Page:The Imperial Gazetteer of India - Volume 10 (2nd edition).pdf/468



456 ORISSA. out of doors. In the dry weather, the streets of Puri look like a great encampment, without the tents. The soaking dews are unwholesomc enough; but as long as the people can spend the night outside, some check exists to the overcrowding of pilgrinis by rapacious lodginghouse keepers. How slight this check practically proves, may be judged of from the fact that the official reports before cited are specially selected as referring to the season when people can sleep out of doors with impunity. But the Car Festival, the great ceremony of the year, unfortunately falls at the beginning of the rains. The water pours down for hours in alniost solid sheets. Every lane and alley becomes a torrent or a stinking canal, which holds in suspension the accumulated filth heaps of the hot weather. The wretched pilgrims are now penned into the lodging-house cells without mercy. Cholera invariably breaks out. The living and the dying are huddled together, with a leaky roof above, and a miry clay floor under foot, 'the space allotted per head being just as much as they can cover lying down.' But it is on the return journey that the misery of the pilgrims reaches its climax. The rapacity of the Purí priests and lodginghouse keepers has passed into a proverb. A week or ten days finishes the process of plundering, and the stripped and half-starved pilgrims crawl out of the city with their faces towards home. They stagger along under their burdens of holy food, which is wrapped up in dirty cloth, or packed away in heavy baskets and red earthen pois. The .men from the Upper Provinces further encumber themselves with a palm-leaf umbrella, and a bundle of canes dyed red, beneath vhose strokes they did penance at thc Lion Gate. After the Car Festival, they find every stream flooded. Hundreds of them have not money enough left to pay for being ferried over the network of rivers in the delta. Even those who can pay havc often to sit for days in the rain on the bank, before a boat will venture to launch on the ungovernable torrent. At a single river, an English traveller once counted as many as forty corpses, over which the kites and dogs were battling The famished, drenched throng toils painfully backward, urged by the knowledge that their slender stock of money will only last a very few wecks, and that, after it is done, nothing remains but to die. The missionaries along thc line of march have ascertained that sometimes they travel forty miles a day, dragging their weary linibs along till they drop from sheer fatigue. Hundreds die upon the roadside. Those are most happy whom insensibility overtakes in some English Station. The servants of the municipality pick them up and carry them to the hospital. The wretched pilgrims crowd into the villages and halting-places along the road, blocking up the strects, and creating an artificial famine. The available sleeping places are soon crammed