"From one vast mount of solid stone
A mighty temple has been cored
By nut-brown children of the sun,
When stars were newly bright, and blithe
Of song along the rim of dawn--
A mighty monolith."

The thirty principal temples are scattered along the rocky mountain
side within a distance of two miles, and seventy-nine others are
in the immediate neighborhood. The smallest of the principal group
is 90 feet long, 40 feet wide, with a roof 40 feet high sustained
by thirty-four columns. They are all alike in one particular. No
mortar was used in their construction or any outside material.
Every atom of the walls and ceilings, the columns, the altars
and the images and ornaments stands exactly where the Creator
placed it at the birth of the universe.

There are several groups of cave temples in the same neighborhood.
Some of them were made by the Buddhists, for it seems to have
been fashionable in those days to chisel places of worship out
of the rocky hillsides instead of erecting them in the open air,
according to the ordinary rules of architecture. There are not
less than 300 in western India which are believed to have been
made within a period of a thousand years. Archæologists dispute
over their ages, just as they disagree about everything else. Some
claim that the first of the cave temples antedates the Christian
era; others declare that the oldest was not begun for 300 years
after Christ, but to the ordinary citizen these are questions of
little significance. It is not so important for us to know when