174 linrothe
tunic, which also ends at the knees. In this they are not different than the early
local donors seen in Zangskar, Ladakh, Baltistan and Gilgit.
The Mulbek image is nearly two-thirds as large as the Kartsé Maitreya, and
thus significantly larger than the Dras sculpture. Fontein writes that it is more
than twenty-five feet (7.62 m) tall, Duncan that it is twenty feet (6.1 m), while
forty feet (12.2 m) and eight meters (26.2 feet) have also been suggested.49 Like
the Dras Maitreya, it is directly along the main route from Srinagar to Leh,
at the village of Mulbek (alt. Mulbe, Mulbil, Moulbé, Mul bhe, etc.), which also
had a palace and a monastery, along with a number of historical inscriptions.50
For these reasons—size and location—it has received more notice than even
the Dras work. As early as 1820 Moorcroft noticed and correctly identified it
as Maitreya, and suggested it was twenty-four feet (7.62 m) high.51 George
Henderson, who accompanied the Forsyth expedition from Srinagar to Central
Asia in 1870, took an excellent photograph of the Mulbek sculpture (fig. 5.18),
followed by Knight’s of 1891, though both were preceded by Melville Clarke’s
photo of 1861.52
The avid Alpinist and Cambridge Professor of Art, William Martin Conway,
sheds a little light on the condition of the sculpture in 1892, a year after Knight’s
visit: “The lower part of the legs and feet are hidden by a little temple built
beneath it. There are also five or six little figures in low relief near or between
the feet, but they are so rough that it is difficult to discover any identifying
features about them.”53 Conway’s account indicates that the condition of the
donor figures has not deteriorated much (more) in the last 120 years.
49 Fontein, “Rock Sculpture,” 5; Duncan, Jane E, A Summer Ride Through Western Tibet
(London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1906), 37; Neve, Ernest F., Beyond the Pir Panjal: Life Among
the Mountains and Valleys of Kashmir (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), 179; Tchekhoff,
Geneviève and Yvan Comolli, Buddhist Sanctuaries of Ladakh (Bangkok: White Orchid
Books, 1987), 16. Dorjay gives “about seven metres”; Dorjay, “Embedded in Stone”, 42.
50 Francke, A. H., “The Rock Inscriptions at Mulbe,” Indian Antiquary 35 (1906): 72–81.
51 Wilson, Travels, I .344, II.19.
52 Henderson, George, with Allan O. Hume, Lahore to Yärkand: Incidents of the Route and
Natural History of the Countries Traversed by the Expedition of 1870, under T.D. Forsyth
(London: L. Reeve, 1873), opp. p. 46; Knight, E.F., Where Three Empires Meet: A Narrative of
Recent Travel in Kashmir, Western Tibet, Gilgit, and the Adjoining Countries (London, New
York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896), 144; Clark, Melville, From Simla Through Ladac
and Cashmere (Calcutta: Bengal Printing Company Ltd, 1862), pl. XX, “An Image Carved in
the Rock, Near Wukka, Ladac” and identified in the caption as “the four-armed Goddess
Moolva”.
53 Conway, William Martin, Climbing and Exploration in the Karakoram-Himalayas (London:
T. Fisher Unwin, 1894), 610–611.