[Sidenote: Repeat Map No. 3.] We leave Tuticorin and travel for a hundred miles across the plain. It is a barren-looking country and dry, though at certain seasons there is plentiful rain, and crops enough are produced to maintain a fairly dense population. Far down on the western horizon, as we journey northward, are the mountains of the Malabar Coast, for in this extremity of India the Western and Eastern Ghats have come together and there is no plateau between them. The mountains rise from the western sea and from the eastern plain into a ridge along the west coast whose summits are about as high as the summits of Ceylon, that is to say some 8,000 feet. A group of small hills, isolated on the plain, marks the position of Madura, a hundred miles from Tuticorin. Madura is the seat of one of the finest temples in the land. [Sidenote: 10. Plan of a South Indian Temple.] A Hindu temple in Southern India usually consists of a square building rising through several stories which grow gradually smaller. It is thus pyramidal in form, and is adorned with tiers of thronged sculpture. Within is a cell containing the image. The temple itself is surrounded by square and walled enclosures, one without the other; the great gateways through the successive walls are the chief glories of southern architecture. Though often larger than the central shrine, they are not unlike it in general appearance, but rectangular in plan, not square. They rise story above story to a summit ridge and are rich with thousands of sculptured figures. These great gateways are known as gopuras. In the courtyards enclosed between the successive walls are the homes of the priests, and usually a large water tank and a hall of a thousand columns. Some of these temples are very wealthy foundations. [Sidenote: 11. The Tank of the Golden Lilies, The Temple, Madura.] [Sidenote: 12. The Temple, Madura.] [Sidenote: 13. A Gopura at Madura.] Here we have the tank of the Golden Lilies in the Temple of Madura, surrounded by a colonnade, with gopuras rising from beyond; and here another view in the same temple, and here a gopura photographed from near.