Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 4 · column 2 of 9 · from the scan, no model involved
breaktast at tne humane hour of eight o'clock. When the bus set us down at the entrance to the western group of temples, the day was already quite hot, foreshadowing the crushing heat in north-central India of what in our part of the world are the spring months. I did not mind a bit, as my cold was now at its most miserable stage. In any case, even a streaming cold could not have spoiled the temples of Khajuraho.
My slender prior acquaintance with Hindu religious architecture, through books and films, did not dispose me favorably towards it. My aesthetic tastes tend toward the simple, impressionistic, austere, and I expected to find the temples altogether too fussy and ornate. Firsthand experience changed my mind. I found the Khajuraho temples (the few we had time to inspect at close range), covered as they were from top to bottom with sculpture in high relief, bewitchingly beautiful. The panorama of human life depicted by the carvings included a startling variety of sexual activities—some of them involving more than two partners and so complicated, and to our eyes so bizarre, that we could not make out for certain what was what. But, so far as I could tell, not one of our group of middleaged Americans, reared presumably in the JudeoChristian tradition, found the sculptures prurient or offensive. We recognized them as part of a comprehensive and uninhibited celebration of the glorious multiplicity of human experience. We
92.1%