CHAPTER VI
MADRAS AND CALCUTTA
HERE is a splendid show of old armor and weapons in the Madras Museum, but those trophies of metal-work are not unique like the relies and fragments from the great Buddhist shrines of the south. Room after room is filled with bas-reliefs and images dating from the noblest period of Greco-Buddhist art, the great tope of Amraoti having been, like the temple of Boro Boedor in Java, a picture-Bible of Buddhism. The exquisite marble bas-reliefs, portraying events in the life of Buddha and scenes of religious ceremony, and the bands of ornament give but a starting-point for the imagination to reconstruct the shrines of twelve and fifteen centuries ago. There are treasured relics dating centuries before the Christian era, and one bit of bone in a beryl cylinder, found in the excavations at the Bhattiprolu mound, is an undoubted fragment of the body of Gautama Buddha. Our guides were not eloquent over these Buddhist relics, knowing more about the jeweled and damascened swords, goads, spears, and daggers of the late Raja of Tanjore, whose treasures had lately come to the "wonder-
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