must not be taken.
The good Jain wipes off a seat before using it, lest he cause the death
of-some valueless insect by sitting down on it. It grieves him to have
to drink water, because the provisions in his stomach may not agree with
the microbes. Yet India invented Thuggery and the Suttee. India is a
hard country to understand. We went to the temple of the Thug goddess,
Bhowanee, or Kali, or Durga. She has these names and others. She is the
only god to whom living sacrifices are made. Goats are sacrificed to
her. Monkeys would be cheaper. There are plenty of them about the
place. Being sacred, they make themselves very free, and scramble around
wherever they please. The temple and its porch are beautifully carved,
but this is not the case with the idol. Bhowanee is not pleasant to look
at. She has a silver face, and a projecting swollen tongue painted a
deep red. She wears a necklace of skulls.

In fact, none of the idols in Benares are handsome or attractive. And
what a swarm of them there is! The town is a vast museum of idols--and
all of them crude, misshapen, and ugly. They flock through one's dreams
at night, a wild mob of nightmares. When you get tired of them in the
temples and take a trip on the river, you find idol giants, flashily
painted, stretched out side by side on the shore. And apparently
wherever there is room for one more lingam, a lingam is there. If Vishnu
had foreseen what his town was going to be, he would have called it
Idolville or Lingamburg.

The most conspicuous feature of Benares is the pair of slender white
minarets which tower like masts from the great Mosque of Aurangzeb. They
seem to be always in sight, from everywhere, those airy, graceful,
inspiring things. But masts is not the right word, for masts have a
perceptible taper, while these minarets have not. They are 142 feet
high, and only 8 1/2 feet in diameter at the base, and 7 1/2 at the
summit--scarcely any taper at all. These are the proportions of a
candle; and fair and fairylike candles these are. Will be, anyway, some
day, when the Christians inherit them and top them with the electric
light. There is a great view from up there--a wonderful view. A large
gray monkey was part of it, and damaged it. A monkey has no judgment.
This one was skipping about the upper great heights of the mosque
--skipping across empty yawning intervals which were almost too wide for
him, and which he only just barely cle