ountains. There is not a glimpse of sun.
The rain descends as a deluge. The river is still further swollen by
the melting of the snow on the Himalaya, and now comes swirling
along in dark and angry mood, rising higher and higher in its banks,
eating into them, and threatening to overtop them and carry death
and destruction far and wide. Men no longer go down to meet it.
They shrink back from it. They uneasily watch it till the fulness of
its strength is spent and it has returned to its normal beneficent
aspect.

No wonder such a river is regarded as sacred. To the more primitive
people it is literally a living person--and a person who may be
propitiated, a person who may do them harm if they annoy him, and
do them good if they make themselves agreeable to him and furnish
him with what he wants. To the cultured Hindus it is an object of the
deepest reverence. If they can bathe in its waters their sins are
washed away. If after death their ashes can be cast on its broad
bosom, they will be secure of everlasting bliss. From perhaps the
earliest days of our race, for some hundreds of thousands of years,
men may have lived upon its banks. For it was in the forests beside
great rivers, in a warm and even climate, that primitive men must
have lived. They would have launched their canoes upon its waters,
and used it as their only pathway of communication with one
another. And always they would have looked upon it with mingled
awe and affection. Besides the sun it would have been the one great
natural object which would attract their attention. Insensibly the
sight of that ever-rolling flood must have deeply affected them.
They must have come to love it as they beheld it through the greater
part of the year. The sight of its destructive power may have made
them recoil for a time in fear and awe. But this would be forgotten
as the flood subsided, and the river was again smooth and smiling
and passing peacefully along before them.

So men do not run away from it. They gather to it. They build great
cities on its banks, and come from great distances to see it. They
perform pilgrimages every year in thousands to the spot where it
issues from the Himalaya. And they penetrate even to its source far
back and high up in the mountains.

To the most enlightened, also, the Ganges should be an object of
reverence for its antiquity, for its future, and for its power. From the
surface of the Bay of Bengal the sun's rays have drawn particl