“Religious procession!” screamed Marten, dragging me after him up the steps of a Jain temple. “We’ll have to hang out here till it gets by. How’s them fer glad rags?”
The paraders were, indeed, attired in astonishing costumes, even for India. The street below us was quickly filled with a screaming of colors no less discordant than the harrowing “music” to which a thousand marchers kept uncertain step. Some of the fanatics, not satisfied with an exaggeration of native garb, masqueraded in the most fantastic of guises, among which the most amusing was that of a bold fellow burlesquing a sahib. He was “made up” to emphasize the white man’s idiosyncrasies, and marched in a hollow square where no point could be hidden from the view of the delighted bystanders. To the Hindu, he is an ass who wears jacket and trousers in preference to a cool, flowing robe; the tenderness of sahib feet is the subject of many a vulgar jest. The burlesquer was attired in a suit of shrieking checks that fitted his slender form as tightly as a glove; on his feet were shoes with great projecting soles in which he might have walked with impunity on red-hot irons. His flour-powdered face was far paler than that of the latest subaltern to arrive from England; over his long hair he wore a close-cropped wig of sickly yellow hue; and his tropical helmet would have given ample shade for four men. He was smoking a homemade imitation of a “bulldog” pipe, and swung a small fence rail jauntily back and forth as he walked. Every dozen yards he feigned to fall into a rage and, dancing about in a simulation of insanity, rushed upon the surrounding paraders, striking wildly about him with his clenched fists. The fact that he never opened his lips during this performance brought great delight to the natives, accustomed to give vent to their anger by taxing their vocal organs to the utmost.
There were other suggestions of the Hindu’s hatred of his rulers, the boldest of which brought up the rear of the procession. Two natives bore aloft a rough wooden cross on which a monkey was crucified—with cords rather than with nails. How widespread are the teachings of Christian missionaries was suggested by the fact that the most illiterate countryman “saw the point,” and twisted his lean features into the ugly grimace that is the low-caste Hindu’s manner of expressing mirth.
One of the many flights of steps leading down to the bathing ghats and funeral pyres of Benares
We fought our way onward to the center of the town and descended a great stone stairway beneath the slender minarets. Up and down the embankment groups of thinly-clad pilgrims, dripping from their ablutions, smoked vile-smelling cigarettes in the shadow of temple walls or purchased holy food at the straw-thatched booths. Here and there members of the most despised caste in India stood before ponderous scales, weighing out the wood that must be used in the cremation of the Hindu dead who hope to attain salvation. The abhorrence of their fellow-beings hung lightly upon the wood-sellers, tempered as it was by the enjoyment of a monopoly compared with which an American trust is a benevolent institution.
In the bathing ghats, segregation of sexes prevailed. The men wore loin clothes, the women white winding sheets through which the contour and hue of their brown bodies shone plainly as they rose from the water. From time to time bands of natives, covered with the dust of travel, tumbled down the stairways and plunged eagerly into the purging river. There is no sin so vile, says the Hindu, that it cannot be washed away in the Ganges at the foot of Benares. Let us hope so, for its waters certainly have no other virtues. Gladly would I, for one, bear away any portable burden of peccadillos in preference to descending into that fever-infected flow of mud. A ray of sunlight will not pass through a wineglassful of Ganges water. Yet pilgrims not only 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, spat it out in great jets, as if bent on dislodging some tenacious sin from between their back molars.
Our circuit of the city brought us back to the station long enough before train time to give opportunity for a duty that falls often to the roadster in India,—a general “wash up.” Twice that day we had been taken for Eurasians. Benares ends abruptly at the railway line; beyond, stretches a flat, monotonous landscape of arid, unpeopled moorland. Armed with a two-pice lump of soap of the hue of maple sugar, we slid down the steep bank below the railway bridge in an avalanche of sand and rubble. Once there, Marten decided that he was “too tired” to turn dhoby, and stretched out in the shade of the bank. I approached the stream, sinking halfway to my knees in the slime. There would have been no Indian impropriety in disrobing at once, but there would certainly have been a sadly sunburned sahib ten minutes afterward. Ordinary beachcombers, like my companion, being possessed of but two cotton garments, must have retired unlaundered or blistered. I, however, was no ordinary vagabond. My wardrobe included three pieces. It was the simplest matter in the world, therefore, to scrub the jacket while wearing the shirt and the shirt while wearing the jacket, and to wrap the garment de luxe around my legs while I soaked the third in the accumulation of Hindu sins.
“Say, mate,” drawled Marten, while I daubed my trousers with the maple-sugar soap, “you’ll sure 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 laborin’ 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, an’ if you’re finished with livin’—”
I looked up suddenly. Barely ten feet away the ugly snout of a crocodile was moving towards me.