Year after year, long after the cause has disappeared, the
feet of the villagers continue in that same deviating track. That is in
perfect keeping with India. Or--to permit ourselves to follow up another
natural sequence--things may quickly begin to fit in with the deviation.
Perhaps the first rainy season after the feet of the villagers had been
made to step aside, some plant was found in possession of the avoided
spot. India-like, its right of possession was unconsciously deferred to.
And then the year following, may be, one or other of the sacred fig
trees appeared behind the plant, and in a few years starved it out. Ten
years will make a banyan sapling, or a pipal, into a sturdy trunk, and
lo, by that time, in some visitation of drought or cholera or smallpox,
or because some housewife was childless, coloured threads are being tied
upon the tree or some rude symbolic painting put upon it. Then an
ascetic comes along and seats himself in its shade, and now, already, a
sacred institution has been established that it would raise a riot to
try to remove.

Visitors to Allahabad go to see the great fort erected upon the bank of
the River Jumna by the Mahomedan emperor, Akbar. One of the sights of
the fort, strange to tell, is the underground Hindu temple of "The
Undying Banyan Tree," to which we descend by a long flight of steps.
Such a sacred banyan tree as we have imagined, Akbar found growing there
upon the slope of the river bank when he was requiring the ground for
his fort. The undying banyan tree is now a stump or log, but it or a
predecessor was visited by a Chinese pilgrim to Allahabad in the seventh
century A.D. Being very tolerant, instead of cutting down the tree,
Akbar built a roof over it and filled up the ground all round to the
level he required. And still through the gateway of the fort and down
underground, the train of pilgrims passes as of old to where the banyan
tree is still declared to grow. Such is Indian conservatism, undeterred
by any thought of incongruity. Benares is crowded with examples of the
same unconscious tenacity. I have spoken of the ruthless levelling of
Hindu temples in Benares in former days to make way for Mahomedan
mosques. Near the gate of Aurangzeb's mosque a strange scene meets the
eye. Where the road leads to the mosque, and with no Hindu temple
nowadays in sight, are seated a number of Hindu ashes-clad ascetics.
What are they doing at the entrance to a Mahomedan mosque? That