Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or the Central and Western Rajput States of India v3.c43.t1.328

v3.c43.t1.328

The Barolli Temples.—To describe its stupendous and diversified architecture is impossible; it is the office of the pencil alone, but the labour would be almost endless. Art seems here to have exhausted itself, and we were, perhaps now for the first time, fully impressed with the beauty of Hindu sculpture. The columns, the ceilings, the external roofing, where each stone presents a miniature temple, one rising over another, until crowned by the urnlike kalas, distracted our attention. The carving on the capital of each column would require pages of explanation, and the whole, in spite of its high antiquity, is in wonderful preservation. This is attributable mainly to two causes: every stone is chiselled out of the close-grained quartz rock, perhaps the most durable (as it is the most difficult to work) of any; and in order that the Islamite should have some excuse for evading their iconoclastic law, they covered the entire temple with the finest marble cement, so adhesive, that it is only where the prevalent winds have beaten upon it that it is altogether worn off, leaving the sculptured edges of the stone as smooth and sharp as if carved only yesterday.