flat-roofed city with the great gopuras, or temple gateways, standing like so many Gibraltars in its midst.
These gopuras loom and dwindle away toward the sky in such a way as to make all things seem toys, and the people pygmies. One such monument would be architectural fame for any city, but Madura's rich shrine is protected by nine such soaring, pyramidal sky-scrapers, the four in the outer wall nine stories in height. 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. This great shrine of Shiva and his fish-eyed consort is a labyrinth where one easily wanders a whole morning. The anteroom or vestibule of the temple is a long hall or choltry, an open pavilion divided by four rows of most elaborately carved columns, where the king used to receive the annual visits of Shiva—a miserable little black image. Neither kings nor idols occupied it then, but a legion of shopkeepers were gathered there, who vaunted their goods and pushed their wares upon us with fury and zeal—cloth, cotton, lace, brass, glass, perfumes, incense, and fruits. One spectacled merchant was casting up his accounts in a ledger made of strips of talipot palm leaves, an orthodox fashion as old as writing.
