This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
142
WINTER INDIA

relics are now to be seen in the India Museum at Calcutta, together with tablets bearing Chinese inscriptions and scores of terra-cotta lamps, seals, and votive tablets molded within the outlines of a bo-leaf.

Of the Jeweled Cloister—that long pavilion covering the path where Buddha paced to and fro and flowers sprang up as he trod, whose carved columns were hung with garlands of flowers and strings of jewels and half incased in silver and gold—only fragments remain to mark the position and extent. Asoka's carved sandstone rail, "the oldest sculptured monument in India," has been carefully replaced, as far as possible, and in long stretches shows us that curious carpenter's arrangement of mortised posts and rails and carved rosette ornaments over each joint and cross-piece. The great pillars and cross-beams of the toran gateway, precursor of the Chinese pailow and the Japanese torii, have been raised before the entrance, but too much of it is missing to tell whether it was as splendid and monumental as the toran of Sanchi which Asoka later began erecting. Twenty posts and many rosettes of the carved rail had been built into the walls and courts of the mahants' college, and no amount of persuasion could induce the heathens to restore them to the temple court.

All about the Bo-tree, the Diamond Throne, the Cloister, and the temple doorway, the stones were daubed with gold-leaf and ocher. The Brahman guide was just able to tell that these yellow smears were the offerings of pious Burmese, but to any