There
Is Their Handwriting Upon The Temple Wall, Upon The Granite Slab
Which Has Mocked At Time; But There Is No Man To Decipher It.
There are the gigantic idols before whom millions have bowed;
there is the same vacant stare upon their features of rock which
gazed upon the multitudes of yore; but they no longer stare upon
the pomp of the glorious city, but upon ruin, and rank weeds, and
utter desolation.
How many suns have risen and how many nights
have darkened the earth since silence has reigned amidst the
city, no man can tell. No mortal can say what fate befell those
hosts of heathens, nor when they vanished from the earth. Day
and night succeed each other, and the shade of the setting sun
still falls from the great Dagoba; but it is the "valley of the
shadow of death" upon which that shadow falls like a pall over
the corpse of a nation.
The great Dagoba now remains a heap of mouldering brickwork,
still retaining its form, but shorn of all its beauty. The
stucco covering has almost all disappeared, leaving a patch here
and there upon the most sheltered portions of the building.
Scrubby brushwood and rank grass and lichens have for the most
part covered its surface, giving it the appearance rather of a
huge mound of earth than of an ancient building. A portion of
the palace is also standing, and, although for the most part
blocked up with ruins, there is still sufficient to denote its
former importance. The bricks, or rather the tiles, of which all
the buildings are composed, are of such an imperishable nature
that they still adhere to each other in large masses in spots
where portions of the buildings have fallen.
In one portion of the ruins there are a number of beautiful
fluted columns, with carved capitals, still remaining in a
perfect state. Among these are the ruins of a large flight of
steps; near them, again, a stone-lined tank, which was evidently
intended as a bath; and everything denotes the former comfort and
arrangement of a first-class establishment. There are
innumerable relics, all interesting and worthy of individual
attention, throughout the ruins over a surface of many miles, but
they are mostly overgrown with jungle or covered with rank grass.
The apparent undulations of the ground in all directions are
simply the remains of fallen streets and buildings overgrown in
like manner with tangled vegetation.
The most interesting, as being the most perfect, specimen, is the
small rock temple, which, being hewn out of the solid stone, is
still in complete preservation. This is a small chamber in the
face of an abrupt rock, which, doubtless, being partly a natural
cavern, has been enlarged to the present size by the chisel; and
the entrance, which may have been originally a small hole, has
been shaped into an arched doorway. The interior is not more
than perhaps twenty-five feet by eighteen, and is simply fitted
up with an altar and the three figures of Buddha, in the
positions in which he is usually represented -the sitting, the
reclining and the standing postures.
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