and an instinctive treading in the old paths.  “Via trita, via tuta.”  In the path from one Indian village to another may often be observed an inexplicable deviation from the beeline, and then a return to the line again.  It is where in some past year some dead animal or some offensive thing has fallen in the path and lain there.  Year after year, long after the cause has disappeared, the feet of the villagers continue in that same deviating track.  That is in perfect keeping with India.  Or—­to permit ourselves to follow up another natural sequence—­things may quickly begin to fit in with the deviation.  Perhaps the first rainy season after the feet of the villagers had been made to step aside, some plant was found in possession of the avoided spot.  India-like, its right of possession was unconsciously deferred to.  And then the year following, may be, one or other of the sacred fig trees appeared behind the plant, and in a few years starved it out.  Ten years will make a banyan sapling, or a pipal, into a sturdy trunk, and lo, by that time, in some visitation of drought or cholera or smallpox, or because some housewife was childless, coloured threads are being tied upon the tree or some rude symbolic painting put upon it.  Then an ascetic comes along and seats himself in its shade, and now, already, a sacred institution has been established that it would raise a riot to try to remove.

Visitors to Allahabad go to see the great fort erected upon the bank of the River Jumna by the Mahomedan emperor, Akbar.  One of the sights of the fort, strange to tell, is the underground Hindu temple of “The Undying Banyan Tree,” to which we descend by a long flight of steps.  Such a sacred banyan tree as we have imagined, Akbar found growing there upon the slope of the river bank when he was requiring the ground for his fort.  The undying banyan tree is now a stump or log, but it or a predecessor was visited by a Chinese pilgrim to Allahabad in the seventh century A.D.  Being very tolerant, instead of cutting down the tree, Akbar built a roof over it and filled up the ground all round to the level he required.  And still through the gateway of the fort and down underground, the train of pilgrims passes as of old to where the banyan tree is still declared to grow.  Such is Indian conservatism, undeterred by any thought of incongruity.  Benares is crowded with examples of the same unconscious tenacity.  I have spoken of the ruthless levelling of Hindu temples in Benares in former days to make way for Mahomedan mosques.  Near the gate of Aurangzeb’s mosque a strange scene meets the eye.  Where the road leads to the mosque, and with no Hindu temple nowadays in sight, are seated a number of Hindu ashes-clad ascetics.  What are they doing at the entrance to a Mahomedan mosque?  That is where their predecessors used to sit two hundred years ago, before Aurangzeb tore down the holy Hindu temple of Siva and erected the mosque in its stead.

[Sidenote:  Yields before a persistent obtruding influence.]