rather inferior to the Ganesa Lena, but in much the same style, and worth seeing in any case. The third group however, in the south-western face of the fort of &iwner, presents something new. For whereas the pillars of the Ganesa and Tulsi caves were of stone, and hewn, as far as possible, out of the rock, generally with a lotus-head, those of this group appear to have been either of wood or of stone deliberately built up ; for they are quite gone, and nothing remains but the capitals in each case carved downwards from the lintel of living rock, and having a hole about one inch in diameter in the centre of the inferior face, as if to receive a point or rivet. The shape, too, of the capitals differs, for these are carved in (so to speak) concentric squares. The remains of a similar pattern in red, yellow, black, and white fresco still remained in 1871 on the ceiling of the largest caye—a vihara, not quite so big as that in the Ganesa Pahar, The native legend, as usual, is that the five Pandus hewed out the caves in a night in pursuance of some bargain, that they parcelled out the work among them, and that he to whom this part of it fell was overtaken by morning, and left the pillars unmade. Who the lazy hero was, they cannot tell, but it was not Bhima, for we shall meet with his handiwork further on, Iu the north¬ east face of the fort are two more groups of caves, none of which are of any size. They are mostly small viharas, with their fronts supported by lotus-headed stone pillars; and the pendant capital which. I have described is not found, as far as I recollect, in any of them. In one, how¬ ever, the same frescoed ceiling-patten* was in existence in ray time. The last of the cave-hills is the Man Mon, a long ridge lying east of the fort, and separated from it by a gap called the Barao Khind. There are three small groups of caves in it, the chief being that attributed to the hero Bhima, and called after him Bhima Sankar. These are not to be confused with the famous temple of Bhima Sankar built by Nana Fadnavis at the source of the river of that name. The top of this Man Mori hill is the site of a fakir’s shrine, with a cistern, said never to run dry ; and the same is the case with a similar shrine and cistern on an