Following the Equator, Complete

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> Following the Equator, Complete


5. Smallpox. Go straight from there to the central Ghat. At its
upstream end you will find a small whitewashed building, which is a
temple sacred to Sitala, goddess of smallpox. Her under-study is there
--a rude human figure behind a brass screen. You will worship this for
reasons to be furnished presently.

6. The Well of Fate. For certain reasons you will next go and do homage
at this well. You will find it in the Dandpan Temple, in the city. The
sunlight falls into it from a square hole in the masonry above. You will
approach it with awe, for your life is now at stake. You will bend over
and look. If the fates are propitious, you will see your face pictured
in the water far down in the well. If matters have been otherwise
ordered, a sudden cloud will mask the sun and you will see nothing. This
means that you have not six months to live. If you are already at the
point of death, your circumstances are now serious. There is no time to
lose. Let this world go, arrange for the next one. Handily situated, at
your very elbow, is opportunity for this. You turn and worship the image
of Maha Kal, the Great Fate, and happiness in the life to come is
secured. If there is breath in your body yet, you should now make an
effort to get a further lease of the present life. You have a chance.
There is a chance for everything in this admirably stocked and
wonderfully systemized Spiritual and Temporal Army and Navy Store. You
must get yourself carried to the

7. Well of Long Life. This is within the precincts of the mouldering and
venerable Briddhkal Temple, which is one of the oldest in Benares. You
pass in by a stone image of the monkey god, Hanuman, and there, among the
ruined courtyards, you will find a shallow pool of stagnant sewage. It
smells like the best limburger cheese, and is filthy with the washings of
rotting lepers, but that is nothing, bathe in it; bathe in it gratefully
and worshipfully, for this is the Fountain of Youth; these are the Waters
of Long Life. Your gray hairs will disappear, and with them your
wrinkles and your rheumatism, the burdens of care and the weariness of
age, and you will come out young, fresh, elastic, and full of eagerness
for the new race of life. Now will come flooding upon you the manifold
desires that haunt the dear dreams of the morning of life. You will go
whither you will find

8. Fulfillment of Desire. To wit, to the Kameshwar Temple, sacred to
Shiva as the Lord of Desires. Arrange for yours there. And if you like
to look at idols among the pack and jam of temples, there you will find
enough to stock a museum. You will begin to commit sins now with a
fresh, new vivacity; therefore, it will be well to go frequently to a
place where you can get

9. Temporary Cleansing from Sin. To wit, to the Well of the Earring.
You must approach this with the profoundest reverence, for it is
unutterably sacred. It is, indeed, the most sacred place in Benares, the
very Holy of Holies, in the estimation of the people. It is a railed
tank, with stone stairways leading down to the water. The water is not
clean. Of course it could not be, for people are always bathing in it.
As long as you choose to stand and look, you will see the files of
sinners descending and ascending--descending soiled with sin, ascending
purged from it. "The liar, the thief, the murderer, and the adulterer
may here wash and be clean," says the Rev. Mr. Parker, in his book. Very
well. I know Mr. Parker, and I believe it; but if anybody else had said
it, I should consider him a person who had better go down in the tank and
take another wash. The god Vishnu dug this tank. He had nothing to dig
with but his "discus." I do not know what a discus is, but I know it is a
poor thing to dig tanks with, because, by the time this one was finished,
it was full of sweat--Vishnu's sweat. He constructed the site that
Benares stands on, and afterward built the globe around it, and thought
nothing of it, yet sweated like that over a little thing like this tank.
One of these statements is doubtful. I do not know which one it is, but
I think it difficult not to believe that a god who could build a world
around Benares would not be intelligent enough to build it around the
tank too, and not have to dig it. Youth, long life, temporary
purification from sin, salvation through propitiation of the Great Fate
--these are all good. But you must do something more. You must

10. Make Salvation Sure. There are several ways. To get drowned in
the Ganges is one, but that is not pleasant. To die within the limits of
Benares is another; but that is a risky one, because you might be out of
town when your time came. The best one of all is the Pilgrimage Around
the City. You must walk; also, you must go barefoot. The tramp is
forty-four miles, for the road winds out into the country a piece, and
you will be marching five or six days. But you will have plenty of
company. You will move with throngs and hosts of happy pilgrims whose
radiant costumes will make the spectacle beautiful and whose glad songs
and holy pans of triumph will banish your fatigues and cheer your spirit;
and at intervals there will be temples where you may sleep and be
refreshed with food. The pilgrimage completed, you have purchased
salvation, and paid for it. But you may not get it unless you

11. Get Your Redemption Recorded. You can get this done at the Sakhi
Binayak Temple, and it is best to do it, for otherwise you might not be
able to prove that you had made the pilgrimage in case the matter should
some day come to be disputed. That temple is in a lane back of the Cow
Temple. Over the door is a red image of Ganesh of the elephant head, son
and heir of Shiva, and Prince of Wales to the Theological Monarchy, so to
speak. Within is a god whose office it is to record your pilgrimage and
be responsible for you. You will not see him, but you will see a Brahmin
who will attend to the matter and take the money. If he should forget to
collect the money, you can remind him. He knows that your salvation is
now secure, but of course you would like to know it yourself. You have
nothing to do but go and pray, and pay at the

12. Well of the Knowledge of Salvation. It is close to the Golden
Temple. There you will see, sculptured out of a single piece of black
marble, a bull which is much larger than any living bull you have ever
seen, and yet is not a good likeness after all. And there also you will
see a very uncommon thing--an image of Shiva. You have seen his lingam
fifty thousand times already, but this is Shiva himself, and said to be a
good likeness. It has three eyes. He is the only god in the firm that
has three. "The well is covered by a fine canopy of stone supported by
forty pillars," and around it you will find what you have already seen at
almost every shrine you have visited in Benares, a mob of devout and
eager pilgrims. The sacred water is being ladled out to them; with it
comes to them the knowledge, clear, thrilling, absolute, that they are
saved; and you can see by their faces that there is one happiness in this
world which is supreme, and to which no other joy is comparable. You
receive your water, you make your deposit, and now what more would you
have? Gold, diamonds, power, fame? All in a single moment these things
have withered to dirt, dust, ashes. The world has nothing to give you
now. For you it is bankrupt.

I do not claim that the pilgrims do their acts of worship in the order
and sequence above charted out in this Itinerary of mine, but I think
logic suggests that they ought to do so. Instead of a helter-skelter
worship, we then have a definite starting-place, and a march which
carries the pilgrim steadily forward by reasoned and logical progression
to a definite goal. Thus, his Ganges bath in the early morning gives him
an appetite; he kisses the cow-tails, and that removes it. It is now
business hours, and longings for material prosperity rise in his mind,
and he goes and pours water over Shiva's symbol; this insures the
prosperity, but also brings on a rain, which gives him a fever. Then he
drinks the sewage at the Kedar Ghat to cure the fever; it cures the fever
but gives him the smallpox. He wishes to know how it is going to turn
out; he goes to the Dandpan Temple and looks down the well. A clouded
sun shows him that death is near. Logically his best course for the
present, since he cannot tell at what moment he may die, is to secure a
happy hereafter; this he does, through the agency of the Great Fate. He
is safe, now, for heaven; his next move will naturally be to keep out of
it as long as he can. Therefore he goes to the Briddhkal Temple and
secures Youth and long life by bathing in a puddle of leper-pus which
would kill a microbe. Logically, Youth has re-equipped him for sin and
with the disposition to commit it; he will naturally go to the fane which
is consecrated to the Fulfillment of Desires, and make arrangements.
Logically, he will now go to the Well of the Earring from time to time to
unload and freshen up for further banned enjoyments. But first and last
and all the time he is human, and therefore in his reflective intervals
he will always be speculating in "futures." He will make the Great
Pilgrimage around the city and so make his salvation absolutely sure; he
will also have record made of it, so that it may remain absolutely sure
and not be forgotten or repudiated in the confusion of the Final
Settlement. Logically, also, he will wish to have satisfying and
tranquilizing personal knowledge that that salvation is secure; therefore
he goes to the Well of the Knowledge of Salvation, adds that completing
detail, and then goes about his affairs serene and content; serene and
content, for he is now royally endowed with an advantage which no
religion in this world could give him but his own; for henceforth he may
commit as many million sins as he wants to and nothing can come of it.

Thus the system, properly and logically ordered, is neat, compact,
clearly defined, and covers the whole ground. I desire to recommend it
to such as find the other systems too difficult, exacting, and irksome
for the uses of this fretful brief life of ours.

However, let me not deceive any one. My Itinerary lacks a detail. I
must put it in. The truth is, that after the pilgrim has faithfully
followed the requirements of the Itinerary through to the end and has
secured his salvation and also the personal knowledge of that fact, there
is still an accident possible to him which can annul the whole thing. If
he should ever cross to the other side of the Ganges and get caught out
and die there he would at once come to life again in the form of an ass.
Think of that, after all this trouble and expense. You see how
capricious and uncertain salvation is there. The Hindoo has a childish
and unreasoning aversion to being turned into an ass. It is hard to tell
why. One could properly expect an ass to have an aversion to being
turned into a Hindoo. One could understand that he could lose dignity by
it; also self-respect, and nine-tenths of his intelligence. But the
Hindoo changed into an ass wouldn't lose anything, unless you count his
religion. And he would gain much--release from his slavery to two
million gods and twenty million priests, fakeers, holy mendicants, and
other sacred bacilli; he would escape the Hindoo hell; he would also
escape the Hindoo heaven. These are advantages which the Hindoo ought to
consider; then he would go over and die on the other side.

Benares is a religious Vesuvius. In its bowels the theological forces
have been heaving and tossing, rumbling, thundering and quaking, boiling,
and weltering and flaming and smoking for ages. But a little group of
missionaries have taken post at its base, and they have hopes. There are
the Baptist Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, the London
Missionary Society, the Wesleyan Missionary Society, and the Zenana Bible
and Medical Mission. They have schools, and the principal work seems to
be among the children. And no doubt that part of the work prospers best,
for grown people everywhere are always likely to cling to the religion
they were brought up in.




CHAPTER LII.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

In one of those Benares temples we saw a devotee working for salvation in
a curious way. He had a huge wad of clay beside him and was making it up
into little wee gods no bigger than carpet tacks. He stuck a grain of
rice into each--to represent the lingam, I think. He turned them out
nimbly, for he had had long practice and had acquired great facility.
Every day he made 2,000 gods, then threw them into the holy Ganges. This
act of homage brought him the profound homage of the pious--also their
coppers. He had a sure living here, and was earning a high place in the
hereafter.

The Ganges front is the supreme show-place of Benares. Its tall bluffs
are solidly caked from water to summit, along a stretch of three miles,
with a splendid jumble of massive and picturesque masonry, a bewildering
and beautiful confusion of stone platforms, temples, stair-flights, rich
and stately palaces--nowhere a break, nowhere a glimpse of the bluff
itself; all the long face of it is compactly walled from sight by this
crammed perspective of platforms, soaring stairways, sculptured temples,
majestic palaces, softening away into the distances; and there is
movement, motion, human life everywhere, and brilliantly costumed
--streaming in rainbows up and down the lofty stairways, and massed in
metaphorical flower-gardens on the miles of great platforms at the
river's edge.

All this masonry, all this architecture represents piety. The palaces
were built by native princes whose homes, as a rule, are far from
Benares, but who go there from time to time to refresh their souls with
the sight and touch of the Ganges, the river of their idolatry. The
stairways are records of acts of piety; the crowd of costly little
temples are tokens of money spent by rich men for present credit and hope
of future reward. Apparently, the rich Christian who spends large sums
upon his religion is conspicuous with us, by his rarity, but the rich
Hindoo who doesn't spend large sums upon his religion is seemingly
non-existent. With us the poor spend money on their religion, but they
keep back some to live on. Apparently, in India, the poor bankrupt
themselves daily for their religion. The rich Hindoo can afford his
pious outlays; he gets much glory for his spendings, yet keeps back a
sufficiency of his income for temporal purposes; but the poor Hindoo is
entitled to compassion, for his spendings keep him poor, yet get him no
glory.

We made the usual trip up and down the river, seated in chairs under an
awning on the deck of the usual commodious hand-propelled ark; made it
two or three times, and could have made it with increasing interest and
enjoyment many times more; for, of course, the palaces and temples would
grow more and more beautiful every time one saw them, for that happens
with all such things; also, I think one would not get tired of the
bathers, nor their costumes, nor of their ingenuities in getting out of
them and into them again without exposing too much bronze, nor of their
devotional gesticulations and absorbed bead-tellings.

But I should get tired of seeing them wash their mouths with that
dreadful water and drink it. In fact, I did get tired of it, and very
early, too. At one place where we halted for a while, the foul gush from
a sewer was making the water turbid and murky all around, and there was a
random corpse slopping around in it that had floated down from up
country. Ten steps below that place stood a crowd of men, women, and
comely young maidens waist deep in the water-and they were scooping it up
in their hands and drinking it. Faith can certainly do wonders, and this
is an instance of it. Those people were not drinking that fearful stuff
to assuage thirst, but in order to purify their souls and the interior of
their bodies. According to their creed, the Ganges water makes
everything pure that it touches--instantly and utterly pure. The sewer
water was not an offence to them, the corpse did not revolt them; the
sacred water had touched both, and both were now snow-pure, and could
defile no one. The memory of that sight will always stay by me; but not
by request.

A word further concerning the nasty but all-purifying Ganges water. When
we went to Agra, by and by, we happened there just in time to be in at
the birth of a marvel--a memorable scientific discovery--the discovery
that in certain ways the foul and derided Ganges water is the most
puissant purifier in the world! This curious fact, as I have said, had
just been added to the treasury of modern science. It had long been
noted as a strange thing that while Benares is often afflicted with the
cholera she does not spread it beyond her borders. This could not be
accounted for. Mr. Henkin, the scientist in the employ of the government
of Agra, concluded to examine the water. He went to Benares and made his
tests. He got water at the mouths of the sewers where they empty into
the river at the bathing ghats; a cubic centimetre of it contained
millions of germs; at the end of six hours they were all dead. He caught
a floating corpse, towed it to the shore, and from beside it he dipped up
water that was swarming with cholera germs; at the end of six hours they
were all dead. He added swarm after swarm of cholera germs to this
water; within the six hours they always died, to the last sample.
Repeatedly, he took pure well water which was bare of animal life, and
put into it a few cholera germs; they always began to propagate at once,
and always within six hours they swarmed--and were numberable by millions
upon millions.

For ages and ages the Hindoos have had absolute faith that the water of
the Ganges was absolutely pure, could not be defiled by any contact
whatsoever, and infallibly made pure and clean whatsoever thing touched
it. They still believe it, and that is why they bathe in it and drink
it, caring nothing for its seeming filthiness and the floating corpses.
The Hindoos have been laughed at, these many generations, but the
laughter will need to modify itself a little from now on. How did
they find out the water's secret in those ancient ages? Had they
germ-scientists then? We do not know. We only know that they had a
civilization long before we emerged from savagery. But to return to
where I was before; I was about to speak of the burning-ghat.

They do not burn fakeers--those revered mendicants. They are so holy
that they can get to their place without that sacrament, provided they be
consigned to the consecrating river. We saw one carried to mid-stream
and thrown overboard. He was sandwiched between two great slabs of
stone.

We lay off the cremation-ghat half an hour and saw nine corpses burned.
I should not wish to see any more of it, unless I might select the
parties. The mourners follow the bier through the town and down to the
ghat; then the bier-bearers deliver the body to some low-caste natives
--Doms--and the mourners turn about and go back home. I heard no crying
and saw no tears, there was no ceremony of parting. Apparently, these
expressions of grief and affection are reserved for the privacy of the
home. The dead women came draped in red, the men in white. They are
laid in the water at the river's edge while the pyre is being prepared.

The first subject was a man. When the Doms unswathed him to wash him, he
proved to be a sturdily built, well-nourished and handsome old gentleman,
with not a sign about him to suggest that he had ever been ill. Dry wood
was brought and built up into a loose pile; the corpse was laid upon it
and covered over with fuel. Then a naked holy man who was sitting on
high ground a little distance away began to talk and shout with great
energy, and he kept up this noise right along. It may have been the
funeral sermon, and probably was. I forgot to say that one of the
mourners remained behind when the others went away. This was the dead
man's son, a boy of ten or twelve, brown and handsome, grave and
self-possessed, and clothed in flowing white. He was there to burn his
father. He was given a torch, and while he slowly walked seven times
around the pyre the naked black man on the high ground poured out his
sermon more clamorously than ever. The seventh circuit completed, the
boy applied the torch at his father's head, then at his feet; the flames
sprang briskly up with a sharp crackling noise, and the lad went away.
Hindoos do not want daughters, because their weddings make such a ruinous
expense; but they want sons, so that at death they may have honorable
exit from the world; and there is no honor equal to the honor of having
one's pyre lighted by one's son. The father who dies sonless is in a
grievous situation indeed, and is pitied. Life being uncertain, the
Hindoo marries while he is still a boy, in the hope that he will have a
son ready when the day of his need shall come. But if he have no son, he
will adopt one. This answers every purpose.

Meantime the corpse is burning, also several others. It is a dismal
business. The stokers did not sit down in idleness, but moved briskly
about, punching up the fires with long poles, and now and then adding
fuel. Sometimes they hoisted the half of a skeleton into the air, then
slammed it down and beat it with the pole, breaking it up so that it
would burn better. They hoisted skulls up in the same way and banged and
battered them. The sight was hard to bear; it would have been harder if
the mourners had stayed to witness it. I had but a moderate desire to
see a cremation, so it was soon satisfied. For sanitary reasons it would
be well if cremation were universal; but this form is revolting, and not
to be recommended.

The fire used is sacred, of course--for there is money in it. Ordinary
fire is forbidden; there is no money in it. I was told that this sacred
fire is all furnished by one person, and that he has a monopoly of it and
charges a good price for it. Sometimes a rich mourner pays a thousand
rupees for it. To get to paradise from India is an expensive thing.
Every detail connected with the matter costs something, and helps to
fatten a priest. I suppose it is quite safe to conclude that that
fire-bug is in holy orders.

Close to the cremation-ground stand a few time-worn stones which are
remembrances of the suttee. Each has a rough carving upon it,
representing a man and a woman standing or walking hand in hand, and
marks the spot where a widow went to her death by fire in the days when
the suttee flourished. Mr. Parker said that widows would burn themselves
now if the government would allow it. The family that can point to one
of these little memorials and say: "She who burned herself there was an
ancestress of ours," is envied.

It is a curious people. With them, all life seems to be sacred except
human life. Even the life of vermin is sacred, and must not be taken.
The good Jain wipes off a seat before using it, lest he cause the death
of-some valueless insect by sitting down on it. It grieves him to have
to drink water, because the provisions in his stomach may not agree with
the microbes. Yet India invented Thuggery and the Suttee. India is a
hard country to understand. We went to the temple of the Thug goddess,
Bhowanee, or Kali, or Durga. She has these names and others. She is the
only god to whom living sacrifices are made. Goats are sacrificed to
her. Monkeys would be cheaper. There are plenty of them about the
place. Being sacred, they make themselves very free, and scramble around
wherever they please. The temple and its porch are beautifully carved,
but this is not the case with the idol. Bhowanee is not pleasant to look
at. She has a silver face, and a projecting swollen tongue painted a
deep red. She wears a necklace of skulls.

In fact, none of the idols in Benares are handsome or attractive. And
what a swarm of them there is! The town is a vast museum of idols--and
all of them crude, misshapen, and ugly. They flock through one's dreams
at night, a wild mob of nightmares. When you get tired of them in the
temples and take a trip on the river, you find idol giants, flashily
painted, stretched out side by side on the shore. And apparently
wherever there is room for one more lingam, a lingam is there. If Vishnu
had foreseen what his town was going to be, he would have called it
Idolville or Lingamburg.

The most conspicuous feature of Benares is the pair of slender white
minarets which tower like masts from the great Mosque of Aurangzeb. They
seem to be always in sight, from everywhere, those airy, graceful,
inspiring things. But masts is not the right word, for masts have a
perceptible taper, while these minarets have not. They are 142 feet
high, and only 8 1/2 feet in diameter at the base, and 7 1/2 at the
summit--scarcely any taper at all. These are the proportions of a
candle; and fair and fairylike candles these are. Will be, anyway, some
day, when the Christians inherit them and top them with the electric
light. There is a great view from up there--a wonderful view. A large
gray monkey was part of it, and damaged it. A monkey has no judgment.
This one was skipping about the upper great heights of the mosque
--skipping across empty yawning intervals which were almost too wide for
him, and which he only just barely cleared, each time, by the skin of his
teeth. He got me so nervous that I couldn't look at the view. I
couldn't look at anything but him. Every time he went sailing over one
of those abysses my breath stood still, and when he grabbed for the perch
he was going for, I grabbed too, in sympathy. And he was perfectly
indifferent, perfectly unconcerned, and I did all the panting myself.
He came within an ace of losing his life a dozen times, and I was so
troubled about him that I would have shot him if I had had anything to do
it with. But I strongly recommend the view. There is more monkey than
view, and there is always going to be more monkey while that idiot
survives, but what view you get is superb. All Benares, the river, and
the region round about are spread before you. Take a gun, and look at
the view.