The other antiquities at Mahavellipore, though very interesting in themselves, are not nearly so important for our history as the raths just described. The caves are generally small, and fail architecturally, from the feebleness and tenuity of their supports. The southern cave diggers had evidently not been grounded in the art, like their northern compeers, by the Buddhists. The long experience of the latter in the art taught them that ponderous masses were not only necessary to support their roofs, but for architectural effect; and neither they nor the Hindus who succeeded them in the north ever hesitated to use pillars of two or three diameters in height, or to crowd them together to any required extent. In the south, on the contrary, the cave diggers tried to copy literally the structural pillars used to support wooden roofs. Hence, I believe, the accident to the long rath, and hence certainly the poor and modern look of all the southern caves, which has hitherto proved such a stumbling-block to all who have tried to guess their age. Their sculpture is better, and some of their best designs rank with those of Ellora and Elephanta, with which they were, in all probability, contemporary. Now, however, that we know that the sculptures in cave No. 3 at Badami were executed in the 6th century[366] (A.D. 579), we are enabled to approximate the date of those in the Mahavellipore caves with very tolerable certainty. The Badami sculptures are so similar in style with the best examples there that they cannot be far distant in date, and if placed in the following century it will not probably be far from the truth. The great bas-relief on the rock, 90 ft. by 40 ft., is perhaps the most remarkable thing of its class in India. Now that it is known to be wholly devoted to Serpent worship,[367] it acquires an interest it had not before, and opens a new chapter in Indian mythology.[368] There seems nothing to enable us to fix its age with absolute certainty; it can hardly, however, be doubted that it is anterior to the 10th century, and may be a couple of centuries earlier. [Illustration: 185. Tiger Cave at Saluvan Kuppan. (From a Photograph.)] There is one other antiquity in a place called Saluvan Kuppan, two miles north of Mahavellipore, which has not yet been drawn or described, but deserves notice as a lineal descendant of the tiger cave at Cuttack (Woodcut No. 73). Here not one but a dozen of tiger heads welcome the anchorite to his abode. Here, too, they are conventionalised as we always find them in Chalukyan art; and this example serves, like every other, to show how the Hindu imagination in art runs wild when once freed from the trammels of sober imitation of natural things, which we find to be its characteristic in the early stages of Buddhist art. KYLAS, ELLORA.