6-24 THE RUINED CITIES. [Part X. 



plies for economising labour, the building of such a 

 mass would at present occupy five hundred bricklayers 

 from six to seven years, and would involve an expendi- 

 tiu-e of at least a million sterhng. The materials are 

 sufficient to raise eight thousand houses each with twenty 

 feet frontage, and these would form thirty streets half- 

 a-mile in length. They would construct a town the size 

 of Ipswich or Coventry ; they would fine an ordinary 

 railway tunnel twenty miles long, or form a wall one foot 

 in thickness and ten feet in height, reaching from London 

 to Edinburgh. 



Such are the dagobas of Anarajapoora, structures whose 

 stupendous dimensions and the waste and misapphcation 

 of labour lavished on them are hardly outdone even 

 in the instance of the Pyramids of Egypt. In the in- 

 fancy of art, the origin of these "high places" may pos- 

 sibly have been the ambition to expand the earthen 

 mound which covered the ashes of the dead into the 

 dimensions of the eternal hills, the earhest altars for 

 adoration and sacrifice. And in their present condition, 

 ahke defiant of decay and triumphant over time, they 

 are invested with singidar interest as monuments of an 

 age before the people of the East had learned to hollow 

 caves in rocks, or elevate temples on the sohd earth. 



For miles round Anarajapoora the sm'face of the 

 country is covered with remnants and fragments of the 

 ancient city ; in some places the soil is red with the dust 

 of crumbling bricks ; broken statues of bulls and ele- 

 phants, stone sarcophagi and pedestals, ornamented with 

 grotesque human figures, he hidden in the jungle ; but the 

 most surprising of all is the multitude of columns, " the 

 world of hewn stone pillars," which excited the astonish- 

 ment of Knox when effecting his escape from captivity.^ 



The number of wild animals in the sm-rounding 

 district is quite extraordinary. Elephants are seen 

 close to the ruins, bufflxloes luxuriate in the damp 

 sedge, crocodiles abound in the tanks, herds of deer 



' Helation, ^c, pt. iv. ch. ii. p. 165. 



