We saw a gilded copper dome, and a golden flag staff, and our guide pointed out the great doors behind which the festival cars were kept, and we saw, too, wonderfully decorated life-sized images of elephants and horses which formed part of the show on great occasions. There were two black and two white elephants, standing between the columns, under rather tawdry and tinselly canopies, and other furniture of the festivals; one large hanging bearing the words of welcome to the Prince and Princess of Wales, which must have been used for the occasion of their visit.
Various donors of parts of the temple were pointed out, in effigy. The Czar of Russia appeared (not however in person) as the donor of certain shrines and a brass canopy or arch which held many lamps.
SACRED TANK OF THE GREAT TEMPLE, MADURA
The practice of drawing the image of the god on festival days through the streets on great cars seems general at all the chief temples in Southern India, and not confined to Juggernath. At Seringham we saw the great car on which the image of Siva was drawn on such occasions, and also the thick cables—like ship’s cables—which were used for the purpose—multitudes of men hauling the car out of the temple and along the streets by these means. Here, too, at Madura the god Siva is represented seated upon his car which is treated as a kind of throne, the wheels and the horses sculptured at the sides in a symbolic sort of way.
In some of the painted histories on the walls, Siva is shown in a winged car (suggesting his rapid flight and omnipresence, perhaps) and, presumably, his image is drawn out on a car at festivals to keep his presence and moving influence vividly in the minds of his worshippers.
It was curious to see the bazaars in the corridors and outer courts of the temple. Rows of stalls, where all sorts of miscellaneous things were sold—brass ware, pottery, woven stuffs, beads, and all kinds of knick-knacks and toys. Some of the sellers squat on the pavement and spread out their goods before them. The temple and its courts is a great resort of the people, in fact. Pilgrims lie down and sleep near its shrines, and the children play freely between its pillars. Bats flutter in and out of the crevices of the ceilings, or hang in little black clusters up aloft in their recesses.
In sketching at the sacred tank a very large crowd of natives gradually collected behind me, and on each side, and it was as much as the guide could do to keep them from closing in, and completely surrounding me. Some American visitors to the temple whom we met afterwards in Ceylon said that, seeing this vast concourse pressing round the tank, they thought it was a suicide! Travellers usually take snap-shots with hand cameras, and I imagine that a sketcher in colours is comparatively rare. The crowd, however, were quite quiet. The guide was encouraging, and remarked when I had finished that it was “better than a photograph.”
Another afternoon we drove out through the city and some three miles beyond to see the “Teppa Tank”—a large sheet of water, enclosed by a low wall painted in red and white stripes, with steps to the water and carved bulls decorating the balustrades. On an island in the centre of the tank rose the pagoda of a temple, in stucco, and four small pagodas at the four corners of the garden-island—a mass of foliage amid which the pagodas shone, ivory-white in the sunshine.
Near this tank on the roadside was another temple sacred to a goddess who was the object of solicitude in the case of people desiring offspring, and to whom votive offerings of cradles were made by the devotees, as well as doll-like images of children made of baked clay and painted. The flat roof of this temple was peopled with a crowd of these grotesque images, and the carriage boy was sent to fetch one for our inspection.