Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/311

A STUDY OF BENARES 261 and Bazar commemorates a period long enough to have included ten imperial sacrifices, each one of which must have represented at least a reign. Probably throughout the Pataliputra age, that is to say from 350 B.C. to A.D. 528, Benares was the ecclesiastical and sacrificial seat of empire. It contains at least two Asokan pillars, one in the grounds of the Queen's College, and the other, as we now know, at the entrance to the old-time Monastery of Sarnath. And we know with certainty that in the youth of Buddha it was already a thriving industrial centre. For the robes that he threw aside, perhaps in the year 590 B.C., to adopt the gerua of the satmyasin, are said in many books to have been made of Benares silk.

But this is in truth only what we might have expected. For the water-way is always in early ages the chief geographical feature of a country, and the position of Benares at the northward bend of the river determines the point of convergence for all the foot-roads of the South and East, and makes her necessarily the greatest distributing centre in India. Thus she constitutes a palimpsest, not a simple manuscript, of cities. One has here been built upon another ; period has accumulated upon period. There are houses in the crowded quarters whose foundations are laid, as it were, in mines of bricks, and whose owners live upon the sale of these ancestral wares. And there is at least one temple that I know of whose floor is eight or ten feet below the level of the present