"He who from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright."
So we are presented with the under world, the earth, the air, and a hint of the distant heaven beyond all.
Some Hindus insist that this sequence is invariable. In purely Hindu countries this may be the case, but in regions where contact with Islám and other influences have modified Hinduism it is not followed, and indeed is almost unknown. The elephant's place at the base is a post of honour, but he ascends also, and is shown in pairs with uplifted trunks pouring waters of lustration over the adorable Lakshmi or Saraswati, Goddess of learning, from sacrificial vases. Nothing could be more spirited and natural than the elephant sculptures, while the friezes above them are merely decorative and no more like life than are the leopards and wyverns of European heraldry. The birds have superb tails of fretted foliage faintly recalling some details of late Gothic sculpture. In an architectural sense nothing is lost by the want of veracity, but it is curious that the elephant should be treated with so much feeling for nature, while the equally familiar horse and ox are always wooden in character.
MODERN ELEPHANT SCULPTURE, FROM THE TOMB OF SOWAI JAI SINGH, MAHARAJA OF JEYPORE
On the face of the rock-hewn Buddhist temple at Karli, on the Western Ghauts, three elephants affront the spectator, and support the hillside rock on each side of the entrance, with a calm air of competence for their task. In gold, silver, brass, ivory, clay, and wood, elephants serve a hundred purposes, and are drawn and painted everywhere. In such modern work as the tomb of Maharaja Jai Singh at Jeypore, where every detail is treated in a conventional way, and the creature's ears are fluted as regularly as scallop shells, there is still a strong sense of his shape and action. A small pen sketch here given may show this. Centuries had closed down on the ancient freedom, and the Muhammadan canon forbidding the representation of life, though never thoroughly accepted in India, had repressed the plastic instinct. You may hear, when going over palaces in Rajputana, of elaborate carvings in stone, which on a threatening hint from the iconoclastic court at Delhi, were hastily covered up with plaster. In other parts of India recent research has unearthed remains of richly-carved Hindu work, sometimes lying in heaps of broken fragments and bearing traces of fire. But though you expel nature with a pitchfork or shut it up like a jack-in-the-box, it is not to be wholly repressed. Even the Muhammadans themselves do not always obey the law; the Persian Shiahs have never considered themselves bound by it, and modern Indian art is mainly Persian.
BORAK. CALIGRAPHIC PICTURE COMPOSED OF PRAYERS
For pious Muhammadans it has long been a practice of Oriental penmen, who are often artists, to weave the fine forms of Persian letters into the outlines of animals or birds. I give an example of the Prophet's mystic horse, Borak, which contains a whole litany of prayers. An elephant on the cover, a tiger on the dedicatory page, and the birds over the monogram of the publishers of this book, are also woven in words of prayer. Every creature alive can be thus represented, and the piety of the inscription covers the profanity of the picture. Muhammadanism, like more religions, is full of ingenious little compromises and transactions after this kind. A more frank defiance of the laws by which at the supreme moments of their lives they profess themselves bound, is characteristic of Christians—