monsters with sinister faces, stout of trunk and limb, reposing big, folded hands on the grips of grounded pollard-clubs. The lions were the heraldic lions of Asia, posturing in ungainly fashion, with out-thrust buttocks, bodies wonderfully foreshortened, the legs of a jibbing horse, and uplifted, ferocious heads. Yet, in some subtle way, the very grotesqueness of these distorted effigies of man and beast—grim, motionless, impassive—enhanced the dignity and the solemnity of this refuge of the ancient gods.
In the west, over the flat, half-submerged country, visible above the dense shrubberies, the day was dying in a wonderful blaze of colour; the heavens above-invaded in many directions by great waves of crimson—displaying a purity of azure, in startling contrast to the vivid green streaks, inset about the furnace-mouth of the horizon. In the east, across the dull red flood of the river, a moon near the full was rising from a bed of rosy cloud-fleece, its orb delicately tinted by the reflected glow of sunset.
Between sun and moon was uplifted the dark and shadowy pyramid of the dagoba, with its grim wardens dimly seen.
A big, black lizard thrust its diamond-shaped head forth from a cranny between two huge stones, and scarred the stillness with its loud,