The signs and sounds of ancient glory die away, the music of the drums grows dim in our ears, and the flashing of gold and silver vanishes; once more we awake to reality on the hillock in the great peace of the present-time city. Climbing down we may pass on toward Thuparama and continue our investigations. Amid numerous evidences of the former monasteries we presently come to one a little south-west of the dagaba, where the huge balustrade of the entrance stairs is split from top to bottom. This balustrade and its companion are well worth examining. The design is quite unusual. The conventional lion is crammed into a small space and the rest of the stones is divided into small compartments, with various dainty and graceful carvings.

But the gem of the carving is on the right side of the southern stone, and consists in a spirited representation of a fight between a cobra and mongoose, while a monkey, clasping its baby to its breast, looks down from a large-leaved tree. A drawing of this unique carving was made especially for this book by Muhandiram D. A. L. Perera, of the Archæological Survey. This is worth examining in some detail, as such a homely subject is extremely rare. For the position of the stone see Frontispiece.

There are graceful figures of women on the stone to the north, and a drawing in low relief of a house or temple at the inner end of each balustrade. These are some of the very few representations of houses remaining to show us what such buildings were like when complete. The columns exactly resemble those standing about

everywhere at the present day, so it is at least likely that the top storeys are faithfully depicted too. Such a building is also occasionally found on a stone used for certain purposes of daily life (see p. 87).

Passing onward again we see to the left a forest of columns, once a house for priests, and to the right the Dalada Maligawa, Temple of the Tooth, easily recognised by the odd capitals of its columns (see p. 65).

The Tooth-relic was brought to Ceylon in A.D. 311, long after Dutugemunu's time, by a Brahman princess, but it was lodged in an already existing building of King Tissa, so parts of this ruin may be as old as anything else in the city. The relic was regarded as so peculiarly sacred that it was carried away for safety during the worst Tamil raids. It accompanied the court whenever the king had sufficient power to take it with him, and was lodged at all the various capitals of the kingdom from time to time. Occasionally, when the monks had reason to distrust their monarch's good faith, they, who had access to it, carried it off themselves, until he came to reason. It was not even safe from members of the royal household, for in the time of the great Parakrama it was stolen by his aunt, and he had considerable difficulty in getting it back from her before she carried it off to India. It was stolen and actually taken to India in the fourteenth century, but was restored after the Cingalese monarch himself, Parakrama III, had been over to the mainland to plead for it in person. The story of this, the most sacred relic of all to Buddhists, is a most

enthralling one, and it is a pity it is not accessible in English. The adventures of the Tooth are, indeed, recorded in Elu, the classical language of the Cingalese, in the Dhatuwansa, a work mentioned in the Mahawansa and still extant, but even in translation the style of this would not appeal to English readers. From golden caskets set with jewels, raised above bowing, swaying, adoring multitudes, to the hair of a princess's head or the saffron folds of a priest's robe as places of hurried concealment, the story runs. From temples of granite, decorated with gold and silver, to windy caves on bare hillsides and holes in the depths of jungles the Tooth has wandered. It is said to have been rescued from the funeral pyre of Buddha by Khema the sage, and eventually brought to Ceylon concealed in the hair of the princess, who was of Kalinga lineage, a race that gave more than one king to Ceylon. The feat must have been difficult, for the fantastic size of this much-prized relic robs it in unprejudiced eyes of any possible claim to be what it represents to be, though its great age and the reverence bestowed upon it invest it with peculiar interest. The tooth is very seldom seen indeed by Europeans. It is enclosed in many caskets and guarded at Kandy, where it is carried in procession every year at the great festival or Perahera, which now takes place in August. But though the original cannot be seen, there is a model in Colombo museum, which shows exactly what it is like. It is held up by a wire, which encircles it and springs from the heart of a lotus-flower after the usual fashion for such relics in Burma as well as Ceylon. The tooth