enery, but nothing on God's
footstool resembles the picture of the holy Hindu city that may
be seen from the deck of a boat on the Ganges. It has often been
described in detail, but it is always new and always different,
and it fascinates its witnesses. There is a repulsiveness about
it which few people can overcome, but it is unique, and second
only to the Taj Mahal of all the sights in India.

A bathing ghat is a pavilion, pier or platform of stone covered
with awnings and roofs to protect the pilgrims from the sun. It
reaches into the river, where the water is about two feet deep,
and stone steps lead down to the bottom of the stream. Stretching
out from these ghats, in order to accommodate a larger number of
people, are wooden platforms, piers of slender bamboo, floats
and all kinds of contrivances, secure and insecure, temporary
and permanent, which every morning are thronged with pilgrims
from every part of India in every variety of costumes, crowding
in and out of the water, carrying down the sick and dying, all
to seek salvation for the soul, relief for the mind and healing
for the body which the Holy Mother Ganges is supposed to give.

The processions of pilgrims seem endless and are attended by
many pitiful sights. Aged women, crippled men, lean and haggard
invalids with just strength enough to reach the water's edge;
poor, shivering, starving wretches who have spent their last
farthing to reach this place, exhausted with fatigue, perishing
from hunger or disease, struggle to reach the water before their
breath shall fail. Here and there in the crowd appear all forms
of affliction--hideous lepers and other victims of cancerous
and ulcerous diseases, with the noses, lips, fingers and feet
eaten away; paralytics in all stages of the disease, people whose
limbs are twisted with rheumatism, men and women covered with all
kinds of sores, fanatical ascetics with their hair matted with
mud and their bodies smeared with ashes, ragged tramps, blind
and deformed beggars, women leading children or carrying infants
in their arms, handsome rajahs, important officials attended by
their servants and chaplains, richly dressed women with their
faces closely veiled, dignified and thoughtful Brahmins followed
by their disciples, farmers, laborers bearing the signs of toil,
and other classes of human society in every stage of poverty or
prosperity. They crowd past each other up and down the banks,
bathing in the water, drying