ese ancient places are thronged with traditions and
overgrown with the weeds of popular fancy, like ruins of ancient castles
covered with ivy; that the original shape of the building is destroyed
by the cold embrace of these parasitic plants, and that it is as
difficult for the archaeologist to form an idea of the architecture
of the once perfect edifice, judging only by the heaps of disfigured
rubbish that cover the country, as for us to select from out the thick
mass of legends good wheat from weeds. No guides and no cicerone could
be of any use whatever to us. The only thing they could do would be to
point out to us places where once there stood a fortress, a castle, a
temple, a sacred grove, or a celebrated town, and then to repeat legends
which came into existence only lately, under the Mussulman rule. As to
the undisguised truth, the original history of every interesting spot,
we should have had to search for these by ourselves, assisted only by
our own conjectures.

Modern India does not present a pale shadow of what it was in the
pre-Christian era, nor even of the Hindostan of the days of Akbar,
Shah-Jehan and Aurungzeb. The neighborhood of every town that has been
shattered by many a war, and of every ruined hamlet, is covered with
round reddish pebbles, as if with so many petrified tears of blood. But,
in order to approach the iron gate of some ancient fortress, it is not
over natural pebbles that it is necessary to walk, but over the broken
fragments of some older granite remains, under which, very often, rest
the ruins of a third town, still more ancient than the last. Modern
names have been given to them by Mussulmans, who generally built their
towns upon the remains of those they had just taken by assault. The
names of the latter are sometimes mentioned in the legends, but the
names of their predecessors had completely disappeared from the popular
memory even before the Mussulman invasion. Will a time ever come
for these secrets of the centuries to be revealed? Knowing all this
beforehand, we resolved not to lose patience, even though we had to
devote whole years to explorations of the same places, in order to
obtain better historical information, and facts less disfigured than
those obtained by our predecessors, who had to be contented with a
choice collection of naive lies, poured forth from the mouth of some
frightened semi-savage, or some Brahman, unwilling to speak and desirous
of disguising the truth