breathe again the very odours of the costus and costly spikenard which native gentlemen wrap up with their rich apparel, and fine muslins and embroidered work.
There are many rich brocades kincobs in the India Museum, of shining dyes, and stiff with gold, from the looms of Murshe- dabad, Benares, and Ahmedabad. A kincob belonging to the Prince of Wales is one of the most sumptuous ever seen in Europe. It is of Ahmedabad work, rich with gold and gay with colours, and was presented to the Prince by the young Guicowar of Baroda. The stuff called soneri , or “ golden,” is richer still, but is not ornamented with a colored border ; it is simply cloth of gold. Ruperi is made in the same way with silver, and it was doubtless in the borrowed glory of this fabric that Herod was arrayed, when enthroned before the people, in the full blaze of the sun, they hailed him as a god [Josephus, Antiquities , xix, vlii 2].
There is an Indian brocade called chand-tara , “moon and stars,” because figured all over with representations of the heavenly bodies ; Athenaeus, a.d. 230, quotes from Duris [b.c. 285-247], the description of a cloak worn by Demetrius [b.c. 330], into which a representation of the heavens, with the stars and 1 2 signs of the Zodiac, was woven in gold ; and Josephus [a.d. 37-100] states [ Wars of the Jeivs, Bk. v, ch. v 4] that the veil pre- sented to the Temple by Herod, “was a Babylonian curtain, embroidered with blue and fine linen, and scarlet and purple, and of a contexture that was truly marvellous. Nor was the mixture of colours without its mystical interpretation, but a kind of image of the universe. . . . This curtain had also em- broidered upon it all that was mystical in the heavens, excepting that of the 12 signs of the Zodiac, in the likeness of living creatures.” In 2 Chronicles iii 14, we read : “And he [Solomon] made the veil of blue and purple and crimson and fine linen, and wrought cherubims thereon.” The veil of the Holy of Holies, made by Moses, Josephus [ Antiquities , Bk. iii, ch. vi 4] states,
