rs objecting to soap and
water. But a word and a gentle tap from the mahout's stick and the
monster brutes roll over on their sides and submit to the inevitable with
a shrill protesting trumpet.

Another diversion not less interesting than the elephants is a wrestling
tournament at the police-thana, where twenty stalwart policemen, stripped
as naked as the proprieties of a country where little clothing is worn
anyhow will permit, are struggling for honor in the arena. Vigorous
tom-toming encourages the combatants to do their best, and they flop one
another over merrily, in the dampened clay, to the applause of a
delighted crowd of lookers-on. The fifty miles are happily overcome by
four o'clock, and with the fever heaping additional fuel on the already
well-nigh unbearable heat, I arrive pretty thoroughly exhausted at
Clarke's Hotel, in the European quarter of Benares.

Of all the cities of the East, Benares is perhaps the most interesting at
the present day to the European tourist. Its fourteen hundred shivalas or
idol temples, and two hundred and eighty mosques, its wonderful bathing
ghauts swarming with pilgrims washing away their sins, the burning
bodies, the sacred Ganges, the hideous idols at every corner of the
streets, and its strange idolatrous population, make up a scene that
awakens one to a keen appreciation of its novelty. One realizes fully
that here the idolatry, the "bowing down before images" that in our
Sunday-school days used to seem so unutterably wicked and perverse, so
monstrous, and so far, far away, is a tangible fact. To keep up their
outward appearance on a par with the holiness of their city, men streak
their faces and women mark the parting in their hair with red. Sacred
bulls are allowed to roam the streets at will, and the chief business of
a large proportion of the population seems to be the keeping of religious
observances and paying devotion to the multitudinous idols scattered
about the city.

The presiding deity of Benares is the great Siva--"The Great God,"
"The Glorious," "The Three-Eyed," and lord of over one thousand similarly
grandiloquent titles, and he is represented by the Bishesharnath ka
shivala, a temple whose dome shines resplendent with gold-leaf, and which
is known to Europeans as the Golden Temple. Siva is considered the king
of all the Hindoo deities in the Benares Pauch-kos, and is consequently
honored above all other idols in the number of devotees that pay homage