Ellora

a town in British India about 200 miles northeast of Bombay. It is noted chiefly for a rock-hewn temple. The work is thought to date about 1000 B. C., or even later. The rock is cut away both inside and out, so that the temple itself, a single piece of solid rock, stands in an immense open pit 270 feet long and 150 feet wide. The walls of the pit or court are cut into a colonnade or cloister, and contain a series of cells. The temple itself, not built, but cut out where it stands, contains a central hall, with a pyramidal roof eighty feet high. This central hall is surrounded by columns and by chambers in the wall. It is entered by a porch, the roof of which rests on sixteen decorated pillars. All pillars and columns, it should be understood, are parts of the living rock left in place as the excavation proceeded. The temple described is the most remarkable thing of the kind known. There are three or four miles of rock-hewn caves in the vicinity of Ellora.

At Ellora, a night's journey from Bombay, there is a series of cave temples, opening from a path or shelf along a cliff front, that extend for a mile and a half in continuous line. All three religions, Buddhist, Brahman, and Jain--had their temples in this wall of trap rock and vied with one another in size and elaboration. The thirty-four complete temples were hollowed out and sculptured during the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries--all to rouse the same fury of destruction in the Moslem conquerors, who wreaked themselves on the carvings of every single cave, and chamber, and vihara cell, and left not one face unharmed in the thousands of images, figures, and heads. Every nose was struck off by the invaders, and whole heads when they had the time; and now the stain of oil, the litter of flower garlands, and the daubs of ocher show that the old religions survive and worshipers are faithful to their traditions and religious festival days.

Two and three-story temples succeed to one's bewilderment, communicating staircases and galleries hewn in the living rock leading from one to another, until one is quite lost. Great halls and chambers, their walls covered with sculpture, every recess holding its image cut from the living rock, are shut from the outer world by rock screens, or galleried walls, whose windows are placed so that the light shall fall on altar, or image, or dagoba, as at Karli, just as the golden statue at Buddha-Gaya was illuminated by the rising sun long before Ellora was known. Bats scream and beat their wings in many dark chambers, which the noisome odor keeps the most industrious visitor away from, and even in the dry, cold weather one has a proper fear of a lurking cobra.

In the so-called Carpenter's Cave, a wooden chaitya hall is exactly imitated in this underground burrowing, even the ribbed ceiling and the heavy joists and beams are imitated in the living rock, as are the dagoba and the seated image of Buddha.

All else at Ellora and elsewhere pales beside the Kailas, the supreme effort of rock-cutters' work, where a court, ninety feet deep and more than one hundred and fifty feet square, was sunk in the solid rock at the edge of the cliff. A rock wall, or screen, was left, as a gateway to the sunken court, and then the detached rock mass, standing free in its midst, was carved over to the outward semblance of an elaborate, two-story, Dravidian temple, and hollowed out into chambers and image halls. The carved columns for flags and lamps remain, the life-sized elephants stand waiting, the sacred bull rests on his pedestal, and all is as complete as anything masons ever constructed. A two-story series of carved chambers surround the court, cave cloisters as elaborately ornamented as the halls of the temple itself. One may walk around the Kailas, view it from different levels from every side, but unfortunately the camera cannot have range enough to reproduce anything but sections. The Ellora caves are cleared of underbrush and rubbish, and well looked after, and railway communication has lately made them easily accessible.--William Zumbro, in National Geographical Magazine.