“No sight I witnessed in India made me more sick at heart than this. It presented a sad example of the utterly debasing character of the idolatry which, notwithstanding the counteracting influences of education and Christianity, still enslaves the masses of the population, deadening their intellects, corrupting their imaginations, warping their affections, perverting their consciences, and disfiguring the fair soil of a beautiful country with hideous usages and practices unsanctioned by even their own minds and works.”—“Religious Thought and Life in India.” Part I, pp. 442-443.
You are now introduced into a darker corridor, and then again into a broad and pillared space, where the columns are sculptured, being cut through and through into figures of dancing gods, like Shiva when he played his flute to the shepherds. You now look out upon a little sheet of water with a miniature temple in the middle of it. This is the Lake of the Golden Lilies. Near by it is the little chapel where Queen Mangammal’s subjects starved her to death in 1706, having placed food so near that she could see and smell it, but not taste it. We now enter another department of the temple; above there are stone images, up around the pillars, in all corners, and hanging down over you wherever you go, near walls or archways. These images are not grave and majestic, but, in the main, grotesque, bacchanalian, in fantastic attitudes, and often combining the bodies of man and beast. They represent, for the most part, the escapades of Shiva. Every now and then one comes to a shrine, where worshipers lie prostrate before it, and remain motionless for a long time. No one knows how long it has taken these poor dusty pilgrims to reach this sacred place. Perhaps they have been three months on the journey. They come from the very base of the Himalayas, or the borders of Thibet, and now that they have reached the end of their pilgrimage, would die with a happy heart. There are several gold plated images, veiled from view, which represent the god Shiva, or his wife, in some part of their marvelous career. The representations in stone, both of men and the brute world, are frequent everywhere. Elephants, horses, cattle, and every kind of animal held sacred in the Hindoo mythology, are cut out of stone, and made to portray the supposed divine attributes of Shiva and his wife. Here, too, are the very _vehanas_, or great chariots, plated with gold, in which the god and his wife are taken out on special days in the year, to ride. Beside these there are silver litters, which serve the same divine purpose on other days.