that the bell was even as a great weaver, weaving into unity of music, and throwing back on earth, those broken and tangled threads of joy and pain that without it would have seemed so meaningless and so confused.
A step beyond were the shops of the flower-sellers, who sell white flowers for the worship of Shiva across the threshold. Oh what a task, to spend the whole of life, day after day, in this service only, the giving of the flowers for the image of the Lord ! Has there been no soul that, occupied thus, has dreamed and dreamed itself into Mukti, through the daily offering?
And so came to me the thought of the old minsters of Europe, and of what it meant to live thus, like the swallows and the townsfolk and the flowers, ever in the shadow of a great cathedral. For that is what Benares is — a city built about the walls of a cathedral.
It is common to say of Benares that it is curiously modern, and there is on the face of it a certain truth in the statement. For the palaces and monasteries and temples that line the banks of the Ganges between the mouths of Barna and Asi have been built for the most part within the last three hundred years. There is skill and taste enough in India yet to rebuild them all again, if they fell to-morrow. Benares as she stands is in this sense the work of the I.adian people as they are to-day.
But never did any city so sing the song of the
