Chapter 52

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

In one of those Benares temples we saw a devotee working for salvation in
a curious way. He had a huge wad of clay beside him and was making it up
into little wee gods no bigger than carpet tacks. He stuck a grain of
rice into each--to represent the lingam, I think. He turned them out
nimbly, for he had had long practice and had acquired great facility.
Every day he made 2,000 gods, then threw them into the holy Ganges. This
act of homage brought him the profound homage of the pious--also their
coppers. He had a sure living here, and was earning a high place in the
hereafter.

The Ganges front is the supreme show-place of Benares. Its tall bluffs
are solidly caked from water to summit, along a stretch of three miles,
with a splendid jumble of massive and picturesque masonry, a bewildering
and beautiful confusion of stone platforms, temples, stair-flights, rich
and stately palaces--nowhere a break, nowhere a glimpse of the bluff
itself; all the long face of it is compactly walled from sight by this
crammed perspective of platforms, soaring stairways, sculptured temples,
majestic palaces, softening away into the distances; and there is
movement, motion, human life everywhere, and brilliantly costumed
--streaming in rainbows up and down the lofty stairways, and massed in
metaphorical flower-gardens on the miles of great platforms at the
river's edge.

All this masonry, all this architecture represents piety. The palaces
were built by native princes whose homes, as a rule, are far from
Benares, but who go there from time to time to refresh their souls with
the sight and touch of the Ganges, the river of their idolatry. The
stairways are records of acts of piety; the crowd of costly little
temples are tokens of money spent by rich men for present credit and hope
of future reward. Apparently, the rich Christian who spends large sums
upon his religion is conspicuous with us, by his rarity, but the rich
Hindoo who doesn't spend large sums upon his religion is seemingly
non-existent. With us the poor spend money on their religion, but they
keep back some to live on. Apparently, in India, the poor bankrupt
themselves daily for their religion. The rich Hindoo can afford his
pious outlays; he gets much glory for his spendings, yet keeps back a
sufficiency of his income for temporal purposes; but the poor Hindoo is
entitled to compassion, for his spendings keep him poor, yet get him no
glory.

We made the usual trip up and down the river, seated in chairs under an
awning on the deck of the usual commodious hand-propelled ark; made it
two or three times, and could have made it with increasing interest and