Having Chosen, For Instance, A Pyramidal Rock, Or A
Cupola Shaped Hillock Like Elephanta, Or Karli, They Scraped Away
Inside, According To The Puranas, For Centuries, Planning On So
Grand A Style That No Modern Architecture Has Been Able To Conceive
Anything To Equal It.
Fables (?) about the Cyclops seem truer in
India than in Egypt.
The marvellous railroad from Narel to Khandala reminds one of a
similar line from Genoa up the Apenines. One may be said to travel
in the air, not on land. The railway traverses a region 1,400
feet above Konkan, and, in some places, while one rail is laid on
the sharp edge of the rock, the other is supported on vaults and
arches. The Mali Khindi viaduct is 163 feet high. For two hours
we hastened on between sky and earth, with abysses on both sides
thickly covered with mango trees and bananas. Truly English
engineers are wonderful builders.
The pass of Bhor-Ghat is safely accomplished and we are in Khandala.
Our bungalow here is built on the very edge of a ravine, which
nature herself has carefully concealed under a cover of the most
luxuriant vegetation. Everything is in blossom, and, in this
unfathomed recess, a botanist might find sufficient material to
occupy him for a lifetime. Palms have disappeared; for the
most part they grow only near the sea. Here they are replaced by
bananas, mango trees, pipals (ficus religiosa), fig trees, and
thousands of other trees and shrubs, unknown to such outsiders as
ourselves. The Indian flora is too often slandered and misrepresented
as being full of beautiful, but scentless, flowers. At some seasons
this may be true enough, but, as long as jasmines, the various
balsams, white tuberoses, and golden champa (champaka or frangipani)
are in blossom, this statement is far from being true. The aroma
of champa alone is so powerful as to make one almost giddy. For
size, it is the king of flowering trees, and hundreds of them were
in full bloom, just at this time of year, on Mataran and Khandala.
We sat on the verandah, talking and enjoying the surrounding views,
until well-nigh midnight. Everything slept around us.
Khandala is nothing but a big village, situated on the flat top
of one of the mountains of the Sahiadra range, about 2,200 feet
above the sea level. It is surrounded by isolated peaks, as
strange in shape as any we have seen.
One of them, straight before us, on the opposite side of the abyss,
looked exactly like a long, one-storied building, with a flat
roof and a battlemented parapet. The Hindus assert that, somewhere
about this hillock, there exists a secret entrance, leading into
vast interior halls, in fact to a whole subterranean palace, and
that there still exist people who possess the secret of this abode.
A holy hermit, Yogi, and Magus, who had inhabited these caves for
"many centuries," imparted this secret to Sivaji, the celebrated
leader of the Mahratta armies. Like Tanhauser, in Wagner's opera,
the unconquerable Sivaji spent seven years of his youth in this
mysterious abode, and therein acquired his extraordinary strength
and valour.
Sivaji is a kind of Indian Ilia Moorometz, though his epoch is
much nearer to our times. He was the hero and the king of the
Mahrattas in the seventeenth century, and the founder of their
short-lived empire. It is to him that India owes the weakening,
if not the entire destruction, of the Mussulman yoke. No taller
than an ordinary woman, and with the hand of a child, he was,
nevertheless, possessed of wonderful strength, which, of course,
his compatriots ascribed to sorcery. His sword is still preserved
in a museum, and one cannot help wondering at its size and weight,
and at the hilt, through which only a ten-year-old child could put
his hand. The basis of this hero's fame is the fact that he, the
son of a poor officer in the service of a Mogul emperor, like
another David, slew the Mussulman Goliath, the formidable Afzul Khan.
It was not, however, with a sling that he killed him, he used in
this combat the formidable Mahratti weapon, vaghnakh, consisting
of five long steel nails, as sharp as needles, and very strong.
This weapon is worn on the fingers, and wrestlers use it to tear
each other's flesh like wild animals. The Deccan is full of legends
about Sivaji, and even the English historians mention him with
respect. Just as in the fable respecting Charles V, one of tile
local Indian traditions asserts that Sivaji is not dead, but lives
secreted in one of the Sahiadra caves. When the fateful hour
strikes (and according to the calculations of the astrologers the
time is not far off) he will reappear, and will bring freedom to
his beloved country.
The learned and artful Brahmans, those Jesuits of India, profit
by the profound superstition of the masses to extort wealth from
them, sometimes to the last cow, the only food giver of a large family.
In the following passage I give a curious example of this. At
the end of July, 1879, this mysterious document appeared in Bombay.
I translate literally, from the Mahratti, the original having been
translated into all the dialects of India, of which there are 273.
"Shri!" (an untranslatable greeting). "Let it be known unto every
one that this epistle, traced in the original in golden letters,
came down from Indra-loka (the heaven of Indra), in the presence
of holy Brahmans, on the altar of the Vishveshvara temple, which
is in the sacred town of Benares.
"Listen and remember, O tribes of Hindustan, Rajis-tan, Punjab, etc.,
etc. On Saturday, the second day of the first half of the month
Magha, 1809, of Shalivahan's era" (1887 A.D.), "the eleventh month
of the Hindus, during the Ashwini Nakshatra" (the first of the
twenty-seven constellations on the moon's path), "when the sun
enters the sign Capricorn, and the time of the day will be near
the constellation Pisces, that is to say, exactly one hour and
thirty-six minutes after sunrise, the hour of the end of the Kali-Yug
will strike, and the much desired Satya-Yug will commence" (that is
to say, the end of the Maha-Yug, the great cycle that embraces the
four minor Yugas). "This time Satya-Yug will last 1,100 years.
During all this time a man's lifetime will be 128 years.
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