The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c16.s2.65

Language: English

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The cave temple stands to the south of this terrace, and comprises a narrow long room with four doorways and a verandah in front (Plate XVIII). The length of the room is greater in front than behind, but the reverse is the case with the length of the verandah; the greatest length of the former being twenty-four feet and six inches in front, and the shortest behind twenty-one feet and six inches, and of the latter in front twenty-five feet, and behind twenty-seven feet. The breadth of the former is seven feet and of the latter five feet. The verandah has a range of three pillars, which with the terminal piers produce four openings corresponding to the four doorways of the chamber. The pillars are divided into three sections, of which the central one is octagonal, and the lower [32] and upper ones square. They have no plinths nor any distinct capital; but each of them has in front of the place where the capital should have been a bracket projecting forwards and shaped like a woman. The architrave is heavy, and over it, supported on corbels, is a parapet formed of pyramidal battlements with intervening bunches of flowers. The walls both of the room and of the verandah are perfectly perpendicular, but the ceiling of the room is slightly arched, whereas that of the verandah is flat. The only carved ornament in the room is an image of Buddha in low relief on the centre of the back wall.

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One of the piers of the front wall has fallen down, causing thereby two contiguous doorways to coalesce into one. The mouldings round the doors are of the Udayagiri type with arched tops and intervening frieze, but the pilasters are richer and more elaborately carved (see Plate XXIV, D.3). The frieze is in five compartments corresponding with the five piers of the front wall, but one of the five is lost by the destruction of one of the piers. Beginning, therefore, with the next compartment, on the left side, we have two human figures in a running or flying position, one proceeding to the left and the other to the right. They are dressed in *dhuti* and *chādara*, the ends of which are flying in the air. Their heads are enveloped in large heavy turbans; on their wrists there are bangles; and massive rings are pendant from their ears. Each of them carries a tray of offerings in his left hand, the right hand being left free. The band of the arch to the right of these figures is in its general character similar to those of the Queen's Palace and Gaṇeśa Caves. It is formed of two fillets enclosing a line of ornamental figures. The first object at the spring of the arch is a stout athlete in a kneeling posture, over whom stands a man holding back, by its two hind legs, a lion running forward towards a man, who is busy tussling with an enraged bull, which he has caught by the left horn, and is about to strike it with an uplifted stick in his right hand.

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Then comes a lion held by its near hind leg by a man, who stands on the head of an athlete similar to the figure at the opposite spring of the arch. The crown of the arch is formed by the intertwining of the tails of two serpents, whose bodies encircle the arch, and whose triple-headed hoods form two prominent wings on its two sides. Over the arch is seen a Buddhist rail running in continuation with the parapet on the verandah. Under the rail, and the pyramidal battlements is a series of squared blocks or a corbel table for the support of the arch. Of course here the whole wall with the frieze and ornaments on it being cut out of the solid rock, the corbels are utterly uncalled for as mechanical supports, and must, therefore, be taken as attempts to represent in stone the ends of rafters which in a wooden house would form the sustaining members of cornices and other superstructure, as unquestionably most corbels are, but their presence can no more be accepted as a proof of the recent transition of the caves from wood to stone than the corbel table under the cornice of the Pantheon, be assumed to be a proof of that glory of the builder's art having been copied directly from a wooden model. As elsewhere stated, there is a spirit of survival of custom which continues long after the exigencies which gives its birth, and this is one of them.