Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have
been.
—Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s New Calendar.
In one of those Benares temples we saw a devotee working
for salvation in a curious way. He had a huge
wad of clay beside him and was making it up into little
wee gods no bigger than carpet tacks. He stuck
a grain of rice into each—to represent
the lingam, I think. He turned them out nimbly,
for he had had long practice and had acquired great
facility. Every day he made 2,000 gods, then
threw them into the holy Ganges. This act of
homage brought him the profound homage of the pious—also
their coppers. He had a sure living here, and
was earning a high place in the hereafter.
The Ganges front is the supreme show-place of Benares.
Its tall bluffs are solidly caked from water to summit,
along a stretch of three miles, with a splendid jumble
of massive and picturesque masonry, a bewildering
and beautiful confusion of stone platforms, temples,
stair-flights, rich and stately palaces—nowhere
a break, nowhere a glimpse of the bluff itself; all
the long face of it is compactly walled from sight
by this crammed perspective of platforms, soaring
stairways, sculptured temples, majestic palaces, softening
away into the distances; and there is movement, motion,
human life everywhere, and brilliantly costumed —streaming
in rainbows up and down the lofty stairways, and massed
in metaphorical flower-gardens on the miles of great
platforms at the river’s edge.
All this masonry, all this architecture represents
piety. The palaces were built by native princes
whose homes, as a rule, are far from Benares, but
who go there from time to time to refresh their souls
with the sight and touch of the Ganges, the river
of their idolatry. The stairways are records
of acts of piety; the crowd of costly little temples
are tokens of money spent by rich men for present credit
and hope of future reward. Apparently, the rich
Christian who spends large sums upon his religion
is conspicuous with us, by his rarity, but the rich
Hindoo who doesn’t spend large sums upon his
religion is seemingly non-existent. With us
the poor spend money on their religion, but they keep
back some to live on. Apparently, in India, the
poor bankrupt themselves daily for their religion.
The rich Hindoo can afford his pious outlays; he
gets much glory for his spendings, yet keeps back a
sufficiency of his income for temporal purposes; but
the poor Hindoo is entitled to compassion, for his
spendings keep him poor, yet get him no glory.
We made the usual trip up and down the river, seated
in chairs under an awning on the deck of the usual
commodious hand-propelled ark; made it two or three
times, and could have made it with increasing interest
and enjoyment many times more; for, of course, the
palaces and temples would grow more and more beautiful
every time one saw them, for that happens with all
such things; also, I think one would not get tired
of the bathers, nor their costumes, nor of their ingenuities
in getting out of them and into them again without
exposing too much bronze, nor of their devotional
gesticulations and absorbed bead-tellings.
