We Were Well Aware That All These Ancient Places
Are Thronged With Traditions And Overgrown With The Weeds Of Popular
Fancy, like ruins of ancient castles covered with ivy; that the
original shape of the building is destroyed by the
Cold embrace
of these parasitic plants, and that it is as difficult for the
archaeologist to form an idea of the architecture of the once
perfect edifice, judging only by the heaps of disfigured rubbish
that cover the country, as for us to select from out the thick mass
of legends good wheat from weeds. No guides and no cicerone
could be of any use whatever to us. The only thing they could do
would be to point out to us places where once there stood a fortress,
a castle, a temple, a sacred grove, or a celebrated town, and then
to repeat legends which came into existence only lately, under the
Mussulman rule. As to the undisguised truth, the original history
of every interesting spot, we should have had to search for these
by ourselves, assisted only by our own conjectures.
Modern India does not present a pale shadow of what it was in the
pre-Christian era, nor even of the Hindostan of the days of Akbar,
Shah-Jehan and Aurungzeb. The neighborhood of every town that
has been shattered by many a war, and of every ruined hamlet, is
covered with round reddish pebbles, as if with so many petrified
tears of blood. But, in order to approach the iron gate of some
ancient fortress, it is not over natural pebbles that it is necessary
to walk, but over the broken fragments of some older granite remains,
under which, very often, rest the ruins of a third town, still more
ancient than the last.
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