[Illustration: XXXIV. A DHYANI BUDDHA OF THE BORO BUDOOR (Cephas Sr.)] Winding our way upward, passing through the galleries whose profound silence, imbued with the intensely religious spirit radiating from their sculptured walls, becomes more and more eloquent; circling the terraces where the attitude of ecstatic elation of the world’s pre-eminently venerable ones in their _chaityas_ exalts the mind in tremulous expectation, we arrive at the dagob, the shrine of shrines, the temple’s coronet, glittering in the bright glow of day. This is the reliquary proper, the centre into which the holiness of the hallowed building converges. It rises, similar to the smaller cupolas, but perpendicular to a height of several feet, from a substructure in the guise of a lotus cushion; it was also closed round about, without any aperture so far as can be concluded from its present state, for a portion of it has tumbled down and the base of the crowning pinnacle, reached by ill-matched, rickety steps, a recent, outrageously discordant addition, serves for a bench, the whole, about 25 feet above the topmost terrace, having been transformed into a crude belvedere, enabling visitors to enjoy the magnificent view. The interior space seems originally to have been divided into an upper and a lower chamber; there is nothing deserving mention in the matter of decoration save an inscription to remind posterity of the late King of Siam’s visit in the disastrous year 1896--a delicious memorial, at the same time, of official vandalism and servility. The golden letters affect one unpleasantly in the spoliated sanctum, whose ruinous condition dates from a previous call, some sixty or seventy years ago, permitted if not encouraged by previous authorities, when looting pseudo-archaeologists broke into it and carried off the relic, which consisted, assuming the credibility of local reports regarding their disappointment, in a small quantity of ashy substance, enclosed in a metal urn with lid; furthermore in a small image of metal and a few coins. The large statue they unearthed too, would have impeded the movements of the marauders on their return voyage and so it remained in place, half hidden in the hole they had dug, undisturbed, for the same reason, by subsequent collectors. Left unfinished by its sculptor, designedly or not,[156] resembling in the position of its hands the Dhyani Buddhas which face the East, does it personify the Adi-Buddha, a purely abstract entity, a metaphysical conception hitherto defying even symbolic utterance? The learned and especially the quasi-learned never lacked weighty arguments pro or contra, and, without prejudice to all they proved and disproved,[157] it does not appear improbable that the lively imagination of the Javanese artist aimed at a tangible expression of him who ran his course as the spirit and source of the Buddhist conception of happiness, resuscitated from his ashes, dominating East and West, North and South, the blissful