The greatest human spectacle in India, the chief incident and motive of Benares life, and the most extraordinary manifestation of religious zeal and superstition in all the world, begins at sunrise by the Ganges bank and lasts for several hours. We started in the first gray light of the dawn, drove two miles across the city, and, descending the ghats, or broad staircases, to the water's edge, were rowed slowly up and down the three-mile crescent of river-front, watching Brahmans and humbler believers bathe and pray to the rising sun, repeating the oldest Vedic hymns. That picturesque sweep of the city front—a high cliff with palaces, temples, and gardens clinging to its terraced embankments and long flights of steps descending to the water—is spectacle enough when lighted by the first yellow flash of sunlight, without the thousands of white-clad worshipers at the Ganges brink and far out in its turbid flood. After three sunrise visits to the river bank, the spectacle was as amazing and incomprehensible as at first, as incredible, as dreamlike, as the afternoon memory of it. I saw it with equal surprise each time, the key-note, the soul of India revealed in Benares as nowhere else,—since all India flocks to Benares in sickness and health, in trouble and rejoicing, to pray and to commit crimes, the sacred city being the meeting-place and hiding-place of all criminals, the hatching-place of all conspiracies.
We sped through empty cantonment streets, but in the native city every thoroughfare was crowded. All were streaming one way, and a hum of voices filled the air as we reached the ghats and came upon
