Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

“ We could look down dark temple corridors to darker shrines, where faint lights glimmered and the highest-caste Brahmans were tending the images of Shiva and Minakshi. Every May these idols are paraded in state to another part of the temple, and the gold and silver chariots and palanquins, the jeweled elephant trappings, and all the treasury of gems belonging to the shrine are brought to light. The Madura temple jewels are among the finest in southern India, and one sees them by special permit, and afterward pays a fee for the cleansing of the jewels. ”

“ Every blank wall, too, was plastered over with flat manure cakes, the common and universal fuel of the country, which one sees in process of manufacture and use from end to end of the empire; a fuel whose rank smoke can be detected in everything one eats and drinks in India, from the earliest tea and toast of the morning to the final rice pudding and coffee at night; a fuel whose use deprives the fields of their natural enrichment and adds to the general poverty ”

“ These most ornamental of defensive constructions begin with door-posts of single stones, sixty feet in height, and rise, course upon course, carved with rows of gods and goddesses, peacocks, Hulls, elephants, horses, lions, and a bewildering entanglement of symbolical ornament all colored and gilded, diminishing with distance until the stone trisul at the top, two hundred and fifty feet in air, looks like the finest jeweler's work. ”

“ TAMIL CHILDREN
streets, and the paling turquoise sky were background only for the stage processions and groups of the blackest people on earth. Heavens! how black they were! How very black! When Marco Polo came to the Malabar coast, he said: "The children that are born here are black enough, but the blacker they are, the more they are thought of, so that they become as black as devils." ”

“ In that temple one may fully realize what heathenism and idolatry really are. One meets there the India of the Sunday-school books, and is appalled with the seeming hopelessness of the missionary's task, of the impossibility of ever making any impression upon such a people, of coping with such superstition. Yet the American Mission in Madura is one of the largest and most successful in India, and in this southern presidency one fifth of the people are Christians. ”

“ Enormous stars pulsed in an intense indigo sky, the moon rose and, streaming across a summer sea, made a heaven above, beneath, and far around us. In the midst of this silvery world floated the odorous, untidy coasting steamer, from whose decks we instinctively lifted our skirts by day, and across which by dark sped myriads of enormous brown roaches. ”

“ We drove down shady lanes, past the elephant stables, to the garden of the English judge to see the great banian tree, whose main trunk, over seventy feet in circumference, is surrounded by a hundred lesser trunks and newly rooted filaments—a leafy hall of columns, measuring one hundred and eighty feet across. ”

“ Tenders will be received at the office of the Controller of Stores, East Indian Railway, Calcutta, up to noon of Thursday, the 14th February ——, for the right of picking cinders from ashes removed from ashpits and pumping engines throughout the line during the twelve months from 1st April to 31st March ——. ”