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The National Geographic Magazine 



highest caste and piety, salaam abjectly 

 to them — a mad world, a crazy crowd, 

 surely. 



The throng is densest, the buzz and the 

 bellowing loudest, at the ghat below the 

 cremation ground, for there are the 

 sacred pools filled with Vishnu's perspira- 

 tion, and where Devi dropped her ear- 

 ring — good reason for sanctity attaching 

 to them, certainly. At this storm center 

 of the holy land of the Ganges bank, the 

 din and the hot sun are dizzying, and the 

 mixture of Ganges water, old flower gar- 

 lands, milk, butter, oil, sweetmeats, 

 spices, and incense, cast into the tank all 

 day and every day, smells to heaven. The 

 odor is sickening, the sight of the gar- 

 bage mess more so, and the lepers and 

 hideous sick folk, who crawl up and 

 down the slimy steps, are fit figures in 

 this picture of heathenism triumphant 

 and undisturbed. Hindu intelligence 

 may be measured exactly when one con- 

 siders that the priests of the river bank 

 could easily check these suicidal cele- 

 brants who flock there to drink the putrid 

 mire in hope of cures. 



Perhaps it is well that Mrs Annie 

 Besant has established her college at 

 Benares to teach the Hindus their own 

 religion, the purer faith of Vedic times, 

 freed from all the idolatrous and crazy 

 abominations of later days. Nothing 

 could be as bad as the creed that now 

 enslaves them. Poseurs and unbalanced 

 Europeans, who come out to India loudly 

 proclaiming their willingness to labor 

 with Mrs Besant to save the Hindus 

 after this novel plan, return to the world 

 at the end of each cold-weaither season. 

 The discipline is strict, the ideals high, 

 the regimen severe at Mrs Besant's col- 

 lege, and even Pierre Loti, after all his 

 sentimentality over the Hindus, could 

 not stand the severe and monkish life 

 prescribed for him by the English 

 prophetess, and returned to the flesh pots 

 of the worldly folk. 



The fantastic little Nepalese temple on 

 the river bank is the one living remnant 

 of Buddhism in Benares, where the 



Buddha preached and taught, and con- 

 verted the people from Hinduism. It 

 is a dark, dragon-eaved structure with 

 flame-itipped__ gables, sadly reminding one 

 of Burma and the further east; but the 

 Buddhism obtaining there is far from 

 the simple teachings of the Enlightened 

 One, who lived in the Deep Park out 

 Sarnath way. 



Aurangzib's mosque, with its two 

 slender, sky-piercing minarets, is easily 

 ithe most conspicuous structure along the 

 ghats, as the conqueror intended it 

 should be, and is a galling sight to 

 Hindu eyes. The few Moslems, who 

 can manage to still live in Benares, fre- 

 quent it every Friday, and the muezzin 

 flings his shrill voice from the minaret 

 as if thousands hung upon his summons ; 

 but Hinduism has submerged the faith 

 of the Prophet, as it triumphed over 

 Buddhism centuries before. 



THE PUBLIC LAUNDRY 



In every river city there are bathing 

 ghats, where the people purify them- 

 selves and their garments without the ac- 

 companiment of prayer, and there are 

 also ghats by the river bank, or tanks 

 where dhobees swing and pound clothes 

 and knead them on boards or stones. 

 The dhobee ghats and grounds are al- 

 ways picturesque, and when one sees the 

 energy with which they switch and club 

 the garments entrusted to them, there is 

 no wonder at the way a wardrobe melts 

 away in Indian travel. The corrugated 

 washboard, the clothes-boiler, the labor- 

 saving soap and soda are unknown and 

 their advantages undreamed of, or the 

 Hindu brain would have evolved them 

 thirty centuries ago, when cerebration 

 was more vigorous and all customs were 

 established. The dhobee man and his 

 harder-working wife slam and squeeze 

 and hammer now, as they did in the first 

 ages after the loom was invented, and 

 when they have spread their dunnage on 

 dusty turf or handy thorn bush the re- 

 sult is all that could be expected by the 

 wearers of fine linen. 



