LOWER TRANSITION ROCKS. 123 



could not be rendered happily by photography, as the many small 

 ridges appearing in the background would be utterly lost. A sketch 

 would have been feasible, but would have required far more time than 

 I had at command. To have done justice to a view exhibiting such 

 an immense quantity of detail in all its parts would have involved 

 several days of hard work. 



To the north of Kumiraswami's temple, one of the most popular 

 The Kumaraswami shrines in this part of India, the haematites are 

 tem P le - cut into rather deeply by the small but exceed- 



ingly picturesque ravine which optns into the Nandihalli valley. 

 Another very lovely spot is to be seen a few yards off the road about 

 half down the good ghat road which the Rajah of Sandur has lately 

 finished and which makes it quite easy to ride up to the temple. Two 

 beautiful bluffs of haematite rising out of a gorge richly wooded and 

 ornamented in the wet season with several pretty waterfalls are here 

 to be seen and admired. 



The temple itself is externally a plain stuccoed building of very 

 moderate size. Only the ghat part of the road was finished at the time 

 of my last visit in 1889 ; but when the intermediate piece of road is com- 

 pleted, it will be easy to visit the temple in a long morning's ride. The 

 temple is itself not architecturally worth a visit, but the geology of the 

 route to be traversed is of considerable interest. A little to the eastward 

 of the temple, a white and purple clayey schist is dug out from under 

 one of the haematite bands and shown to the believing Hindus as the 

 fossil remains of the milk which flowed from the breasts of the goddess 

 Parvati as she wandered disconsolately over the mountains in search 

 of her lost son Kumaraswami! 



The lower beds of the haematite series rise to a considerable 

 Adar Gani gorge and height in the ridge west-north-west of the temple, 

 but they offer no specially interesting features at 

 that place. Further west the plateau is deeply cut into by a large and 

 deep gorge, the northern scarped side of which is formed by the lowest 

 of the great beds and by underlying red haematitic argillites, which 

 being very bare of vegetation give the whole hill side a conspicuously 



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