It is fifty miles from my chowkee to Benares, and the dread of being overtaken with serious illness away from medical assistance urges upon me the advisability of reaching there to-day, if possible.  The morning is ushered in with a stiff head-wind, and the fever leaves me feeling anything but equal to pedalling against it when I mount my wheel at early daybreak.  By sheer strength of will I reel off mile after mile, stopping to rest frequently at villages and under the trees.

A troop of big government elephants are having their hoofs trimmed at a village where a halt is made to obtain a bite of bread and milk.  The elephants enter unmistakable objections to the process in the way of trumpeting, and act pretty much like youngsters objecting to soap and water.  But a word and a gentle tap from the mahout’s stick and the monster brutes roll over on their sides and submit to the inevitable with a shrill protesting trumpet.

Another diversion not less interesting than the elephants is a wrestling tournament at the police-thana, where twenty stalwart policemen, stripped as naked as the proprieties of a country where little clothing is worn anyhow will permit, are struggling for honor in the arena.  Vigorous tom-toming encourages the combatants to do their best, and they flop one another over merrily, in the dampened clay, to the applause of a delighted crowd of lookers-on.  The fifty miles are happily overcome by four o’clock, and with the fever heaping additional fuel on the already well-nigh unbearable heat, I arrive pretty thoroughly exhausted at Clarke’s Hotel, in the European quarter of Benares.

Of all the cities of the East, Benares is perhaps the most interesting at the present day to the European tourist.  Its fourteen hundred shivalas or idol temples, and two hundred and eighty mosques, its wonderful bathing ghauts swarming with pilgrims washing away their sins, the burning bodies, the sacred Ganges, the hideous idols at every corner of the streets, and its strange idolatrous population, make up a scene that awakens one to a keen appreciation of its novelty.  One realizes fully that here the idolatry, the “bowing down before images” that in our Sunday-school days used to seem so unutterably wicked and perverse, so monstrous, and so far, far away, is a tangible fact.  To keep up their outward appearance on a par with the holiness of their city, men streak their faces and women mark the parting in their hair with red.  Sacred bulls are allowed to roam the streets at will, and the chief business of a large proportion of the population seems to be the keeping of religious observances and paying devotion to the multitudinous idols scattered about the city.