Winter India/Chapter 27

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

 

CHAPTER XXVII
THE CAVES OF ELLORA AND KARLI

E touched the Western world at Bombay only for a day, and quickly took train again, spreading our razais for an all-night ride of one hundred and seventy-eight miles to Nandgaon. No bogie-car, no sort of spring or buffer, softened the thumps of the hard-cushioned couches, and the occupant of the upper berth, feeling a draft when she had climbed to her swinging shelf, unhooded the lamp and found that the side wall of the car consisted of wire netting only in its upper portion. Her bedding was removed to the floor, and as there was no way to check this generous ventilation, chill drafts swept the compartment as the train ran through damp fields and dark spaces, and the dust of the road-bed covered us an inch deep by morning. The feeble lamp flickered out soon after midnight, and it took vigorous shouting at two dark stations before we could get the station-master and his notebook to investigate, report, and reilluminate with a broken-down lamp that went out as soon as we left his station. As everywhere in India, there were steaming tea-kettles on the platforms and cups of tea at one's window at every halt; and we thawed and packed in the darkness in time to dismount at Nandgaon at six o'clock. More tea, with some toast and bananas, constituted breakfast, and we got away in two small tongas, each with a pair of tiny, galloping ponies. It was not the tonga of the Simla road, but the original native vehicle which has lent its name to everything on wheels. "The tonga is a low, two-wheeled, dachshund of a cart, with the build of a gun-carriage," is Steevens's happy description of it. The road led across an uninteresting, level, unfenced, dry plain, with detached hills showing on the horizon. We stopped every seven miles to change ponies, and we changed tongas, visited back and forth from one cart to the other, rode backward as the passenger is supposed to ride, sat on the front seat with the driver, and did everything to beguile the tedium and discomfort of that all-day ride of fifty-six miles. The sun grew warmer, and it was almost hot at noon, the country more and more uninteresting, with few villages, few travelers, and no incidents to distract us after an indifferent tiffin at a way-station. At three in the afternoon, we reached the foot of the ghat in whose perpendicular face the great cave-temples have been excavated. The rock-cut temples at Mahabalipur had been but preparation for the great series of caves at Ellora, where the face of a steep hillside has been burrowed into, great chambers hollowed out, and porticoes, galleries, staircases, and passages cut in the solid rock and covered with splendid bas-relief sculpture on the most elaborate scale. The line of rock-temples extends for a mile

 

ROCK-CUT TEMPLE AT ELLORA

 

and a quarter along the front of the cliff, Buddhists, Jains, and Brahmans having in turn cut their shrines in the everlasting hills, accomplishing this stupendous work in the sixth, eighth, and later centuries. For more than two hours we rambled along the face of the cliffs, in and out, up and down the different stages and galleries of the thirty-four rock-cut shrines; and, fatigued as we were, hastened with breathless interest from one to another of the many surprises.

All that we had seen of rock-sculptures and monolith temples elsewhere paled before this great display, and all the monuments of patient toil and infinite labor in the world seemed nothing compared to the Kailas at Ellora. First, the great sunken court, measuring one hundred and fifty-four by two hundred and seventy-six feet, was hewn out of the solid trap-rock of the hillside, leaving the rock mass of the temple wholly detached in a cloistered court like a colossal boulder, save as a rock bridge once connected the upper story of the temple with the upper row of galleried chambers surrounding three sides of the court. One enters from the plain by an ornamental gateway in the cliff front, a rock screen closing the front of the court. Colossal elephants and lamp-posts stand on either side of the open mandapam, or pavilion, containing the sacred bull; and beyond rises the monolithic Dravidian temple to Shiva, ninety feet in height, hollowed into vestibule, chamber, and image-cells, all lavishly carved. Time and earthquakes have weathered and broken away bits of the great monument, and Moslem zealots strove to destroy the carved figures, but one hardly notes these defects in presence of this greatest wonder of the Indian world, absolutely unique among architectural monuments. Patches of ocher and shreds of flower garlands remained from the last festival, the only suggestion of human touch or occupancy. One seemed to feel the presence of magic forces there, as if the Kailas had been turned to stone by some enchantment. It dazed one to consider that one mind could have conceived such a stupendous monument as this ex-voto of an eighth-century raja—his material expression of gratitude at his restoration to health by the neighboring springs.

The three-story Brahmanical temples were the next most amazing spectacle: gallery over gallery hewn in the cliff front and connected by curious arched passages and tunnels of later date, as in the Do Tal (two-story) and the Tin Tal (three-story) temples. The Das Avatar's main hall is cut one hundred and forty-three feet into the rock, forty-six massive pillars connecting the roof and floor. One Buddhist cave with a double gallery in the screen front, and an upper window opening to the plain, has a ribbed roof, and from so closely following the lines of the early chaitya halls of wooden construction, it is known as the Carpenter's Cave. There is a carved dagoba in the apse of its long hall, where the seated figure of Buddha and attendant figures in air are in the spirit of the best period of Buddhist art. There are storied viharas or monasteries near it, which, like this great chaitya, follow closely the forms of wooden construction. The Dehwarra, adjoining the Carpenter's Cave, measures one hundred and ten by seventy feet, two rows of massive rock pillars joining the floor and roof. In the Jain caves beyond, cross-legged tirthankars sit in meditation in carved cells, archaic prototypes of the fairy marble alcoves on Mount Abu.

Sated with wonders, we were carried up the steep hill to the Nizam's dak bangla, where brass bedsteads with wire springs and double hair mattresses were as great a surprise as the architectural wonders that had stunned us. With great consideration, we omitted from the khansamah's menu all dishes requiring long preparation, in order that we might dine as soon as possible and go to those mattresses the earlier. At the end of two hours of calling and waiting on the "Very well, madam," we crossed the dark lawn to the cook-house door to make a final demand for food of some kind. White figures and turbans flitted about in the lighted interior, making an admirable picture within the frame of the door, and we stood in darkness, silently appreciating it, and wondering if it would be attainable by kodak in daylight. We saw the cook strain the soup into the tureen through the end of the dish-cloth he had used and flung on his arm while we watched, and then we cried aloud. Cook, khansamah, and bearer all leaped aside, soup and dish-rag dropped to the floor, and they retreated to far corners of the cook-house mumbling and wailing: "Oh, memsahib! Please, memsahib!" etc. I had long revolted at the taste and smell of the ordinary gray soup served everywhere, and reckless flights of the imagination in trying to describe the flavoring were borne out by that scene. A very meek and deprecatory khansamah served that dinner of plain chops and potatoes with the inevitable cauliflower, cringing as he offered any dish, backing away quickly at each sound, and keeping one eye fearfully turned upon us and the door of escape as he moved about.

Early the next morning we returned to the temples, climbed the steps, and passed through the rock screen or gateway of the Kailas, fearing lest it be a dream of the night. We sought vainly for some vantage-point in the contracted court where a camera could cover the whole mass of the Kailas. From the galleried chambers surrounding the court we saw the central temple best, and by a pitch-dark stairway we happened into an upper chamber where the finest bas-reliefs at Ellora covered the walls, and the ornamental capitals of the columns were pierced and chiseled out in the free and bold designs of a wood-carver. Even there the hand of Alamgir and his fanatics had fallen, and the tiny figures and the ornaments were defaced. The caves are still places of pilgrimage, and at the great festivals of Shiva crowds troop through the Kailas, and the images are smeared with ocher and hung with garlands. The tread of these thousands of bare feet for centuries has given that peculiar, greasy polish to the stone floors that no other treatment bestows. In the rainy season, waterfalls stream over the front of the cliff, the courts and halls are flooded, and the path that runs along the cliff from cave to cave is a moat defending the temples from the plain.

It was an ideally fresh and fragrant morning when we started down from the grassy plateau to the plain, but it grew hot as the tongas bumped along the tedious way. As we reached a more cultivated stretch of country, sago- and cocoa-palms rustled their dusty fronds in the rising breeze that soon brought with it a rain-cloud and a cold mist that pierced to the marrow. The rain came in blinding sheets, swept through the tongas, and for two hours trickled down on us and our rolls of bedding. We arrived at the station in time to be partially dried over pans of charcoal as we ate a hurried dinner. The train rumbled in toward nine o'clock, and we rode as far as Kalyan, where we waited from four to seven o'clock, when the Poona train picked us up. We had the first new car we had seen, a shining, highly varnished contrast to the ancient, unswept, unwashed cars in which we had been jolted over India. Peacock-blue glass in the windows gave an unearthly look to the red, scorched landscapes we rode through in ascending the Bhor Ghat. By twenty-one tunnels and many loops and zigzags we rose two thousand feet in seventeen miles, the train halting at several reversing stations, where the engine switched past to join the other end of the train. We had eagle views out and down to rocky cañons as bare, dry, and roughly sculptured by the elements as any in our arid regions of the Southwest, even the familiar cactus of Arizona deserts flourishing in the wastes of rock and sand.

From Lonauli station a very trim dog-cart carried us through a model settlement toward the open fields. Our guide to the caves of Karli was Dhoond Dhu, a cheerful little barelegged turban of thirteen, who spoke good English with the chirpy voice of a young robin, and made every point tell by the appeal of his deep, dark eyes. He fought valiantly to make a good bargain for us with the chair-bearers at work in a cactus-strewn field, when the cart had stopped at the end of wheel tracks in a plowed ground. They were decrepit chairs with makeshift poles tied to them—carrying-chairs only, as one decrepit leg and then another fell out if one attempted to sit in them while they rested on the ground. The path led steeply along the side of a hill that became a precipice in places, the chairs creaking and momently threatening collapse. We remembered our bogus Nawab at Jeypore when three fraudulent priests assumed to do the honors of the great Buddhist cave at Karli. Blackened columns and a lofty entrance recessed in the rock are an imposing preparation for the great chaitya hall, a chamber one hundred and twenty-four feet long, forty-two feet wide, and forty-six feet high. A row of ornamental columns rises on either side to the ribbed teak roof, and at the far end, in the nave, a massive dagoba, despoiled of its bas-reliefs, images, and ornaments, is claimed as their sacred emblem by the Shivaites who have so long held the place. Dating from the beginning of the Christian era or earlier, this cave shows the first and purest form of Buddhist temples, and is the largest and finest cave-temple of its kind in India.

 

THE GREAT CAVE-TEMPLE, KARLI

 

Steps lead to adjoining viharas, three-story caves where the square cells with sculptured walls allowed room only for the stone shelf or string-bed of the anchorite.

Workmen dawdled with pick and crowbar, clearing away rubbish at the entrance, and the discomfited priests lounged there, chatting, when we came back from the viharas. Black rain-clouds were rolling up, and we started down the rocky path, leaving Dhoond Dhu to stir up and drive the chair-coolies. Then a great cry arose as priests, workmen, and coolies ran howling: "Prissint! Prissint! Memsahib!" rubbing their itching palms across their faces and extending them beseechingly. They shoved one another aside, wrangled fiercely, and seemed ready to do violence to the small guide. It was not the place in which to have an argument with even one bad man, and the dozen big beggars could easily have pitched us over the precipice, or shut us up in farther caves, without killing, until we were ready to pay ransom. But one has such contempt for the Hindu that fear or the possibility of danger never suggested itself until we were well away and thought what that number of Afghans or Macedonians might have done. To stop the clatter and warn off the bogus priest who had snatched Dhoond Dhu roughly by the shoulder, I lifted my umbrella and took but one step forward, when the pack ran back to the cave entrance, and the chair-coolies threw themselves flat and crawled to their poles, imploring mercy. We had to lean against the rock wall while we laughed at the farcical dénouement, Dhoond Dhu shaking the last turban fold loose with his child-like spasms of glee.

On reaching Lonauli early in the afternoon, we had asked the station-master to have a compartment reserved on the midnight train to Bombay. "Certingly, memsahib, certingly. I will wire to Poona." At six o'clock we had no answer—because no wire had been sent. At seven the condition continued, the station-master was still absent, and the assistant would not send a telegram "because there iss no rule for thatt." We sent a telegram and asked the assistant to sell us the tickets then, that we might sleep in the waiting-room until the train came at five minutes after midnight. "No, no," said the babu; "the 12:05 iss one of to-morrow's trains. I cannot sell you ticket now and mix my accounts for two days so terribly. I should lose some money, and I am poor man."

It was a hot, close night, and the scorching air came in waves from the bare cliffs of the Bhor Ghat as the train curved and reversed and crept from one twinkling light and group of lights to another down the two thousand feet to the plain. With our arrival at Bombay at six in the morning, we had spent our twentieth night on Indian railway trains in three months of travel, in that first winter; and gladly we bade farewell to the red razais.