"But aren't the women as religious as the men?" inquired Captain Ringgold.
"More so, if anything. But they come down to the river before sunrise and take their swim. If you had been here this morning you would have seen them coming out of the water just as the men are ready to go in, and you would have observed them in their white garments, dripping like drowned rats. That pagoda you see ahead of us with the bell tower and shining in gilt is the only temple the Buddhists have in Benares."
"We are coming now to the Munikurnika Ghat. It is a five-syllable word, but you can easily pronounce it," said Sir Modava, who thought he would "spell" the captain for a time; and he was quite as familiar with the banks of the Ganges.
"And it is quite musical," added the captain.
"Pronounce u like double o, and the rest of the letters as in English, and you can speak it without choking," said the Hindu gentleman. "But there are some letters in Hindu that have no equivalents in English."
"Moo-ui-koor-ni-ka Ghat," added Louis, pronouncing the word. "But what is it all about?"
"It is the place for burning the dead, such as you saw in Bombay, but on a much larger scale," replied Sir Modava. "You see that it extends a considerable distance. Please keep to the leeward of the smoke, Captain Carlisle."
"That is what I am doing, Sir Modava."
"These funeral pyres are burning all the time, night and day. The people whose bodies are consumed in these fires, and their friends, believe that the souls of the deceased will pass from this spot into paradise, where, if they have not been very great sinners they will be transplanted into the bodies of future Brahmins. Many deceased persons are brought even hundreds of miles to be burned on the Munikurnika by the Ganges, as their sure passport to the realms of bliss."
The obliging captain took the steamer near enough to the ghat to enable the tourists to see the process of burning. An occasional puff of the horribly offensive odor came to the nostrils of the sightseers; but the captain sheered off, and they got very little of it.