Idols of the Cave

POTCHARD, of the Archæological Survey, stood upon the rock’s brow and stretched himself luxuriously. He had finished an uncommonly good morning’s work. He had been copying a newly found inscription which promised to go far to solve the mystery of the famous monuments on which he was engaged. The publication of this discovery, he reflected, would mean a great gain to science. Incidentally it would add much to his own professional reputation, even when all due credit had been given, as in the generous glory of the moment he was determined that it should be given, to his Brahman assistant, the actual finder, and when his own official superior, who would be in a better position than himself to publish it abroad, had in turn taken his share of honor at the other end. It seemed good to Potchard, in the hour of which I am writing, to be alive; which was to say, to be in possession of reasonable health and a congenial career, to have earned an hour of leisure by hard and fortunate work, to know that a comfortable drink and tiffin would shortly be waiting for him in the resthouse, and in the meanwhile, thanks to the quickening coolness that flowed, like the vast breath of a god, from the glittering bay before him, to be out here pleasurably in the open at high noon — a luxury of which those only will appreciate the full value who, born in temperate latitudes, know how rarely it is obtainable in the Indian plains, at least so far south as Potchard’s province lay. It seemed very good to him to be out here in the open on a pleasant coast, far from the office and the railway, and inhaling blissfully the sense of freedom and solitude and silence, of gray rock and palm and sea, and of the neighborhood of those marvelous monuments of a mysterious antiquity to which he had given his heart.

The enormous boulder upon which he stood, and the thousand others piled and scattered around him and strewn at random along the coast in either direction, were of the kind that commonly outcrop and litter themselves upon the Southern plains and jungles — now in the form almost of monolithic mountains, the seat and throne of many a Dekhan acropolis; now, as here, in a manifestation less vast, but multitudinous, conglomerate, and confused, and sometimes built upon itself in a fashion so fantastic and precarious as to suggest the sportive handiwork of demons. The rock itself is generally of the same character throughout, gray and rounded, bald and dry, stained with broad stripes from the rain, but almost destitute of grass or lichen. In this voluminous and lasting material some forgotten dynasty of the South had chosen here to engrave, in symbols proportionately vast, the dark record of its power. One ponderous ridge of granite had been carved into the likeness of seven pagan minsters of the prime, complete, with all their clustering cells and pillared halls, reduced indeed from the scale of thronged originals, but still a wonder of gigantic sculpture. Beyond these curious monuments, with their stone guard of colossal bulls, lions, and elephants, rose the graceful spire of another and somewhat later temple of builded stones, the most romantic of all the relics of this forgotten sea mart, within whose desolate forecourt the waves themselves now bowed in adoration, and washed with tidal punctuality the pedestal of the god’s columnar standard. All this was now hidden from Potchard’s view by the giant rockeries between, and by a comparatively modern temenos of Vishnu, enclosed in a great square of wall, which the reputed sanctity of the spot still kept drowsily alive; but pillared chambers had been carved by the same antique art out of the core of several rocks in the immediate neighborhood; and the naked shoreward face of the great boulder upon the crown of which Potchard himself stood bore a magnificent bas-relief, famous — in photographs — to archœologists throughout the world, and representing, with a vigor and realism generally lacking in later Indian art, and at the same time with a mastery and finish possible only in a developed and successful school, some celebrated miracle or act of worship, in which a cloud of gods and sages, fabulous beings, and forest animals, including a family of stately elephants, nearly as large as life, took their secular and silent part.

The subject of this crowning masterpiece of the solitudes, though well known to that oracular authority, Tradition, had long been in doubt among those who knew better; and Potchard, having nothing else to do, took a vague resolve to look again at the bas-relief on his way home to tiffin, in order to review upon the spot the latest arguments that had been put forward on the subject. His way to the lower ground, however, led him past the pillared front of one of those shallow porches cut into the rock which have been already mentioned. In this elemental chamber he had already noticed, while talking that morning to his assistant in the course of his tour of inspection, the existence of a peculiar echo; he now turned aside and entered the portico with the object of finding out the exact nature of this peculiarity.

The chamber — a work, as he now knew, of the seventh century of our era — was very neatly finished, and as fresh as if it had been carved last year. Grotesque pillars propped the lintel, and large mythological panels in bas-relief adorned the walls at the back and sides. By shouting and singing scales before these graven images in a way that would have appeared comic to an observer unacquainted with his object, Potchard discovered that the echoes of the cave remained comparatively dull to most noises, but if one particular note of the scale was mooted the rock responded like a bell.

While a moiety of Potchard was engaged in the pursuit, and exploitation, of this pretty discovery, his idle eye fell to considering the sculptures by which he was surrounded. The panel which occupied the side wall represented, in that vigorous and early style whose quality has been already indicated, the delightful Earth goddess lifted in triumph out of the Deluge by the boarheaded incarnation of Vishnu. In the neighboring panel at the back the same deity’s yet more honorable bride, Sri Lakshmi, goddess of Prosperity, was undergoing the royal rite of lustration, or enjoying a shower bath, at the hands

— for so the early Aryans reverently regarded the dexterous member used — of her attendant elephants. This popular subject, stereotyped later into an almost heraldic formula, was here treated with a freedom which looked novel to the reverted eyes of the modern. The goddess, naked as Aphrodite, sat throned on a lotus in the centre. Beneath her on either side a file of naked girls passed waterpots from hand to hand. The elephants, two vaguely huge and jutting heads that filled the upper region of the panel as it were with a condensation or stone metaphor of opposing thunderclouds, received and lifted the pitchers in their serviceable coils, and poured the water over the body of the goddess, the effect of movement being cleverly suggested, as on the Parthenon frieze or in a modern cinematograph, by representing each figure at a different stage of the action.

Potchard was of course well acquainted professionally with these and all the sculptures of the site. Professionally, again, he was proud of them, as the curator of a museum is proud of his best specimens. But although — perhaps because — he had once been through the mill of an English art school, he had never felt them as living art, nor learned the secret, if any existed, of their beauty. To-day, however, he was suddenly caught unawares by the grace of the little figure of the Earth goddess as by a trick of living loveliness; and as he turned thence, with new interest and respect, to study the adjoining panel of the Lakshmi of the Elephants, the dormant art student within him gradually became aware that he was looking at a composition of extraordinary beauty and power, articulate in symbols different indeed from those of his own tradition, yet perhaps no further than they from the nature which guided both. The spacing and balance of the design, Potchard said to himself in the dialect of the studio, were admirable; and the contrast between the slender, languid beauty of the naked girls and the uncouth and massive heads of the elephants— At this point the thread of his mental soliloquy got lost in the reality of delightful contemplation.

Almost at the same instant a brown Hindu stepped suddenly and noiselessly from behind him, laid his hand upon the trunk of one of the elephants, and seemed to be trying to remove some dust or other matter from the angle of the contour.

‘ Here, what are you doing? ’ Potchard called out sharply in Tamil, taking the newcomer for one of the folk from the Vishnu temple hard by. “Be good enough to leave those images alone.'

The stranger turned a handsome, frank South Indian face, showing his fine teeth in a smile.

‘You need not fear,’ he said, ‘that I shall harm the images. I can neither mar nor mend them. Moreover, I do not wish to mar them, for it was I that made them.'

‘Made them, did you?’ said Potchard with a laugh. ‘That is interesting. How long ago do you think those images were made?’

The man meditated a moment. ‘They were made long, long ago,’ he said. ‘They were made in the reign of the king Mamalla, the great Pallava.'

Potchard gaped. This was precisely the information which he had deciphered that morning from the newly discovered inscription, and which he thought to be known to himself and his assistant alone of living men, for the local traditions regarding the origin of the monuments were vague and fantastic, and the inscriptions were not understood. Apparently this fellow had been talking to the assistant; but, as he appeared to be crazy, it was strange that he should grasp, as he seemed to do, the significance of the information.

He was a man of medium height, but so well proportioned as to appear almost tall. He was girt with the usual South Indian loin cloth to the ankles, and went naked from the waist upward, like all the people of the South where Muslim or Western sophistication has not asserted itself. His long hair was tied in a chignon, not at the back, as is the general fashion in the Tamil country, but somewhat aside, as they use it in Malabar; and the chignon itself was much larger than usual. His face was aquiline, and would have been exceptionally handsome, even to Western eyes, but for a certain downward curve and protrusion of the lower lip, which, however, by no means impaired the distinction though it broke the beauty of the features.

Potchard surveyed the man with interest, slowly recovering from his surprise. In India it is not entirely uncommon to meet mystically disposed persons who make paradoxical assertions and extravagant claims; and Potchard was in the humor to enter into the fun of the thing.

‘If you made those images in the reign of King Mamalla, my friend,’ he remarked, ‘you must have undergone a great many rebirths in the meanwhile. I wonder you have n’t forgotten the incident.’

The man looked at Potchard with an oddly serious and serene expression.

‘The artist, sir, is free from rebirths,’ he said, ‘so long as his works endure on earth; for his former individuality endures with them. When they are hidden or neglected it sleeps in them; but when they are admired it wakes again in the gazer’s heart, and rejoices.’

‘As admirer or admired?' asked Potchard quizzically.

‘That, sir, is a difficult problem in logic, which I cannot explain. Perhaps there is no real difference at all. Are we not all one in Brahma, the Ultimate Soul? I only know that contemplation wakes, and is glad.’

The hidebound Englishman did not quite follow this, for he proceeded to ask: ‘Do you not grow tired of contemplating your own work so many times, and after all these years?’

‘Ah, sir, you are not an artist, or you would not put the question. Have you never seen a living artist brood upon his own work done? Do you know how often he will return to the same employment, even when he has so many other calls upon him, and fresh beauty to achieve? Will that need of his grow less, do you think, when he can create no longer? To know the beauty of his own work done, that is the artist’s heaven. There is a faculty that will outlast the hardest material that the earth affords him to shape his thought in. I used to think that I revised my work so that I might alter and improve it; but now I can alter it no longer, nor often wish to alter it, indeed, for we learn little in the world of shadows; but I still take a tireless pleasure in looking it over. You must remember that the soul of the dead artist suffers long eclipses, incalculable intervals of sleep and oblivion, in which perhaps there lies some quick virtue of forgetfulness that makes awakening always sweet. If all the world should come together and stand at gaze throughout the centuries, admiring these images of mine, perhaps I might be weary of my bliss; but they don’t.’

‘You have a healthy appetite for a ghost, my friend,’ said Potchard; ‘but how is it that I have never seen you before? For this is not the first time that I have admired your masterpieces.’

‘You have not rightly admired them before,’ replied the other. ‘ Did you not notice how the echo of this chamber chimes in answer to one note only, and is deaf to all the others? In the same way there is only one mood of the mind that can call up the living secret of a work of art. The rest approach it vainly.’

‘If this is fooling,’ thought Potchard, ‘at least it is excellent fooling,’ and fragmentary phrases and vaguely remembered anecdotes from spiritualistic writers began to occur to him. If he were really assisting at any such phenomenon — what an opportunity!

He pulled a notebook out of his pocket; but the sight of it seemed to make the stranger ill, and he put it away again.

‘This Mamalla, now, the great Pallava— what manner of man was he?’ Potchard asked, as it were casually.

The other’s eyes kindled. ‘ He was a great king,’ he replied, ‘and his navies sailed upon the sea; he reverenced the gods and was kind to merchants; but especially he loved and rewarded the artists.’ He paused, pleasantly reflective.

‘What else did he love?’ Potchard asked encouragingly.

‘Beautiful women,’ replied the other readily, ‘and he loved to have us carve their beauty in the rock. See how beautiful are the girls carrying the pitchers there. But that is partly a trick,’ he added with a laugh, ‘for the girls and the elephants each make the other appear more beautiful by comparison. Look at the figure of the Earth goddess in the next panel,’ and he indicated the figure which had first caught Potchard’s attention that morning. ‘That figure pleased the King particularly. See how prettily she sits poised on the knee of the mighty Boar god; and again the head of the beast by comparison makes her lovelier. Is she not beautiful?’

‘Certainly,’ Potchard admitted a little awkwardly. ’What is he doing? Kissing her?’

‘Smelling her,’ was the prompt reply. ‘The Boar has raised her above the floods; he is smelling the fresh fragrance of the Earth.’ And Potchard, though slightly shocked, could not but recognize the ingenuous aptness, the rude poetry of the thought.

’That was not my own idea,’ continued the stranger pleasantly. ‘It was told me by a Brahman poet. The Brahmans had beautiful ideas about the gods, and beautiful stories. But sometimes they would hinder an artist, rather than help him. They insisted that the gods should have four arms each, and sometimes six or eight. Do you believe, sir,’ and he turned to Potchard confidentially, ‘that the gods have so many arms?’

‘That, my good sir, is a question which you ought to be in a better position to answer than I am,’ said Potchard smiling.

‘Why?’ asked the other. ‘I know no more of the gods now than when I was alive in the flesh. Are they not the gods of the living? But I shall never believe that they have all those arms. To have so many would not be beautiful, and the gods must surely be beautiful. I always used to hide away the odd arms as well as I could, so that no one but ihe bigots need notice them. See the Vishnu there, and yonder, again,’ and he indicated the figures on various panels.

Potchard assented vigorously. He was experiencing a delightful sense of intimacy with an age and people about whom, in company with other archæologists, he had long been curious. He was beginning, however, to reproach himself for wasting an opportunity so precious as the present in talking what he called ‘artistic shop,’ however archaic, and he cast about to turn the conversation into more profitable channels.

’Where did these Pallavas originally come from?’ he asked suddenly, fingering the notebook in his pocket. It was a momentous question, and its right answer would mean fame and a new chapter of Indian history.

The stranger did not seem to hear, and Potchard, with concealed suspense, repeated his question. He refrained from looking at the other lest he should seem too eager, for he knew that what we eagerly desire is harder to obtain from others than what we affect to despise.

‘Come from?’ echoed the stranger absent-mindedly, after another painful pause. ‘Come from? Originally?’ His far-away voice seemed to be growing fainter.

Suddenly he gripped the patient Potchard’s arm with an unspectral vigor which startled the archæologist.

‘See,’ he said, in a soft but vigorous tone of glee, pointing to the panel of the elephants.

A little striped squirrel, a creature almost as common in India as the house sparrow in England, picked its way delicately across the forehead of the right-hand elephant, leaped across to the other for a moment, then, descending by way of the beast’s trunk and the shoulder of the nearest handmaiden, dropped to the floor and ran away.

The stranger’s enjoyment must have been contagious, for Potchard actually failed for the moment to notice his own disappointment, in the simple delight of that little casual spectacle, that freak of contrast pretty and pointed as a Greek epigram, that merry twinkle of delicate life and color and agility across the huge features of the hoary monument.

‘Ah, very pretty,’ said the archæologist, forgetting the Pallavas and speaking as to a friend. ‘ I have often noticed that the little living creatures that haunt such a monumental site as this, the lizards and squirrels, the green parrots, doves, and other birds, seem somehow prettier and pleasanter to the eye than in the open woods. Is it because life is the one thing wanting here, the lost, irrevocable treasure? Or is it merely as a relief to the much dead art of the place?’

The Viswa-karma smiled.

‘No doubt it is difficult for art to emulate the variety and minuteness of nature,’ he admitted, ‘but that subtle glorification, which you have observed, of the beauty even of the commonest living creatures here is partly due, I believe, to the influence of all the souls of the dead artists that are sleeping around you, for one of the noblest functions of the artist is to glorify the world we live in, or rather to lend men eyes so that they may see more clearly the glory that is there already.’

Through the lulling charm of the stranger’s eloquence Potchard’s professional conscience began to prick him again. ‘But you were about to tell me, when the squirrel interrupted us,’ said he, ‘something concerning the Pallavas.’

‘Was I?’ said the artist, all the enthusiasm dying out of his eyes. ‘What was it?’

‘Where they originally came from.’

‘Came from?’ said the other inattentively; and then again, after an interval, as if he were trying to collect himself, ‘Came from?’

Each time the voice was weaker. His stature also seemed to shrink, and Potchard, gazing desperately expectant, suddenly thought he began to see a glimpse of one of the columns of the chamber through the man’s naked body. Potchard made a grab at his notebook. He thought vaguely of Hamlet and his ‘tables,’ and the ghost who had to leave at cockcrow.

‘Be quick and brief, for heaven’s sake,’ he cried, tense over his notebook, pencil ready, ears at strain, for the voice now was very faint.

‘Originally came from—’

There was another long pause. Potchard looked up — and found the stranger gone.

‘Why,’ said he, ‘didn’t I stick to the art “shop”? I might at least have found out what was the subject of the great bas-relief.’

He sat down disconsolately on the sill of the chamber and glared into the sunlight. The extravagant hopes which he had been subconsciously cherishing, of revelations which were to confound his archæological brethren, were suddenly curtailed. It remained only to make the most of what was left. He put his notebook on his knee and bit the end of his pencil.

As one who has in a dream apparently created some immortal work of literature— an heroic poem, perhaps, or a volume of epoch-making discoveries in thought or science — finds, as he approaches step by step the confines of the waking world, that the jewels of his eloquence turn one by one to common pebbles, and the fruit of his invention to ashes, so it fared with Potchard the archæologist as he sat upon the threshold of the rock chapel; until he was fain to confess that there was not one of those wonderful revelations, whose combined effect had been to produce so thrilling a sense of familiarity with the unrecorded past, which could not have been deduced in the course of a discerning and sympathetic study of the sculptures themselves.

Sympathetic and discerning study of old art, however, even when it falls short of inspiration, is rare enough in archæological reports to excite notice. When Potchard produced his next account his brethren said that Potchard was inspired.

For once Potchard felt bound to admit that they were right.