The devout Hindu knows in Benares the height of ecstasy: but, if I am typical, the European experiences there both discomfort and inquietude. Nowhere else in India did I feel so foreign, so alien. To be of cool Christian traditions and an Occidental, an inquisitive sightseer among these fervent pilgrims intent upon their pious duties and rapt in exaltation and unthinking inflexible belief, was in itself disconcerting, almost to the point of shame; while the pilgrims were so remarkably of a different world, a different era, that one felt lost.

This, however, is not all. India is never too sanitary, except where the English are in their own strongholds, but Benares—at any rate the parts which the tourist must visit—is least scrupulous in such matters. The canonization of the cow must needs carry a penalty with it, and Benares might be described as a sanctified byre without any labouring Hercules in prospect. Godliness it may have, but cleanliness is very distant. The streets, too, seem to be narrower and more congested than those in any other city; so that it is often embarrassingly difficult to treat the approaching ruminants with the respect due to them. Fortunately they are seldom anything but mild and unaggressive. Part perplexed, part inquisitive, and part contemptuous, they are met everywhere, while in one of the temples in which the unbeliever may (to his great contentment) do no more than stand at the entrance, they are frankly worshipped. In another temple monkeys are revered too, careering about the walls and courtyards and being fed by the curious and the devout.

Holiness is not only the peculiar characteristic of Benares: it is also its staple industry. In the streets there is a shrine at every few feet, while the shops where little lingams are for sale must be numbered by hundreds.

The chief glory of Benares is, however, the Ganges, on one side of which is the teeming sweltering city with its palaces and temples heaped high for two or three miles, and bathers swarming at the river's edge; while the other bank is flat and bare. A watering-place front on the ocean's shore does not end more suddenly and completely. There is nothing that I have seen with which to compare the north bank of the Ganges, with the morning sun on its many-coloured faÇades and towers, but Venice. As one is rowed slowly down the river it is of Venice that one instinctively thinks. As in Venice, the palaces are of various colours, pink and red and yellow and blue, and the sun has crumbled their faÇades in the same way. But there is this difference—that over the Benares roofs the monkeys scamper.

Gradually Venice is forgotten as the novel interest of the scene captures one's whole attention. At each of the ghauts (a landing place or steps) variegated masses of pilgrims—no matter how early the hour, and to see them rightly one ought to start quite by six—are making their ablutions and deriving holiness from the yellow tide. You saw them yesterday trudging wearily through the streets, the sacred city at last reached; and here they are in their thousands, brown and glistening. They are of every age: quite old white-bearded men and withered women, meticulously serious in their ritual, and then boys and girls deriving also a little fun from their immersion. Here and there the bathing ghaut is diversified by a burning ghaut, and one may catch a glimpse of the extremities of the corpse twisting among the faggots. Here and there is a boat or raft in which a priest is seated under his umbrella, fishing for souls as men in punts on the Thames fish for roach. And over all is the pitiless sun, hot even now, before breakfast, but soon to be unbearable.

I was not sorry when the voyage ended and we returned to the Maharajah's Guest House for a little repose and refreshment, before visiting the early Buddhist stronghold at Sarnath, the "Deer Park," where the Master first preached his doctrine and whither his five attendants sought a haven after they had forsaken him. Drifting about its ruins and contemplating the glorious capital of the famous Asoka column—all that has been preserved—I found myself murmuring the couplet,—

but the odds are that even the early Buddhists were not immune.