Modern Gaya, the Sahibs' market, is an orderly new town with broad thoroughfares and busy bazaars, the whitewashed houses, the tidy streets and drains betraying the infallible signs of model British rule, prosperity, and eternal sanitation. It is distinct from the more ancient Brahm-Gaya, where huddled houses cut by narrow streets crowd around the great Brahman temple of the Vishnupad by the river bank, to which more than one hundred thousand Hindu pilgrims come to bathe and pray each year—a temple crowded with Buddhist sculptures and wreck from older temples.
The dak bangla at Gaya stands in a great shady compound, whichh looks upon a busy part of a main street, a continuous panorama of half-clad and sheeted figures, of absurd ekkas and bullock-carts going by beyond the bangla lawn, as if drawn across a stage for one's delight. There is a well at one side of the compound, to which we watched all the neighbor folk come to fill their brass lotas or heavy, red earthen jars—half-veiled women, who needed help to lift the great weights and poise them on their heads, their slender, feeble figures bending under the weight. Others, balancing these great amphoræ with ease, passed out with the graceful, noble tread of goddesses, the living figures of a Greek frieze. On the bangla's covered portico we were sheltered from the wind and dust, the sun shone warmly, and little parrakeets twittered and shrieked, flying about the lawn. We were so well entertained with this spectacle and play of Hindu life, that we sat for an hour—balanced ourselves, rather, for that space
