The great distinguishing feature of the Jains is the extreme to which they push the characteristic tenderness felt by the Hindus for animals of all descriptions.  Jaina is, distinctly, the purified.  The priests eat no animal food; indeed, they are said not to eat at all after noon, lest the insects then abounding should fly into their mouths and be crushed unwittingly.  They go with a piece of muslin bound over their mouths, in order to avoid the same catastrophe, and carry a soft brush wherewith to remove carefully from any spot upon which they are about to sit such insects as might be killed thereby.

“Ah, how my countryman Bergh would luxuriate in this scene!” I said as we stood looking upon the various dumb exhibitions of so many phases of sickness, of decrepitude and of mishap—­quaint, grotesque, yet pathetic withal—­in the precincts of the Jain hospital.  Here were quadrupeds and bipeds, feathered creatures and hairy creatures, large animals and small, shy and tame, friendly and predatory—­horses, horned cattle, rats, cats, dogs, jackals, crows, chickens; what not.  An attendant was tenderly bandaging the blinking lids of a sore-eyed duck:  another was feeding a blind crow, who, it must be confessed, looked here very much like some fat member of the New York Ring cunningly availing himself of the more toothsome rations in the sick ward of the penitentiary.  My friend pointed out to me a heron with a wooden leg.  “Suppose a gnat should break his shoulder-blade,” I said, “would they put his wing in a sling?”

[Illustrations:  INTERIOR OF THE GREAT SHAITYA OF KARLI.]

Bhima Gandharva looked me full in the face, and, smiling gently, said, “They would if they could.”

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.