With a resolved but throbbing heart the beautiful Hindoo wife entered within the black narrow portal of this gorgeous but gloomy structure. The lower part of the edifice was involved in a shadowy light which imparted a cavernous solemnity to this house of a most unholy worship. The huge idol rose amid the distance surrounded by a blaze of light that filled the dome in which the colossal image stood, but did not extend far enough to pierce the distant gloom. As she stalked forward with a measured pace, the monstrous figures surrounding the columns seemed to glare upon her from their granite pedestals like so many petrified ogres. Her heart throbbed with emotion. The object of her visit at this dark hour of night rose to her memory with an impetuous impulse, whilst the associations of the gloom of the grave, and that of the consecrated edifice which she had now entered for the purpose of propitiating a deaf and dumb idol for the benefit of a departing soul, and to arrest the summons of death, sent a chill through the whole mass of her blood which seemed to reach and congeal the very fountain of life. When she reached the dome there was not a person but herself that she could perceive in the sanctuary. The light of the solitary lamp hanging from the centre of the dome was reflected from thousands of brilliant gems which cast a radiance around the figure of intense and dazzling brilliancy. She prostrated herself before the image, and poured the full tide of her heart’s emotions in a prayer for the restoration of her husband. A general belief prevailed among the Hindoos of that part of the country that souls after death were summoned before the Idol of Somnat, which transported them into other bodies according to their merits in this life, where he became a sort of Hindoo Rhadamanthus, resembling that infernal justiciary, however, in nothing less than in the rigid impartiality of his justice. It was also declared by the Brahmins belonging to this celebrated temple, that the ebb and flow of the tides represented the reverence paid by the ocean to this shrine.