Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/189

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BENARES
167

genre picture. The fruit and flower bazaar carries on the dominant, decorative yellow note, and the orange of marigolds blends well with the rich reds of earthenware in the pottery bazaar, where the lotas and chatties have preserved the same lines from earliest times recorded in sculptures. The kincobs, or gold brocades, of Benares are tawdry and tinselly past belief, commonplace in design and color.

If anything could further disenchant one with Hindu forms of worship, it is provided at the temple of Durga, the Monkey Temple. One steps into a red sandstone and pink stucco court, where priests wait for gifts and gray apes with red faces sit in rows on the parapets, cornice, and roof, swarm up and down columns, drop noiselessly beside one and stretch long, lean, gray arms over his shoulder and clutch at his garments. The big apes chatter and mouth and make faces, and the little ones run screaming to safety, for when gift cakes are impending, the big apes are violent. The priests seem little more intelligent than the other sacred servitors, and as more and more apes drop noiselessly to the crowded pavement the tourist turns and flees.

I had unceasingly demanded the great mahatma, a certain holy man and miracle-worker who was reported as living in some palace garden of Benares, and but a little way beyond the Monkey Temple. We left the carriage, disputed passage with a sacred cow in a narrow lane, and found the green paradise of the Annanbag Garden, where dwelt Swamji, the living god. This aged seer and sage, a Brahman of so high a caste and sphere that no touch or deed can