Page:The Rock-cut Temples of India.djvu/207



HE first Cave that begins, or rather ends, the series in the northerly direction, possesses the most highly ornamented, perhaps it might be said, the handsomest exterior of all the Viharas of Ajunta. The hall of its interior is 64 feet square, adorned with twenty pillars, each 3 ft. in diameter, all of them richly carved, and with bold bracket capitals.

The interior has been a good deal filled with mud, but notwithstanding this, its paintings are tolerably entire, and some of them are interesting, but like the sculpture and all the details of the architecture, they are small, and frittered away, and possess nothing of that breadth of treatment which characterizes some of the older excavations. 45