Rangoon is a city of gorgeous colors and varied human types. But one need not go far to find the Burmese girl Kipling has immortalized:
"'Er petticoat was yaller and 'er little cap was green,
An er name was Supi-yaw-lat--jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen
An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot.
An' a wastin' Christian kisses on a 'eathen idol's foot'"
{207 continued}
But let us get back to Benares and its pilgrims. They do not all die, nor do they spend all their time bathing in the sacred waters of "Mother Gunga," as the Ganges is called. Naturally there are many temples in which they must worship, many priests whom they must support. There are said to be 2000 temples in Benares and the high priest of one of them--while sparring for a bigger tip for his services--told me that he was at the head of 400 priests supported by his establishment alone (the Golden Temple).
And such temples as they are! I have seen the seamy side of some great cities, but for crass and raw vulgarity and obsceneness there are "temples" in Benares--so-called "temples" that should minister to man's holier nature, with so-called "priests" to act as guides to their foulness--that could give lessons to a third-rate Bowery den. No wonder that the Government of India, when it made a law against indecent pictures and carvings, had to make a special exception for Hindu "religious"(!) pictures. There is a limit, however, even to the endurance of the British Government, and at the Nepalese Temple I was told that the authorities do not allow such structures to be built now. Moreover, it is not only admitted that the temples in many parts of India are the resort of the lowest class of women, "temple girls" dedicated to gods and goddesses, but their presence is openly defended as proper.
Most of the temples in Benares, too, are as far from cleanliness as they are from godliness. The Golden Temple with its sacred cows penned up in dirty stalls, its ragged half-naked worshippers, its holy cesspool known as "The Well of Knowledge," its hideous, leprosy-smitten beggars, its numerous emblems of its lustful god Krishna, and its mercenary priests, {208} is a good illustration. And the famous Monkey Temple (dedicated like the Kalighat to Mother Kali) I found no more attractive. This temple is open to the sky and the most loathsome collection of dirty monkeys that I have ever had the misfortune to see were scrambling all around the place, while the monkey-mad, bloodstained, goat-killing priests, preying on the ignorance of the poor, and itching for a few annas in tips, won a place in my disgust second only to that occupied by their monkey companions. I left and went out to the gate where the snake-charmers were juggling with a dozen hissing cobras. It was pleasanter to look at them.
That night an eminent English artist, temporarily in Benares, discoursed to me at length though vaguely on the beauties of Hindu religious theory, but what I had seen during the day did not help his argument. Emerson's phrase may well be applied to Hinduism, "What you are speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say."
Not that it has anything to do with Hinduism but simply to get a better taste in the mouth at the end, let us turn in conclusion to a happier subject. Some days ago I went to Darjeeling on the boundary of northern India and on the edge of the great Himalaya mountain range. In sight from its streets and from nearby peaks are the highest mountains formed by the Almighty's hand, the sublimest scenery on which the eye of mortal man may ever rest.
Long before daylight one morning I bestrode a sure-footed horse and wound my way, with two friends of a day, as friends on a foreign tour are likely to prove, to the top of Tiger Hill, from which point we looked across the boundaries of Tibet and saw the sun rise upon a view whose majesty defied description. In the distance on our left there glittered in its mantle of everlasting snow, and with its twin attendants, the summit of Mt. Everest, 29,002 feet high, the highest mountain on the surface of the earth. Even grander was the view directly in front of us, for there only one third as far away as Everest, royal {209} Kinchinjunga shouldered out the sky, its colossal, granite masses, snow-covered and wind-swept, towering in dread majesty toward the very zenith. Monarch of a white-clad semicircle of kingly peaks it stood, while the sun, not yet risen to our view, colored the pure-white of its crest with a blush of rose-tint, and in a minute or two had set the whole vast amphitheatre a-glitter with the warm hues of its earliest rays. Across forty-five miles of massive chasms and rugged foothills (these "foothills" themselves perhaps as high as the highest Alps or Rockies) we looked to where, thousands of feet higher yet, there began the eternal snow-line of Kinchinjunga, above which its further bulk of 11,000 additional feet formed a dazzling silhouette against the northern sky. Stand at the foot of Pike's Peak and imagine another Pike's Peak piled on top; stand at the foot of Mount Mitchell and imagine four other Mount Mitchells on top of one another above its highest point--the massive bulk in either case stretching thousands and thousands of feet above the line of everlasting snow. Such is Kinchinjunga.
Spellbound we watched as if forbidden intruders upon a view it was not meet for any but the high gods themselves to see. About it all was a suggestion of illimitableness, of more than earthly majesty, of infinite serenity and measureless calm, which sat upon our spirits with a certain eerie unworldliness.