dings
and spill off into the water. There are indeed all sorts and
conditions of men and women. Princes come from afar with their
gorgeous retinues and stately equipages, and go down into the
bathing-places calling on the names of their gods as trustingly as the
poor doomed leper who thinks that the waters of Mother Gunga may bring
the hoped-for healing of his body. Wealthy, high-caste women whose
faces no man ever sees except those that be of their own
households--they too must not miss the blessing for soul and body to
be gained in no other way, and so they are brought in curtained,
man-borne _palki_ and are taken within boats with closed sides, where
they bathe apart from the common herd. Men and women, old and young,
high and low (except the outcasts)--all come. There are once-brown
Hindus with their skins turned to snowy whiteness by leprosy, men with
limbs swollen to four or five times natural size by elephantiasis,
palsied men and women broken with age, who hope to win Heaven (or that
impersonal absorption into the Divine Essence which is the nearest
Hindu approach to our idea of Heaven) by dying in the sacred place.

A great many pilgrims--may God have pity, as He will, on their poor
untutored souls--die in despair, worn out by weakness and disease, ere
they reach Benares with its Balm of Gilead which they seek; but many
other aged or afflicted ones die happier for the knowledge that they
have reached their Holy City, and that their ashes, after the quick
work of the morrow's funeral pyre, will be thrown on the waters of the
Ganges. "_Rama, nama, satya hai_" (The name of Rama is true): so I
heard the weird chant as four men bore past me the rigid red-clad
figure of a corpse for the burning. No coffins are used. The body is
wrapped in white if a man's, in red if a woman's, strapped on light
bamboo poles, and before {204} breakfast-time the burning wood above
and beneath the body has converted into a handful of ashes that which
was a breathing human being when the sun set the day before.

Other writers have commented on the few evidences of grief that
accompany these Hindu funerals. In Calcutta mourners are sometimes
hired--for one anna a Hindu can get a professional mourner to wail
heart-breakingly at the funeral of his least-loved mother-in-law--but
somehow the relatives of the dead themselves seem to show little
evidence of grief. "But where are the bereaved families?" I asked a
Hindu priest as we looked at a