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92. TEMPLE CEILING This fascinating ceiling is in the hall of the Khajirako Temple in Madkya Pradesh, India. It gives a fine example of tessellations of the plane. At first sight it looks as though it should be a regular hexagonal tessellation, but closer inspection shows that there are frequent anomalies, and this is not the case. Each of the regular hexagons that does occur is partitioned into three congruent parallelograms having interior angles of 60° and 120°. Since the ceiling is covered by these in a non-overlapping way, we can say that we have a tessellation of these parallelograms. Closer analysis reveals that there is (mostly!) a regular arrangement of 6-parallelogram stars surrounded by six 3-parallelogram hexagons, each hexagon having three star neighbours. The colouring adds further variation, with the hexagons alternating between green and brown. It is difficult to see whether variations in the star colourings are intentional or due to the ravages of time!
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