[Sidenote: 18. The Main Bazaar Street, Trichinopoly.] [Sidenote: 19. The Tank and the Rock, Trichinopoly.] [Sidenote: 20. The Same—another view.] [Sidenote: 21. The Rock temple, Trichinopoly.] In the distance through the archway is the Rock of Trichinopoly which we approach nearer by the main bazaar of the town, and then, nearer still, we come to the tank which lies beneath the Rock. Amid the water is a pagoda or shrine. In the foot of the Rock itself there is excavated a temple. Such rock temples are frequent in India, perhaps because rock is less costly to carve where it lies undisturbed than it is to quarry and to remove and to build and to carve. [Sidenote: 22. Trichinopoly, looking east from the top of the Rock.] [Sidenote: 23. Trichinopoly, looking south from the top of the Rock.] [Sidenote: 24. The Bull Nandi, Tanjore.] [Sidenote: 25. The Fort, Tanjore.] [Sidenote: 26. The Temple, Tanjore.] [Sidenote: 27. Police drilling on the Maidan, Tanjore.] Here we have views from the summit of the Trichinopoly Rock, looking eastward over the city, and then southward over the roof of the great temple to the tank and the Christian Church. Bishop Heber died at Trichinopoly. In each aspect we see the unbroken plain which surrounds the City. Do you notice the Bull Nandi as an ornament along the edge of the roof of the temple? Here we have him again carved from a great block of granite at Tanjore, a place not far from Trichinopoly. Other scenes at Tanjore follow. One shows us the wall of the Fort with the moat outside, and the gopura of the Great Temple. Another is a vista within the temple walls, and gives some idea of the great spaces which the larger temples occupy. Then suddenly we become conscious of one of the sharp contrasts which characterise the India of to-day. These are Police drilling on the Maidan, or public place of Tanjore, and away on the horizon are the semaphores of the railway. In the plain of the Carnatic, which surrounds Madura, Trichinopoly, and Tanjore, we are not merely in the midst of the Hindu religion and caste system, but we are also near scenes rendered memorable by the struggle for India, a hundred and fifty years ago, between the French and the English. Two trading companies, the one seated in London and the other in Paris, obtained leave from the local princes to establish trading posts on the Coromandel Coast. They presently fortified these posts and became ambitious rivals.