In The Meanwhile
Vultures, Crows And Other Birds Of Prey Gather In Thick Clouds
And Considerably Retard The Progress Of
The bodies down the river.
Occasionally some half-stripped skeleton is caught by the reeds,
and stranded there helplessly for
Weeks, until an outcast, whose
sad duty it is to busy himself all his life long with such unclean
work, takes notice of it, and catching it by the ribs with his
long hook, restores it to its highway towards the ocean.
But let us leave the river bank, which is unbearably hot in spite
of the early hour. Let us bid good-bye to the watery cemetery
of the poor. Disgusting and heart-rending are such sights in
the eyes of a European! And unconsciously we allow the light wings
of reverie to transport us to the far North, to the peaceful village
cemeteries where there are no marble monuments crowned with turbans,
no sandal-wood fires, no dirty rivers to serve the purpose of a
last resting place, but where humble wooden crosses stand in rows,
sheltered by old birches. How peacefully our dead repose under
the rich green grass! None of them ever saw these gigantic palms,
sumptuous palaces and pagodas covered with gold. But on their
poor graves grow violets and lilies of the valley, and in the
spring evenings nightingales sing to them in the old birch-trees.
No nightingales ever sing for me, either in the neighboring groves,
or in my own heart. The latter least of all.
- - - - - - -
Let us stroll along this wall of reddish stone. It will lead us
to a fortress once celebrated and drenched with blood, now harmless
and half ruined, like many another Indian fortress. Flocks of
green parrots, startled by our approach, fly from under every
cavity of the old wall, their wings shining in the sun like so
many flying emeralds. This territory is accursed by Englishmen.
This is Chandvad, where, during the Sepoy mutiny, the Bhils streamed
from their ambuscades like a mighty mountain torrent, and cut many
an English throat.
Tatva, an ancient Hindu book, treating of the geography of the
times of King Asoka (250-300 B.C.), teaches us that the Mahratti
territory spreads up to the wall of Chandvad or Chandor, and that
the Kandesh country begins on the other side of the river. But
English people do not believe in Tatva or in any other authority
and want us to learn that Kandesh begins right at the foot of
Chandor hillocks.
- - - - -
Twelve miles south-east from Chandvad there is a whole town of
subterranean temples, known under the name of Enkay-Tenkay. Here,
again, the entrance is a hundred feet from the base, and the hill
is pyramidal. I must not attempt to give a full description of
these temples, as this subject must be worked out in a way quite
impossible in a newspaper article. So I shall only note that here
all the statues, idols, and carvings are ascribed to Buddhist
ascetics of the first centuries after the death of Buddha. I wish
I could content myself with this statement. But, unfortunately,
messieurs les archeologues meet here with an unexpected difficulty,
and a more serious one than all the difficulties brought on them
by the inconsistencies of all other temples put together.
In these temples there are more idols designated Buddhas than
anywhere else. They cover the main entrance, sit in thick rows
along the balconies, occupy the inner walls of the cells, watch
the entrances of all the doors like monster giants, and two of
them sit in the chief tank, where spring water washes them century
after century without any harm to their granite bodies. Some of
these Buddhas are decently clad, with pyramidal pagodas as their
head gear; others are naked; some sit, others stand; some are
real colossi, some tiny, some of middle size. However, all this
would not matter; we may go so far as to overlook the fact of
Gautama's or Siddhartha-Buddha's reform consisting precisely in
his earnest desire to tear up by the roots the Brahmanical idol-worship.
Though, of course, we cannot help remembering that his religion
remained pure from idol-worship of any kind during centuries, until
the Lamas of Tibet, the Chinese, the Burmese, and the Siamese taking
it into their lands disfigured it, and spoilt it with heresies. We
cannot forget that, persecuted by conquer-ing Brahmans, and expelled
from India, it found, at last, a shelter in Ceylon where it still
flourishes like the legendary aloe, which is said to blossom once
in its lifetime and then to die, as the root is killed by the
exuberance of blossom, and the seeds cannot produce anything but
weeds. All this we may overlook, as I said before. But the
difficulty of the archaeologists still exists, if not in the fact
of idols being ascribed to early Buddhists, then in the physiognomies,
in the type of all these Enkay-Tenkay Buddhas. They all, from the
tiniest to the hugest, are Negroes, with flat noses, thick lips,
forty five degrees of the facial angle, and curly hair! There is
not the slightest likeness between these Negro faces and any of
the Siamese or Tibetan Buddhas, which all have purely Mongolian
features and perfectly straight hair. This unexpected African type,
unheard of in India, upsets the antiquarians entirely. This is why
the archaeologists avoid mentioning these caves. Enkay-Tenkay is
a worse difficulty for them than even Nassik; they find it as
hard to conquer as the Persians found Thermopylae.
- - - - - -
We passed by Maleganva and Chikalval, where we examined an exceedingly
curious ancient temple of the Jainas. No cement was used in the
building of its outer walls, they consist entirely of square stones,
which are so well wrought and so closely joined that the blade of
the thinnest knife cannot be pushed between two of them; the
interior of the temple is richly decorated.
On our way back we did not stop in Thalner, but went straight on
to Ghara.
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