Neither let her take thee with her eyelids.-The Bible.
And making a tinkling with their feet.-The Bible.
The bazaars were moving in one solid
mass in the direction of, but not to, the Cow Temple.
For hours the endless streams had
moved inch by inch through the narrow streets lined
with shops and gaily painted houses, towards the heart
of India’s Holy City.
Young women and old, young men and
old, children, fakirs and holy men pressed patiently
forward, impelled and called by some mystic summons
they could not explain.
There was no pushing nor striving,
neither was there laughter nor any kind of merry-making,
although a flower garland hung around every neck,
although the multi-coloured raiment was of the best
and cleanest and brightest, and the different marks
of the different religious sects shone as though fresh
painted between the eyes and upon the face and body.
The holy cows walked slowly with the
people, hung with garlands and painted on the face
and sides; holding up the traffic as, unafraid, they
snuffled their velvety muzzles in the unguarded baskets
of grain, and pushed their way unconcernedly and by
holy right across the human stream into the Cow Temple
as they passed the ever-open door.
There was certainly no pushing nor
striving to get one before the other, but underneath
the calm pulsated a certain restrained excitement,
to be read in the light of the thousands of eyes, and
the extraordinary spasmodic, almost uncontrolled,
movements of the delicate dusky hands.
Mothers would suddenly jerk their
children up into their arms and press their little
faces against one of the thousands of tiny shrines,
where the gods sit all day and all night behind the
bars through which are thrust offerings of flowers,
of food, of jewels.
Men would suddenly strip themselves
of all except the loin-cloth and, casting their clothing
at the feet of some holy man, proceed calmly upon
their way. One out of a number of beautiful,
fragile girls, with cast-down painted eyes and half-veiled
face, for no apparent reason would sidle up against
some man; rest for one moment against him, and continue
with him upon the road, his arm about her, crushing
her body to his; and the drums throbbed, and the horns
screamed in and around the temple of their goddess.
Yet one did strive, and, heedless
of rebuke, did push her way ruthlessly through the
throngs, slipping on the greasy pavement covered with
refuse and cow-dung; sliding, ducking, squirming her
way in and out, breathless and dishevelled, with a
simple brown sari slipping from about her sleek
head and pock-marked face.
Her monkey eyes flashed this way and
that in search of something or someone she could not
find; her withered hands beat her withered breast;
the sweat streamed down her face until at last the
crowd gave way, and looking upon her as one mentally
afflicted, helped her stumbling passage up to and
through the temple gateway.
Priests stood at the entrance to the
outer court of the temple. They did not stand
there, as do the ushers in the West, in order to keep
the riff-raff, those humble, poverty-stricken children
of God, from occupying the plush-covered seats in
His House; but knowing the intimate connection between
religion and the senses, and the limited space of
the court of sacrifice and the temple itself, they
stood there in order to keep a finger upon the pulse
of that mass of humanity’s passions.
The full moon flung her silver on
to the stained worn flags of the roofless court; hundreds,
thousands even of tiny wicks in tiny earthenware saucers
flickered in the niches and on the outer edge of the
walls; hundreds of torches flung a smoky veil around
the restless figures passing in and out of the narrow
entrance, and over dark heaps which lay at the foot
of the walls and in the corners.
Black heaps which, lay upon dark carpets,
heaps big and small which seemed to move, around which
hung an overpowering, sickening stench of blood.
Heaps revealed when touched by the
fluttering drapery of some worshipper to be the decapitated
bodies of goats and bullocks lying in their blood,
and from which would rise the millions of ever-moving
flies which had given them a semblance of life in the
torch-light.
Millions of flies, bloated offences,
which settle for a second heavily on your face or
arm and fly slowly back to their feasting.
It had been a day of stupendous sacrifice,
and the place ran blood.
From the inner temple came the sweet
never-stopping clang of a silver bell, as in one continuous
stream the worshippers climbed slowly up the flight
of steps, passed in, struck one note by swinging the
tongue of the bell to announce their arrival to their
goddess, and passed out; while babies of both sexes,
naked save for a silver bead upon their rotund little
bellies in the male, or a profusion of tiny bracelets
and a nose-ring in the female, heaped the flower offerings
in masses at Kali’s feet.
Kali! Ah! formidable, terrible image graven
in stone!
Pictures, highly coloured and blatant
reproductions which will shock your artistic sense,
can be bought for a few annas at the native shops
which swarm outside the temple walls; but it is probable,
nay, it is certain that not a single one of the Europeans
who may read this book will ever see the original
goddess in all her terror, and all that inexplicable
power with which she holds the Hindu multitudes in
the palms of her black hands.
Black, and crowned and heaped with
jewels, she looks down at, or through, or over you
with her slanting fish-shaped eyes. Her small
ears, her flat nose, her arms, her pendant breasts
are smothered in priceless gems; a huge red tongue
protruding through the stretched mouth hangs far down
upon the chest, ready to lick up the flames of sacrificial
fires; a magnificent tiara binds the black hair which
streams in masses behind her small distorted body;
rows of pearls, flower garlands, and a string of skulls
hang about her short neck; one hand holds a knife,
the other a bleeding head, two are raised in blessing,
while behind her shines a sun of flaming tongues of
fire, and over all is spread an umbrella.
Yet it is not the horror of the repulsive
physique hewn in stone which holds you breathless
before her; you know it is stone you are looking at,
just as you know that the Sphinx is stone; but as with
the Sphinx you feel the life of centuries throbbing
through the carved monster; you feel that its breath,
which is about you, is the wind which has swept across
the desert places and teeming cities of the East; you
feel that the eyes which are upon you have seen all
things; in fact you are almost mesmerised by the force
of ages into falling upon your knees in worship, before
you suddenly wrench yourself violently round to face
the sun outside the open door; and even as you do it
involuntarily put your hands to your neck, upon the
nape of which, by the suggestion of unconfessed fear,
you have felt the stealthy, longing, jewelled fingers.
On this night the slanting fish eyes
of the goddess seemed to look through the doorway,
and to linger upon the exquisite figure of a child
dancing upon the extreme edge of the terrace between
the two flights of steps.
Dancing!-hardly that, as
she stood, her body swaying slightly in the whirl
of her mixed emotions, and totally unconscious of four
young men who, arms entwined, stood below, watching
the beauty of her body and her movements with half-shut
eyes.
Her ankle-length, full muslin skirt
swung this way and that, as she moved slightly from
her bare, over-slender waist, which accentuated the
wonder of the young bosom out of all proportion in
any but an eastern maid of ten years.
Jewels flashed in her delicate nose
and ears, and on her slender fingers and parted toes,
for was she not on the eve of her marriage, this little
maid? Who, finding herself upon this unwonted
night, alone for the first time in her life, had broken
purdah, with her senses strung by days and nights
of never-ceasing preparation for her marriage; during
which she had been massaged by skilful, cunning hands;
bathed and perfumed, forced to dance, forced to over-feed;
until roused to a pitch of terrible excitement by
drugs and curiosity, and the religious ecstasy of
all around her, she had crept out alone, and into
the temple with the teeming multitude to dance for
the glory of her goddess.
Her little feet made patterns in the
dust as she turned slightly, this child of ten, until
her snake-like arms seemed stretched in invitation
to the four pairs of burning eyes fixed upon the virgin
beauty of the little body.
Who noticed in all that crowd when
four pairs of hands shot up and seized her about the
knees, lifting her gently down, or who, in the tumult,
heard the cry smothered in the muffling cloth of a
white coat in a distant shadowed corner.
And one dead body more or less in
the morning, what does it signify or matter in a place
which reeks of blood?
And just as this happened, and just
as a dishevelled pock-marked woman stole swiftly up
the temple steps, every face turned in one direction,
and wave after wave of indescribable excitement swept
the multitude.
And yet there was nothing, no sound,
no sight to account for it; only the high priest,
tall and terrible, with the face of a Roman emperor
or a Jesuit, came from behind the altar and stood
at the open door, looking first at the throngs and
then at a mass of black cloud which, as is sometimes
the way in India, had suddenly spread itself towards
the east, and was slowly climbing the heavens.