Although the caves at Elephanta are wonderful, they are greatly inferior in size and beauty to a larger group at Ellora, a day’s journey by train from Bombay, and after that a carriage or horseback ride of two hours.  There are 100 cave temples, carved out of the solid rock between the second and the tenth centuries.  They are scattered along the base of a range of beautifully wooded hills about 500 feet above the plain, and the amount of labor and patience expended in their construction is appalling, especially when one considers that the men who made them were without the appliances and tools of modern times, knew nothing of explosives and were dependent solely upon chisels of flint and other stones.  The greatest and finest of them is as perfect in its details and as elaborate in its ornamentations as the cathedrals at Milan or Toledo, except that it has been cut out of a single piece of stone instead of being built up of many small pieces.

The architect made his plans with the most prodigal detail and executed them with the greatest perfection.  He took a solid rock, an absolute monolith, and chiseled out of it a cathedral 365 feet long, 192 feet wide and 96 feet high, with four rows of mighty columns sustaining a vaulted roof that is covered with pictures in relief illustrating the power and the adventures and the achievements of his gods.  It would accommodate 5,000 worshippers.  Around the walls he left rough projections, which were afterward carved into symbolical figures and images, eight, ten and twelve feet high, of elephants lions, tigers, oxen, rams, swans and eagles, larger than life.  Corner niches and recesses have been enriched with the most intricate ornamentation, and in them, still of the same rock, without the introduction of an atom of outside material, the sculptors chiseled the figures of forty or more of the principal Hindu deities.  And on each of the four sides is a massive altar carved out of the side of the cliff with the most ornate and elaborate traceries and other embellishment.

Indeed, my pen is not capable of describing these most wonderful achievements of human genius and patience.  But all of them have been described in great detail and with copious illustrations in books that refer to nothing else.  I can only say that they are the most wonderful of all the human monuments in India.

  “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.