Leaving the plains we entered a very interesting hill country covered with jungle and forests where we saw many teak trees and banyans, besides many varieties of acacia. Mountains of striking form came into view, suggestive of castled crags. We soon afterwards passed the Thull Ghat, where the line rises as much as 1050 feet in a distance of about ten miles—which means a steep gradient. We passed rice fields, also sugar canes, and a kind of Indian corn, but not maize, and castor-oil plants which are cultivated extensively. There were interesting and picturesque groups of natives at all the stations. Finally Munmad was reached towards six o’clock in the evening. This was our first stage, and the junction for Daulatabad our next, in the territory of the Nizam of Hyderabad. We, however, decided to stay the night at Munmad and go on the next morning—in fact, if I remember right, it was a case of necessity, as there was no train on that evening. So we were conducted to the Dak Bungalow, some little walk from the station, through a native village, with our baggage carried on the heads of women coolies. We found the bungalow a most inhospitable place of incredible bareness, and nothing to sleep on but narrow wooden framed couches, having a sort of stringy webbing full of holes. The gaunt draughty rooms were almost destitute of other furniture and had no conveniences of any kind. The native keeper of the place seemed helpless. There was no food to be had, and he could not have cooked it if there had been, so we had to make shift as best we could with what we had in our tea baskets. I should not advise any one to travel in India, at least at all off the track of hotels, without provisions and bedding. There was not much sleep to be had that night. The beds were frightfully uncomfortable and the room was cold. An Anglo-Indian official on the forest service occupied the best room, we afterwards discovered, but he, as is usual, travelled with his horses and several servants, including a cook, and a supply of necessaries of all sorts. We left the inhospitable bungalow early the next morning, processing through the village in the same way as that in which we had come, with our baggage on the heads of the coolie women. We made the acquaintance at Munmad of the charming, frisky little palm squirrels which abound everywhere in India—delightful little greenish-grey creatures with dark longitudinal stripes extending from their noses to their tails. They play about the dwellings quite familiarly, but are off like a shot up a tree and out of sight at the smallest alarm. Scaling the trunk of a tree spirally, they have almost the appearance of lizards, and they are certainly as nimble.
The buffalo cow, too, is seen in every Indian village, a strange, dusky, rough-coated beast, with a weird, half-human, but rather sinister expression in its dark eyes, with long horns turned back upon their necks. They walk scornfully along to be milked, with an air which seems to say they thought the world but a poor place.
We took train to Daulatabad and entered the Nizam’s territory. A police officer in his service was in the train, and was very intelligent and gave us much useful information. We now passed through a more arid-looking country than before, where cactuses and low trees grew sparsely on burnt yellow slopes and rocky hills, often of strange form, the country showing signs of a great upheaval from the sea.
At Daulatabad, a small road station, a tonga was waiting for us, drawn by two poor broken-down ponies and a rather ragged red-turbaned driver. Our destination was the town of Rozah, a drive of some ten miles and mostly uphill, on a loose, rough road.
A conspicuous object in the landscape at Daulatabad is the ancient fortress upon a steep hill rising abruptly from the plain. It was a famous stronghold, but was conquered by the Mohammedans in the thirteenth century. There are the ruins of the ancient city which it once protected, and within the citadel are remains of Hindu temples, one transformed into a mosque by the Moslems. Our road lay through the shattered gates which still marked the extent of the city with fragments of the outer walls, the whole area overgrown with trees and herbage, and clusters of native huts here and there. The road to Rozah is an almost continuous ascent, and in some places very steep, which made it very hard work for the wretched ponies which dragged our tonga, though, of course, we relieved it of our weight by walking up the worst hills. The sun was blazing, but there was a little shade to be had occasionally under the fine banyan trees which skirted the roadside.
Towards evening we saw the domes of Rozah on a high plateau in front of us, and presently entered the town through a battlemented gate. It was a Mohammedan town with many important domed tombs, but it had a neglected and sparsely peopled aspect and a look of departed splendour. We made our way along a straggling street, and, passing through another gate, came out upon the other end of the plateau, from which we saw, opening before us as far as the eye could reach towards the west, the vast, green, fruitful plains of the Deccan. In command of this view we found our quarters for the night—the Travellers’ Bungalow—but this, the Nizam’s bungalow, was a great contrast to the one at Munmad, being clean and comfortable, with good beds and sufficient furniture and rugs, and a bath-room. The native in charge was able to provide food, too, and to cook a dinner, which, if not exactly Parisian, was, at all events, a vast improvement upon our last one. The sun set without a cloud, the last golden light lingering upon the white and black domes of the tombs around us. Then followed the afterglow, and then the darkness fell like a curtain, but the stars were intensely bright in the clear sky. The air was very pure and the silence of the place was profound. We were glad to rest after our long, hot, dusty journey, but I managed to get a sketch done before the light went.
After breakfast the next morning (December 12) we started to walk to the caves at Ellora, which we found were only a short distance down the hill. A winding road led us past another of the Nizam’s bungalows to a sort of terrace in front of the first great cave, or, more properly, rock-cut temple, the Kylas, which, coming down the hill from above, one does not see until close upon it, and it is only on entering the court through the great gateway that one slowly realises the wonder of it. A huge temple of symmetric ground plan cut clean out of the great cliff, the straight sides of which are seen rising like a vast wall above it. A mass of intricate and richly carved detail, a veritable incrustation of carving of extraordinary richness rises before one. Standing clear in a spacious court, enclosed on three sides by a deep arcade cut in the sheer sides of the cliff (which shows the tool marks), having an outer row of massive detached columns and an inner row of engaged columns, and deep recessed chambers.
THE KYLAS, CAVES OF ELLORA
On each side of the entrance to the temple in the court stand two isolated columns or pylons, and near these two great stone elephants. These columns and elephants really flank a big pedestal of stone with steps cut in it which lead up to a huge image of a Sacred Bull within a square chamber, from which a bridge is crossed and the portico of the temple is reached. Through this the great central hall, or nave, of the temple is entered, divided into four parts by groups of pillars, leaving an open passage up the middle and across to a portico on each side. From this chamber a few steps lead to the shrine of the Lingam, through a doorway. There are steps and doorways to each side of the shrine which lead on to open platforms, where are five recesses richly covered with sculptures of the Hindu mythology, as indeed is the whole temple, both within and without. The carved treatment and the whole idea of the scheme suggests that the original prototypes of such temples must have been structures of wood, and the elaborate treatment and small scale of some of the ornamental work seems reminiscent of wood-carving.