ut how I got in. For Indian temples are sacred to
Indians; no alien may pass within the walls to the centre of the shrine;
moreover, we never go to the temples to see the parts that are open to
view, because we know the stumbling-block such sight-seeing is to the
Hindus. All this the women know, for everything a missionary does or
does not do is observed by these observant people, and commented on in
private. Now, as they gather round me, I tell them why I have come (how
I got in I cannot explain, unless it was, as the women declared, that,
being in a seeley, one was not conspicuous), and they take me into
confidence, and tell me the truth about themselves, which is the last
thing they usually tell, and strikes me as strange; and they listen
splendidly, and would listen as long as I would stay. But it is not wise
to stay too long, and I get into the stream again, which all this time
has been pouring round the inner block of the temple, and am carried
round with it as it pours back and out.

And as I pass out, still in that stream, I notice that the temple area
is crowded with all kinds of merchandise, stalls of all sorts, just as
outside. Vendors of everything, from mud pots up to jewels, are roaming
over the place crying their wares, as if they had been in a market; and
right in the middle of them the worship goes on at the different shrines
and before the different idols. There it is, market and temple, as in
the days of our Lord; neither seems to interfere with the other. No one
seems to see anything incongruous in the sight of a man prostrated
before a stone set at the back of a heap of glass bangles. And when
someone drops suddenly, and sometimes reverently, in front of a stall of
coils of oily cakes, no one sees anything extraordinary in it; they know
there is a god somewhere on the other side of the cakes.

On and out, through the aisle with its hundred pillars, all stone--stone
paving, pillars, roof; on and out, into the glare and the sight of the
goats again. But one hardly sees them now, for between them and one's
eyes seem to come the things one saw inside--those men and women,
hundreds of them, worshipping that which is not God.

Is Pan dead? . . .

Pan is dead! Oh, Pan is dead! For, clearer than the sight of that
idolatrous crowd, I saw this--I had seen it inside those temple
walls:--a pile of old, dead gods. They were bundled away in a corner,
behind the central shrine--stone gods, mere headless stumps;