XV
BORO BOEDOR
The deep portico of the passagrahan commands an angle and two sides of the square temple, and from the mass of blackened and bleached stones the eye finally arranges and follows out the broken lines of the terraced pyramid, covered with such a wealth of ornament as no other one structure in the world presents. The first near view is almost disappointing. In the blur of details it is difficult to realize the vast proportions of this twelve-century-old structure—a pyramid the base platform of which is five hundred feet square, the first terrace walls three hundred feet square, and the final dome one hundred feet in height. Stripped of every kindly relief of vine and moss, every gap and ruined angle visible, there was something garish, raw, and almost disordered at the first glance, almost as jarring as newness, and the hard black-and-white effect of the dark lichens on the gray trachyte made it look like a bad photograph of the pile. The temple stands on a broad platform, and rises first in five square terraces, inclosing galleries, or processional paths, between their walls, which are covered on each side with bas-relief sculptures. If placed in single line these bas-reliefs would extend for three miles. The terrace walls hold four hundred and thirty-six niches or alcove chapels, where life-size Buddhas sit serene upon lotus cushions. Staircases ascend in straight lines from each of the four sides, passing under stepped or pointed arches the keystones of which are elaborately carved masks, and rows of sockets in the jambs show where wood or metal doors once swung. Above the square terraces are three circular terraces, where seventy-two latticed dagobas (reliquaries in the shape of the calyx or bud of the lotus) inclose each a seated image, seventy-two more Buddhas sitting in these inner, upper circles of Nirvana, facing a great dagoba, or final cupola, the exact function or purpose of which as key to the whole structure is still the puzzle of archæologists. This final shrine is fifty feet in diameter, and either covered a relic of Buddha, or a central well where the ashes of priests and princes were deposited, or is a form surviving from the tree-temples of the earliest, primitive East when nature-worship prevailed. The English engineers made an opening in the solid exterior, and found an unfinished statue of Buddha on a platform over a deep well-hole; and its head, half buried in debris, still smiles upon one from the deep cavern. M. Freidrich, in “L’Extrême Orient” (1878), states that this top dagoba was opened in the time of the resident Hartman (1835), and that gold ornaments were found; and it was believed that there were several stories or chambers to this well, which reached to the lowest level of the structure. M. Désiré de Charnay, who spent an afternoon at Boro Boedor in 1878 in studying the resemblance of the pyramid temples of Java to those of Central America, believed this well-hole to be the place of concealment for the priest whose voice used to issue as a mysterious oracle from the statue itself.
BORO BOEDOR. FROM THE PASSAGRAHAN
A staircase has been constructed to the summit of this dagoba, and from it one looks down upon the whole structure as on a ground-plan drawing, and out over finely cultivated fields and thick palm-groves to the matchless peaks and the nearer hills that inclose this fertile valley of the Boro Boedor—“the very finest view I ever saw,” wrote Marianne North.
Three fourths of the terrace chapels and the upper dagobas have crumbled; hundreds of statues are headless, armless, overturned, missing; tees, or finials, are gone from the bell-roofs; terrace walls bulge, lean outward, and have fallen in long stretches; and the circular platforms and the processional paths undulate as if earthquake-waves were at the moment rocking the mass. No cement was used to hold the fitted stones together, and another Hindu peculiarity of construction is the entire absence of a column, a pillar, or an arch. Vegetation wrought great ruin during its buried centuries, but earthquakes and tropical rains are working now a slow but surer ruin that will leave little of Boro Boedor for the next century’s wonder-seekers, unless the walls are soon straightened and strongly braced.