court or compound, containing a spring of water and a place of worship. Around it are quarters for hundreds of people, and at the gateways and corner-towers residences for officers. A whole population could take refuge here with their women and their cows against the onset of an army or the invasion of a tribe. The fact that it could have been worth while for a powerful government like that of Delhi to occupy so large a work at the close of the Dekkan wars, in what seems to us now an obscure village, is a wonderful testimony to the strength and hostility of the Mahratta country round it, a strength and hostility which were the expression of thousands of years of organised independence.
Outside the fort the city has been walled, and the river, circling within the walls, has acted at the gateway of the city as a moat, over which even now stand the ruins of a grand old bridge of three arches. At the end of the road that once crossed this bridge, at what must have been the outer gate of the city, there is a buttress-foundation, now treated as a sacred mound, where both Hindus and Mohammedans come to worship the Mother. The trees that grow on it are the neem and the bo, the old bodhi-tree, or asvattha. At their feet a few stones are red with vermilion, and broken glass bracelets tell of accepted vows.
So much for the mingling of historic and pre-historic. All through this countryside we find ourselves close to the remoter origins of Hinduism.
