slope, and within 50 feet of Jarasandha's Tower, a tank 100 feet square has been formed, partly by excavation, and partly by building up. There is a second tank, at a short distance to the north, formed by the excavation of the rock for building materials. Both of these tanks are now dry. The stupa, called Jarasandha-ka-baithak, is a solid cylindrical brick tower, 28 feet in diameter, and 21 feet in height, resting on a square basement 14 feet high. The cylinder was once surmounted by a solid dome or hemisphere of brick, of which only 6 feet now remain, and this dome must have been crowned with the usual umbrella rising out of a square base. The total height of the building could not, therefore, have been less than 55 feet or thereabouts. The surface has once been thickly plastered, and the style of ornamentation is similar to that of the Great Temple at Buddha Gaya.* I sank a shaft 41 feet in depth from the top of the building right down to the stone foundation; and I continued a gallery, which had been begun many years ago, at the base of the cylinder, until it met the well sunk from above, but nothing whatever was discovered in either of these excavations to show the object of the building. On the west side of Jarasandha's Tower, and almost touching its basement, I observed a low mound which seemed like the ruin of another stupa. On clearing the top, however, I found a small chamber 5 feet 8 inches square, filled with rubbish. This chamber gradually widened as it was cleared out, until it became 7 feet square. At 5 feet in depth, the rubbish gave place to brick-work, below which was a stratum of stone, evidently the rough foundation of the building. In the south-west corner of the brick-work, about one foot below the surface, I found 84 seals of lac firmly imbedded in the mud mortar. The seals were all oval, but of different sizes, generally about 3 inches long and 2 inches broad. All, however, bore the same impression of a large stupa with four smaller stupas on each side, the whole surrounded by an inscription in medieval Nagari characters, Ye Dharmma hetu prabhava, &c., being the well known formula of the Buddhist faith. Externally, this building was square with projections in the centre of each face and similar in its ornamentations to the basement of Jarasandha's Tower. * See Plate XV. for a sketch of this stupa. C On the eastern side of the Panchâna River, there is an extensive mound of ruins, being half a mile long from north to south, and 300 yards broad in its widest part. There are the remains of two paved ascents on the river side, and of three more on the opposite side of the mound. In the middle of the mound there is a small mud fort, and at the northern end there are several pieces of sculpture collected together from different places; one of these is inscribed and dated in the year 42 of some unknown era, somewhere about the eleventh century, or perhaps even somewhat later. At two miles to the south-west of the village of Giryek, and one mile from Jarasandha's Tower, there is a natural cavern in the southern face of the mountain, about 250 feet above the bed of the Bânganga rivulet. This cave, called Gidhadwâr, is generally believed to communicate with Jarasandha's Tower; but an examination with torches proved it to be a natural fissure running upwards in the direction of the tower, but only 98 feet in length. The mouth of the cavern, is 10 feet broad and 17 feet high; but its height diminishes rapidly towards the end. The cave is filled with bats, and the air is oppressively warm and disagreeable, which alone is sufficient to prove that there is no exit to the cavern otherwise there would be a draught of air right through it. Vultures swarm about the precipitous cliffs of pale grey horn stone, and I picked up their feathers in the mouth of the cave. The remains at Giryek, which I have just described, appear to me to correspond exactly with the accounts given by Fa-Hian of the "Hill of the Isolated Rock," where Indra questioned Buddha on 42 points, writing each of them singly with his finger upon a stone, and with that given by Hwen Thsang of the hill of Indra-sila-guha, which refers to the same story. Fa-Hian states that traces of these written questions still existed, and that there was a monastery built upon the spot, but he makes no mention of any stupa. Hwen Thsang states that on the crest of the hill there were marks in two places where the four former Buddhas had sat and walked. On the eastern peak there was a stupa and also a monastery called the "Hansa Sangháráma” or "Goose's Monastery," to account for which he relates the Beal's Fa-Hian, c. 28; and Julien's Hwen Thsang, III., 58. |