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Updated: June 21, 2025
The "Chaitya Vihara" or chapel cave alone is worth a visit. Pillars and pilasters with eight-sided shafts and waterpot-bases, which scholars attribute to the period B. C. 90 to A. D. 300, stand sentinel over verandahs stretching away into darkness on either side of the main aisle.
The play-house was an eight-sided, three-storied, tower-like building of oak and plastered lath, upon a low foundation of yellow brick. Two outside stairways ran around the wall, and the roof was of bright-red English tiles with a blue lead gutter at the eaves.
It was eight-sided, having in each angle a slender pillar, round which silken draperies were twined. The wall between the pillars was entirely covered, to the height of six or seven feet, with creepers, from which hung quantities of ripe fruit and of brilliant flowers, that almost hid the leaves.
Round-arched openings for bells occur on each side, and within the crowning balustrade with its obelisks a stone dome rises to an eight-sided domed lantern. Like all the church, the front is built of beautiful limestone, rivalling Carrara marble in whiteness, and seen down the narrow street which runs uphill from across the small praça the whole building is most imposing.
Higher up there is a round window heavily moulded and the whole gable ends in a queer little round pediment set between two armillary spheres. Inside the piers are eight-sided with octagonal bases and caps, and with a band of ornament half-way up the shaft. The arches are simply chamfered but are each crossed by three carved voussoirs.
In the flat centre under the collar ties each square is again surrounded by the band of ornament and by the chains, but here band and chain are also carried across the corners, leaving a large octagon in the centre with four triangles in the angles. Each octagon has a plain border about a foot wide, and within it a plain moulding surrounding an eight-sided hollow space.
Outside the buttresses are square below and three-cornered above; all the walls are battlemented; the aisle windows are tall and round-headed. On the north side a good trefoil-headed door leads to the interior, where the arches are round, the piers clustered with cable-moulded capitals and starry eight-sided abaci.
The thin columns are also round, but the bases are eight-sided; so are the capitals, but with a round abacus of boughs and twisted ribbons. The great hall above is also Dom Manoel's work, though the ceiling may probably have been retouched since. His also are the two-light windows, with slender shafts and heads more or less trefoil in shape, but with many small convex curves in the middle.
There might even be diamonds; there are in some river beds." "Look," said Grizzel, holding out her hand with the stone in it, "I have rubbed a bit off one side at last. If I rub long enough it will come bright all over." A small, roughly eight-sided crystal lay in the palm of her hand. Six sides were dull and colourless, the remaining two sides were clear and transparent.
Then, as you floated still farther north and drew nearer to the coast, the desolate hill would detach itself from the mainland and become a little mountain-isle, with a flock of smaller islets clustering around it as a brood of wild ducks keep close to their mother, and with deep water, nearly two miles wide, flowing between it and the shore; while the shining speck on the seaward side stood out clearly as a low, whitewashed dwelling with a sturdy round tower at one end, crowned with a big eight-sided lantern a solitary lighthouse.
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