42 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY
the Lord Buddha on the road that goes up to the palace of Rajgir.
We had been some time in the place before we noticed that it was on one particular islet in the river below us that the village deathfires might so often be seen at evening. It was a very ancient custom in India to burn the dead by the stream-side just outside the town. But this sandbank was far away from the village. Hardly could they have chosen a point less easily accessible. Ah, yes ! certainly there was the explanation ; the burning ghdt of these peasants in the twentieth century must be still where their ancestors had chosen it, in the fifth, in the first — aye, even for centuries before that — maybe immediately without the city of Old Rajgir. It takes a peculiar angle of vision, and perhaps a peculiar mood of passivity, to see the trees turn into a forest when the exist- ence of such was pre'^iously unsuspected. So I shall not attempt to guess how many more evenings elapsed before, as we went along the roadway on the far side of the burning ghdt, one of us noted the broken steps and the entwined tamarind and ^(?-trees that marked the old-time ghdt of Rajgir. Nor do I know how many more days went by before there came to some one of us the flash of insight that led us finally to discover that the mass of fallen masonry close by was that very ancient gateway of the city through which, Buddha himself with the goats must have passed, and brought to our notice the dome-like
