through the crowd of which, and of small temples, the
eye wanders in vain for some attractive feature, or
evidence of the wealth, the devotion, the science, or the
grandeur of a city celebrated throughout the East for
all these attributes. Green parrots and pigeons people
the air.
The general appearance of an oriental town is always
more or less ruinous; and here the eye is fatigued with
bricks and crumbling edifices, and the ear with prayer -
bells. The streets are so narrow that it is difficult to
ride a horse through them; and the houses are often
six stories high, with galleries crossing above from
house to house. Enormous spiders’ webs hang from
the crumbling walls, resembling curtains of coarse
muslin, being often some yards across, and not arranged
in radii and arcs, but spun like weaver’s woofs. Paint-
ings, remarkable only for their hideous proportions and
want of perspective, are daubed on the walls in vermilion,
ochre, and indigo. The elephant, camel, and
porpoise of the Ganges, dog, shepherd, peacock, and
horse, are especially frequent, and so is a running
pattern of a hand spread open, with a blood-red spot
on the palm. A still less elegant but frequent object
is the fuel, which is composed of the manure collected
on the roads of the city, moulded into flat cakes, and
stuck by the women on the walls to dry, retaining the
sign-manual of the artist in the impressed form of her
outspread hand. The cognizance of the Eajah, two
fish chained together, appears over the gates of public
buildings.
The hundreds of temples and shrines throughout the
city are its most remarkable features : sacred bulls, and
lingams of all sizes, strewed with flowers and grains of
rice, meet the eye at every tu rn ; and the city s boast is
the possession of one million idols, which, of one kind
and another, I can well believe.
Through the kindness of Mr. Eeade (the Commissioner),
I obtained admission to the Bishishar-Kumardil,
the “ holiest of holies.” I t was a small, low, stone
building, daubed with red inside, and swarming with
stone images of Brahminee bulls, and various disgusting
emblems. A fat old Brahmin, naked to the O O
waist, took me in, but allowed no followers; and what
with my ignorance of his phraseology, the clang of bells
and din of voices, I gained but little information. I
emerged, adorned with a chaplet of magnolia flowers,
and with my hands full of Calotropis and Nyctanthes
blossoms. I t was a horrid place for noise, smell, and
sights. Thence I went to a holy well, rendered sacred
because Siva, when stepping from the Himalaya to
Ceylon, accidentally let a medicine-chest fall into it.
The natives frequent it with little basins or baskets of
rice, sugar, &c., dropping in a little of each while they
mutter prayers.
The observatory at Benares, and those at Delhi,
Matra on the Jumna, and Oujein, were built by Jey-
Sing, Eajah of Jayanagar, upwards of 200 years ago;
his «kill in mathematical science was so well known,
that the Emperor Mahommed Shah employed him to
reform the calendar.
Of the more important instruments I took sketches;
No. 1 is the Naree-wila, or Equatorial dial; No. 2, the