670 Notes on the Ruins at MaMlalipuram. [No. 7. 



alone be visible from the shore, and that they would be best seen 

 when illuminated by the setting sun, I would enquire, how is it pos- 

 sible that these slender ornaments should shine " far out" in the 

 surf of the Coromandel coast, where not years or months, but a few 

 hours of the stiff gales, with which it is so constantly visited, would 

 be all-sufficient, not only to destroy the lustre of gilt copper, but 

 to dislodge every stone between high and low water mark ? It can- 

 not be supposed that any sudden convulsion lowered the whole coast, 

 so that all at once the waves should roll within a few feet of the top, 

 instead of below the foundations of the Pagodas : for such a con- 

 vulsion must infallibly have shaken them to pieces, as well as levelled 

 the existing temple, whose still uninjured pinnacles clearly disprove 

 the hypothesis : therefore the subsidence, if ever it took place, must 

 have been extremely gradual, like those of the Swedish and parts of 

 the Italian coast : and recollecting the numerous years, (not to say 

 centuries) that would be required to sink the forty or fifty feet 

 which may reasonably be assumed to have been the height of the 

 vanished structures, I only ask, is it credible that the waves should 

 have spared them until only their tops (still bright and glittering 

 notwithstanding the dashing spray ! ! ! ) remained above the surface. 

 I am sorry to be obliged thus to demolish the beautiful romance 

 of the " "Wave-covered metropolis of Bali ;" but it is not the first of 

 the aerial castles of Indian tradition, that has faded before the fuller 

 light of modern European investigation. Like Bishop Heber, I find 

 it difficult to understand how this particular spot should have sunk 

 so much, if (as other writers aver) the rest of the Coromandel coast, 

 both north and south, has rather risen within historical times. I 

 have already mentioned the local features leading me to conclude, 

 that this immediate vicinity has not suffered any encroachment from 

 the ocean, but has rather gained from, and increased in elevation 

 above it by, alluvial deposits from the higher* lands : and if a Brah- 



* The brick foundations I have mentioned as being five or six feet below the 

 present surface of the land, are very considerably more than that amount above 

 high-water mark. I have not noticed Capt. Newbolt's argument in favour of the 

 submersion of the city : viz. that Chinese and other coins are often washed ashore 

 in storms ; because the fact is equally explicable, by the supposition that this was 

 a port frequented by foreign ships, of which some must necessarily, in the course 

 of years, have been wrecked and sunk in the vicinity. 



