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boats in tow. He was afloat, and somewhere between Amsterdam and Alkmaar, but he could not tell where. It was a day that was still half-night. Gray waters stretched in every direction under a dark-gray sky, and out of the waves rose the upper parts of houses, in many cases ruined; the tops of trees; windmills, in fact the upper third of all the familiar Dutch scenery. And on the waters there drifted a dimly seen flotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned,-furniture, rafts, and miscellaneous objects.

The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there did a dead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box or chair or suchlike buoy hint at the hidden massacre. It was not till the Thursday that the dead came to the surface in any quantity. The view was bounded on every side by a gray mist that closed overhead in a gray canopy. The air cleared in the afternoon, and then, far away to the west, under great banks of steam and dust, the flaming, red eruption of the atomic bombs became visible across the waste of water.

They showed flat and sullen through the mist, like London sunsets. "They sat upon the sea, says Barnet, "like frayed-out water-lilies of flame."

Barnet seems to have spent the morning in rescue work along the track of the canal, in helping people who were adrift, in picking up derelict boats, and in taking people out of imperiled houses. He found other military barges similarly employed, and it was only as the day wore on and the immediate appeals for aid were satisfied that he thought of food and drink for his men and what course he had better pursue. They had a little cheese but no water. "Orders," that mysterious direction, had at last disappeared. He saw that he had now to act upon his own responsibility.

"One's sense of a destruction so farreaching and of a world so altered that it seemed foolish to go in any direction and expect to find things as they had been before the war began.

"Every boat we drew near now hailed us for water, and their demands did much to exasperate our thirst. I decided that

if we went away to the south we should reach hilly country, or at least country that was not submerged, and then we should be able to land, find some stream drink, and get supplies and news. It was a voyage in a red-lit mist, in a world of steamy silhouette, full of strange voices and perplexity, and with every other sensation dominated by a feverish thirst. We sat," he says, "in a little huddled group, saying very little, and the men forward were mere knots of silent endurance.

"I do not think any of us felt we belonged to a defeated army, nor had we any strange sense of the war as the dominating fact about us. Our mental setting had far more of the effect of a huge natural catastrophe. The atomic bomb had dwarfed the international issues to complete insignificance. When our minds wandered from the preoccupations of our immediate needs, we speculated upon the possibility of stopping the use of these frightful explosives before the world was utterly destroyed. For to us it seemed quite plain that these bombs and the still greater power of destruction of which they were the precursors might quite easily shatter every relationship and institution of mankind.

"It 's plain,' said Mylius, 'we 've got to put an end to war. Things have to be run some way. This-all this is impossible.'

"I made no immediate answer. Something, I cannot think what, had brought back to me the figure of that man I had seen wounded on the very first day of actual fighting. I saw again his angry, tearful eyes and that poor dripping, bloody mess, which had been a skilful human hand five minutes before, thrust out in indignant protest. 'Damned foolery!' he had stormed, 'damned foolery! right hand, sir! My right hand!'

My

"My faith had for a time gone altogether out of me. 'I think we are toosilly,' I said suddenly to Mylius, 'ever to stop war. If we 'd had the sense to do it, we should have done it before this. I think this-' and I waved a gesture at the gaunt, black outline of a smashed windmill that stuck up, ridiculous and ugly, above the red waters-'this is the end." "

(The third part of Mr. Wells's Prophetic Trilogy will appear in the March CENTURY)

TH

THE HEART OF INDIA

BY E. F. BENSON

Author of "The Relentless City," "Account Rendered,” etc.

HERE is not a pious Hindu in all India who would not, if it were possible for him, come to Benares to die, nor count himself happy in dying if only, when the ardent purity of fire had embraced and devoured his outworn body, the ashes thereof might be given into the liquid keeping of holy Ganges, which makes all things pure, and purges whatever it touches with waves of absolution and supreme unction. Until we accept and, as far as we can, understand the literal truth of this statement, and believe unquestioningly in the unquestioning faith that inspires it, we cannot hope to form the faintest idea of what Benares means, and shall find there only what so many find, namely, a picturesque river-bank crowded with idle folk who bathe in the morning and do nothing all day long, a repulsive method of publicly disposing of the dead, and sour, distrustful glances at the cameras of tourists, their loud voices, and jostling progress, at their pointed fingers, and looks averted from the burning ghat, or glued there with horrified curiosity.

Such features as these strike every one who with superficial eye and hustling steps visits this incomparable riverside, and superficially they are quite undeniable. He will draw hurried conclusions from some of those fakirs and contemplative folk who spend their time there, and have an eager eye to their begging-bowls, and, hastily generalizing, will call them a mob of idle beggars. To him this crowded theater of a town, which forever gazes on the mute, flowing stage of the Ganges, where nothing happens, where no dramatic presentment is made, will be to him but a curious huddle of dusty and tumbling palaces, a muck-heap of wrecked religions, and meaningless superstitions inspired by the Oriental love of indolence; while of the river itself he will see nothing more than a broad and strangely pellucid stream, considering the pollutions that are cast eter

nally into it, with flotsam of withered marigold flowers, a mere highroad for the stacked boats that bring incessant loads of wood to the city. Rows of great palaces, decaying and untended, are buried up to their very balconies in alluvial accumulations; others the scouring action of the river has bodily uprooted, and they have slipped and toppled down the steep bank, none underpinning them, till here a steeple rises from the river-bed itself, here, until the next rains come, a flight of steps and the terrace that once crowned it are strewn sidewise and disjectedly along the margin of the stream. Next year the flooded river will complete the destruction it has begun, and this massive bastion will vanish forever below the blind, devouring waters. To him an indescribable throng of fraudulent fanatics who do not believe in the faith they profess, and only play with the austerities they apparently practise, people these ruinous banks. On wooden platforms, shaded by straw umbrellas, sit those false fakirs and Oriental Pecksniffs, geniuses, at any rate, in one art, namely, that of complete lethargy. Some bemuse themselves with silence, some with bodily immobility that has soaked through to their souls, and they are lost and drowned not in sacred meditation, but in fathomless gulfs of vacancy.

FAITH OR FRAUD?

PERHAPS he may allow that once, when religion in these mystical lands of the East was alive and bred men who were holy of soul, such life of concentrated immobility, which led to the "seedless contemplation," was genuine. But such took their crutch and begging-bowl not on to crowded riversides, but into the empty places of forest and of jungle, and in stillness realized their souls. He cannot credit that such an accumulation of holiness as professes to unfold itself on this left bank of the Ganges is conceivable. These loinclothed drones find that it is easier to earn

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livelihood and savings by sitting still than by honest work: it is not inherent sanctity, but inherent laziness, that sits all day below those straw umbrellas, and has its joints and muscles pleasantly massaged by a black-eyed little bronze statue of a chela, who begs for his master all day and shares his blanket at night. He knows something of the native, does our bustling observer, and we may take it from him this is a mere crowd of fraudulent and idle beggars.

One such he will see who, he will be told, never sits down. For four years he has stood day and night; and all day, as every one may see, he stands in the blaze of the sun, body and head completely uncovered but for a narrow loin-cloth, and, smeared over with the ashes that distinguish the followers of Siva, bends over a wood fire, the smoke of which ascends continually into his face. He has vowed to continue thus for twelve years.

But twelve years already have passed for another, sitting in a small cramped palanquin, so that back and legs can never be extended, and during this time he has never spoken. All power of movement has long since left him, but morning by morning he is borne down by his chelas, and dipped in the sacred river. Then he is brought back and placed in his prison again, from which all day he looks with steadfast eyes upon the Ganges. He is completely naked, but when, a few years ago, the English authorities decreed that for the sake of decency he should wear the minimum of covering, fearing, one must suppose, that visitors who poked their heads through the windows of his palanquin would be shocked, the feeling in Benares was such that the order was hastily rescinded.

pyre, and covered with dry wood and fagots; for a little while the son and only mourner, brown and glistening from his half-finished morning's bath, will watch the flames flower round his father's corpse, then, when all is going well, he will return to his interrupted ablutions. Perhaps an arm or leg will shoot out of the blaze, making a wild, indescribable gesture in the air as the flame eats through the sinews of thigh and shoulder, and the superficial observer will look on that with ghoulish interest, or, if more sensitive, with shudder and aversion, as with a shudder he will look at the dogs that live about the burning ghat, and help, if the fire fails. And if that is all that our observer sees, he will have failed as utterly in reaching the essential truth and naturalness of all it holds for the native, as he will have failed in appreciating all the rest.

POTENTIAL SEDITION AND DISEASE

OR, still superficial, though piercing below the actual visible impression, and seeking, though missing, the essential spirit of the place, he will remember how the mutiny was largely spread by just such fakirs as he sees here by the score. He will have been told, too, that the Brahmans, who are the brain of India, are busy with seditions and revolutionary concoctions, and using this holy place as a hotbed for their schemes. He will remember the sour and suspicious looks cast at him, and feel that the air is thick with treachery and ominous with danger. Here sedition is cooked, and the savor of it spreads, like the drifting smoke of the burning ghat, over the illimitable plains, carried there by those traveling fakirs who pass through Benares and wander over every province. Then this In these two cases, and in many more broiling, dusty reach of the Ganges belike them, he who attempts to understand comes to him a nightmare fecund with poBenares without granting the postulate we tential force, and the whole length of the have started with, may, it is true, be a crowded quays is as deadly as a coiled little shaken in his conclusion; but he will cobra, which, as it sleeps, distils into its proceed to justify himself by asking what glands an imminent and deadly poison. is the good of it all, or by passing on, per- The poison collects, collects, and such haps, to the burning ghat. There he will crimes as that of the bomb outrage at see the pyre being built by chattering un- Delhi are no more than a somnolent and dertakers; he will see lying on the steps, tentative stroke. To him the place reeks in shallow water, the shrouded corpse, re- with sinister things, and by contrast the ceiving its last ablution before the flame very burning ghat becomes a place of relief purifies it and the holy river again re- from the ominousness of the underlying ceives the ashes of the burning. He will menace. There, at any rate, fire cleanses see it cheerfully bestowed on the half-built and consumes; there is no breeding of sub

tle and accumulating poison. And thus again, though seeing what is very likely true enough, our wanderer has failed to see what Benares means.

Or, finally, he will take boat in the early morning, and see the mile-long shore of the river as thick as the sands at Margate with naked brown humanity, male and female alike, bathing in and drinking of the sacred stream, or casting into it of ferings of coins and flowers. And he will only remember that fifty yards above the main sewer of Benares debouches into the river, bearing with it, without the slightest doubt, millions upon millions of the germs of cholera, smallpox, and enteric fever, while only ten yards away the corpses that wait for the burning are soaking in the river. All that again is perfectly true, but again, as utterly as before, he misses not only the significance of what is passing before his eyes, mounted on his hobby-horse of hygiene, but from ignorance, even as in his judgments on the fakirs and the ruined palaces, misses even the facts of the case. But we will let our wanderer hurry home to breakfast, thrilled and horrified by what he has certainly seen, and uncomprehending how the nature of his vision was defective from the beginning, because he did. not know or would not appreciate the power that lies within Benares, and every year, through the evanescent generations, drives it forward, unchanging, though altered, by ruinous decay, and draws to it the eyes and travel-weary footsteps of thousands, a light to lighten their darkness, a very dayspring from on high.

GENIUS LOCI

BENARES is a holy place, the home of Hinduism, the cradle, as far as we can tell, of the faith. India, which has so often been conquered, which is so fickle in allegiance, has here preserved an inviolable constancy, and all the tyrannies that have overrun it, even the newest and bitterest of all, coming from the ultimate West and the far-off island of fog, have left this strange cathedral by the river even as they found it, and as it is to-day. There may be, and certainly are, faithless worshipers in its liquid courts, those in whom superstitions, savagely alive, have taken the place of the religion which to them is dead; in others worship may be but apathetic, though race hatred may be fervent,

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and their brains teem with secret schemes, silently matured; in others the contents of the fakir's bowl may be of more consequence than the tenor of the fakir's meditation, but to miss the note of worship that sounds so sonorously along the river-bank, and merely listen for the discords, to miss the incense of prayer and meditation that rises all day as thick as the dust-clouds along its trampled terraces, is to miss all. It is not from laziness that its inhabitants allow palace and shrine and cupola and minaret to slide and topple down the riverbank: it is because there dwells that in the place compared with which the crumble of masonry and the action of the river, viewed as destroyer only, are less than the motes in the sunbeam compared with the And who shall deny the river the gold and the flowers that are given it, for is it not the holy Ganges, which washes clean of all sin, even as an established and scientific fact its waters at once cleanse and remove from it the putrefaction and disease that the sewers of the city pour into it, so that you may drink of its waters, dismounting from your hobby of hygiene, and risk contracting none of the plagues that pour into it? Of this there is no doubt; for not long ago some scientific soul took a sample of water from the mouth of the main sewer, and found it to be swarming with the deadly life of cholera and enteric fever. Half he mixed with distilled water, half with water out of the Ganges itself. Two days later he found that the portion mingled with pure water contained its deadliness in unimpaired vitality; in the other the bacilli which had swarmed there were all dead. The explanation of this we will leave to those who study such things, and remember only, if we want to understand Benares, that the holy Ganges has on those who flock there a power of spiritual cleansing as sure and speedy as this material property of the actual fluid. That is the dayspring that flows clear and pellucid. below these hallowed banks.

THE YOUNG BRAHMAN

ON my first visit to the river with a friend one grilling afternoon in March, a young Brahman, with his threefold cord bound below his left shoulder, looked at us as we passed with the unconscious pride and aloof contempt of his caste for all

others, most particularly for those who, like ourselves, were of no caste at all, and then began following us at a little distance. We had been told that there was a good deal of espionage of strangers going on, and supposed that we were being kept under surveillance. He was young, perhaps sixteen, and evidently poor, for his clothes were threadbare with usage, and he had no shoes; but poverty, of course, has nothing to do with caste, and more than once some portly and silk-bedizened merchant stepped swiftly out of his path, so as not to impede the convenience of his progress, and saluted him, the salute being returned with the courtesy of a superior to one who was far below him. We had, I am glad to say, no cameras, and we did not point at and comment on the strange figures of naked fakirs and meditating holy men, and at last, after strolling quietly along to within some hundred yards of the burning ghat, we sat down on a fragment of tumbled masonry. Then slowly, with pauses of silence, he approached, and asked us why we had come to Benares. Were we thinking? And all Benares was in that phrase.

Near by was a dog, with her new-born litter lying round her, pitifully thin and emaciated. My friend went to a shop close by, bought a saucerful of milk, and set it down by her. At that the aloofness of our young Brahman altogether broke down. We were of no caste, it is true, but such an action as that made us faintly tolerable, and without more ado he attached himself to us as our guide. For himself, he was "learning to think"; he was also learning astrology, and his father was a carpenter with a wage of fifteen rupees (one pound) per month. Did we wish to see the Nepaulese temple? Most Englishmen wanted to go to the Nepaulese temple. He could take us there, though it was not open of an afternoon. But we did not desire to see that Augean stable of mean and unimaginative obscenity, and rose a little in his estimation. By degrees he melted into a sort of chattering merriment, sparred boyishly with a combative goat that squarely occupied our path, told us what manner of women were those who leaned over the balcony above us, said he would meet us at the same place early next morning at the bathing-hour to row up the river and drift back again.

And yet the whole current of his life, of which this boyish friendliness was a mere surface straw, ran as remote from, and unconjecturable by, us as if he had been an inhabitant of the moon. He tolerated us, perhaps because we did not hurry and shout, but he only condescended to us: to himself he was a being as vastly superior to us as were we to the dog to which we had given milk. For he was a Brahman, and he was learning to think. I would give a year's life, I believe, to penetrate into that boy's soul, to see with his eyes, to enter into the mental heritage that the generations of his Brahman forefathers had given him, to be aware with his consciousness, and for a month to understand Benares and all that makes it what it is.

MORNING RITUAL

EARLY next morning we were back again at the river-bank, while yet the sun was hardly risen, and there waited for us our Brahman, who had engaged a boat from "some common fellow." He had bathed already and, cool and glistening, was squatting by the river-edge, cleaning his teeth with white wood ash. Strangely different this morning was the aspect of air and sky and river and thronging worshipers. For the hard, tired blaze of the afternoon, for the sense of awful age and antiquity that sometimes is almost crushing in those sun-smitten and dusty plains, there was exchanged the fresh and scentless air of dawn and an atmosphere of tender pearl. The glorious river, curved like a mitar, lay dim and steely at our feet, and above it was piled the iridescent fairyland of temples and palaces. All had been renewed by the coolness of the sacred and starry night, and instead of the dusty crowds that yesterday thronged the banks, a gleaming huddle of brown-skinned men and boys and women, joyous with the cool water and the radiant youth of the sun and air, bathed in, and drank of, the sacred stream. Standing waist-deep in the holy waters, they washed head and chest and shining arms, with ablution for the mouth and ritual of anointment for nose and eyes. Had there lain below these joyful washings no touch of religion or belief, the scene would still have been one of springlike and dewy exhilaration: a whole town was renewing itself with cool water at the dawn of day. But below, dynamic

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