rma 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 mi