With the others J.W. set out for an advantageous observation point, on the wall of the fort which stands on the tongue of land between the two streams.  On the way J.W. assured himself that if Calcutta seemed without religion, here was more than enough of it to redress the balances.  In the throng was a holy man whose upraised arm had been held aloft until it had atrophied, and would never more swing by his side.  And yonder another holy one sat in the sand, with a circle of little fires burning close about him.  The seeker after he knew not what who made his search while lying on a bed of spikes was here.  And once a procession passed, two hundred men, all holy after the fashion of Hindu holiness, all utterly naked, with camels and elephants moving in their train.  As if to show how these were counted men of special sanctity, the people fell on their faces to the ground beside them as they passed, and kissed their shadows on the sand.

The point of vantage reached, J.W.’s bewildered eyes could scarce make his brain believe what they saw.  He was standing on a broad wall, thirty feet above the water, and perhaps a hundred feet back from it.  Up and down the stream was an endless solid mass of heads.  J.W. looked for some break in the crowd, some thinning out of its packed bodies, but as far as he could see there was no break, no end.  Government officials had estimated the number of pilgrims at two millions!

A signal must have been given, or an hour had come—­J.W. could not tell which—­but somehow the people knew that now was the opportunity to enter the water and gain cleansing from all sin.  A mighty, resistless movement carried the human stream to meet the river.  Inevitably the weaker individuals were swept along helpless, and those who fell arose no more.  Horrified, J.W. stood looking down on the slow, irresistible movement of the writhing bodies, and he saw a woman drop.  A British police officer, standing in an angle of the wall beneath, ordered a native policeman to get the woman out But the native, seeing the crush and unwilling to risk himself for so slight a cause, waited until his superior turned away to another point of peril, and then, snatching the red-banded police turban from his head, was lost in the general mass.

The woman?  Trampled to death, and twenty other men and women with her, in sight of the stunned watchers on the wall, who were compelled to see these lives crushed out, powerless to help by so much as a finger’s weight.

What was it all for?  J.W. asked his companions on the wall.  And they said that the word went out at certain times and the people flocked to this Mela.  They came to wash in the sacred waters at the propitious moment.  Nothing else mattered; not the inescapable pollution of the rivers, not the weariness and hunger and many distresses of the way.  It was a chance, so the wise ones declared, to be rid of sin.  Certainly it might not avail, but who would not venture if mayhap there might be cleansing of soul in the waters of Mother Ganges?