The interior decorations of the roof can only be conjecturally determined, as I was unable to discover any ornamented stones that could with certainty be assigned to it. Baron Hugel doubts that Márttand ever had a roof; but, as the walls of the temple are still standing, the numerous heaps of large stones that are scattered about on all sides can only have belonged to the roof.
I can almost fancy that the erection of this sun-temple was suggested by the magnificent sunny prospect which its position commands. It overlooks the finest view in Kashmír, and perhaps in the known world, Beneath it [[358]]lies the paradise of the East, with its sacred streams and cedarn glens, its brown orchards and green fields, surrounded on all sides by vast snowy mountains, whose lofty peaks seem to smile upon the beautiful valley below. The vast extent of the scene makes it sublime; for this magnificent view of Kashmír is no petty peep into a half-mile glen, but the full display of a valley sixty miles in breadth and upwards of a hundred miles in length, the whole of which lies beneath “the ken of the wonderful Márttand.”
The principal buildings that still exist in Kashmír are entirely composed of a blue limestone, which is capable of taking the highest polish—a property to which I mainly attribute the beautiful state of preservation in which some of them at present exist.
Even at first sight one is immediately struck by the strong resemblance which the Kashmirian colonnades bear to the classic peristyles of Greece. Even the temples themselves, with their porches and pediments, remind one more of Greece than of India; and it is difficult to believe that a style of architecture which differs so much from all Indian examples, and which has so much in common with those of Greece, could have been indebted to chance alone for this striking resemblance.
One great similarity between the Kashmirian architecture and that of the various Greek orders is its stereotyped style, which, during the long flourishing period of several centuries, remained unchanged. In this respect it is so widely different from the ever-varying forms and plastic vagaries of the Hindú architecture that it is impossible to conceive their evolution from a common origin.
I feel convinced myself that several of the Kashmirian forms, and many of the details, were borrowed from the temples of the Kabúlian Greeks, while the arrangements [[359]]of the interior and the relative proportions of the different parts were of Hindú origin. Such, in fact, must necessarily have been the case with imitations by Indian workmen, which would naturally have been engrafted upon the indigenous architecture. The general arrangements would still remain Indian, while many of the details, and even some of the larger forms, might be of foreign origin.
As a whole, I think that the Kashmirian architecture, with its noble fluted pillars, its vast colonnades, its lofty pediments, and its elegant trefoiled arches, is fully entitled to be classed as a distinct style. I have therefore ventured to call it the Arian order—a name to which it has a double right; first, because it was the style of the Aryas, or Arians, of Kashmír; and, secondly, because its intercolumniations are always of four diameters—an interval which the Greeks called Araiostyle.
Extract from Vigne’s “Travels in Kashmír.”
The Hindú temple of Márttand is commonly called the House of the Pandús. Of the Pandús it is only necessary to say that they are the Cyclopes of the East. Every old building, of whose origin the poorer class of Hindús in general have no information, is believed to have been the work of the Pandús. As an isolated ruin, this deserves, on account of its solitary and massive grandeur, to be ranked not only as the first ruin of the kind in Kashmír, but as one of the noblest among the architectural relics of antiquity that are to be seen in any country. Its noble and exposed situation at the foot of the hills reminded [[360]]me of that of the Escurial. It has no forest of cork-trees and evergreen-oaks before it, nor is it to be compared, in point of size, with that stupendous building; but it is visible from as great a distance. And the Spanish sierra cannot for a moment be placed in competition with the verdant magnificence of the mountain-scenery of Kashmír.