ed,
looked here very much like some fat member of the New York Ring
cunningly availing himself of the more toothsome rations in the sick
ward of the penitentiary. My friend pointed out to me a heron with a
wooden leg. "Suppose a gnat should break his shoulder-blade," I said,
"would they put his wing in a sling?"

[Illustrations: INTERIOR OF THE GREAT SHAITYA OF KARLI.]

Bhima Gandharva looked me full in the face, and, smiling gently, said,
"They would if they could."

The Jains are considered to have been the architects _par excellence_
of India, and there are many monuments, in all styles, of their skill
in this kind. The strange statues of the Tirthankars in the gorge
called the Ourwhai of Gwalior were (until injured by the "march of
improvement") among the most notable of the forms of rock-cutting.
These vary in size from statuettes of a foot in height to colossal
figures of sixty feet, and nothing can be more striking than these
great forms, hewn from the solid rock, represented entirely nude,
with their impassive countenances, which remind every traveler of
the Sphinx, their grotesque ears hanging down to their shoulders, and
their heads, about which plays a ring of serpents for a halo, or out
of which grows the mystical three-branched _Kalpa Vrich_, or Tree of
Knowledge.

The sacred hill of Sunaghur, lying a few miles to the south of
Gwalior, is one of the Meccas of the Jains, and is covered with
temples in many styles, which display the fertility of their
architectural invention: there are over eighty of these structures in
all.

"And now," said Bhima Gandharva next day, "while you are thinking upon
temples, and wondering if the Hindus have all been fools, you should
complete your collection of mental materials by adding to the sight
you have had of a Hindu temple proper, and to the description you have
had of Jain temples proper, a sight of those marvelous subterranean
works of the Buddhists proper which remain to us. We might select
our examples of these either at Ellora or at Ajunta (which are on the
mainland a short distance to the north-east of Bombay), the latter
of which contains the most complete series of purely Buddhistic caves
known in the country; or, indeed, we could find Buddhistic caves just
yonder on Salsette. But let us go and see Karli at once: it is the
largest _shaitya_ (or cave-temple) in India."

Accordingly, we took railway at Bombay, sped along the isle, over the
bridge to the isl