A SHRINE OF VISHNU. 381 



position, and the nails of the tightly clenched fingers had 

 actually grown through the hand and protruded at its back : 

 all of them jostling or being jostled along the narrow path. 

 A few of the more aged or sick were being carried in baskets 

 on the backs of men, sometimes of women. Occasionally 

 a man might be seen measuring his length flat on the ground, 

 then rising and remeasuring it, thus progressing by a regular 

 succession of these prostrations throughout his whole journey, 

 perhaps for hundreds of miles, to the shrine. How some of the 

 wretched creatures contrived to get over such rough ground 

 was truly astonishing. When performing their religious 

 observances on this arduous mountain-pilgrimage, they seem 

 utterly reckless of all hardship and danger. Many are 

 drowned at the confluence of the Alaknanda and Doulee, a 

 sacred spot (as every junction of large rivers is by Hindoos 

 considered), where they all think it an imperative duty to 

 bathe off a smooth slab of rock jutting out into the deep 

 rapid current of the combined streams. By way of propitia- 

 tion, some even cast themselves voluntarily into the river. 

 Fifteen had that year been swept away by an avalanche. A 

 poor old man I accosted on the way, carrying a little child in 

 his arms, burst into tears as he told me his sad tale. The 

 child's mother had slipped on a snow-slope on the way 

 between the two mountain-shrines of Kedarnath and Bad- 

 rinath, its father in attempting to rescue her had also lost 

 his footing, when both had fallen together and disappeared 

 for ever in a torrent far below, and he, its grandfather, was 

 left to return home with the infant alone. One poor wretch 

 had managed to crawl as far as the shrine, and had lain down 

 and died, from sheer exhaustion, on its very threshold, the day 

 I arrived there. 



The temple is situated in a wild glen begirt with towering 

 snowy heights, but the summits of some of the higher peaks 

 are invisible from it. Although its sublime surroundings are 

 such fit emblems of the majesty of the Almighty, the temple 



