Close by a Hindoo woman was going quickly round and round the trunk of a Bo-tree, which had at its base a lingam and a small nandi or stone bull (both symbols of Siva). She must have gone round at least a hundred times during the few minutes we stopped to watch her, and always in the same direction, but Mahmud said she would not fall as she was always doing it day in and day out.
It was as simple an employment of energy as children make setting themselves just such tasks—walking along the crack between two boards of a nursery floor and back so many hundred times, or hopping on one foot round and round the table, not always with any added zest of competition. It expressed an opposite need to that of contemplation, but in the monotonous round of its activity appeared to symbolize that view of life which shows it as a ceaseless movement along a path that leads nowhere, progressing without change and never arriving save at some part of its many times traversed orbit identical with all the rest. And well may Siva be worshipped in a circle, for the emblem the woman was running round—which invested with religious garments the mystery of perpetual regeneration—symbolizes the Destroyer also since neither Death nor Life can be conceived alone any more than light and darkness or silence and a song.
To enter the Golden Temple is not permitted to Europeans—only to peep through a hole in the wall and also to look at the roofs from the upper balcony of an adjacent house. There are two tall conical roofs shaped—as in so many Hindoo temples—like a common type of mould for ice puddings and a lower dome between them ridged like a melon, and beyond rises the white Mohammedan mosque. One of the tall roofs is red with only little spikelets gilded, but the other is gold all over as well as the lower dome.
As I turned from looking in at the gateway of the Golden Temple I saw just facing it a small Siva temple of stone delicately carved; and near to this, through a pair of brass doors, I saw the shrine of the "Saturday" god—a round face shown upon the upper part of a hanging cloth, without body or limbs, and with two flower-decked emblems in front of it. Then, a yard or two further on, I came to the Cow Temple and entered a cloistered court, where sacred peacocks strutted at their ease and pigeons fluttered. The temple itself was in the middle of this open court, and from its inner sanctuary at the back of its pillared porch or pavilion came the sound of a woman singing in a shrill high voice. A brown cow was licking the wet blossoms off the lingams, and under the cloisters where a crowd of people stood gazing at him sat a particularly ugly fakir. Naked, except for a loin-cloth, he sat looking at the ground with his legs crossed. Mahmud said he was a "Bramchari fakir," and we learned from the gazers that he had arrived early the same morning and had not moved since. He was extremely fat, as fat as the Chinese god of good luck, but with nothing merry about him and a look that was repulsive to me. His long brown hair hung down on to the pavement behind him. He had a piece of board to sit upon, and on the ground in front were offerings of food, but the people said he could not eat anything (he really looked too full). They admired and stared and wondered, and Mahmud said that the fat fakir was an arrant humbug, but then Mahmud was not a Hindoo.
The droppings of sacred bulls seemed everywhere; and when we came out of the Cow Temple and turned down a narrow passage, the way was dirtier than ever, and yet more weird and strange. Through two doors open in the side of the wall a huge red Ganesh, festooned with flower garlands, the lower part of his elephant face covered by a yellow cloth, stared with three eyes, and near him some Hindoos were making butter.
The same afternoon I drove out four miles from Benares to Sarnath to see the Buddhist remains there. Wide spaces of dry mud—dazzling in the sunlight—stretched away from each side of the road, parched for lack of the rain which should have covered them in a mantle of green crops.
The Buddhist "Tope" at Sarnath is an immense and apparently solid mass of brick-work raised upon a stone base and reminding one of the Dagobas of Anuradhapura in Ceylon. Chinese Buddhist pilgrims visited Sarnath at the time when the Romans were leaving England and have left descriptions of this earlier Benares. Excavations on an extensive scale are now going on, and 300 coolies were employed upon them at the time of my visit. The walls and general plan of many buildings, probably monasteries referred to in the account of the Chinese pilgrims, have been unearthed, and a museum is being built to house the finds, which are at present kept under a brick shelter. On a trolley near the latter I saw a very remarkable lion capital from a granite column 45 feet high, which was found lying in several pieces. This capital takes the form of a large quadrupled lion, with an annular relief below its feet of small figures of horses and elephants.
There is a Jain temple close to the Buddhist one; but what little daylight remained I spent in wandering about the new excavations and especially in examining a square chamber just uncovered, which was surrounded by short square columns connected by rows of wide cross-bars or rails of stone, lozenge-shaped in section. On some of these cross-bars there were circular medallions carved with geometric patterns in an arrangement similar to that in specimens in the Calcutta museum. Among the carved decoration there was much incised pattern-work with the spaces cut out, leaving square and not rounded edges.
I did not leave Sarnath till just at sunset, and driving back to Benares it seemed as if a sign came that I should never exhaust the wonders of the world. I saw a star sail slowly and almost horizontally across the sky. It was very bright indeed and had a tail or stream of light behind it and remained visible even after I had drawn Mahmud's attention to it, so that he said, "Yes—it is a star."