of living beings into stone by the gods;[14] they were therefore the exact resemblance of living beings, while the others could only be rude imitations’.  ‘Gauri’, or the Fair, is the name of Parvati, or Devi, when she appears with her husband Siva.  On such occasions she is always fair and beautiful.  Sankar is another name of Siva, or Mahadeo, or Rudra.  On looking into the temple at the statue, a lady expressed her surprise at the entireness as well as the excellence of the figures, while all round had been so much mutilated by the Muhammadans.  ’They are quite a different thing from the others’, said a respectable old landholder; ’they are a conversion of real flesh and blood into stone, and no human hands can either imitate or hurt them.’  She smiled incredulously, while he looked very grave, and appealed to the whole crowd of spectators assembled, who all testified to the truth of what he had said; and added that ’at no distant day the figures would be all restored to life again, the deities would all come back without doubt and reanimate their old bodies again’.

All the people who come to bathe at the fair bring chaplets of yellow jasmine, and hang them as offerings round the necks of the god and his consort; and at the same time they make some small offerings of rice to each of the many images that stand within the same apartment, and also to those which, under a stone roof supported upon stone pillars, line the inside of the wall that surrounds the circular area, in the centre of which the temple stands.  The images inside the temple are those of the three great gods, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, with their primaeval consorts;[15] but those that occupy the piazza outside are the representations of the consorts of the different incarnations of these three gods, and these consorts are themselves the incarnations of the primaeval wives, who followed their husbands in all their earthly ramblings.  They have all the female form, and are about the size of ordinary women, and extremely well cut out of fine white and green sandstone; but their heads are those of the animals in which their respective husbands became incarnate, such as the lion, the elephant, &c., or those of the ‘vahans’, or animals on which they rode, such as the bull, the swan, the eagle, &c.  But these, I presume, are mere capricios of the founder of the temple.  The figures are sixty-four in number, all mounted upon their respective ‘vahans’, but have been sadly mutilated by the pious Muhammadans.[16]

The old ‘Mahant’, or high priest, told us that Mahadeo and his wife were in reality our Adam and Eve; ‘they came here together’, said he, ’on a visit to the mountain Kailas,[17] and being earnestly solicited to leave some memorial of their visit, got themselves turned into stone’.  The popular belief is that some very holy man, who had been occupied on the top of this little conical hill, where the temple now stands, in austere devotions