The holy caves of India

It would have been hot, as it always seems to be in this eastern part of the Indian state of Maharashtra. The land ahead of him would have been much as it is today - fairly flat, dusty, yellow, featureless, tricked out with thick scrub and forests of mimosa and tamarind trees. He was a soldier, and his fellow officers would have been behind him, keeping as quiet as they could and well downwind of their prey, a thus far unseen tiger.

Then there was a gap in the scrub, the land fell away, and down, down, well below the eyeline, there lay, unexpected, a winding and noisily rushing river. Beyond it, filling his view, rose a cliff that was marked indelibly and incredibly with a horizontal tidemark of large and oddly shaped apertures, caves, perhaps, carved by water or winds. Or on second sight maybe not, since the openings seemed more like doorways, doorways carved and fretworked into the cliff-face stone.

He was named John Smith, he was a captain in the Madras Army, and he would have remained an almost forgotten British imperial figure but for a single scratched graffito that he left high on a basalt pillar in one of these caves, with, in perfectly legibly incised copperplate, his name and the date, April 1819. This small moment of recorded vandalism marks this otherwise unsung soldier as the first European discoverer of an ancient construction that still, nearly 200 years on, has the power to utterly astound and astonish those who see it for the first time.

The monument comprises a series of 29 caves that have been carved deep into this sheer face of a horseshoe-shaped cliff a few miles from the old walled town of Ajanta, hidden away in the deep gorge gouged in the high Deccan plains by the Waghora River about 300 miles inland from Mumbai.

It is a UnescoWorld Heritage Site, designated as such back in 1983 as one of India's first, along with the Taj Mahal. And though Shah Jahan's famous memorial in Agra is far better known, the Ajanta Caves are hugely popular, particularly with Indians, who see them as eloquent testimony to their country's immense and unbroken history. The caves can in consequence become insufferably crowded.

But I went in March, the lowest of the low seasons - the schools hadn't closed for spring break and the weather, though warm, wasn't as hot as most Indian travellers prefer. There were so few people around that it sometimes seemed as though the tourists were outnumbered by the monkeys, who gathered in troops up in the neem trees, gazing down at the scattering of humans who wandered, in rapt attention, in and out of great gaping holes in the high walls of the cliff.

And while it is what is inside the caves that these days attracts most interest - and controversy, since, within, there are memorably beautiful mural paintings and images fully 2,000 years old and more - the simple, most astonishing fact remains that these caves are, in the very truest sense, and just as the captain suspected, entirely human constructions.

They are not merely occupied or used by humans. They were not the consequence of any geological accident. They were carved, and everything within them was carved as well.

Each one of these enormous caverns was hollowed from the flint-hard rock by hand. Every single pillar, statue, elephant, Buddha and griffon inside is the original rock, previously undisturbed deep within the cliff: the three-dimensionality of each object was fashioned by ancient stonemasons working their way painstakingly around and beside and beneath each imagined sculpture-to-be, creating space from rock, and leaving these magnificent subterranean monuments behind as they chipped the caves away.

Inside, today's visitors find guides with flashlights, essential in the gloom of the deeper caves to help them understand the complexity of the story. While in some seasons the guides must attend to a crush of visitors, it was seldom that I encountered more than three other people in any one cave, and in Cave 10, one of the oldest and largest, there was no one other than the guide, a Mr. Malhotra.

He darted about energetically, pointing his slow-dimming light up to the most exquisite of the images and tut-tutting at the graffiti of midcentury Indian visitors who had incised their names and dates and trysting notes to absent lovers on some of the walls.

He clambered up the cliff and into the first cave: he found "a foetid smell arising from numerous bats ... the remains of a recent fire ... the entire skeleton of a man ... prints of the feet of tigers, jackals, bears, monkeys, peacocks etc., impressed into the dust formed by the plaster of the fresco paintings which had fallen from the ceiling."

He reached a safe spot to sit in the sun, and there, gazing out over the river, he smoked a bidi and found himself moved - for seemingly he was an educated man - to quote Horace, the ode that begins "quae non imber edax non aquilo impotens ..." - "cannot be destroyed by gnawing rain or wild north wind, by the procession of unnumbered years or by the flight of time."

Gradually, the story of the making of the Ajanta Caves became clear. Though interpretations of the details have been many and controversial, the basic story now seems to be agreed upon.

In ancient days the village of Ajanta stood athwart a trade route - the main Delhi-Mumbai railway passes close by today, essentially following the same path. (A few visitors to the caves disembark from trains at Jalgaon station, 40 miles away; most, however, fly into Aurangabad, 60 miles away, but with better hotels.)

About 2,200 years ago, when a dynasty of aristocrats known as the Satavahanas was in power in this corner of India, and when the doctrines of the Buddha were enthusiastically accepted, a group of wealthy merchants decided to sponsor the carving of a small number of cave monasteries and cave temples for the use of priests and mendicants who used the route. (The tradition extended in time through much of the Buddhist world: vast numbers of caves have been carved, for instance, into the side of a cliff in Dunhuang, on the Chinese Silk Road, where scholars are fascinated to note that the earliest Buddhas have Indian facial features).Stone carvers set out to work.

They first made themselves secure by belaying themselves from ropes anchored high up on the cliffs, lowered themselves perhaps a hundred feet down from the lip, and started chipping away into the rock face, beginning high up, fashioning what would in time become the cave's roof.

Once they had incised a narrow letter-box-like opening a hundred or so feet into the cliff, they began to carve downward. But they didn't simply cut downward to make an enormous void. They had planned something far more complex, and so in their descending journey they deliberately left uncarved parts of the rock that would in time become shaped into pillars, elephants, camels and other creatures.

The rock was very hard: the process of carving the bare stubs of the cave-inhabitants and cave-menageries and cave-furniture would take many years to complete.

But eventually the carving was done, whereupon the painters moved in. These were artists who were ordered either to paint the statues, or parts of them or, more importantly, to create painting on the roofs and walls of the caves. This they did with great flamboyance and bravura, while using a palette of only six colours, all of them natural - red and yellow ochre, black and white, malachite green and a blue of crushed lapis lazuli, found in abundance nearby.

The Ajanta Caves languished, silent and forgotten and essentially unvisited, for almost a millennium and a half, until Captain Smith and his tiger hunters of the Madras Army fetched up there in the spring of 1819.

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