Muttra.
When excavating at Muttra, General Cunningham found several pillars of a rail, which, judging from the style, is most probably of about the same age as that at Bharhut, or it may be a little more modern, but still certainly anterior to the Christian Era. The pillars, however, are only 4½ ft. high, and no trace of the top rail nor of the intermediate discs has been found. Each pillar is adorned by a figure of a naked female in high relief, singularly well executed, richly adorned with necklaces and bangles, and a bead belt or truss round their middles. Each stands on a crouching dwarf, and above each, in a separate compartment, are the busts of two figures, a male and female, on a somewhat smaller scale, either making violent love to each other, or drinking something stronger than water.[123]
Though the sculptures at Sanchi and Cuttack have made us familiar with some strange scenes, of what might be supposed an anti-Buddhistical tendency, this rail can hardly be Buddhist. We do not, indeed, know if it was straight or circular, or to what class of building it was attached. If part of a palace, it would be unobjectionable. But if it belonged to a temple, it ought to have been dedicated to Krishna, not to Buddha. It is not, indeed, impossible that a form of Vishnuism may have co-existed with Buddhism in the neighbourhood of Bindrabun, even at this early age. But these are problems, the existence of which is only just dawning upon us, and which cannot be investigated in a work like the present.
Sanchi.
29. Rail at Sanchi.
(From a Drawing by Gen. Cunningham.)
Though the rails surrounding the topes at Sanchi are not, in themselves, so interesting as those at Buddh Gaya and Bharhut, still they are useful in exhibiting the various steps by which the modes of decorating rails were arrived at, and the torans or gateways of the great rail are quite unequalled by any other examples known to exist in India. The rail that surrounds the great tope may be described as a circular enclosure 140 ft. in diameter, but not quite regular, being elliptical on one side, to admit of the ramp or stairs leading to the berm or procession-path surrounding the monument. As will be seen from the annexed woodcut (No. 29), it consists of octagonal pillars 8 ft. in height, and spaced 2 ft. apart. These are joined together at the top by a rail 2 ft. 3 in. deep, held in its position by a tenon cut on the top of the pillars, as at Stonehenge; between the pillars are three intermediate rails, which are slipped into lens-shaped holes, on either side, the whole showing how essentially wooden the construction is. The pillars, for instance, could not have been put up first, and the rails added afterwards. They must have been inserted into the right or left hand posts, and supported while the next pillar was pushed laterally, so as to take their ends, and when the top rail was shut down the whole became mortised together as a piece of carpentry, but not as any stone-work was done, either before or afterwards.
