looked exactly like a long, one-storied building, with a flat roof and
a battlemented parapet. The Hindus assert that, somewhere about this
hillock, there exists a secret entrance, leading into vast interior
halls, in fact to a whole subterranean palace, and that there still
exist people who possess the secret of this abode. A holy hermit, Yogi,
and Magus, who had inhabited these caves for "many centuries," imparted
this secret to Sivaji, the celebrated leader of the Mahratta armies.
Like Tanhauser, in Wagner's opera, the unconquerable Sivaji spent seven
years of his youth in this mysterious abode, and therein acquired his
extraordinary strength and valour.

Sivaji is a kind of Indian Ilia Moorometz, though his epoch is much
nearer to our times. He was the hero and the king of the Mahrattas in
the seventeenth century, and the founder of their short-lived empire. It
is to him that India owes the weakening, if not the entire destruction,
of the Mussulman yoke. No taller than an ordinary woman, and with the
hand of a child, he was, nevertheless, possessed of wonderful strength,
which, of course, his compatriots ascribed to sorcery. His sword is
still preserved in a museum, and one cannot help wondering at its size
and weight, and at the hilt, through which only a ten-year-old child
could put his hand. The basis of this hero's fame is the fact that
he, the son of a poor officer in the service of a Mogul emperor, like
another David, slew the Mussulman Goliath, the formidable Afzul Khan.
It was not, however, with a sling that he killed him, he used in this
combat the formidable Mahratti weapon, vaghnakh, consisting of five long
steel nails, as sharp as needles, and very strong. This weapon is worn
on the fingers, and wrestlers use it to tear each other's flesh like
wild animals. The Deccan is full of legends about Sivaji, and even
the English historians mention him with respect. Just as in the fable
respecting Charles V, one of the local Indian traditions asserts that
Sivaji is not dead, but lives secreted in one of the Sahiadra caves.
When the fateful hour strikes (and according to the calculations of the
astrologers the time is not far off) he will reappear, and will bring
freedom to his beloved country.

The learned and artful Brahmans, those Jesuits of India, profit by
the profound superstition of the masses to extort wealth from them,
sometimes to the last cow, the only food giver of a large family.

In the following