File:Winter India (1903) (14783109373).jpg

Identifier: winterindia00scid (find matches)
Title: Winter India
Year: 1903 (1900s)
Authors: Scidmore, Eliza Ruhamah, 1856-1928
Subjects: India -- Description and travel
Publisher: New York : The Century Co.
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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pavilions re-flected from each corner of the platform. We drovedown shady lanes, past the elephant stables, to thegarden of the English judge to see the great baniantree, whose main trunk, over seventy feet in circum-ference, is surrounded by a hundred lesser trunksand newly rooted filaments—a leafy hall of columns,measuring one hundred and eighty feet across. We went to the spacious Moorish and Hindu sev-enteenth-century palace of the great ruler, TirumalaNayak, and after a small boy of the neighbor-hood had taken us in charge and scolded, stampedliis foot, and pushed an old gray-haired sweeperabout, that abject being produced the keys and ad-mitted us to cool, shadowy halls and council-cham-bers with richly carved and paneled ceilings, to thekings bedchamber, where a carved and gilded bedonce swung by chains from latticed ceilings, anddown whose chains the clever thief slid to steal thecrown jewels; and from the terraced roof where theprime minister used to dwell we saw the whole,
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TIIK, fllvKAT CdlUK.V. MAOflJA TKMII.K. ON INDIAS CORAL STRAND 15 flat-roofed city with the great gopuras, or templegateways, standing like so many Gibraltars in itsmidst. These gopuras loom and dwindle away toward thesky in such a way as to make all things seem toys,and the people pygmies. One such monument wouldbe architectural fame for any city, but Madurasrich shrine is protected by nine such soaring, py-ramidal sky-scrapers, the four in the outer wall ninestories in height. These most ornamental of de-fensive constructions begin with door-posts of singlestones, sixty feet in height, and rise, course uponcourse, carved with rows of gods and goddesses, pea-cocks, Hulls, elephants, horses, lions, and a bewilder-ing entanglement of symbolical ornament all coloredand gilded, diminishing with distance until thestone trisul at the top, two hundred and fifty feetin air, looks like the finest jewelers work. Thisgreat shrine of Shiva and his fish-eyed consort is alabyrinth where one easily

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