I cannot tell: but well I recollect a fugitive impression left on me by an early morning in Benares, now many years ago. I threaded its extraordinary streets, narrower than the needle's eye, and crowded with strange, lithe, nearly naked human beings, with black, straight, long wet hair, and brown shining skins, jostled at every step by holy bulls or cows, roaming at their own sweet will with large placid lustrous eyes, in an atmosphere heavy with the half-delicious, half-repulsive odour of innumerable flowers, mostly yellow, that lay about everywhere in heaps, fresh and rotten, till I came out finally upon the river bank. A light steamy mist, converted by the low sun's horizontal rays into a kind of reddish-golden veil, hung in the quiet air, lending an almost magical effect to the long row of great temples, whose steps run down into the river, along the northern bank: half of them in ruins, and looking as if they must presently slide away into the water and disappear. And as I floated slowly down, I watched with curiosity, half wondering if I was dreaming, the throng of devotees, sitting, lying, gliding here and there, like an antique procession on an old Greek frieze or vase; some muttering and praying, others bathing, others again standing motionless as statues in the stream, buried in a sort of _samadhi_ meditation: every outline of every attitude, in that clear Indian air, as sharp as if cut with scissors out of paper. And lying close beside, cheek by jowl with the bodies still alive, the ashes of dead bodies just burned or still burning on the Ghat. Life and Death touching, running into one another, and nobody amazed: all as it should be, and a matter of course! England and India, bureaucracy, democracy, sedition, education, politics and Durbars:--the world with all its tumult and its roaring passes clean over their heads, unheeded, unobserved: for them the noise and bustle do not matter, do not trouble: they do not hear, they do not listen, they do not even care. It is curious, this peace, this indifference, this calm: it does not seem reality; it is like a thing looked at in a picture, like a dream. And, somehow, as I gazed at it, mechanically there came into my mind, as it were of its own accord, a story I had read in some old navigator's "yarn," of the albatross, sleeping on the great South Sea, in the fury of a storm, with its head beneath its wing. CEYLON, 1912 I A SPOILED CHILD I A SPOILED CHILD BENEDICTION _A bow to the mystical evening dance of the Rider on the Mouse,[6] who whirling round his elephant trunk, smeared with wet vermilion, suddenly shoots it straight up into the purple sky, and stands for a single instant still, poised in the yellow twilight, as if to make a coral handle for the white umbrella of the laughing Moon._ [Footnote 6: Ganesha.] I