Ellora

Ellora, a village of Hindostan, in the Nizam's dominions in the Deccan, 12 miles N. of Aurungabad. Its ruins are surrounded by a stone wall, but its great feature is its cave temples in the slope of a hill of red granite. The general form is that of a horseshoe of one mile in extent. Some of the temples are caves, and some are open at the top, and they are some Buddhist and some Brahmin. The largest and finest is dedicated to Siva, and consists of a solid mass of rock one hundred feet high, round which are excavated galleries and colonnades having the whole Hindu Pantheon elaborately carved upon them. A smaller temple is the Buddhist cave of Visvakarma. This has a curved roof, and contains a colossal image of Buddha.