to fill the sacred water-vessels, and we started to climb the two hundred and ninety steps worn slippery with the tread of generations of barefooted worshipers and painted with the perpendicular red and white stripes of Shiva, Our elderly, pompous guide was voluble, measured, and minute, and permitted no trifling nor omissions. Samuel Daniel talked like Samuel Johnson, using the grandiloquent, polysyllabic literary language of the eighteenth century. We had engaged him to show us the sights, and he did it thoroughly. "Here is the place where many hundreds of people were crushed to death in the dark of the afternoon of a festival in 1849," he said. Since then, the British government has cut windows in the rock, placed lamps, and forbidden climbing after four o'clock. At one landing we found a group of little boys sitting before a greasy, black image of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, receiving instruction from a Brahman teacher; at another landing a high priest stood statuesque in yellow robes, the sacred white Brahman thread and bead on his neck, his forehead smeared with ashes; and at last we came out to the air at a small shrine on an outer shelf of the rock, where we had a far-reaching view of the level plain. After one more tunnel staircase we gained the open summit, climbed a last pinnacle, and found ourselves two hundred and thirty-six feet above the city, that lay like a relief-map at our feet, the fortress-like gopuras of the Srirangam temples rising from green groves southward, A little temple to Ganesha crowns the rock, the goal of the breathless pilgrimage. Half-
