s were there with their trains, and princes riding upon elephants,
and Brahmins robed in their vestments, and swarms of voluptuous
dancing-girls, moving to chant of _kabit_ and _damari_. But whither,
whither? Out of the city into the sun they passed, between avenues of
banyan, down colonnades of palm. But whither, whither?

Blue-distant, a mountain of carven stone appeared before them,--the
Temple, lifting to heaven its wilderness of chiselled pinnacles,
flinging to the sky the golden spray of its decoration. Higher it grew
with approach, the blue tones changed to gray, the outlines sharpened in
the light. Then each detail became visible: the elephants of the
pedestals standing upon tortoises of rock; the great grim faces of the
capitals; the serpents and monsters writhing among the friezes; the
many-headed gods of basalt in their galleries of fretted niches, tier
above tier; the pictured foulnesses, the painted lusts, the divinities
of abomination. And, yawning in the sloping precipice of sculpture,
beneath a frenzied swarming of gods and Gopia,--a beetling pyramid of
limbs and bodies interlocked,--the Gate, cavernous and shadowy as the
mouth of Siva, devoured the living multitude.

The eddy of the throng whirled him with it to the vastness of the
interior. None seemed to note his yellow robe, none even to observe his
presence. Giant aisles intercrossed their heights above him; myriads of
mighty pillars, fantastically carven, filed away to invisibility behind
the yellow illumination of torch-fires. Strange images, weirdly
sensuous, loomed up through haze of incense. Colossal figures, that at a
distance assumed the form of elephants or garuda-birds, changed aspect
when approached, and revealed as the secret of their design an
interplaiting of the bodies of women; while one divinity rode all the
monstrous allegories,--one divinity or demon, eternally the same in the
repetition of the sculptor, universally visible as though
self-multiplied. The huge pillars themselves were symbols, figures,
carnalities; the orgiastic spirit of that worship lived and writhed in
the contorted bronze of the lamps, the twisted gold of the cups, the
chiselled marble of the tanks....

How far had he proceeded? He knew not; the journey among those countless
columns, past those armies of petrified gods, down lanes of flickering
lights, seemed longer than the voyage of a caravan, longer than his
pilgrimage to China! But suddenly, inexplicably, t