By eleven o'clock I was driving from Benares Station through the lines of red brick, one-storeyed barracks, ranged upon the flat pale-grey dusty earth of the cantonment. The railway station is a long way from the town, but at last, nearly opposite a white-spired English church with a "classic" portico smothered in brilliant bougainvillias, I reached Clark's Hotel, and thanks to a friend's introduction, found that a police inspector, one Mahmud Ali, had been deputed to attend me during my visit and show me Benares.
We began without loss of time and at noon were driving along the hot roads, while more leisured mortals slept at the doors of their house on four-post charpoys.
Upon the plaster walls of the better native houses there was a good deal of rude figure decoration, generally in red and yellow. We passed Queen's College, which is a Sanskrit College for native students, the Prince of Wales' Hospital, and then an old wall upon which were inscribed the words:—
"In the garden within this wall were the quarters occupied in the Autumn of 1781 by Warren Hastings, first Governor General of Fort William in Bengal."
Now I always think it is wise to humour a friendly cicerone, and I was not going at the very outset of our companionship to dispute at any length with Mahmud Ali, but somehow or other his mind was confused in regard to history. He declared that he had something of very great interest to show me in the garden and took me to an old well near a farther wall, saying that Warren Hastings concealed himself there during the Mutiny!
The streets were gay and crowded with foot-passengers, camels and horses, sacred cows and native vehicles. We passed one camel loaded with tobacco from some outlying village and just after, a bridegroom of the Hindoo noble caste Khatri, in a pink dress shot with gold, riding upon a white horse amid a deafening noise of drums and trumpets on his way to worship at a temple before the marriage ceremonies.
We were going to the famous Golden Temple and approached it by the bazaar of the brass-workers, where, between lines of tall houses, the sky dwindled to a narrow strip of blue. Far down the bazaar, past the Madhogi Hindoo Temple, a crowd of people huddled together were hurrying along, as if with a common object, under blue smoke which veiled them like a filmy gauze. These, Mahmud told me, were a band of pilgrims making a round of the Benares shrines, and I saw many such groups of native people going about with a leader like a Cook's conducted party.
Presently we came to a small square on the right of the bazaar, shut in by tall buildings, in which the Golden Temple stands and wherein is also the renowned Well of Knowledge. Sacred bulls were nosing about the pavement round a Bo-tree smeared with a red paint called Sandoor and a sweetmeat stall that was protected from the sun by a huge mushroom-like umbrella. Over the sacred well itself, upon its surrounding stone platform about 2 feet high, was built a pavilion of red-coloured stone and plaster, where an old man in a worn and very dirty coat of English cut sat ladling water out of a bucket to anyone who asked. I, of course, was not permitted to step upon the platform, but the faithful also have nowadays to suffer some prohibitions and are no longer allowed to choke the well with flowers.
In the Well of Knowledge, Vishnu the preserver is said to be for ever and behind it and its surrounding shrines of Ganesh and other gods (Ganesh is the good-luck god who was son of Siva and had, of course, nothing to do with Vishnu) the old Vishnagi Temple stands partly in ruins, as it has been ever since it was broken up by the puritan Aurungzebe, and partly turned into a mosque. The old part of this building is yellow-grey sandstone, tawny with age, but the mosque shone brightly in the sunlight with fresh Mohammedan whitewash.