The most conspicuous feature of Benares is the pair of slender white minarets which tower like masts from the great Mosque of Aurangzeb.  They seem to be always in sight, from everywhere, those airy, graceful, inspiring things.  But masts is not the right word, for masts have a perceptible taper, while these minarets have not.  They are 142 feet high, and only 8 1/2 feet in diameter at the base, and 7 1/2 at the summit—­scarcely any taper at all.  These are the proportions of a candle; and fair and fairylike candles these are.  Will be, anyway, some day, when the Christians inherit them and top them with the electric light.  There is a great view from up there—­a wonderful view.  A large gray monkey was part of it, and damaged it.  A monkey has no judgment.  This one was skipping about the upper great heights of the mosque —­skipping across empty yawning intervals which were almost too wide for him, and which he only just barely cleared, each time, by the skin of his teeth.  He got me so nervous that I couldn’t look at the view.  I couldn’t look at anything but him.  Every time he went sailing over one of those abysses my breath stood still, and when he grabbed for the perch he was going for, I grabbed too, in sympathy.  And he was perfectly indifferent, perfectly unconcerned, and I did all the panting myself.  He came within an ace of losing his life a dozen times, and I was so troubled about him that I would have shot him if I had had anything to do it with.  But I strongly recommend the view.  There is more monkey than view, and there is always going to be more monkey while that idiot survives, but what view you get is superb.  All Benares, the river, and the region round about are spread before you.  Take a gun, and look at the view.

The next thing I saw was more reposeful.  It was a new kind of art.  It was a picture painted on water.  It was done by a native.  He sprinkled fine dust of various colors on the still surface of a basin of water, and out of these sprinklings a dainty and pretty picture gradually grew, a picture which a breath could destroy.  Somehow it was impressive, after so much browsing among massive and battered and decaying fanes that rest upon ruins, and those ruins upon still other ruins, and those upon still others again.  It was a sermon, an allegory, a symbol of Instability.  Those creations in stone were only a kind of water pictures, after all.

A prominent episode in the Indian career of Warren Hastings had Benares for its theater.  Wherever that extraordinary man set his foot, he left his mark.  He came to Benares in 1781 to collect a fine of L500,000 which he had levied upon its Rajah, Cheit Singly on behalf of the East India Company.  Hastings was a long way from home and help.  There were, probably, not a dozen Englishmen within reach; the Rajah was in his fort with his myriads around him.  But no matter.  From his little camp in a neighboring garden, Hastings sent a party to arrest the sovereign.