Below us the street quickly filled with a parade of Hindus wearing strange costumes of all kinds and colors. To the wild, screaming music a thousand marchers kept uncertain step. One bold fellow was “made up” to look like an Englishman. He was dressed in a suit of shrieking checks that fitted his thin body as tightly as a glove; on his feet were shoes with great, thick soles in which he might without harm have walked on red-hot coals. His face was so covered with flour that he was far paler than the palest of Englishmen. Over his long hair he wore a close-cropped wig of sickly yellow; and the helmet on his head was big enough to give shade to four men. He was smoking a pipe, and he swung a queer-looking cane gaily back and forth as he walked. Every dozen yards he pretended that he had become very angry, and danced about madly, rushing toward the other paraders and striking wildly about him with his fists. In these fits of anger he never once opened his lips. The natives looking on laughed with delight. They thought he was acting just like a sahib.
We fought our way onward to the center of the town, and climbed down the great stone stairway of another temple, where we could watch the pilgrims wash away their sins in the holy waters. Up and down the banks of the river Ganges, groups of thinly dressed natives, dripping from their baths in the holy waters, smoked bad-smelling cigarettes in the shadow of the temple, or bought holy food from the straw-roofed shacks.
Bathing in the holy waters were men wearing almost no clothing, and women wearing winding sheets. From time to time bands of pilgrims covered with the dust of travel tumbled down the stairways and plunged eagerly into the river. For the Hindu believes that, no matter how badly a person has behaved, his sins can be washed away in the Ganges at the foot of Benares.
The river did not look as if it could make one pure. Its waters are so muddy that a ray of sunshine will not pass through a glassful of it. I, for one, would be afraid to bathe in that fever infected flow of mud. Yet the native pilgrims splashed about in it, ducking their heads beneath the surface and dashing it over their faces; they rinsed their mouths in it, scraped their tongues with sticks dipped in it, and blew it out of their mouths in great jets, as if they were determined to get rid of all the sin in their bodies.
I do a bit of laundry work washing my coat in the Ganges below the city and at the same time keeping a good lookout for crocodiles.
We went through the city, and reached the station in time for a “wash-up.” Twice that day we had been taken for Eurasians (a Eurasian is a person who is half European and half Asiatic); so we thought it was about time to wash our faces. The station stood at the end of the city. Beyond it stretched a flat, sandy plain. Armed with a lump of soap of the color of maple-sugar, we slid down the steep bank below the railway bridge, with a mass of loose sand and rolling stones. When we reached the spot, however, Marten decided that he was “too tired” to turn dhoby, and stretched out in the shade on the bank. I waded out into the river, sinking half way to my knees in the mud. It would not have been impolite or out of place to undress at once, but there would certainly have been a sadly sunburned sahib ten minutes afterward. So I scrubbed my jacket while wearing my shirt, and the shirt while wearing the jacket, and wrapped the jacket around me while I soaked my trousers in waters filled with Hindu sins.
“Say, mate,” drawled Marten, as I daubed my trousers with the maple-sugar soap, “you’ll surely go to heaven fer scrubbin’ your rags in that mud. There’s always a bunch of Hindu gods hangin’ around here. I don’t want to disturb a honest workin’-man, o’ course, but I’d be so lonesome if you was gone that I’m goin’ to tell you that there’s one comin’ to take you to heaven now, and if you’re finished with livin’—”
I looked up suddenly. Barely ten feet away, the ugly snout of a crocodile was moving toward me.
“Stand still!” shouted Marten, as I struggled to pull my legs from the clinging mud. “He’s a god, I tell you. Besides, he’s probably hungry. Don’t be so selfish.”