BENARES 89 



pitiation of their respective deities. Beggars literally 

 swarm at their thresholds : in no city of the world 

 are the beggars so numerous and so hideously dis- 

 gusting as at Benares ; maimed, blind, paralyzed, 

 diseased, they gather from every part of India and 

 crowd before the temples where the pious will not 

 overlook their appeals. But repulsion overcomes 

 one's sense of pity, and prompts one to hurry past. 

 The hotels in Benares, fortunately, are far from 

 this centre of filth and degradation, and great was 

 the relief when at the end of a day of sight-seeing I 

 returned to the pure, untainted open air. Benares 

 had seemed to me like a great festering sore on the 

 clean surface of the land, aggravated by the thou- 

 sands drawn thither by the irresistible force of 

 superstition, fostered by the practices carried on 

 under the guise of religion. That this hotbed of 

 vice, filth, ignorance, and degradation should be 

 called the holy city of India is irony of the deepest 

 description. On looking back at that virtueless 

 place, if one wishes to include any pleasure in one's 

 recollections, one must remember only the sun- 

 sparkling waters of the Ganges, the thronging life 

 of the ghats, and the rising mass of ancient build- 

 ings which have come down to us, some ruined, 

 many crumbling, all jumbled one above the other 

 in reasonless confusion, through unnumbered cen- 



