looked for some
break in the crowd, some thinning out of its packed bodies, but as far
as he could see there was no break, no end. Government officials had
estimated the number of pilgrims at two millions!

A signal must have been given, or an hour had come--J.W. could not tell
which--but somehow the people knew that now was the opportunity to enter
the water and gain cleansing from all sin. A mighty, resistless movement
carried the human stream to meet the river. Inevitably the weaker
individuals were swept along helpless, and those who fell arose no more.
Horrified, J.W. stood looking down on the slow, irresistible movement
of the writhing bodies, and he saw a woman drop. A British police
officer, standing in an angle of the wall beneath, ordered a native
policeman to get the woman out But the native, seeing the crush and
unwilling to risk himself for so slight a cause, waited until his
superior turned away to another point of peril, and then, snatching the
red-banded police turban from his head, was lost in the general mass.

The woman? Trampled to death, and twenty other men and women with her,
in sight of the stunned watchers on the wall, who were compelled to see
these lives crushed out, powerless to help by so much as a finger's
weight.

What was it all for? J.W. asked his companions on the wall. And they
said that the word went out at certain times and the people flocked to
this Mela. They came to wash in the sacred waters at the propitious
moment. Nothing else mattered; not the inescapable pollution of the
rivers, not the weariness and hunger and many distresses of the way. It
was a chance, so the wise ones declared, to be rid of sin. Certainly it
might not avail, but who would not venture if mayhap there might be
cleansing of soul in the waters of Mother Ganges?

On another day J.W. came to a temple, not a great towering shrine, but
a third-rate sort of place, a sacred cow temple. Here was a family which
had journeyed four hundred miles to worship before the idols of this
temple. They offered rice to one idol, flowers to another, holy water
from the river to a third. No one might know what inner urge had driven
them here. The priest, slow to heed them, at length deigned to dip his
finger in a little paint and with it he smeared the caste mark on the
foreheads of the worshipers. It was heartless, empty formality.

J.W. watched the woman particularly. Her face was an unrelieved
sadness; she had fulfilled t