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The Jains are considered to have been the architects _par excellence_
of India, and there are many monuments, in all styles, of their skill
in this kind. The strange statues of the Tirthankars in the gorge
called the Ourwhai of Gwalior were (until injured by the "march of
improvement") among the most notable of the forms of rock-cutting.
These vary in size from statuettes of a foot in height to colossal
figures of sixty feet, and nothing can be more striking than these
great forms, hewn from the solid rock, represented entirely nude,
with their impassive countenances, which remind every traveler of
the Sphinx, their grotesque ears hanging down to their shoulders, and
their heads, about which plays a ring of serpents for a halo, or out
of which grows the mystical three-branched _Kalpa Vrich_, or Tree of
Knowledge.
The sacred hill of Sunaghur, lying a few miles to the south of
Gwalior, is one of the Meccas of the Jains, and is covered with
temples in many styles, which display the fertility of their
architectural invention: there are over eighty of these structures in
all.
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