facing always to the east, and moving their lips in prayer. They filled their water-jars and poured it over their heads, and they drank it "to purify themselves," our mentor said, although one group of purity-seekers stood two feet from the mouth of a rapidly discharging sewer, every sort of city filth floating to their hands and water-jars, the bodies of men and animals and decaying flowers floating by. They drank the pestilent fluid, they carried it home for household use, and bottles were being filled to be sent and carried to the remotest parts of India. Western education and sanitary science avail nothing against the Ganges superstition. The British have provided a pure water supply for Benares, but the people prefer the sacred dilution of sewerage and cremation-ground refuse, thus inviting and encouraging every disease.
Whole platforms of Brahmans went through their morning ceremonies before us as if on a theater stage. Some sat with fixed or upraised eyes, some with eyes closed—all absorbed, as if in hypnotic trance, slowly whispering and muttering their prayers, lost in contemplation of their fingers, symbols of different gods, dipping each one in the river many times and praying to it fervently as the water trickled off. They dipped wisps of grass in the river and contemplated them prayerfully, meditating on the one hundred and eight manifestations of Shiva, the ten hundred and eight manifestations of Vishnu. They emptied their jars by rule; they prayed, touching their arms, breasts, knees in slow callisthenics as they vowed themselves to one and an-
