in Bengal and other provinces. The strange cult of Siva still goes on, although it is remarkable that what was once only a god of destruction, who might have been invoked in Europe during this year of war, has been transformed. Siva, whose four arms used to wield deadly weapons, has been changed by the Purānas into "a calm, serene and beautiful deity"; and Kailāsa, his city, has become the proverbial abode of happiness. Nevertheless, the other Siva survives, and the people in the northern provinces still do puja to the elephant-trunked Ganesha and the monkey-god.
We western people are very liable however to mistake the signs of that faith. Take the description of the grottoes of Siva by M. Loti, in which the sensation of the overwhelming antiquity of the east, and its splendour, terror, and gloom are realised with western avidity. The traveller reaches Golconda—the "phantom of a town," from Hyderabad, and passes gates which give access to a chaos of granite. Daulatabad, another phantom not unlike a tower of Babel, is passed, and Rozas is reached, and a kind of sea—really desert-plains, burnt and scorched to sand and dust—appears there in
