Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/305



in great places we cannot always command the passive moments of rare insight. It was already my third visit to Benares when I sat one day, at an hour after noon, in the Vishwanath Bazar. Everything about me was hushed and drowsy. The sadhu-like shopkeepers nodded and dozed over their small wares; here the weaving of girdle or scapulary with a mantram, there a collection of small stone Shivas. There was little enough of traffic along the narrow ,footway, but overhead went the swallows by the invisible roadways of the blue, flying in and out among their nests in the eaves. And the air was filled with their twittering, and with the sighing resonance of the great bell in the Temple of Vishweswar, as the constant stream of barefooted worshippers entered, and prayed, and before departing touched it. Swaying, sobbing, there it hung, seeming as if in that hour of peace it were some mystic dome, thrilled and responsive to every throb of the city's life. One could believe that these ripples of sound that ran across it were born of no mechanical vibration, but echoed, here a moan, there a prayer, and yet again a cry of gladness, in all the distant quarters of Benares :