CHAPTER XXXVII

  “Let us pass our lives at Benares, living by the banks
  of the divine river, clad only in a single garment, and
  with our hands uplifted over our heads.”—­The Vairagya Sataka.

The Praying Ghats or Steps lay desolate in the light of the full moon.

Hundreds of small lights twinkled and flickered before the countless temples; hundreds of fading flower garlands, hung about the temple doors or festooned about the gods—­some of which are quite indescribable—­perfumed the night air; and to the right and to the left the smouldering bodies on the Burning Ghats cast a crimson glow on the slow, silvery waters of India’s most holy river.

Of worshippers there was not one.

Of the countless priests who crowd the steps at dawn there was but one.

The mad priest.

Naked save for a loin cloth, he stood as he always stands from dawn to dawn with feet wide apart and hands upraised to the heavens, outlined against some one of the Rajah’s palaces which crown the top and stretch the length of the terraces like a mighty rampart between the holiness of the place, and the fret and traffic of the outer world.

The holy man’s arms, his legs, his emaciated body are covered with a fine ash powder, his long hair is matted with cinders and cow-dung, his mad eyes stare across the river into the infinite, at that which we cannot see, as he stands shouting unintelligible, maybe mad words, maybe not, to the glory of his goddess, Kali the Terrible.

Was he born mad? no one knows!  What does he eat or drink?  A handful of rice, a sip of water from his glittering bronze vessel!  When does he sleep?  No one can tell you.

Who knows! who cares!

He is a holy man! the mad priest of the Holy City!

He alone had taken no heed of the incessant resistless throbbing of the drums behind him in the city; neither did he take notice of the two white figures as they ran lightly, swiftly, hand-in-hand down the sunken, crooked, granite steps to a place between the praying rafts at the water’s edge.

For a moment Leonie hesitated with the water lapping her feet on the third step, then she turned her head slowly, and looked straight into the man’s eyes which had been fixed intently on the nape of her neck.

She gave a little sigh, drew out the dagger and let fall the plaited glory of her hair, and lifting the garlands from about her neck threw them out on to the waters; then with a native woman’s movement pulled the sari backwards from her head, and unwound it from her shoulders which gleamed like ivory in the moonlight.  Slowly, but without hesitation, even as the man dropped his shawl and long white garment upon the waters, she untwined the sari from about her body, dropped it across a suttee stone, and the dagger upon the step behind, and stood swaying gently with naught but the sheeting about her waist and limbs.