This is why we are shown all these jewels of the temple. The jewels, some say, derive from mythological times; others date them from the second century, or the fourth, or the twentieth. There was even a trowel in silver given by an Englishman cured of some disease or other. Here are sapphires, diamonds, moonstones, emeralds, one as big as an egg. Here are the headdresses of the gods chased with ruby, gold, and pearl, and looking like helmets, and there are waist-chains of diamonds. Here is one piece of no known origin: a small serpent of diamonds and rubies.

‘All that is only rococo,’ says André Malraux, ‘but this, this is pure Byzantine.’

But one tires of seeing so many precious stones. We arrange to meet with the gods in the evening.

In the evening, because it is then that Shiva comes to visit his spouse. He comes from his sanctuary to the accompaniment of hymns and music, in a palanquin, with silver vessels and camphor. The doors of his domain are closed, and he is carried to the entrance of his wife’s apartments. The evening music is grave but intimate. The god goes to spend the night with the goddess; a cosmic event that might shake the earth. The tambourines are struck to convey this. A flute sings an air of love. Now the doors of the sanctuary are closed to men. Outside everything is light and silence. The night of the gods is lit with silence.

‘What strikes me most,’ says André Malraux, ‘is that with so many men, there is but one silence.’

* * *

Now we go from Madurai to Coimbatore. The road, white at first, then ochre, rises and twists towards the mountains. The rich plains of tender rice are green, almost blue, with their irrigating channels. It is a bountiful earth, holy with temples and with a sweetness so civilized that Tamil poets have sung of it for more than two thousand years. (The Shiva of Madurai presides over the most ancient academy in the world, the Tamil Sankham). Now the earth turns dry and red, with pebbled beds of rivulets and squat tamarind trees lining the highway. Once in a while we come upon wild mimosa growing by deep wells, where bulls draw up water in hide buckets. And over all the wide earth fly the crows.

Suddenly we stop. Malraux sees a small altar with clay horses beside it. They have black eyes, yellow tails, and their heads are held high with the pride of belonging not to the world of men but to that of the gods. Two women, perhaps a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, come now to worship these rustic divinities. They pour water on the heads of the gods, and then the young woman starts to murmur a prayer or hymn. We ask them: ‘Do you still make these horses now?’ They reply: ‘Not now, but at the time of the festivities.’