Page:Wanderings of a Pilgrim Vol 2.djvu/493

 *perhaps from its having been undermined, perhaps from bad cement having been used. Her Highness spared no expense; probably the masons were dishonest, and that fine structure, which cost her fifteen lākh to rear a little above the river, is now a complete ruin.

The ghāt of Appa Sāhib is still in beauty, and a very curious one at the further end of Benares, dedicated to Mahadēo, is still uninjured; a number of images of bulls carved in stone are on the parapet of the temple, and forms of Mahadēo are beneath, at the foot of the bastions.

We loitered in the budgerow for above six hours amongst the ghāts, which stretch, I should imagine, about three miles along the left bank of the Ganges.

At the side of one of the ghāts on the edge of the river sat a woman weeping and lamenting very loudly over the pile of wood within which the corpse of some relative had been laid; the friends were near, and the pile ready to be fired. I met a corpse yesterday in the city, borne on a flat board; the body and the face were covered closely with bright rose-coloured muslin, which was drawn so tightly over the face that its form and features were distinct; and on the face was sprinkled red powder and silver dust; perhaps the dust was the pounded talc, which looks like silver.

How soon the young Hindūs begin to comprehend idolatry! A group of children from four to seven years old were at play; they had formed with mud on the ground an image of Hunoomān, after the fashion of those they had seen on the river-side; and they had made imitations of the sweetmeat (pera) in balls of mud, to offer to their puny idol.

I was at Benares eight years ago (in November, 1836); the river since that time has undermined the ghāts, and has done so much damage, that, in another ten years, if the Ganges encroach at an equal rate, but little will remain of the glory of the most holy of the Hindū cities. The force of the stream now sets full upon the most beautiful cluster of the temples on its banks; some have been engulphed, some are falling, and all will fall ere long; and of the Bāiza Bā'ī's ghāt, which was so beautiful