Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/197

Rh We took a boat at the next ghat, and were towed up-stream by a rope made fast to the tip of the mast, in the crazy Yang-tse and Asiatic fashion, and then were rowed quickly across to the marble palace of the Maharaja of Benares. Instead of landing at the inviting marble steps, we climbed the mud bank and walked around to an untidy back gate, the land entrance, seeing there an ill-kept menagerie and the frowzy soldiers of the body-guard. We passed through several courts and marble halls to the state apartments, where splendid rugs, tawdry European ornaments, and mechanical toys made extreme contrasts, and came out on the marble terraces and latticed loggias overlooking the river and the city's long line of palaces and temples. The jeweled beauties of the zenana should have been lounging there to complete the picture, but they were shut up behind latticed windows looking on the inside court. This Ramnuggur palace would seem to be the most desirable place to live in, but there is a strong prejudice against dying there or anywhere on that opposite bank of the Ganges. Generations ago, the maharaja tormented a Brahman by asking ninety-nine times where his soul would go to from the palace, and the Brahman, at the hundredth query, assured the great man that his soul would enter a donkey if he died there. Now when an illness becomes at all serious in Ramnuggur precincts, the victim is hurried to a boat and frantically ferried across.

As we were leaving the palace a fanfare of trumpets and bugles announced the arrival of the maha-