Chapter XXIV: Rakhykash1

[1] Reprinted by permission from _The Fortnightly Review_.

The river flowing swiftly was a glorious vivid blue, clear as crystal and dancing with gleeful hurry. There was almost a greater contrast between the water of the Ganges here at Hurdwar and at Howrah than between that of the Thames at Billingsgate and Bablock Hythe.

The Hari Ghat lies in a short sidepiece of the river, with a railed iron bridge about two feet wide crossing its neck. From this narrow bridge I looked back at the ghat with its shrines and temples, and the rocky sides of the hills above which here come down steeply. In the water itself were hundreds and hundreds of big large-scaled fish which are cherished and fed regularly. They swirled about the posts of the little bridge in a dense crowd,--dark brownish-green creatures about two feet long, some with red gills showing.

On the steps of the ghat itself no one is permitted to wear shoes, and leaving mine, I walked with stocking feet to visit the "Charan," or sacred footprints, and the Gangadwara Temple. By this a priestess played a flute, squatting upon {334} a tiny platform. She was dressed in bright colours and spangled clothes with a strange conical hat on her head. There was a priestess similarly dressed on another wooden platform at the top of the other end of the steps. There were sacred cows, of which I had already noticed several in the street, bearing a strange deformity in an extra limb hanging loosely from the hump. In some cases this extra limb ended in a hoof, and in some cases in a second pair of horns and in one I saw both together. I wondered whether these excrescences had really been grafted on. There were various holy people about the road leading to the ghat--"Sadhus" and "Nagas" with naked bodies whitened with ashes.

A friendly Brahmin took me into the inner sanctum of the temple at At Khamba Mundi near the ghat and there, under a mauve silk coverlet, decorated with gold thread-work, rested the _Granth_, the sacred book of the Sikhs. It was rather like a body upon a wooden bed. Above, hung a canopy with a deep border of gold and silver fringe. The place was covered inside and out with paintings of the stories of the gods. In the inner courtyard over the part of the building where the book is kept, there was a tall pole bearing a once white flag and a leafless bush. On the other three sides of the courtyard the buildings were all rest-houses for pilgrims.

Now, the kindly Brahmin had a glass eye {335} which was very far from clean and had no resemblance to its bloodshot fellow. It seemed to have been rather large for its socket, to have been fixed in years ago and never since disturbed. He showed me the Temple of Sarwarnath where there are statues of elephants within the surrounding courtyard. The bull Nandi was conspicuous on the high stone platform of the temple, and beside the main entrance was a tall iron pole about forty feet high ending in a large green bronze trident called the "Tarshoon," often represented in little in the hand of Siva.

Hurdwar seems to exist upon its importance as a place of pilgrimage, and to have little else of interest about it. The Brahmin, whose terrible eye was more insistent than that of the ancient mariner, told me above all places I ought to visit Rakhykash, twelve miles farther up the river and of very great holiness. It was nearly one o'clock, but it appeared just possible to get there and back that day. I had engaged for the day a vehicle called a tumtum, a kind of two-wheeled cart, and in spite of the protests from the driver that the roads would be impassable we hurried back to the bungalow for my ulster and started on a particularly rough drive.

Passing the Hari Ghat, the road, paved roughly with large round stones, led under a two-storeyed brick archway out of Hurdwar. Below flowed the swift blue river glistening in the sun, {336} and above rose the rocky slope of the hillside. These rock slopes are the end of a line of hills striking at a sharp angle to the river. Leaving them, the way was soon along uneven country--level on the whole, but rough and tumble in detail. The road alternated between collections of boulders and stretches of sand and at intervals streams, some narrow and some wide, crossed it on their way from the hill slopes to join the wider river. Ten times we had to ford considerable rivulets apart from minor water-courses. Only once there was a bridge, wooden and primitive.

Here and there towards the first part of the journey were a few acres of cultivated ground mostly given to paddy, and in one place there was a plantation of fruit trees now snowy with blossom. Most of the way, however, was through a rough tract of jungle with large trees in places and miles of tall rough grass sometimes ten and even twenty feet high. We passed bullock-carts bringing heavy loads of broken wood, and once I saw an ox lie down on the sand under the yoke it found too hard to bear. We passed two men carrying between them in a cloth a huge python which they took out to show me--a creature twice the length of a man.

All the while, far beyond the forest on the other side of the river, mountains were in sight, pale and ethereal in the heat of the afternoon. I {337} passed many ant-hills--ridged grey peaks of mud under which snakes often lie. At one moment a flight of green parrots would rise from near trees and cross the road screaming--at another I would see a crowd of monkeys golden in the sunlight swinging in the slender upper branches. There were cork trees with masses of tiny pink blossoms, and one kind of tree, as large as an English oak, known as the "flame of the forest," was covered with big five-petalled scarlet flowers.

It was getting ominously late and the shadows lengthened every minute. At last the tumtum driver declared that he _could_ not drive over the rocky way to the village. I left him by some great trees on the roadside, and to lead me to the holy places I waylaid a boy whom I drove before me hurrying in a race with the sun--my servant following at his usual decorous pace. I think it was another mile before passing quite a number of large solid brick and stone Darmsalas (or pilgrims' rest-houses) and a small bazaar, I came out on a wide stretch of rounded boulders along the side of the river. The hills now rose from quite near the farther bank and the scene was very beautiful indeed. The water rushed along, rippling over shallows and racing through narrower channels bluer than ever.

There were no temples of any architectural pretensions, and it became evident to me that {338} the importance of Rakhykash did not lie in its buildings at all, but in the worshipping places of the Sikhs. Along and above the shore, I came at intervals to paled enclosures within which a large and devout crowd of people sat listening to a priest who was seated beneath a thatched gable-shaped cover on wooden upright posts. The largest of these was at the head of a path made of smooth white boulders which stretched a furlong from the water's edge. At the opening to the loose tall fence were many shoes. Leaving mine with the rest, I stood for a moment at the entrance, looking inquiring permission to one of the priests. The men were grouped round the front and sides of the thatched cover, and receiving welcome I entered and sat among them on a reed mat like the rest. At one side were a crowd of women farther away than the men, all in white robes which covered their heads like white hoods lovely in the soft warm glow of the setting sun.

The thatched shelter is called the _Kuteah_. The Padre or chief priest sat just in front of the thatched opening and round him Gristis or minor priests, one of whom was speaking. When he had finished, the women all rose and went out in long single file. The sun had just set. Beyond were the mountains and infinite space. The sound of the river came faintly over the great expanse of stones.

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Most of the turbaned priests were in woollen robes or togas of a colour between saffron and salmon pink. The thatched hut of long grass was, I should have said, facing the river so that the high priest looked towards it. The pilgrims and other people were in white or other colours and a few in black blankets. Just in front of the priests were four musicians, with grey clothes and white turbans, the ones nearest me with two tom-toms and the farther one with a kind of viol. They were now singing to their music words of the _Granth_. The viol player was blind and made grimaces as he sang; all had black beards. One Gristi, who had in front of him the holy book itself folded in a cloth on a book-rest, presently stopped the singers and sent a man to say they were all pleased to see me among them. He told me that they do not make temples but worship only the words of the _Granth_, and that the musicians were singing some of these words. These men all looked clean and healthy. Most of their faces were refined--some of them noble.

Slowly the light faded and when I came away the last thing I saw of that place was the splendid landscape--the river flowing under solemn hills and stars coming out. I do not suppose I shall ever see nearer to the source of the Ganges.

Darkness had fallen before I again found the tumtum. The driver was sitting with some other men who were preparing food at a fire {340} under the trees. An elephant was supping on a heap of green branches which had been thrown down for him close by.

When we started to come back we had no lamp but borrowed a lantern a little later from a camp outside Rakhykash under promise of return by coolie next day.

The long journey back was nearly as much walk as drive. After an hour and a half the light of a fire showed above the road and we stopped to rest the horse. A man came down the rocks and said there was a holy lady there who gave tea to all travellers and had sent word she would be pleased if the sahib would stop and take refreshment. Now it was late and the night was very dark, but it would be good to rest the horse rather longer, and I went up rough steps in the rock to a level place some ten feet above the road which was here passing a piece of low hill.

On the ground were mats, but I was shown a place on a slab of stone. We were under a thatched roof without sides, and in front of me was a wood fire with one large forked branch smouldering, and every now and then this blazed up brightly as the fire was stirred. There were a few people sitting along each side, and immediately behind the fire, facing me, was a woman sitting very upright with crossed legs. She was naked to the waist, with a dark cloth round her lower limbs, and her face and body were entirely {341} whitened with white ash. She had very long hair which fell in thick brown coils about her shoulders, but being pushed back from the forehead left her face quite uncovered. The flames cast as they danced a great shadow of the woman on a cloth hanging at the back to keep out the wind.

I learned after many questions that this woman had lost both father and mother when she was twelve years of age, and had thenceforward given her life to make refreshment for pilgrims and travellers; that she was now fifty-five years old, and that for the last five years she had stayed here: that the place was called Dudupani, and that her own name was Duthani Hookamnajee.

Of fakirs, anchorites and other holy people she was the first I had seen in India who seemed to me beautiful, and indeed had a strange loveliness. Not only did she look much less old than the age she told me, but her face had that subtle curve immediately below the cheek bones that draws like a strain of music, and which I have seen only in two women and in La Joconda, and one marble head shown as a piece by Praxiteles at the Burlington Fine Arts Club a few years ago.

Her large ecstatic eyes, her tall forehead, her long, straight nose, her delicate lips and chin were alike lovely, and the wan pallor added by the white ash made the favourite Eastern comparison {342} to the beauty of the moon less unreal than with any princess it was ever applied to; she was not emaciated, and her body had that moderate fullness which best shows the perfection of each natural curve. Her eyes as I have said were large and dull, but although wide as if their gaze came from the depths of some far away uncharted sea, they had also in them recognition and arrest--and empire.

Oh! Flaubert with your talk of the mummy of Cleopatra--would you not rather have seen the strange beauty of this living death than any coffined husk of once warm flesh?

But when she spoke in the hush of this strange night, the sweetness of her soft low tones was almost passionately unendurable. Music not of the Venusberg but eloquent of the appealing purity of a being locked in chains of ice, doomed slowly to die, renouncing the world in which it has been placed, judging its Maker in a fatal mad conceit.

Slowly she kept moving her little hands, warming them at the fire. In a brass cup hot tea was brought to me made not with water but with fresh milk from the cow. The other people were passing round fresh pipes, with glowing coals in their flower-shaped cups. In the fire three or four irons were standing upright, and three of them had trident heads like the tarshoon at Sarwan Nath. Was this woman herself {343} impaled on a real trident of which the irons were but outward signs?

"You have done better to see me than to see all priests," she said. I asked which of the gods she liked best, and she answered, "There is only one God." Later she said, "I shall speak of you with the God every night wherever you may be."

She put her hand down into a large brass bowl at her side and took out fruits which were passed to me on a brass dish. I ate an orange slowly and asked her if there was anything she would like sent to her from Europe. She said she wanted nothing. "I give tea--I give all--only my name I keep," and her name is Duthani Hookamnajee.

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