12.  Well of the Knowledge of Salvation.  It is close to the Golden Temple.  There you will see, sculptured out of a single piece of black marble, a bull which is much larger than any living bull you have ever seen, and yet is not a good likeness after all.  And there also you will see a very uncommon thing—­an image of Shiva.  You have seen his lingam fifty thousand times already, but this is Shiva himself, and said to be a good likeness.  It has three eyes.  He is the only god in the firm that has three.  “The well is covered by a fine canopy of stone supported by forty pillars,” and around it you will find what you have already seen at almost every shrine you have visited in Benares, a mob of devout and eager pilgrims.  The sacred water is being ladled out to them; with it comes to them the knowledge, clear, thrilling, absolute, that they are saved; and you can see by their faces that there is one happiness in this world which is supreme, and to which no other joy is comparable.  You receive your water, you make your deposit, and now what more would you have?  Gold, diamonds, power, fame?  All in a single moment these things have withered to dirt, dust, ashes.  The world has nothing to give you now.  For you it is bankrupt.

I do not claim that the pilgrims do their acts of worship in the order and sequence above charted out in this Itinerary of mine, but I think logic suggests that they ought to do so.  Instead of a helter-skelter worship, we then have a definite starting-place, and a march which carries the pilgrim steadily forward by reasoned and logical progression to a definite goal.  Thus, his Ganges bath in the early morning gives him an appetite; he kisses the cow-tails, and that removes it.  It is now business hours, and longings for material prosperity rise in his mind, and be goes and pours water over Shiva’s symbol; this insures the prosperity, but also brings on a rain, which gives him a fever.  Then he drinks the sewage at the Kedar Ghat to cure the fever; it cures the fever but gives him the smallpox.  He wishes to know how it is going to turn out; he goes to the Dandpan Temple and looks down the well.  A clouded sun shows him that death is near.  Logically his best course for the present, since he cannot tell at what moment he may die, is to secure a happy hereafter; this he does, through the agency of the Great Fate.  He is safe, now, for heaven; his next move will naturally be to keep out of it as long as he can.  Therefore he goes to the Briddhkal Temple and secures Youth and long life by bathing in a puddle of leper-pus which would kill a microbe.  Logically, Youth has re-equipped him for sin and with the disposition to commit it; he will naturally go to the fane which is consecrated to the Fulfillment of Desires, and make arrangements.  Logically, he will now go to the Well of the Earring from time to time to unload and freshen up for further banned enjoyments.  But first and last and all the time