And as I throw the shutter wide,
And look out at the dawn,
The garden paths are neatly dried,
And all the clouds are gone.
But hark, where in the morning light
Yon chestnut lifts its dome,
I hear the last, last Weather Sprite
Dragging her broomstick home.
WONDERFUL CAVERNS.
VI.—THE ROCK TEMPLES OF AJUNTA AND ELLORA.
On one of India's loneliest glens, called Ajunta, travellers come upon a perfect settlement of buildings and temples, cut in the face of a semicircle of cliffs about two hundred and fifty feet high. Over the cliff leaps a brawling river, making seven distinct falls before reaching the valley below.
From a distance only pillared fronts appear, but on a closer view the real grandeur and beauty of the temples come to light. The inside walls are covered with paintings, well drawn, and fairly well preserved. The pictures chiefly illustrate the life of Buddha, and the sacred tree beneath which he used to sit often appears in them, hung with rich gifts from his followers. The good works which he did for the poor and suffering are constantly painted. Other paintings show hunting scenes and battles, drawn with great vigour and of huge size; others have pictures of peacocks, elephants, apes, and other animals.
The architecture of these caves is very fine. We can hardly imagine the enormous labour of cutting out the deep ribs of the roof, the light twisted pillars, and elaborate framework for pictures which adorn the galleries. The marvel is how human hands could have done such work, especially when we remember that the natives of India, like those of Egypt, who did great feats in rock architecture, had the smallest and most delicately-shaped hands of all human races.
The Rock Temple of Kailus at Ellora.
There are thirty-four distinct rock-temples at Ellora, near Aurangabad, in India. Most of them are of the usual pattern of cave-temples, some the work of Buddhists, others of a sect called Jains, who are famous for kindness to animals. The more modern ones are built by Brahmins, and these are the true marvels of Ellora, though they can hardly be accounted as cave-temples, being cut bodily out of the rock outside as well as inside. The way in which these monuments of industry were probably built was as follows:—The builders first marked off a large square of the cliff, and outside this square dug a wide deep trench, leaving an immense mass of stone standing in the centre. Out of this mass, which may or may not have contained natural caverns, they cut a magnificent temple, standing on a raised platform, and adorned with domes, galleries, colossal statues of animals and the richest forms of ornament. Fancy the patient toil, lasting year after year, even when the outside was finished, of scooping out the interior, with its great halls and passages!