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sacred city twenty miles square, the nucleus of a vast capital whose suburbs must long lie hidden in the dense jungle which twenty centuries have piled high upon their skeletons. Forests of slender pillars, out from a single stone, their capitals as exquisitely carved as those of a Gothic nave or chapter-house, start up in every direction. One temple alone has sixteen hundred such monoliths, all that remain of a building of nine hundred apartments which blazed with "cornices embellished with gems tinkling festoons of gold and pearls... suspended bunches of flowers made of various gems, ,"1 and a roof of brazen tiles. Smaller clusters of pillars are visible in every vista of the partially-cleared jungle, and ravishing is the harmony of their proportions with the surrounding trees, and of their pearly grey with the carpet of green velvet from which they spring. Between the groups lie enormous sunken baths, terraced to the bottom in finely-moulded steps. Great monolithic cisterns, massive tablets and stele, altars and images, all miraculously carved, lie about on every side: the place is a waste-heap of sculptured stone, of precious works of art. Here and there is a flight of steps in perfect condition, its guardstones, balustrades, and the faces of the treads all gems of workmanship, springing from the semi

adorned

circular moonstone with six or more consecutive bands of relievo of immaculate handling. The centuries have dealt kindly with these venerable masterpieces. The relief and undercutting are as sharp as the day they were chiselled; and they and all the wonders around leave us marvelling both at the tremendous age of fine art, and at the folly of those who prate of "progress" in a human gift which knows no steady advance, but rises and falls like the temperature of a fevered creature, which in sooth it is.

But the most astounding of all the wealth of relics are the stupendous dagabas, or bellshaped shrines, which heave their august domes above the laked and wooded plain. Beside these, as first constructed, the pyramids of Egypt must take second place for immensity of labour and grandeur of appearance. Great feats, like great pictures, are best portrayed in the simplest colours, the baldest words and figures. Conceive, then, a mound of solid red brick 405 feet high, with a diameter of 360 feet, and a base of 8 acres in extent, resting on a square plinth of vast dimensions. Such is, or was before Time and the devastating Tamil sheared it somewhat, the Ab. hayagiriya Dagaba, and there are three others at Anuradhapura of little less dimensions. Their foundations lie one hundred feet deep, "composed of layers of crystallised stone and

1 From the 'Mahawansa' or manuscript records of Ceylon, still perfectly preserved. Quoted from Mr H. W. Cave's 'The Book of Ceylon,' a fascinating volume absolutely indispensable to the visitor to the island.

plates of iron and copper alternately placed and cemented." One is supposed to hide a plate of brass eight inches thick and a plate of silver seven inches thick, entirely covering the foundations like a deck of metal. Their capacity averages some twenty millions of cubic feet apiece, and each contains enough bricks to build 8000 houses of 20 feet frontage, the complement of thirty streets half a mile long, the lining of a railway tunnel twenty miles in length, the total contents of a large town. So computes the statistician,1 who would belie his frigid trade did he not consider these dagabas as a "waste and misapplication of labour." We accept his sums, but not his summary. There is a kingly majesty of bulk and a queenly majesty of proportion, and when the twain are married, as in these grandiose monuments, utility is no child of theirs. Rather, it should be said, is the profoundest of all utilities their indestructible offspring, the uses of beauty, of veneration, of enjoyment to any who have eyes to see the grandeur of gigantic labour expended not for cash but faith. For these mountains of rosy brick are religious reliquaries. Each has its secret heart, a little treasure-chamber buried so deeply in the centre of a myriad tons of masonry that the destroying Tamils were unable

to reach them. Though their frantic fingers tore for centuries at the walls, they could only reduce parts of the swelling domes to irregular cones: then they and not the guardian walls were worn out. It is difficult for the brutal westerner not to sympathise with them when he reads of the ineffable beauties sleeping beneath the bricks! Imbedded in the centre of the Ruanweli Dagaba, for instance, lies almost for certain "an exquisitely beautiful bo-tree 2 in precious metals

the root of coral, fixed in an emerald ground the stem of fine silver, the leaves glittered with gems. The faded leaves were of gold; its fruit and tender leaves were of coral." The mere description is a poem; Keats himself would have wept for that "faded leaf" conception. But there is more. There is a canopy above the tree "fringed with a gold border tinkling with pearls. with bunches of pearls at the four corners. At the foot of the bo-tree were arranged rows of vases filled with the various flowers represented in jewellery." Spirits of Bond Street and Rue de la Paix, what would ye not give for such glories behind your plate-glass windows!

Polonnaruwa falls little behind Anuradhapura except for a thousand years less of age. It is still older than our oldest cathedral, and its buildings, of

1 Sir Emerson Tennent. Quoted from Mr Cave's 'The Book of Ceylon.' 2 The sacred tree of Buddhism, the original of which still grows within its own temple in Anuradhapura. The quotations are from Mr Cave's references to the Mahawausa, the singularly complete and accurate record of the ancient Sinhalese.

which many remain in fair condition, are majestic in the extreme. Here, too, are vast dagabas and endless columns; but the specialities of the place are perhaps, first, the massive temples, with more Hindoo ornamentation about them than the purer elegancies of Anuradhapura; secondly, the huge statues which, upright, recumbent, or carved in relief upon rock-faces, commemorate the gentle gods and mighty monarchs of the Sinhalese.

Space fails, and how little has been told of the most fascinating facet of this jewel of Asia, her resplendent past. What of Mehintale mountain, thronged with temples, with inscriptions, altars, hermits, pilgrims, and blossoming sacred trees, to be reached by eighteen hundred and forty wide stone steps cut out of its steep side from top to bottom? What of the Isurumuniya Temple near Anuradhapura, the Aluwihare Temple near Matale, the vast religious caverns at Dambulla, all hewn bodily out of the basalt cliffs, incredibly

gloomy and grand, the strongrooms of a faith? What of Sigiri, that terrific rock, leaping like an explosion from the plain beside an idle tank, its perpendicular sides scored with the heliacal coils of the most marvellous ascending gallery ever devised, its buttresses riddled with baths, temples, and retreats, its top strewn with the ruins of a palace,— all the litter of a mighty monarch, who vainly hoped that conscience herself could not follow him to this, the most inaccessible stronghold on earth? What of the lordly fanes at Galmaduwa, at Degaldoruwa, types of hundreds of all dimensions which nestle all over the island, incredibly secret and old, yet in full use by the worshippers of to-day? Hundreds more still lie deep under the earth itself, the roots of the forest gripping their masonry. There is more yet to discover than is already in the light in Ceylon, a land twice blest in the riches of her youth and age.

THE TWYMANS.

BY HENRY NEWBOLT.

CHAPTER XLIX.

WHATEVER Percy might think of his claim, it was not in his nature to pursue it halfheartedly, so long as he pursued it at all. On the first morning of the Easter Vacation he made straight for London, and the working day was still only beginning when he knocked at the door of Mr Mundy's chambers in Westminster. "Can you tell me," he asked as he shook his guardian's hand, "how I ought to approach these Heralds? I don't even know where the College of Arms is."

Mr Mundy retained his grasp, and tapped with his left hand on Peroy's arm. "It is you who ought to tell me that," he replied. "I hardly know the difference between lions and kittens, you know."

Peroy well remembered the scene of that first antagonism -he had remembered it many times in past years. But now the recollection brought none of the old uncomfortable feeling: he differed from Mr Mundy in that taste, he was about to differ from him more strongly upon a more practical matter, but he knew that their friendship would none the less remain unbroken, and even unruffled. In these thirteen years he had had time to study his guardian; instinctively at first and then more consciously, he

had perceived that the difference between their views of life was deeper than a mere question of preferences, and finally that it was not a complete difference after all, since there was within himself a whole range of feelings and ideas very like those against which he had in old days contended. Mr Mundy had ceased to be an enemy; he had become, so far as his philosophy was concerned, merely a rather unmanageable part of Percy's own mind: the man himself remained outside, genial, humorous, and quiet, with a mountainous calm that was very refreshing to one of Percy's quick, irritable temperament. But now Mr Mundy, having made his little score, turned to a bookcase, and with appropriate slowness took out a ponderous red Directory.

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not compare well with that of Oxford. Fleet Street, Ludgate Circus, Queen Victoria Street itself, all oppressed him: only the black and grey beauty of Wren's churches from time to time lifted the weight for a moment as he passed them, words of a language that he could understand, in the midst of much alien gibberish. Then came a welcome surprise. In a little courtyard of its own, standing well back between two huge meaningless blocks of building, he saw a low red house with a balustrade and double flight of steps in front of it. Fitness, proportion, dignity -it had every quality that was lacking in its neighbours. So plain was the rebuke it implied that Percy, as he jumped from the hansom, found himself wondering how much longer the creators of this world of giant warehouses would refrain from crushing it out of exist

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hundred years past. With these Peroy would have loved to linger, but Mr Mundy was already following the porter out of another door and up a sombre staircase, exactly like the typical Oxford college staircase. The painted tinplate with Mr Wilbraham's name over his door increased the resemblance, and therefore seemed appropriate, though Percy was again disappointed by the absence of the more picturesque title.

Inside the room, when they were ushered into it, there was still nothing to lessen this disappointment. Mr Wilbraham at his knee-hole table might have been a solicitor of the most ordinary kind, a courteous man of the world with a business-like manner and an air of being entirely at the disposal of his clients for a strictly limited space of time. He understood Percy's position already, and assured him that the Twyman pedigree, by Sir William's order, had been recently completed, and was in the library ready for his inspection and signature. He then led his visitors back across the hall, through an antechamber, and into the library on the far side of it. This was a room entirely to Percy's mind, hushed and reposeful, with dark shelves on which stood none but huge and venerable tomes. Even the catalogue, as he soon afterwards discovered, was in manuscript on vellum, and seemed to contain no recent entries: anything new, it appeared, would be out of place here he felt out of place him

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