There is also a temple famous in Indian song and story called Khailahsah, or "highest heaven." The mountain has been penetrated to a great depth and height to make room for this wondrous bit of sculpture. Within an area stands a pagoda almost, if not quite, a hundred feet high. It is entered by a noble portico guarded by huge stone figures of men; towering above it are, cut out of the hill, a music-gallery of the finest workmanship and five large chapels, and above all there is in front a spacious court terminating in three magnificent colonnades: huge columns uphold the music-gallery; stone elephants, looking toward us, heave themselves out of this mass of rock-work, and right in front is a grand figure of the Hindoo goddess Lakshimi being crowned queen of heaven by stone elephants, that have raised themselves on their hind feet to pour water over her head from stone vessels grasped in their trunks. Everywhere we found fresh objects of wonder, and each new cave seemed the greatest marvel of all. The entire hillside is perforated with chatiyas, monasteries, pagodas, towers, spires, obelisks, galleries, and verandahs, all cut out of the solid rock.[78] Nothing could be wilder and more fantastic than the effect produced by these excavations, situated as they are amid natural scenes very wild and romantic--waterfalls, ravines, gorges, old gnarled forest trees, and a dense undergrowth of brushwood. Naturally, freely, unexpectedly, as the tree grows, was the development of early Hindoo art. Everywhere one sees an unrestrained imagination breaking through and overleaping the bounds of judgment, reason, and even that intuitive sense of refinement to which the Hindoo mind is by no means a stranger. Our journey next was quite an adventurous one. We started straight across the high plain of the Deccan for the Thull Ghauts. In some parts the country is sandy and desolate, and in others well cultivated, but in no way remarkable till we reached the rugged but grandly mountainous country through which our road lay, circuitous and difficult, but wild and beautiful, as far as Nashik, or "the City of the Nose," sacred to the Hindoos for various local traditions, but above all as being the spot whence the Godaveri takes its rise. The real source of this famous river, however, is some eighteen or twenty miles distant, at Thrimbâk. On our road lay a deep and dangerous nullah or creek, which we forded with much difficulty, assisted by a number of natives whom we were obliged to hire from a little village lying half a mile from its banks. Passing this, we saw the Ghauts for the first time, with their fine forests, and here and there a mountain-stream, not yet dried up by the hot summer sun, tumbling down the mountain-sides or flowing over pebbly beds, sometimes gleaming into the sunlight and sometimes hidden in verdure, and anon lying in deep eddying pools at the foot of the Ghauts, that rise up grand and defiant on every side.