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You are away down in southern India, nearly three hundred and fifty miles below Madras, and this is a corridor in one of the largest temples in the empire. It was built for the worship of the Hindu gods and is not very old as India goes—native sculptors were chiselling the bracelets of this smirking warrior and shaping the horrid claws of that griffin beyond him, at the very time when the Pilgrim Fathers were building their little log cabins on the shore of Massachusetts Bay!

And people come here still every day to pray to Things Unknown. See that garland of flowers hung before the little shrine at the left. Some poor soul thinks to secure a favor or avert a calamity by means of this offering. But worship here does not always take so poetic a form. Many of the images kept here for adoration are smeared with red-lead to simulate clots and streams of blood, or periodically bathed in oils so that they drip as if with perspiration. The religion cultivated here is a grim faith with very little serenity in it. Theoretically there is a possibility of aspiration and noble feeling in connection with Hindu faith, but in this part of India religion seems to be now quite incomprehensible to any western mind.

The amount of detailed labor expended in the construction of this one set of temple-buildings is something enormous. Before you leave the spot, study a little into the bewildering detail of these columns—then remember that there are a thousand such in one building and that it is guarded by nine huge towers, 200 to 400 feet high, every one covered with similarly fantastic sculptures from base to summit.

(Read accounts of this temple in Arnold's "India Revisited," Carpenter's "From Adam's Peak to Elephanta," Steevens' "In India." etc.)

From Notes of Travel, No.11, copyright, 1904, by Underwood & Underwood.

Curiously sculptured pillars of the temple at Madura, India.
Piliers curieusement sculptés du temple à Madura - Inde
Sonderbare Säulen-Skulpturen des Tempels zu Madura, Indien.
Columnas curiosamente esculpidas del templo en Madura, India.
Underbart skulpterade pelare tiu Madura-templet, Indien.
Интересныя скульптурныя колонны храма Мадура, Индія