at one's window at every halt; and we thawed and packed in the darkness in time to dismount at Nandgaon at six o'clock. More tea, with some toast and bananas, constituted breakfast, and we got away in two small tongas, each with a pair of tiny, galloping ponies. It was not the tonga of the Simla road, but the original native vehicle which has lent its name to everything on wheels. "The tonga is a low, two-wheeled, dachshund of a cart, with the build of a gun-carriage," is Steevens's happy description of it. The road led across an uninteresting, level, unfenced, dry plain, with detached hills showing on the horizon. We stopped every seven miles to change ponies, and we changed tongas, visited back and forth from one cart to the other, rode backward as the passenger is supposed to ride, sat on the front seat with the driver, and did everything to beguile the tedium and discomfort of that all-day ride of fifty-six miles. The sun grew warmer, and it was almost hot at noon, the country more and more uninteresting, with few villages, few travelers, and no incidents to distract us after an indifferent tiffin at a way-station. At three in the afternoon, we reached the foot of the ghat in whose perpendicular face the great cave-temples have been excavated. The rock-cut temples at Mahabalipur had been but preparation for the great series of caves at Ellora, where the face of a steep hillside has been burrowed into, great chambers hollowed out, and porticoes, galleries, staircases, and passages cut in the solid rock and covered with splendid bas-relief sculpture on the most elaborate scale. The line of rock-temples extends for a mile
