But he was born a Brahman, of course, and what Ramaswamy means is that up till then he was counted a child and could play and run about with other children without responsibilities; now that he has been invested with the cord he has taken up his birthright and is of the highest caste, the caste from which the priests come; he may not eat anything prepared by a lower caste, or even let others touch him, for he is set apart, and very proud of his new dignity in spite of the many difficulties it carries with it.

The child who stands staring at us with her shawl over her head is a little girl about the same age as the boy. She has been grinding corn between two stones and is a very thin and miserable little wretch. Her clothes are rags and there are no bangles on her little brown ankles. Ramaswamy tells us she is a widow! That child? She has probably never even seen the boy-husband who was so unlucky as to die; but because he did she is scorned by everyone. The worst life in all India is that of a widow. She has no ornaments, no amusements, and is treated worse than a slavey in a boarding-house, and for her there is no escape.

Right out in the street sits a man weaving a web of wonderful colours; he throws the shuttles, carrying different coloured threads, across and across, without seeming to look at them, and all the time the web is growing into an intricate pattern under his fingers. So his father wove, and his grandfather and great-grandfather. All these crafts run in families. A little farther on is a potter spinning a wheel with his feet, while the soft lump of dull-coloured clay takes shape beneath his clever thumb as it races round. It seems to grow and swell and curve exquisitely as if it were a living thing. There are few sights more fascinating than a potter at work. You have often heard of the "potter's thumb," I expect? The thumb grows broad and flat and capable, because it is the chief instrument with which the potter works. On the floor beside him lie many of the clay jars of different sizes and shapes ready for the baking, others are being baked. There is always a good sale for them, and a potter in India flourishes exceedingly. Even now there is a woman passing us with a pot balanced on her head and a child on her hip. She swings along in the dust with a graceful gliding step, for she has been used to carrying things on her head almost from babyhood. These pots are brittle enough and frequently get broken, and even the poorest households must have a supply of them. But what helps the potter to make a living more than anything else is the custom that when a death occurs in a family, or a new life arrives in it, all the pots must be broken and new ones bought! It is a symbol of the life that has gone out and the new life beginning.

In church you must have heard those grandly poetic lines —

"Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.

"Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it."

Pass on to the silversmiths' quarter. Any of these men can do fine and beautiful work with very few tools. If you want anything made you pay them in a queer way. For the finished article is put in the scales and weighed against rupees thrown into the other balance, and when the rupees equal it then you give them to the workman, together with so many annas in each rupee for his work.

How can we ever take in all this varied life, so different from the life we are used to? The women sitting on the balconies above, the pariah dogs prowling for scraps below, the druggists and spice-sellers, the fruit and vegetable stalls? Over it all is that peculiar, scented, musty bazaar smell, made up of saffron and wood and dirt, with which we are already so familiar.

Wonderful Delhi! A city teeming with myriads of men of many races and customs, living side by side. Successor of seven cities which have stood here or hereabout in successive ages. From the earliest days a place of consequence, a place to be reckoned with, and now, by the proclamation of the King-Emperor, the first city in the land, as it is already the centre!

CHAPTER XIX
TO THE DEATH!

A curious building, isn't it? I mean that one right in front of us. It is something like a very large and many-sided crown, built of stone and set upon the ground. The sides are pierced with windows of the same sort as those seen in churches, and on each of the angles there is a little pinnacle. It rises up serenely against the soft blue sky of this early morning. We are far from Delhi now, having arrived at Cawnpore late last night, and we have come out here first thing this morning. It is only seven now.

Cawnpore! The Mutiny! Those two things rush simultaneously into the mind, for Cawnpore is associated with the most awful scenes of the Mutiny, and no Briton can ever think of it without those scenes flashing before him.

Come nearer and pass inside the crown and you will see in the centre a great angel of the usual sort, with high sweeping wings, holding palm branches folded across its breast. It marks the Well of Cawnpore.

You know that story, of course, and yet, as we sit here, on the very spot where it all happened, with the Indian sky above us, we cannot help recalling it once more. In telling it I shall not dwell on the agonies and bloodshed which have hallowed this place for ever; they are done with, and those who suffered have been at rest for nearly sixty years. The deep peace around us overlies their torments and forbids us to think too much of the darker side of the picture. But the heroism, the courage, the indomitable spirit that animated these men and women, these things live for ever, rising up from the earth in a flood of inspiration for all who pass over the place.

There are certain little animals called Tasmanian devils, who do not know what it is to give in; they die fighting and attack their persecutors as long as one limb hangs on to another; of such stuff were the people besieged at Cawnpore. They were encamped here on a wretched piece of flat ground, quite open except for a low mud wall, which anyone could have jumped over easily. There were about nine hundred and fifty of them altogether, some soldiers, some civilians, some women and children and a few native soldiers who remained loyal. Outside were unending hordes of natives well armed and well trained, because the greater part were the men of the native regiments who had mutinied, known by the name of Sepoys. A few huts built of thin brick were all the shelter the beleaguered people had; they were constantly under a shrieking storm of bullets and shells, and were ringed around by steel. You would have said two days at the outside would see the end of it, and that then the black hordes would sweep clean over that field, having wiped out the garrison completely; but so amazing is the power of pluck that those within held the hordes at bay for twenty-three days! They not only prevented any single Sepoy from getting inside alive, but they constantly sallied out and acted on the defensive, burning their enemies' defences and killing scores of them, while thousands fled in confusion before them! The sublime impudence of it! And all the time they were short of food; women and children were laid in holes in the earth covered with planks to protect them from the bullets. And water – ah, that was the worst – water had to be fetched from a well which was quite exposed in the midst of the encampment, and the Sepoys kept up an incessant fire on it. We are now beside it, this well where water was drawn at the price of blood, and yet volunteers were never lacking. The very ground our feet now rest upon was ringed around with the bodies of those who laid down their lives for the women and children. There was another well, a little distance off, now marked by an Iona cross, and to this, under cover of night, the British conveyed their dead for burial.

Read the inscription that circles round the wall of the well now in front of us: —

"Sacred to the perpetual memory of a great company of Christian people, chiefly women and children, who near this spot were cruelly murdered by the followers of the rebel, Nana Dhundu Pant of Bithur, and cast, the dying with the dead, into the well below, on the fifteenth day of July 1857."

Yes, we have not come to the end yet!

When the bloodthirsty tyrant, better known as Nana Sahib, found he could not crack this nut, when he realised that his whole army was held at bay by a few hundreds of determined spirits – there were only three hundred fighting men to begin with, and they were daily killed – he made terms with them, promising to send the survivors safely in boats down the river if they would give in. Desperate as they were, without food or water, without shade from the killing glare of the Indian summer sun, the brave men held their heads high and only accepted on condition they marched out under arms with so many rounds of ammunition to each man.

This was granted.

Now leave the well and follow that heroic band who went down to the river on that blazing day some sixty years ago. It is about a mile away. The little garrison now numbered some four hundred and fifty all told, the half of what they had been three weeks before. Blackened with the sun and smoke and gunpowder, so as to rival the Sepoys in complexion, tattered and worn and wounded, but yet with courage undaunted, they went down to the river.

There is another building here, an arcade on the banks facing the placid stream; it has a tower behind and a broad flight of stairs, a ghaut, as it is called, flanked by walls running down to the margin. But on that day long ago there was nothing of this, nothing but a number of clumsy boats with thatched roofs to keep the sun off, native fashion. As the English took their places in them, suddenly a bugle rang out, and at that signal the native boatmen sprang from their places and splashed ashore; up rose an army of Sepoys from the scrub on the banks, and death was rained on the victims of the blackest deed of treachery ever written in the annals of the world. Standing here on these smooth steps which mark the place it is difficult even to picture that scene of horror. Many were killed outright, many mortally wounded and torn, one hundred and twenty-five were dragged ashore and brutally killed afterwards; it was they who were thrown into the well; but three boats got away down the stream. Two went ashore and all the occupants were killed by the merciless brutes who lined the banks. The other had men in it, men who were filled with a madness of wrath that knew no bounds. In spite of their own condition, in spite of the odds against them, they leaped like tigers on the foe whenever they got the chance. They were followed by the natives, who fired on them repeatedly from a safe distance, and again and again the dead had to be east into the stream. Yet when a Sepoy boat ran against a sandbank, twenty or so of the powder-blackened Englishmen sprang out into the water and raced with fury to kill them, though the boat contained three times their own number. It is good to read how they wiped out all but those who escaped in terror by swimming! At last only fourteen of the English were left alive and they got hopelessly penned in a backwater. These men charged the army of Sepoys on the banks and made them keep their distance. They secured themselves in a tiny temple on the margin of the river and killed all who approached. At length, seeing preparations made for blowing them up with gunpowder, they charged out; seven who could swim made for the river, the other six (one was dead) rushed straight at the mass of Sepoys and dealt death on every side before they fell.

Four of the seven eventually outdistanced their persecutors and reached safety, and then, alas! one died.

It is good to hear that an avenging army descended on Cawnpore, though too late to save the remnant of the captives. The Sepoys were smitten hip and thigh, and thousands paid with their lives for those other lives they had spared not. Nana Sahib fled and was never heard of again. Stripped of all his wealth and luxury he must have skulked from place to place like a plague-tainted rat, till death took him and he went to meet the souls of the hundreds he had treacherously and brutally massacred.

It is finished! The price has been paid; the native has learnt that it is not well to meddle with white men. And we must not forget that hundreds of natives remained faithful, and gave their lives to save those of our fellow-countrymen.

As we wander back through the park in the sunshine, now growing fierce and strong, toward the Memorial Church showing above the trees, the chief feeling is not of bitterness but of pride. That little band, whose courage was unquenchable and untamable, were not picked men and women, but just an ordinary crowd made up of soldiers and civilians and their wives and children, yet not one act of selfishness or cowardice remains to stain their record. When the last extremity came, sloth and indifference and selfishness dropped off like sloughs and only devotion and bravery shone out. It is grand to belong to a race which holds these qualities as the highest good.

One incident more. When the tyrant had brought his handful of captives up from the river he found there were a few men among them. So before he started to massacre the women and babies he sent for the men to come forth to instant death; he dared not leave even half a dozen men of the untamable breed, who are "little used to lie down at the bidding of any man," among them, even unarmed.

The men came forth, and among them was a lad of fourteen; he was only a year older than you, but he preferred to be reckoned among the men rather than to hide behind the women's petticoats. He chose a soldier's death and he had it, for he fell pierced by bullets with the rest.

CHAPTER XX
A CITY OF PRIESTS

Surely you have never before seen anything like this, there is nothing to be seen like it anywhere else!

We are at Benares, the sacred city of the Hindus, which stands on their sacred river, the Ganges. We have taken a boat and have floated out into the current, and are looking up with amazement at the spectacle before us. The city rises high on the banks, and towers and minarets and domes of a curious long-drawn-out shape, glittering in the sun like gold, arise out of the flat roofs. Down to the river at every opening between the houses stretch stairways, as you know called ghauts, some broad and some narrow. We judge that they are there, though we cannot see the steps, for every inch is covered by a moving mass of people, clothed in the colours of the rainbow. You have often turned a kaleidoscope over and over, and watched the bits of coloured glass falling into strange patterns. Half shut your eyes and make a tube of your hands and see if this doesn't remind you of a kaleidoscope.

Thousands and thousands of people are passing and repassing up and down, or sitting on every scrap of available building. They flow out over the steps and down into the water itself. They are standing there knee-deep, waist-deep, shoulder-deep, with hardly any clothes on their glistening brown and yellow bodies, diligently throwing the water over themselves, washing their long, straight, black hair in it, or even drinking it!

Ah, what is that gruesome object? Take care, don't touch it as it floats by; it looks like a bit of charred stick, but indeed it is half-burnt human bones!

We have already seen a few sacred rivers in our wanderings – the gigantic Nile, the tiny Jordan, and now we see the Ganges, which in size comes between the two, being one thousand four hundred and fifty-five miles in length. Quite a respectable-sized river that! The Hindus regard it with such reverence that they count bathing in it a religious act, and when they die their one desire is to be burned beside it so that their bones may be cast into its waters. If we row a little way up we shall see this ceremony at the Burning Ghauts. There are funeral pyres of wood where the relatives are carrying out the last offices for the dead. Some prowling pariah dogs, of the lean yellow breed, and a few impertinent crows are hovering about, hoping that some scraps may fall to their share. The dead bodies are rolled up in white and red cloth and lie with their feet in the blessed water awaiting their burning.

Men are bringing logs of wood to pile upon the pyres, others are poking about in the ashes of the last burned to see if maybe an anklet or ear-ring has fallen off and may be scavenged.

The red flames rise and lick up the sides, while the enveloping smoke wreathes around the corpse. Remember that at one time the miserable widow of the dead man would have mounted that gruesome throne and be sitting there to be burnt alive. This is forbidden by law now, as indeed it was forbidden by some of the wisest of the Indian kings too, only until the British came there never was any power strong enough to enforce it.

Benares is the religious capital of India; it takes the place that Canterbury does with us, and it has been the place of pilgrimage for generations.

We have met with Buddhists in Ceylon and Mohammedans in Egypt. There are Buddhists among the natives of India too, though not many, considering the population; there are many more Mohammedans, but by far the largest number of the people, outnumbering the Mohammedans by three to one, are the Hindus, and it is as a Hindu capital that Benares mainly exists. British rule throws protection alike over all races and all religions; never was there a broader based dominion; be a man a Hindu, Sikh, Mohammedan, Parsee, Buddhist, or Christian, the law protects him in the exercise of his faith so long as it does not lead to cruelty such as in the burning of widows, or so long as it does not encroach upon the rights of others.

The Hindu religion is an extraordinary one. At first sight, seeing the jumble up of strange gods, – the cow-goddess, the monkey-god, elephant-god, and others, – it seems rather to resemble the religion of the ancient Egyptians, but it is not a real resemblance. The highest idea of the Hindu, as of the Buddhist, is to pass out into a sort of painless existence of nothingness. And to overcome the flesh and to arrive at a placid state, where nothing matters, is attempted here on earth by some. Some of the old men, fakirs as they are called, like the one we met in Delhi, do astonishing things merely by force of an iron determination. They will sit so long holding an arm in one position that it shrivels. Others will lie for years on a bed of spikes. They eat very little, live on charity, and are often lost in a state of trance.

As we row slowly back along the river we see countless flat umbrellas, like those known as Japanese umbrellas, studding the gay crowd; under each one of these there is a "holy man," and there are thousands of them altogether in this city, living on the offerings of the pilgrims.

Look at that fellow seated cross-legged on a plank running out into the river. He pours water over his feet every now and again out of a little copper bowl, and mutters something. He is so much absorbed in what he is doing that he never looks up or turns his head. Another, close by, has hung his gaily-coloured turban on a post and proceeds to unwind his garment and cast it from him before he steps into the water with hardly a rag upon him. This lady in an orange scarf, dripping wet, seats herself on the end of the board, and winds a dry scarf round herself so adroitly that it is like a conjuring trick; she stands up and the wet one falls from her. She would get well paid as a quick-change artiste at a music hall, and such a gift would be invaluable for bathing on the Cornish coast!

The men along the edge are very jolly, they chatter all the time and splash and wash and enjoy themselves. No English seaside place on a trip-day can beat this crowd. The fact that dead bones and skulls are constantly thrown into the water, and that the ashes of dead people, and much else that is indescribably filthy, mingles with it, doesn't seem to disturb them at all.

When you have wearied of watching them we will go and visit one of the innumerable temples in the city, but we shall need a guide for that, as it is not safe to wander in these streets alone.

No sooner have we landed and fought our way into one of the narrow alleys, than the road is blocked by an enormous bull who stands placidly before a greengrocer's stall sampling his wares. The man makes no attempt to drive him away, but tries to tempt him by holding a choice bunch of his best stuff. The beast has slavered over much that will be sold for human food afterwards. What? A good smack on the flank! For goodness' sake take care! The animal is supposed to be sacred; to touch him would be to bring out all the inhabitants of these houses on to us like a swarm of hornets. Luckily the beast is so well fed that he soon moves on and we can get past.

Now we have reached the most important temple of all, known as the Golden Temple, and as we pass into the cloisters we see a couple more animals standing inside, as much at home as if they were in a byre, which, indeed, the place smells like, with a strange scent of sweet flowers on the top of it. It is a wonderful place, but oh, so dirty! It is dedicated, of all things, to the poison-god, Shiva! It stands in a quadrangle, roofed in, and above rise some of those curious elongated domes we saw from the boat. If we climb up through that flower-stall where blossoms are being sold for offerings, we can see these domes, which really have cost a lot of money, as two of them are gilt all over; the gilding keeps its glitter here and rises dazzlingly against the hot sky.

There are other temples by the dozen and mosques too for the Mohammedans. If we wander round we shall see many strange sights; in one shrine is the image of the god Saturn, a silver disc, in another that of Ganesh, the elephant-god, surely the most hideous of all! Look at him! A squatting dwarf with an elephant's trunk! At another place is the image of Shiva himself; it has a silver face, though made of stone, and possesses four hands; it is guarded by a dog, and you can buy little imitation dogs made of sugar anywhere near. There is even an image of the goddess of smallpox, and if you ask why the Hindu chooses such repulsive and revolting things to worship, the answer is, because he is afraid. He says, "If the gods are good they will not injure me, but if they are evil I must propitiate them!"

Everywhere we go we have copper bowls or even the half of coco-nut shells thrust at us for offerings; the priests tolerate the strangers entering their temples only because they hope to get something out of them.

We are now far from Benares; we have left behind the narrow crowded alleys, the violent smells, and the gay colours, and are in the train speeding toward Calcutta, whence we will take a steamer to Burma. The train has just stopped at a wayside station and there is a chance to stretch our legs. Ramaswamy appears and tells us they are going to stop here for a time. He doesn't seem to know why, – something about a sahib is all we can gather, – so we get out and wander along the village street. We have only gone a short way when we see a kind of litter coming along slung on bearers' shoulders. It is screened by curtains, and beside it rides a white man in a helmet, followed by natives. Why, that is the very man who came up in the train from Delhi with us! I wonder what he is doing here. That must be a sick woman in the litter. This is evidently what the train was waiting for, so we might as well go back.

We get to the station just in time to see the curtains pushed aside by the sahib, who very tenderly and skilfully raises in his arms the sick person inside, and supports him into the station. It is a gaunt scarecrow of a man, a skeleton of a creature, whose big pathetic eyes look dark in his hollow face. He is evidently very ill. He is half-carried across to a carriage next to ours that has been prepared for him, and is laid down on a couch on the seat, and it is not long before we get under way again. Going out a little later on to the platform between the two compartments we find our friend, the tall Englishman, standing there smoking. He recognises us at once and asks us about our experiences; it is not difficult to find out about the invalid.

"One of the best chaps going," he says shortly. "Simply broken up by the work he's been doing in the plague-camp up there. He is a doctor, so am I, and I've just got back from leave. I went up-country to relieve Jordan, but the work is nearly over, and I found him played out. He has hardly had his clothes off for weeks. The difficulty is to persuade these people to get out of their infected houses into a camp until the place is made sanitary and the plague stayed. He was single-handed at first, now there are two other men up there, so I can be spared to take him down to the coast. He'll get over it; oh yes, he's got the turn now, though he was nearly gone once or twice, but he'll never be the same man again. He is invalided home for a bit, and the voyage will pull him up, but even as he is he's sore at leaving it. He wants to finish his job."

"Then when you've left him at Calcutta you'll go back to the infected district?"

"Yes, of course, why not? It's all in the day's work, and you know we've actually had only thirty deaths in a month since the beggars were got out into camp, and they were dying at the rate of hundreds a week before. Grand, isn't it?" His face lights up with enthusiasm.

India is full of such men; they don't play for safety, they take their lives in their hands at a moment's notice, and go blithely to grapple with death.