for both economic and climatic reasons. We came out on the hard sand beach where the ocean lapped in soft, creamy wavelets, and the terrible Coromandel surges we had heard and read of only splashed gently on the steps of a quaint little pyramidal temple carved, course upon course, to its final bell-cap. Posts and columns stand far out in the water, and a line of breakers, a mile still further out, mark where legend says other pagodas stand intact beneath the waves. Southey has imaged it in "The Curse of Kehama," but prosaic surveyors say that there is only a reef of needle-rocks below the surface. That lonely little temple at the edge of the loud-sounding sea, although a common thing of masons' construction, is most impressive of all the seven temples. Its stone façade is rounded with sand-blast, spray, and surge, its walls are broken, its portico and platform half wrecked by the fury of past storms, and its cool, wet chambers hold Vishnu's images in his different incarnations,—Buddha, Vishnu's ninth avatar, occupying a last cool grotto.
The sun was burning with full strength then, and we sought the mud and thatch Tamil village under a cluster of palm-trees. The villagers swarmed out, and an inky, sooty flock of cherubs ran beside us to another boulder-temple, where we sat in the shade and regarded a huge stone hollowed like a churn or bowl, where "the gopis made butter for Krishna in the forest"—"But the cat ran away with the butter," said Daniel, regretfully. Krishna, the dancing god of Hindu mythology, very nearly corresponds to the Greek Apollo or Hercules, and the gopis parallel the naiads and muses.
