CHAPTER IV.

BENARES.

In the comparative cool of early morning, I sallied cut on a stroll through the outskirts of Benares. Thousands of women were stepping gracefully along the crowded roads, bearing on their heads the water-jars, while at every few paces there was a well, at which hundreds were waiting along with the bheesties their turn for lowering their bright gleaming copper cups to the well-water to fill their skins or vases. All were keeping up a continual chatter, women with women, men with men: all the tongues were running ceaselessly. It is astonishing to see the indignation that a trifling mishap creates-such gesticulation, such shouting, and loud talk, you would think that murder at least was in question. The world cannot show the Hindoo's equal as a babbler; the women talk while they grind corn, the men while they smoke their water-pipes; your true Hindoo is never quiet; when not talking, he is playing on his tom-tom.

The Doorgha Khond, the famed Temple of the Sacred Monkeys, I found thronged with worshippers, and garlanded in every part with roses: it overhangs one of the best holy tanks in India, but has not much beauty or grandeur, and is chiefly remarkable for the swarms of huge, fat-paunched, yellowbearded, holy monkeys, whose outposts hold one quarter of the city, and whose main body forms a living roof to the temple. A singular contrast to the Doorgha Khond was the Queen's College for native students, built in a mixture of Tudor and Hindoo architecture. The view from the roof is noticeable, depending as it does for its beauty on the mingling of the rich green of the timber with the gay colours of the painted native huts. Over the trees are seen the minarets at the river-side,

and an unwonted life was given to the view by the smoke and flames that were rising from two burning huts, in widelyseparated districts of the native town. It is said that the natives, whenever they quarrel with their neighbours, always take the first opportunity of firing their huts; but in truth the huts in the hot weather almost fire themselves, so inflammable are their roofs and sides.

When the sun had declined sufficiently to admit of another excursion, I started from my bungalow, and, passing through the elephant-stables, went down with a guide to the ghauts, the observatory of Jai Singh, and the Golden Temple. From the minarets of the mosque of Aurungzebe I had a lovely sunset view of the ghauts, the city, and the Ganges; but the real sight of Benares, after all, lies in a walk through the tortuous passages that do duty for streets. No carriages can pass them, they are So narrow. You walk preceded by your guide, who warns the people, that they may stand aside, and not be defiled by your touch, for that is the real secret of the apparent respect paid to you in Benares; but the sacred cows are so numerous and so obstinate that you cannot avoid sometimes jostling them. The scene in the passages is the most Indian in India. The gaudy dresses of the Hindoo princes spending a week in purification at the holy place, the frescoed fronts of the shops and houses, the deafening beating of the tomtoms, and, above all, the smoke and sickening smell from the "burning ghauts," mingled with a sweeter smell of burning spices, that meet you as you work your way through the vast crowds of pilgrims who are pouring up from the river's bank-all alike are strange to the English traveller, and fill his mind with that indescribable awe which everywhere accompanies the sight of scenes and ceremonies that we do not understand. When once you are on the Ganges bank itself, the scene is wilder still:-a river front of some three miles, faced with lofty ghauts, or flights of stairs, over which rise, pile above pile, in sublime confusion, lofty palaces with oriel windows hanging over the sacred stream; observatories with giant sun-dials, gilt domes (golden, the story runs), and silver minarets. On the ghauts, rows of fires, each with a smouldering body; on the river, boat-loads of pilgrims, and fakeers praying while they float; under the houses, lines of

prostrate bodies—those of the sick-brought to the sacred Ganges to die-or, say our Government spies, to be murdered by suffocation with sacred mud; while prowling about are the wolf-like fanatics who feed on putrid flesh. The whole is lit by a sickly sun fitfully glaring through the smoke, while the Ganges stream is half obscured by the river fog and reek of the hot earth.

The lofty pavilions that crown the river front are ornamented with paintings of every beast that walks and bird that flies; with monsters, too-pink and green and spotted-with griffins, dragons, and elephant-headed gods embracing dancing-girls. Here and there are representations of red-coated soldiersEnglish, it would seem, for they have white faces, but so, the Maories say, have the New Zealand fairies, who are certainly not British. The Benares taste for painting leads to the decoration with pink and yellow spots of the very cows. The tiger is the commonest of all the figures on the walls—indeed, the explanation that the representations are allegorical, or that gods are pictured in tiger shape, has not removed from my mind the belief that the tiger must have been worshipped in India at some early date. All Easterns are inclined to worship the beasts that eat them: the Javanese light floating sacrifices to their river crocodiles; the Scindees at Kurrachee venerate the sacred muggur, or man-eating alligator; the hill-tribes pray to snakes; indeed, to a new comer, all Indian religion has the air of devil-worship, or worship of the destructive principle in some shape: the gods are drawn as grinning fiends, they are propitiated by infernal music, they are often worshipped with obscene and hideous rites. There is even something cruel in the monotonous roar of the great tomtoms; the sound seems to connect itself with widow-burning, with child-murder, with Juggernauth processions. Since the earliest known times, the tomtom has been used to drown the cries of tortured fanatics; its booming is bound up with the thousand barbarisms of false religion. If the scene on the Benares ghauts is full of horrors, we must not forget that Hindooism is a creed of fear and horror, not of love.

The Government of India has lately instituted an inquiry into the alleged abuses of the custom of taking sick Hindoos to

the Ganges-side to die, with a view to regulating or suppressing the practice which prevails in the river-side portion of Lower Bengal. At Benares, Bengal people are still taken to the river-side, but not so other natives, as Hindoos dying anywhere in the sacred city have all the blessings which the most holy death can possibly secure; the Benares Shastra, moreover, forbids the practice, and I saw but two cases of it in the city, although I had seen many near Calcutta. Not only are aged people brought from their sick-rooms, laid in the burning sun, and half suffocated with the Ganges water poured down their throats, but, owing to the ridicule which follows if they recover, or the selfishness of their relatives, the water is often muddier than it need be: hence the phrase "ghaut murder," by which this custom is generally known. Similar customs are not unheard of in other parts of India, and even in Polynesia and North America. The Veddahs, or black Aborigines of Ceylon, were, up to very lately, in the habit of carrying their dying parents or children into the jungle; and, having placed a chatty of water and some rice by their side, leaving them to be devoured by wild beasts. Under pressure from our officials, they are believed to have ceased to act thus, but they continue, we are told, to throw their dead to the leopards and crocodiles. The Maories, too, have a way of taking out to die alone those whom their seers have pronounced doomed men, but it is probable that, among the rude races, the custom which seems to be a relic of human sacrifice has not been so grossly abused as it has been by the Bengal Hindoos. The practice of Ganjatra is but one out of many similar barbarities that disgrace the religion of the Hindoos, but it is fast sharing the fate of suttee and infanticide.

As I returned through the bazaar, I met many most unholylooking visitors to the sacred town. Fierce Sikhs, with enormous turbans ornamented with zig-zag stripes; bankers, in large purple turbans, curling their long white moustaches, and bearing their critical noses high aloft as they daintily picked their way over the garbage of the streets; and savage retainers of the rajahs staying for a season at their city palaces, were to the traveller's eye no very devout pilgrims. In truth, the immoralities of the "holy city" are as great as its

religious virtues, and it is the chosen ground of the loose characters as well as of the pilgrims of the Hindoo world..

In the whole of the great throng in the bazaar, hardly the slightest trace of European dressing was to be perceived: the varnished boots of the wealthier Hindoos alone bore witness to the existence of English trade-a singular piece of testimony, this, to the essential conservatism of the Oriental mind. With any quantity of old army clothing to be got for the asking, you never see a rag of it on a native back-not even on that of the poorest coolie. If you give a blanket to an outdoor servant, he will cut it into strips, and wear them as a puggree round his head; but this is about the only thing he will accept, unless to sell it in the bazaar.

As I stopped to look for a moment at the long trains of laden camels that were winding slowly through the tortuous streets, I saw a European soldier cheapening a bracelet with a native jeweller. He was the first topee-wallah ("hat-fellow," or "European ") that I had seen in Benares city. Calcutta is the only town in Northern India in which you meet Europeans in your walks or rides; and, even there, there is but one European to every sixty natives. In all India, there are, including troops, children, and officials, far less than as many thousands of Europeans as there are millions of natives.

The evening after that on which I visited the native town, I saw in Secrole cantonments, near Benares, the India hated and dreaded by our troops-by day a blazing deadly heat and sun, at night a still more deadly fog-a hot white fog, into which the sun disappears half an hour before his time for setting, and out of which he shoots soon after seven in the morning, to blaze and kill again—a pestiferous fever-breeding ground-fog, out of which stand the tops of the palms, though their stems are invisible in the steam. Compared with our English summer climate, it seems the atmosphere of another planet.

Among the men in the cantonments, I found much of that demoralization that heat everywhere produces among Englishmen. The newly-arrived soldiers appear to pass their days in alternate trials of hard drinking and of total abstinence, and are continually in a state of nervous fright, which in time must wear them out, and make them an easy prey to fever. The