The pass was crowned with dense, dark forest--deodar, walnut, wild cherry, wild olive, and wild pear, but mostly deodar, which is the Himalayan cedar; and under the shadow of the deodars stood a deserted shrine to Kali--who is Durga, who is Sitala, who is sometimes worshipped against the smallpox.
Purun Dass swept the stone floor clean, smiled at the grinning statue, made himself a little mud fireplace at the back of the shrine, spread his antelope skin on a bed of fresh pine-needles, tucked his bairagi--his brass-handled crutch--under his armpit, and sat down to rest.
Now, a Hill-man makes nothing of a few hundred feet up or down, and as soon as the villagers saw the smoke in the deserted shrine, the village priest climbed up the terraced hillside to welcome the stranger.
Here, on the night when the shrine was completed, Vishnu the Preserver appeared to the three Brahmins in a dream.
And the Brahmins caused the prophecy to be written over the gates of the shrine in letters of gold.
There
shrines and palaces and towers(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!) Resemble nothing that is ours.
1) Sweet-voiced daughter of Zeus from thy gold-paved Pythian shrine Wafted to Thebes divine, What dost thou bring me?
1) Yea, but now flashed forth the summons from Parnassus' snowy peak, "Near and far the undiscovered doer of this murder seek!" Now like a sullen bull he roves Through forest brakes and upland groves, And vainly seeks to fly The doom that ever nigh Flits o'er his head, Still by the avenging Phoebus sped, The voice divine, From Earth's mid shrine.
He no longer spoke cheerfully to his flock, nor ran with alacrity to the
shrine of Hastur.
Every three or four hundred yards, it seemed to me, we came upon the shrine of some saint or other--a rude picture of him built into a huge cross or a stone pillar by the road-side.--Some of the pictures of the Saviour were curiosities in their way.
Here and there, on the fronts of roadside inns, we found huge, coarse frescoes of suffering martyrs like those in the shrines. It could not have diminished their sufferings any to be so uncouthly represented.
10-12) `...and men will lay up for her (3) many offerings in her
shrines. And as these things are three (4), so shall mortals ever sacrifice perfect hecatombs to you at your feasts each three years.'