Although the bulky _raksasas_ which keep her company in that place of exile, prove that official vandalism did not hesitate to avail itself of facilities of transportation afforded by forced labour, the uncommonly heavy guardians of the _chandi_ Sewu balked even the absolute decrees of local despotism. Everything desirable that could be detached and removed, is, however, gone. Those in authority having exercised their privilege by helping themselves, mere private individuals gleaned after their reaping, with or without permission, and exceedingly interesting collections of antiquities were formed by owners of neighbouring sugar-mills. What they appropriated, did, at least, remain in the country, but, among other sculpture, the lion-fighting elephants which lined the fourteen staircases, ten feet high and eight feet wide, still in place as late as 1841, cannot even be traced--they are dissolved, battling animals, staircases and all. It is always and everywhere the same story: statuary and ornament are stolen, treasure-seekers smash the rest, the stones are prime building material and who cares for the preservation of worthless, because already looted and demolished, tumble-down temples? The monuments in the plain of Soro Gedoog have suffered exceptional outrages; at this moment hardly anything is left because there exists absolutely no control, says Major van Erp. His investigations disclosed that stones taken from the _chandi_ Prambanan and, when this was stopped, from the _chandi_ Sewu, were used for the building of a dam in the river Opak. Had not public opinion made itself heard, both these temples might have shared the fate of the _chandi_ Singo, once one of the finest in that region, whose gracefully decorated walls excited the admiration of Brumund in 1845, whose substructure with damaged ornament still held out until 1886, while now the ground-plan cannot even be guessed at and deep holes, dug to get at the foundations, are the only indications of the razed building’s site. To give an idea of the quantity of material used for the dam in the river Opak, I transcribe the measurements of its revetments: 35 metres on the left and from 50 to 60 metres on the right bank; the facings, running up to a height of 6 metres, make it evident beyond doubt where the stone for that work was quarried. Neither are we quite sure that such frightful spoliation belongs wholly to the past. The value of Government solicitude, so eloquently paraded in circulars and colonial reports, can be gauged from the fact, stated by Mr. L. Serrurier, that, during officially sanctioned excavations among the ruins of the _chandis_ Plahosan and Sewu, the stones brought to the surface were simply thrown pell-mell on a heap without their being marked as to locality and position, quite in keeping, it should be added, with the prevailing custom.