128 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY
of years Ajanta was thought of in India as one of the great opportunities of the artist, or maybe as a grand visual exposition of the monkish classics.
We can judge of the length of time over which the work spread, the time during which the tradi- tion was growing up, by the fact that the paintings in Cave Sixteen, which is older, are stiffer and more purely decorative, such of them as remain, than those in Seventeen. But even those of Sixteen are not the oldest pictures at Ajanta. When we enter Cave Nine for the first time, we find ourselves in the company of a great host of rapt and adoring worshippers. They stand on every face of the simple octagonal pillars, with their looks turned always to the solemn looking stupa or dagoba. They have each one of them a nimbus behind him. They might be Bodhisattvas, but the feeling of worship so fills the httle chapel that instinctively one piIis them down as the early saints and companions of Buddha, and turns with a feeling of awe to join their adoration of the dome- like altar. They are not archaic in the sense of crudity. But they have the feeling of an early world about them. They are like the work of Fra Angelico, but may be anything in date from the second century onwards, that is to say a thousand years before his time! In the aisle that runs behind the pillars the walls are covered with simple scenes from the Teaching of Buddha. Here we find the mother bringing her dead son, and the Master seated with his disciples about him. But
