in palanquins to be healed of their maladies by a
bath; or if that might not be, then to die on the
blessed banks and so make sure of heaven. There
were fakeers in plenty, with their bodies dusted over
with ashes and their long hair caked together with
cow-dung; for the cow is holy and so is the rest of
it; so holy that the good Hindoo peasant frescoes the
walls of his hut with this refuse, and also constructs
ornamental figures out of it for the gracing of his
dirt floor. There were seated families, fearfully
and wonderfully painted, who by attitude and grouping
represented the families of certain great gods.
There was a holy man who sat naked by the day and
by the week on a cluster of iron spikes, and did not
seem to mind it; and another holy man, who stood all
day holding his withered arms motionless aloft, and
was said to have been doing it for years. All
of these performers have a cloth on the ground beside
them for the reception of contributions, and even
the poorest of the people give a trifle and hope that
the sacrifice will be blessed to him. At last
came a procession of naked holy people marching by
and chanting, and I wrenched myself away.
CHAPTER L.
The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin
to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.
—Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s New Calendar.
The journey to Benares was all in daylight, and occupied
but a few hours. It was admirably dusty.
The dust settled upon you in a thick ashy layer and
turned you into a fakeer, with nothing lacking to the
role but the cow manure and the sense of holiness.
There was a change of cars about mid-afternoon at
Moghul-serai—if that was the name—and
a wait of two hours there for the Benares train.
We could have found a carriage and driven to the
sacred city, but we should have lost the wait.
In other countries a long wait at a station is a
dull thing and tedious, but one has no right to have
that feeling in India. You have the monster crowd
of bejeweled natives, the stir, the bustle, the confusion,
the shifting splendors of the costumes—dear
me, the delight of it, the charm of it are beyond
speech. The two-hour wait was over too soon.
Among other satisfying things to look at was a minor
native prince from the backwoods somewhere, with his
guard of honor, a ragged but wonderfully gaudy gang
of fifty dark barbarians armed with rusty flint-lock
muskets. The general show came so near to exhausting
variety that one would have said that no addition
to it could be conspicuous, but when this Falstaff
and his motleys marched through it one saw that that
seeming impossibility had happened.
Copyrights
Following the Equator from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
