72 BENARES. Chap. III. 



The famed mosque, built by Aurungzebe on the 

 site of a Hindoo temple, is remarkable for its two 

 octagonal minarets, 232 feet above the Ganges. The 

 view from it over the town, especially of the European 

 Resident's quarter, is fine ; but the building itself is 

 deficient in beauty or ornament : it commands the muddy 

 river with its thousands of boats, its waters peopled with 

 swimmers and bathers, who spring in from the many 

 temples, water-terraces, and ghats on the city side : oppo- 

 site is a great sandy plain. The town below looks a mass 

 of poor, square, flat-roofed houses, of which 12,000 are 

 brick, and 16,000 mud and thatch, through the crowd of 

 which, and of small temples, the eye wanders in vain for 

 some attractive feature or evidence of the wealth, the 

 devotion, the science, or the grandeur of a city celebrated 

 throughout the East for all these attributes. Green parrots 

 and pigeons people the air. 



The general appearance of an oriental town is always 

 more or less ruinous ; and here the eye is fatigued with 

 bricks and crumbling edifices, and the ear with prayer- 

 bells. The bright meadows and green trees which adorn the 

 European Resident's dwelling, some four miles back from 

 the river, alone relieve the monotony of the scene. The 

 streets are so narrow that it is difficult to ride a horse 

 through them ; and the houses are often six stories high, 

 with galleries crossing above from house to house. These 

 tall, gaunt edifices sometimes give place to clumps of 

 cottages, and a mass of dusty ruins, the unsavoury retreats 

 of vermin and filth, where the Calotropis arborea generally 

 spreads its white branches and glaucous leaves — a dusty 

 plant. Here, too, enormous spiders' webs hang from the 

 crumbling walls, choked also with dust, and resembling 

 curtains of coarse muslin, being often some yards across, 



