blown away by
the fresh wind which rises at the approach of the dawn, when, in a word,
the right side of the river with its ghotas plunges into stillness
and silence, to be reawakened when the evening comes, processions of a
different kind appear on the left bank. We see groups of Hindu men and
women in sad, silent trains. They approach the river quietly. They
do not cry, and have no rituals to perform. We see two men carrying
something long and thin, wrapped in an old red rug. Holding it by the
head and feet they swing it into the dirty, yellowish waves of the
river. The shock is so violent that the red rug flies open and we behold
the face of a young woman tinged with dark green, who quickly disappears
in the river. Further on another group; an old man and two young women.
One of them, a little girl of ten, small, thin, hardly fully developed,
sobs bitterly. She is the mother of a stillborn child, whose body is to
be thrown in the river. Her weak voice monotonously resounds over the
shore, and her trembling hands are not strong enough to lift the poor
little corpse that is more like a tiny brown kitten than a human being.
The old man tries to console her, and, taking the body in his own hands,
enters the water and throws it right in the middle. After him both the
women get into the river, and, having plunged seven times to purify
themselves from the touch of a dead body, they return home, their
clothes dripping with wet. In the meanwhile vultures, crows and other
birds of prey gather in thick clouds and considerably retard the
progress of the bodies down the river. Occasionally some half-stripped
skeleton is caught by the reeds, and stranded there helplessly for
weeks, until an outcast, whose sad duty it is to busy himself all his
life long with such unclean work, takes notice of it, and catching it
by the ribs with his long hook, restores it to its highway towards the
ocean.

But let us leave the river bank, which is unbearably hot in spite of
the early hour. Let us bid good-bye to the watery cemetery of the poor.
Disgusting and heart-rending are such sights in the eyes of a European!
And unconsciously we allow the light wings of reverie to transport us
to the far North, to the peaceful village cemeteries where there are no
marble monuments crowned with turbans, no sandal-wood fires, no dirty
rivers to serve the purpose of a last resting place, but where humble
wooden crosses stand in rows, sheltered by old birches.