children, the surroundings are

more holy

and more mephitic, since, penned in by high walls, there is no draught from the great Ganges to carry off their stagnant fetor. Yes, here the whole thing is if one could but understand it; its foulness and its sweetness and its greatness, its seeming failure and its age-long success. Here centuries ago a man preached a faith that was all serenity and kindness and beauty; within a mile men preach another that is all nobility and love and light. But on the crowds by the Well of Knowledge neither has any influence, neither offers any beauty which they can desire.

But while writing of the mud one must not forget the marigolds, if only because they were the one pretty thing to be set against all the inanities of decoration we have endured. The marigold is Parvati's flower, and Parvati, who is the Hindu Venus-not the smirking mediæval Goddess, but the Greek one, terrible in her beauty as "an army with banners"-is the wife of Shiva, whom Benares honours. So it was that marigolds met us; marigolds in garlands hung from green bamboos; wreaths of marigolds nailed to wall and doorway; carts laden with their pale primrose yellow; women, clad in apricot pink, with piles of golden marigolds in brown baskets on their heads, and heaps of them at street corners, amber and orange and deep velvet bronze, being strung deftly into endless cables.

The joyous colour everywhere caught the eye, an aromatic odour hung gratefully in the air, covering even the multitudinous stench of the bazar. At the temples priests hung marigold garlands about one's neck, and marigolds wreathed the prow of one's boat on the river, and were scattered about her as she slid down the stream.

So to the last the impressions mingled, the beauty and the deformity, the fineness and the foulness, mud and marigolds.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE LAST FESTA

SINCE, proverbially, the best wine is seldom served at the end of the feast, one was unprepared at Benares for a scene which overshadowed everything that India had shown us, a scene which one could imagine no brush but Turner's having the courage to face or the power to render, and Turner's only at its most riotous and magnificent hour. The scene was really, in a sense, a pictorial accident; it was not, that is, what we went out

to see.

It was only when the lights of that entertainment were burning low, when the last sheaf of ineffectual rockets had been flung into the air, and when everything officially was all but over, that the picture made itself, piled itself, as it were, under the glaring torches from the thronged river up the astounding ghats into the sky. But that moment was the last of the day, and, being unofficial, came so late that the Prince and Princess must unfortunately have missed it, since the picture's foreground, on which all its uplifted colour rested, was made from the crush of boats of fantastic sizes and shapes and decorations, which swarmed suddenly out of

U

the darkness of the river to reach the stage where the Royal party had landed. There were, however, so many other charming moments in the afternoon that the whole of it is worth recounting. The occasion was a visit to his Highness the Maharaja of Benares, whose curious fort-like Palace lies in flood time like an ivory crown in the green swirl of the river, but now stands like a pleasure-house above a donjon whose mighty stone bastions reach down to thrust their feet into the shrunken stream. It is built on the opposite bank to Benares, about a mile above it, and the river, leaving the Palace, takes a great double curve, which shows the city's lovely crescent partly over the water and partly over the white wastes of sand, while immediately in front of the Palace, westward across the river, is the level wooded rich green plain.

It was out of this, by a road which had been cut through the high banks, ramped up across the paddy fields, and carried out across the white sands to what, in the monsoon, is the centre of the river, that the Royal party came, embarking, from a stage which had been built there, in barges that were an odd opposite to the motors which had carried it, barges with leaping horses, weird griffins, and purple-winged peacocks at the prow, driven by rowers in orange and crimson, who, seated in the low stern under the great painted tiller, swung their backs flat to