188 Notes on a Tour in Maunhhoom. [No. 3, 



remainder of the tower is solid briclc work throughout. Its height is 

 about 60 feet, hut the upper portion of it has fallen, and it is impossible 

 to say how it svas finished off. The bricks of which these temples are 

 composed, some of them eighteen inches by twelve, and only two inches 

 thick, look as if they were machine-made, so sharp are the edges, so 

 smooth their surface, and so perfect their shape. They are very carefully 

 laid throughout the mass of massonry, so closely fitting that it would 

 be difficult to insert at the junction the blade of a knife. The, 

 entrance to all the temples faces the rising sun. The objects of 

 worship, whatever they were, have disappeared from the fanes, but in 

 the southern temple there is a stone gutter through the wall, termina- 

 ting in a well-carved gargoyle for carrying off the water used in the 

 ablution of the idol. The bricks used for ornamental friezes and 

 cornices appear to have been carefully moulded for the purpose before 

 they were burned ; and the design, executed entirely of bricks thus 

 moulded and put together, is, though very elaborate, wonderfully 

 perfect and elegant as a whole ; but in some places stucco has been 

 added, and further ornamentation or more delicate tracery attempted 

 in the stucco on the brick foundation, and this tracery, where it 

 remains, is in wonderful preservation. The entrance to the temple is 

 wide and lofty and arched like the interior, that is by the projection, 

 till they meet, of bricks horizontally laid, Door , their appears on 

 sign of. The fane must have been open to the world. The only 

 animals I could discern in the ornamentation were geese, introduced 

 in the scrolls : the goose is a Boodhist emblem. 



The other temples are of similar design, but smaller size. In 

 front of them I observed several pillars of stone, but I found no archi- 

 traves, and the pillars are hardly long enough to have been the support 

 of a covered porch in front of the fane. These three temples are all 

 of the same type, and are no doubt correctly ascribed by the people to 

 the " Srawaks" or Jains. I found indeed no Jain images on the spot, 

 but about a mile to the south, the remains of a Hindoo temple in a 

 grove was pointed out to me, and all the images from all the temples 

 in the neighbourhood have been there collected. The grove temple 

 was dedicated to Siva, but amongst the images were several nude 

 figures like those already described, that were in all probability the 

 ' Jinas' of the brick temple. 



