in palanquins to be healed of their maladies by a bath; or if that might not be, then to die on the blessed banks and so make sure of heaven.  There were fakeers in plenty, with their bodies dusted over with ashes and their long hair caked together with cow-dung; for the cow is holy and so is the rest of it; so holy that the good Hindoo peasant frescoes the walls of his hut with this refuse, and also constructs ornamental figures out of it for the gracing of his dirt floor.  There were seated families, fearfully and wonderfully painted, who by attitude and grouping represented the families of certain great gods.  There was a holy man who sat naked by the day and by the week on a cluster of iron spikes, and did not seem to mind it; and another holy man, who stood all day holding his withered arms motionless aloft, and was said to have been doing it for years.  All of these performers have a cloth on the ground beside them for the reception of contributions, and even the poorest of the people give a trifle and hope that the sacrifice will be blessed to him.  At last came a procession of naked holy people marching by and chanting, and I wrenched myself away.

CHAPTER L.

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

The journey to Benares was all in daylight, and occupied but a few hours.  It was admirably dusty.  The dust settled upon you in a thick ashy layer and turned you into a fakeer, with nothing lacking to the role but the cow manure and the sense of holiness.  There was a change of cars about mid-afternoon at Moghul-serai—­if that was the name—­and a wait of two hours there for the Benares train.  We could have found a carriage and driven to the sacred city, but we should have lost the wait.  In other countries a long wait at a station is a dull thing and tedious, but one has no right to have that feeling in India.  You have the monster crowd of bejeweled natives, the stir, the bustle, the confusion, the shifting splendors of the costumes—­dear me, the delight of it, the charm of it are beyond speech.  The two-hour wait was over too soon.  Among other satisfying things to look at was a minor native prince from the backwoods somewhere, with his guard of honor, a ragged but wonderfully gaudy gang of fifty dark barbarians armed with rusty flint-lock muskets.  The general show came so near to exhausting variety that one would have said that no addition to it could be conspicuous, but when this Falstaff and his motleys marched through it one saw that that seeming impossibility had happened.