They all do. Four travelers whom I had taken there have published minute and thrilling accounts of how the procession wound up and up, and how the vultures flapped their wings, although I had seen nothing of the kind."
Guide-book in hand, and Sir Edwin Arnold's caves of Elephanta fresh in mind, we rose with the dawn one morning and sped away by steam-launch across the harbor to the cave-temples of Shiva that date before the twelfth century. We landed at a pier of detached concrete blocks, and made our way by leaps to land, where the old sergeant who guards the place described every temple, every bas-relief, every group and image, so minutely that we ought never to forget a detail of those rock-sculptures, many of them of such beauty that we echoed the sergeant's anger at the Portuguese for firing cannon into the caves to destroy the idolatrous work. We tiptoed here and there, kept away from the darker corners, looked suspiciously at every rock and bush and tuft of grass, remembering Sir Edwin Arnold's tales of the deadly cobras on Elephanta; but the sergeant insisted that there were no snakes, that he had never seen one. It only remained for him to tell us, as he did, that he never had fever, for our last illusion to vanish. If we were not to be bitten by cobras and filled with fever germs by visiting Elephanta, what more was it than a pleasure excursion and boating picnic? What glory in daring it? What credit for anything more than one morning's hire of a steam-launch? We did the museum, the art school, the hospital for animals, the
