r 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. There we had to hire elephants again to visit the splendid ruins
of Mandu, once a strongly fortified town, about twenty miles due n