ared, each time, by the skin of his
teeth. He got me so nervous that I couldn't look at the view. I
couldn't look at anything but him. Every time he went sailing over one
of those abysses my breath stood still, and when he grabbed for the perch
he was going for, I grabbed too, in sympathy. And he was perfectly
indifferent, perfectly unconcerned, and I did all the panting myself.
He came within an ace of losing his life a dozen times, and I was so
troubled about him that I would have shot him if I had had anything to do
it with. But I strongly recommend the view. There is more monkey than
view, and there is always going to be more monkey while that idiot
survives, but what view you get is superb. All Benares, the river, and
the region round about are spread before you. Take a gun, and look at
the view.

The next thing I saw was more reposeful. It was a new kind of art. It
was a picture painted on water. It was done by a native. He sprinkled
fine dust of various colors on the still surface of a basin of water, and
out of these sprinklings a dainty and pretty picture gradually grew, a
picture which a breath could destroy. Somehow it was impressive, after
so much browsing among massive and battered and decaying fanes that rest
upon ruins, and those ruins upon still other ruins, and those upon still
others again. It was a sermon, an allegory, a symbol of Instability.
Those creations in stone were only a kind of water pictures, after all.

A prominent episode in the Indian career of Warren Hastings had Benares
for its theater. Wherever that extraordinary man set his foot, he left
his mark. He came to Benares in 1781 to collect a fine of L500,000 which
he had levied upon its Rajah, Cheit Singly on behalf of the East India
Company. Hastings was a long way from home and help. There were,
probably, not a dozen Englishmen within reach; the Rajah was in his fort
with his myriads around him. But no matter. From his little camp in a
neighboring garden, Hastings sent a party to arrest the sovereign. He
sent on this daring mission a couple of hundred native soldiers sepoys
--under command of three young English lieutenants. The Rajah submitted
without a word. The incident lights up the Indian situation
electrically, and gives one a vivid sense of the strides which the
English had made and the mastership they had acquired in the land since
the date of Clive's great victory. In a quarter of a century, from being