the city produces an impression as of a town built in the clouds and then dropped, scattered over the plain with vast arid and barren spaces left between the houses. in the native and moslem quarters, indeed, there is a crowd of buildings, closely packed, crammed together on quite a small plot of ground; and among them the electric tramway runs its cars, useless just now, and empty of travellers, for it is the beginning of ramadan, and the mohammedans in broad daylight are letting off crackers in honour of the festival.
in the hotel compound—more absurd than all the rest, lost in a waste of open land beyond the seething native town—there was a swarm of coolie servants, their wives and their children, who played all day at climbing about the coaches put up under the trees. and, without ceasing, a maddening hubbub of laughter and crying came up from this litter of brats, more weariful than the silence of vacancy all around.
the draught-oxen all had their horns painted[pg 134] in gaudy colours, generally one horn blue and the other green.
in the evening, in the open street, we came upon a circle of bystanders all beating time, while in the midst four little girls were dancing, wearing the sarong, but naked to the waist. they leaned very much over to the right, resting the right elbow on the groin, clapping the right hand with the left, and throwing back the left leg. all four did the same, round and round, and this went on again and again without a pause, under the pale light of the stars filtering through an enormous banyan tree. occasionally a woman among the crowd would give a slow, long-drawn cry, and the dancers answered in very short notes, piercingly shrill.
in the native town, on a tank in front of a temple, a raft was moving very slowly. under a dazzlingly gorgeous canopy stood an idol of gold, covered with garlands and jewels. a dense crowd, white and fragrant with jasmine and sandal-wood, stood about the sacred pool and on the steps, and bowed reverently as the divinity floated past.
one old man, indeed, bowed so low that he fell into the water, and all the worshippers shouted with laughter.
the streets were hung with gaudy flags and[pg 135] coloured paper. altars had been erected, four poles supporting an awning with flounces of bright-coloured silk, and under them a quantity of idols, of vases filled with amaryllis and roses, and even dainty little dresden figures—exquisite curtseying marquises, quite out of their element among writhing vishnus and kalis.
that evening, near the temple where the god, having left the tank, was receiving the flowers and scents offered by his votaries, there was howling and yelling from the crowd of hindoos, all crushing and pushing, but going nowhere. and louder yet the noise of the tom-toms, which the musicians raised to the desired pitch by warming them in front of big fires throwing off clouds of acrid smoke.
in one tent there was a display of innumerable gilt images, very suggestive of jesuit influence—mincing, chubby angels, martyrs carrying palm-branches, and ecstatic virgins with clasped hands, all serving to decorate the shrine in which the god was to be carried back to the temple. coloured fires lighted the workmen, and in the background the temple was darkly visible, with only a few dim lamps shrouded in incense, and burning before rama, whose festival was being kept.
[pg 136]
the god having been placed in the shrine, which was enormously heavy, and took a hundred men to carry it, the procession set out. first two drums, then some children burning coloured fire and whirling fireworks round above their heads. three oxen with housings of velvet, richly embroidered in gold, carried tom-tom drummers, and behind them came the priests and the god, hardly visible among the lights and flowers on the shrine. a breath of awe fell on the crowd as the divinity came by; they bowed in adoration with clasped hands and heads bent very low.
to light the way, coolies carried long iron tridents tipped with balls of tow soaked in oil. the mass moved slowly forward through the people, suddenly soothed to silence. the procession paused at the wayside altars, and then, in the middle of a circle formed by the torch-bearers and coloured lights, the sacred bayadères appeared—three girls with bare heads, dressed in stiff new sarongs heavy with tinkling trinkets, and an old woman crowned with a sort of very tall cylindrical tiara of red velvet embroidered with gold. very sweet-toned bagpipes and some darboukhas played a slow tune, and the dancers began to move; they spun slowly round, their arms held out, their bodies kept rigid, [pg 137]excepting when they bowed to the shrine. the crude light of the red fire or the sulphurous flare of the torches fell on their glittering ornaments, alternately festive and mysterious, shedding over the performance an atmosphere at once dreamy and magically gorgeous.
then all went out, died gently away; the tom-toms and pipe attending the god's progress alone were audible in the silence; till in the distance a great blaze of light flashed out, showing a crowd of bright turbans and the glittering splendour of the shrine going up the steps to the temple where, till next year, rama would remain—the exiled god, worshipped for his wisdom which enabled him to discover the secrets, to find the true path, and win the forgiveness of his father.
the doors were shut; all was silence—the stillness of the star-lit night.
many hapless creatures here suffer from elephantiasis, and even quite little children are to be seen with an ankle stiffened, or perhaps both the joints ossified; and the whole limb will by-and-by be swollen by the disease, a monstrous mass dreadfully heavy to drag about. other forms of lupus affect the face, and almost always, amid a crowd watching[pg 138] some amusing performance, a head suddenly appears of ivory whiteness, the skin clinging to the bone or disfigured by bleeding sores.
steaming over the transparent and intensely blue sea, we presently perceived an opaquer streak of sandy matter, getting denser, and becoming at last liquid, extremely liquid, yellow mud—the waters of the ganges, long before land was in sight. between the low banks, with their inconspicuous vegetation, a desolate shore, we could have fancied we were still at sea when we had already reached the mouth of the sacred stream. some hindoos on board drew up the water in pails to wash their hands and face, fixing their eyes in adoration on the thick sandy fluid. enormous steamships crossed our bows, and in the distance, like a flock of ibis, skimmed a whole flotilla of boats with broad red sails, through which the low sun was shining. the banks closed in, the landscape grew more definite—tall palm trees, plots of garden ground, factory chimneys, a high tower. on the water was an inextricable confusion of canoes and row-boats flitting among the steamships and sailing barks moored all along the town that stretched away out of sight.