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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
Discerns the signal of its distant splash. Grudge not the toil to track yon rugged stair," Down where huge fragments strew the torrent bed.
Look up and scan the tow 'ring precipice. Sat ever beauty on such awful front?
Was e'er dread grief so girt with loveliness? How goodly are thy robes, thou foam-clad
queen. What hues of heaven are woven in thy skirt; Thy misty veil, how gracefully it fallsForever falls and yet unveils thee not! Down the black rock in many a show'ry jet, Like arrowy meteors on the midnight sky, Prone shoot the parted waters. And lo where With angry roar athwart the precipice In mighty furrows rushes to the plunge A headlong torrent. But majestic most Thy stately fall, unbroken to the base, Fair column of white water meekly shrined In the dim grandeur of thy gloomy chasm. Imperishable waters! To the place From whence ye came incessant ye return, Dissolve, condense and constant reappear; A river now, and now a restless wave, Aloft a heaven-obscuring canopy,
A thunder cloud alighting in soft rain, Or spilt in torrents on the streaming earth, Again to gather, and perchance again Shoot from yon heights a sounding cataract. GORDON FORBES.
THE AGE OF SRIHARSHA,
IN connection with Mr. D. R. Bhandarkar's note appended to my note on "The age of Sriharsha" ante, p. 83, I have to offer the following observations:
(a) Rajasekhara's Prabandhakosa was compos ed more than a century and a half after the reign of the Gahadavala king Jayachchandra (A.D. 1170-1193) in A. D. 1348 (Sivadattasarman's introduction to Naishadhiyacharitam, p. 3). The story of the composition and publication of the
[NOVEMBER, 1913
Naishadhiya as told by Rajasekhara bas very little historical basis. Of course the names of some historical personages find place in the story. But even here the author is not correct. He names the patron of Briharsha as Jayantachandra and not Jayachchandra and makes him the son and not the grandson of Govindachandra, king of Vârânusl; so Rájasekhara cannot be accepted as a very reliable authority on Gahaḍavála history, and it is not safe to accept his testimony concerning the contemporaneity of Jayachchandra and Sriharsha as decisive without corroborative contemporary evidence. Rajasekhara may as well have connected a poet of an earlier age with Jayachchandra as Merntunga has connected Bana, Magha, and the dramatist Rajasekhara with Bhoja Paramara in his Prabandhachintamani.
(b) As for Arnava-varnana we know of no other charitá which is called varnana, and so it is difficult to accept Arnava-varyana as a charita of the Châhamana king Arņoraja.
(c) The Chhinda chief (of Gayâ) mentioned in the Gaya inscription of Purushottamadeva, who was a tributary of Aśokavalla, and dated in the year 1813 after Buddha's Nirvana, was not a contemporary of Jayachchandra, but flourished a century after Jayachchandra's accession. The date of this inscription is usually taken as corres ponding to Wednesday, 28th October, A.D. 1176, with 638 B. C. as the initial year of the era of Buddha's Nirvana. As this is the only instance of the use of this era in India, it cannot be can. sidered as of Indian origin, but must have been imported from outside. It has been proved that the era of Buddha's Nirvana starting from 544 B. C. took its rise in Ceylon in the middle of the eleventh century and was thence carried to Burma (Fleet's Contributions to J. R. 4. S. of 1909, 1911 and 1912; Geiger's Introduction to the Mahavamsa, London, 1912, p. 29). From a Burmese inscription at Bodh-Gay& we learn that Burmese monks repaired a chaitya at Bodh-Gay three times, and that the last repair works were
The descent on the south side of the fall down to the pool at the bottom.
The section of the fall called La Dame Blanche,-the fall on the south or Mysore side of the river.
The fall known as 'The Rooket,'-to the north or right of La Dame Blanche.
The Roarer, falls into a basin and thence leaps towards the Réja fall and joins it.
The Raja, also called the Horse-shoe fall, the Main fall and the Great fall,-is the large fall on the north or Kanara side of the Sharavati river.