Far as the eye could reach, the rich green valley teemed with human life. Thousands on thousands flocked from many a point, and pressed to where the gaudy flags and beating drums told of the approaching Poojah. The steady hum of the vast multitude seemed like the ocean's fall on some far distant shore. Grief, joy, pain, pleasure, prayers and songs, blended with howling madness, or cries of devotees, in one strange, stormy discord; the heat and glare, the many new and striking garbs, the sea of dusky visages and brightly glaring eyes, mixed with the varied gorgeous foliage, and flinging into contrast the lovely gentleness of distant hills and woods, made up a whole not easy to forget, yet difficult to paint. But my attention was before long directed to some preparations in progress not far from where I stood. I had observed several huge poles standing at a great height, with ropes and some apparatus attached to them, the use of which I knew from report alone. Here I now remarked a great deal of bustling activity; a number of attendants were beating back the crowd in order to clear a space around one of the loftiest of the poles I have mentioned. This was a work of much difficulty, for the mob was both excited and dense. At length, however, they succeeded in the task, and finding the ground before me pretty clear, I advanced close to the scene of action. Round about the pole were a number of Fakirs or Ascetics, a sort of self-mutilated hermits, who hope and firmly believe that, by distorting their limbs into all sorts of impossible positions and shapes, they have insured the favor of some unpronounceable divinity, and with that a ready and certain passport to some future state about which they have not the most remote idea, which renders their devotion the more praiseworthy.