object of worship.  There are twenty-eight sacred cows at the central temples, and perhaps 500 more at other places of worship throughout the city; the trees around the temple gardens swarm with sacred monkeys and apes; there are twenty-two places where the dead are burned, and the air of the city is always darkened during the daytime by columns of smoke that rise from the funeral pyres.  No other city, not even London, has so many beggars, religious and otherwise; nowhere can so many pitiful spectacles of deformity and distress be seen; nowhere is such gross and repulsive obscenity and sensuality practiced—­and all in the name of religion; nowhere are such sordid deceptions imposed upon superstitious believers, and nowhere such gloomy, absurd and preposterous methods used for consoling sinners and escaping the results of sin.  Although Benares in these respects is the most interesting city in India, and one of the most interesting in the world, it is also the most filthy, repulsive and forbidding.  Few people care to remain there more than a day or two, although to the ethnologist and other students, to artists and people in search of the picturesque, it has more to offer than can be found elsewhere in the Indian Empire.

Benares is as old as Egypt.  It is one of the oldest cities in existence.  It was already famous when Rome was founded; even when Joshua and his trumpeters were surrounding the walls of Jericho.  It is the hope of every believer in Brahminism to visit Benares and wash away his sins in the water of the sacred Ganges; the greatest blessing he can enjoy is to die there; hence, the palaces, temples, and lodging-houses which line the river banks are filled with the aged relatives and friends of their owners and with pilgrims who have come from all parts of India to wait with ecstatic patience the summons of the angel of death in order to go straight to heaven.

Nothing in all their religion is so dear to devout Hindus as the Ganges.  The mysterious cavern in the Himalayas which is supposed to be the source of the river is the most sacred place on earth.  It is the fifth head of Siva, and for 1,600 miles to its delta every inch of the banks is haunted with gods and demons, and has been the scene of events bearing upon the faith of two-thirds of the people of India.  The most pious act, and one that counts more than any other to the credit of a human soul on the great books above, is to make a pilgrimage from the source to the mouth of the Ganges.  If you have read Kipling’s story of “Kim,” you will remember the anxiety of the old lama to find this holy stream, and to follow its banks.  Pilgrims to Benares and other cities upon the Ganges secure bottles of the precious water for themselves and send them to friends and kindred in foreign lands.  No river in all the world is so worshiped, and to die upon its sacred banks and to have one’s body burned and his ashes borne away into oblivion upon its tawny current is the highest aspiration of hundreds of millions of people.