it grimly, kicking and slippery though it was,
under what must have seemed to it a terrible hurrying horror. When at
last that baby emerged, it was too crushed in spirit to cry.

Beyond this little domestic scene was a group of half-reluctant women,
longing and yet fearing to venture under the plunging waters; and beyond
them again were the bathers, crowding but never jostling each other, on
the narrow ledge upon and over which the Falls descend. Some were
standing upright, with bowed heads, under the strong chastisement of the
nearer heavier fall; some bent under it, as if overwhelmed with the
thundering thud of its waters. Some were further on, where the white
furies lash like living whips, and scourge and sting and scurry; and
there the pilgrims were hardly visible, for the waters swept over them
like a veil, and they looked in their weirdness and muteness like martyr
ghosts. Further still some were carefully climbing the steps cut into
the cliff, or standing as high as they could go upon an unguarded
projection of rock, with eyes shut and folded hands, entirely oblivious
apparently to the fact that showers of spray enveloped them, and the
deep pool lay below.

I had never seen anything quite like this: it was such a strange
commingling of the beautiful and sorrowful. The women--"fair"-skinned
Brahman women they chanced to be--were in their usual graceful raiment
of silk or cotton, all shades of soft reds, crimson, purple, blue,
lightened with yellow and orange, which in the water looked like dull
fire. Their golden and silver jewels gleamed in the sunlight, and their
long black hair hung round faces like the faces one sees in pictures.
The men wore their ordinary white, and the ascetics the salmon-tinted
saffron of their profession.

Then, as if to add an ethereal touch to it all, a rainbow spanned the
Falls at that moment, and we saw the pilgrims through it or arched by it
as they stood, some at either end of the bow where the colours painted
the rock and the spray, and some in the space between. The sun struck
the forest hanging on the steeps above, and it became a vivid thing in
quick delight of greenness. It was something which, once seen, could
hardly be forgotten. The triumphant stream of white set deep in the
heart of a great horseshoe of rock and woods; the delicate, exquisite
pleasure of colour; and the people in their un-self-consciousness,
bathing and worshipping just as they wished, with for background