Of their rise; it was in this year that the gifts were offered.
Lakshmi, Indra and Yama having blessed them, returned with shouts
of triumph to their chariot, kept on the way free from obstacles
[the sky], by the force of mantrams. When they [the gods] all left,
poured a heavy shower....." and so on.
Rahn and Kehetti are the fixed stars which form the head and the
tail of the constellation of the Dragon. Shukra is Venus. Lakshmi,
Indra and Yama stand here for the constellations of Virgo, Aquarius
and Taurus, which are subject and consecrated to these three among
the twelve higher deities.
The first caves are dugout in a conical hillock about two hundred
and eighty feet from its base. In the chief of them stand three
statues of Buddha; in the lateral ones a lingam and two Jaina idols.
In the top cave there is a statue of Dharma Raja, or Yudhshtira,
the eldest of the Pandus, who is worshipped in a temple erected
in his honor, between Pent and Nassik. Farther on is a whole
labyrinth of cells, where Buddhist hermits probably lived, a huge
statue of Buddha in a reclining posture. and another as big, but
surrounded with pillars adorned with figures of various animals.
Styles, epochs and sects are here as much mixed up and entangled
as different trees in a thick forest.
It is very remarkable that almost all the cave temples of India
are to be found inside conical rocks and mountains. It is as
though the ancient builders looked for such natural pyramids
purposely. I noticed this peculiarity in Karli, and it is to be
met with only in India. Is it a mere coincidence, or is it one
of the rules of the religious architecture of the remote past?
And which are the imitators - the builders of the Egyptian pyramids,
or the unknown architects of the under ground caves of India? In
pyramids as well as in caves everything seems to be calculated with
geometrical exactitude. In neither case are the entrances ever at
the bottom, but always at a certain distance from the ground. It
is well known that nature does not imitate art, and, as a rule,
art tries to copy certain forms of nature. And if, even in this
similarity of the symbols of Egypt and India, nothing is to be
found but a coincidence, we shall have to own that coincidences
are sometimes very extraordinary. Egypt has borrowed many things
from India. We must not forget that nothing is known about the
origin of the Pharaohs, and that the few facts science has succeeded
in discovering, far from contradicting our theory, suggest India
as the cradle of the Egyptian race. In the days of remote antiquity
Kalluka-Bhatta wrote: "During the reign of Visvamitra, first king
of the Soma-Vansha dynasty, after a five days battle, Manu-Vena,
the heir of ancient kings, was abandoned by the Brahmans, and
emigrated with his army, and, having traversed Arya and Barria,
at last reached the shores of Masra....."
Arya is Iran or Persia; Barria is an ancient name of Arabia; Masr
or Masra is a name of Cairo, disfigured by Mussulmans into Misro
and Musr.
Kalluka-Bhatta is an ancient writer. Sanskritists still quarrel
over his epoch, wavering between 2,000 years B.C., and the reign
of the Emperor Akbar (the time of John the Terrible and Elizabeth
of England). On the grounds of this uncertainty, the evidence of
Kalluka-Bhatta might be objected to. In this case, there are the
words of a modern historian, who has studied Egypt all his life,
not in Berlin or London, like some other historians, but in Egypt,
deciphering the inscriptions of the oldest sarcophagi and papyri,
that is to say, the words of Henry Brugsch-Bey:
". . . I repeat, my firm conviction is that the Egyptians came
from Asia long before the historical period, having traversed the
Suez promontory, that bridge of all the nations, and found a new
fatherland on the banks of the Nile."
An inscription on a Hammamat rock says that Sankara, the last
Pharaoh of the eleventh dynasty, sent a nobleman to Punt: "I was
sent on a ship to Punt, to bring back some aromatic gum, gathered
by the princes of the Red Land."
Commenting on this inscription, Brugsch-Bey explains that "under
the name of Punt the ancient inhabitants of Chemi meant a distant
land surrounded by a great ocean, full of mountains and valleys,
and rich in ebony and other expensive woods, in perfumes, precious
stones and metals, in wild beasts, giraffes, leopards and big monkeys."
The name of a monkey in Egypt was Kaff, or Kafi, in Hebrew Koff,
in Sanskrit Kapi.
In the eyes of the ancient Egyptians, this Punt was a sacred land,
because Punt or Pa-nuter was "the original land of the gods, who
left it under the leadership of A-Mon [Manu-Vena of Kalluka-Bhatta?]
Hor and Hator, and duly arrived in Chemi."
Hanuman has a decided family likeness to the Egyptian Cynocephalus,
and the emblem of Osiris and Shiva is the same. Qui vivra verra!
Our return journey was very agreeable. We had adapted ourselves
to Peri's movements. and felt ourselves first-rate jockeys. But
for a whole week afterwards we could hardly walk.
A City Of The Dead
What would be your choice if you had to choose between being blind
and being deaf? Nine people out of ten answer this question by
positively preferring deafness to blindness. And one whose good
fortune it has been to contemplate, even for a moment, some fantastic
fairy-like corner of India, this country of lace-like marble palaces
and enchanting gardens, would willingly add to deafness, lameness
of both legs, rather than lose such sights.
