CBSE Class 7 Answered

The Rajarajeshvara temple at Thanjavur had the tallest shikhara among the temples of its time. Constructing it was not easy because there were no cranes in those days, and the 90-tonne stone for the top of the shikhara was too heavy to lift manually. So the architects built an inclined path to the top of the temple, placed the boulder on rollers and rolled it all the way to the top. The path started more than four kilometres away so that it would not be too steep. This was dismantled after the temple was constructed, but the residents of the area remembered the experience of the construction of the temple for a long time. Even now a village near the temple is called Charupallam, the ‘Village of the Incline’.