THE TEMPLES OP INDIA 



969 



and many other trades. The blacksmith 

 will not marry into the family of the 

 -weaver, nor will he eat or drink with 

 him, nor will the carpenter with the shep- 

 herd, nor the accountant with the mason. 

 Each profession is handed down from 

 father to son. Before his birth the call- 

 ing of the man is decided and his associa- 

 tions fixed. Society is thus made up, not 

 of men, but of castes, and man sympa- 

 thizes, not with his fellow-man, but with 

 his caste. No success, no genius, no vir- 

 tue, can" lift him out of the caste in which 

 he was born, and no crime, except a 

 breach of caste, can degrade him from it. 

 This the Hindu believes to be the ordi- 

 nance and will of God. His place in so- 

 ciety was fixed at the creation." 



Of recent years the influences of 

 British rule, of Occidental ideas, and 

 particularly of railways, have greatly les- 

 sened the stringency of the caste system. 



45. The famous Horse Columns in 

 front of the Hall of a Thousand Col- 

 umns in the third court of the Great 

 Temple of Siri Rangam, 2 miles out- 

 side of Trichinoply. Men on rearing 

 horses are shown spearing tigers, the 

 horses' feet resting on the shields of men 

 on foot beside them. The temple pos- 

 sesses a rich treasury of jewels. 



46. The Great Gopura or Tower of 

 the Temple at Siri Rangam, 152 feet in 

 height, covered with course after course 

 of gods, warriors, men, and horses 

 carved in everlasting stone. 



47. This group of monolithic temples 

 at Mahalipura were cut from boulders 

 as long ago as the fourth and sixth cen- 

 turies — so early, in fact, that the only 

 architectural models were the wooden 

 •churches and monasteries of the Bud- 

 dhists, which they precisely repeat and 

 preserve as records. Two of the five 

 temples (four only are shown in the 

 picture) are mere image-cells, ponderous 

 sentry-boxes cut from some granite out- 

 cropping or stray boulder left in geologic 

 days, each with its archaic stone lion or 

 elephant standing guard beside it. Each 

 stands free and complete, carved from 

 hase to finial, the coarse yellow granite 

 showing; no seams or crevices save those 



left by earthquake shock. Of the three 

 larger temples which are grouped to- 

 gether, the Split Temple (the central 

 figure) is forty-two feet long and 

 twenty-five feet high. The exterior was 

 first shaped and carved, and then the in- 

 terior was hollowed out, leaving such 

 slender lion columns to support the mass- 

 ive entablature and cornices and the 

 solid barrel vault of the second story, 

 that angles and pieces of the cornice 

 fell away and the solid walls gaped in 

 cracks that show the sky. If an earth- 

 quake caused these cracks, it was 

 enough, apparently, to discourage any 

 further work, and all five raths are left 

 incomplete, their interiors still in the 

 rough, the altars and objects of worship 

 never made ready. A few Sanskrit in- 

 scriptions give clue to the era of their 

 sculpture, but nothing of record of their 

 real history is known. 



The little four-story vihara shown 

 next the Split Temple is twenty-seven 

 feet square and thirty-four feet high. Its 

 exterior is finished, but the work of ex- 

 cavating the interior and the upper rows 

 of cells had apparently only begun when 

 the work stopped, never to be resumed, 

 and only the lizards live and move in 

 these monuments of the great city of 

 Bali. 



48. At Ellora, a night's journey from 

 Bombay, there is a series of cave temples, 

 opening from a path or shelf along a 

 cliff front, that extend for a mile and a 

 half in continuous line. All three re- 

 ligions — Buddhist, Brahman, and Jain — 

 had their temples in this wall of trap rock 

 and vied with one another in size and 

 elaboration. The thirty-four complete 

 temples were hollowed out and sculp- 

 tured during the sixth, seventh, and 

 eighth centuries — all to rouse the same 

 fury of destruction in the Moslem con- 

 querors, who wreaked themselves on the 

 carvings of every single cave, and cham- 

 ber, and vihara cell, and left not one face 

 unharmed in the thousands of images, 

 figures, and heads. Every nose was 

 struck off by the invaders, and whole 

 heads when they had the time ; and now 

 the stain of oil, the litter of flower gar- 



