plunge into the sacred stream. No other festival
is so numerously attended as is this fair. The
crowds which resort to Allahabad or Benares
are far outnumbered by those which twice a
year flock to Hurdwar. Many days before
the festival, the roads leading to the spot are
thronged with crowds of people. Long lines
of hackeries and native waggons filled with
muslins, gauzes, silks, and woollen stuffs; of
camels, groaning under the weight of huge bags
filled with apples, peaches, plums, grapes, and
figs; of cows and bullocks, tottering beneath
sacks of grain; women chattering and
squabbling, labouring under the burdens their
husbands disdain to bear, or squatted on the
tops of the packs of merchandise, keeping watch
and ward over the household utensils that adorn
the pile; children, naked to the skin, toddling
by their sides, or resting on the waggons; men,
holding arguments in stentorian tones, or
screaming shrilly at some unfortunate yoke of
oxen that has managed for the hundredth time
to fix the wheel of the ghari in the tenacious
mud of the road; all, amid a perfect Babel of
sounds, groan, pant, and toil onwards, in their
endeavours to arrive first. The beggar by the
roadside thinks the golden age is come again,
buxheesh and food are so plentiful. The sick
and the dying are almost envied, so blessed are
they accounted in being near to the great watery
highway that is to lead them direct to heaven.
Those who, after selling all they had, have toiled
on foot many hundreds of miles to render their
homage at Gunga's shrine, are treated with
peculiar veneration. Those who are about to
take a leading part in the approaching
ceremonies, or on whom devolves the duty of
ordering and arranging the vast assembly,
pass among the crowd, encircled with a halo of
reverence and awe. So, when the long
expected day comes round, the favoured spot and
its whole neighbourhood are brilliant and
bright with the busy throng. The temples are
filled with anxious devotees, eager to render
themselves fitted to receive the fullest extent of
sanctity which the river is capable of according;
the streets are almost impassable with hurrying
crowds. The meadows round the town, and
every open space, are bright with garments and
trappings of many brilliant colours. Long lines
of low tents stretch away on all sides, each canvas
covering sheltering from the rays of the burning
sun an excited merchant, clamouring to the
passers-by to purchase his wares. Hindoos and
Mahommedans of every class jostle one another
with a magnanimous disregard of the ordinary
differences of nationality and caste; Cashmerians
with long black hair, their bodies
enveloped in numerous dirty rags; men from Thibet,
and half-savages from Gurhwal; representatives
of every neighbouring hill tribe, scarcely
distinguishable one from another by any fashion
save that of their hair; all are for once in their
lives jumbled together without any respect to
social standing. Here tumblers and jugglers
are practising their tricks; fakeers seated on
their mats under the shade of a tree are
proclaiming their virtues aloud, and receiving very
substantial tokens of the approval of their
audiences; bargains are being struck with as much
greediness and zeal as if the whole end and
business of the meeting were buying and selling;
horses and tats are being ridden or led up and
down for the satisfaction of cautious bidders;
business in all shapes rages throughout the
place. When the sun enters Aries, and the
waters of the sacred river attain their greatest
sanctity, all mundane affairs are carefully put
aside for the time, and all present hasten to the
river. So by degrees the professed object of the
melah, immersion in the river, is, with its
attendant feasting, accomplished. Business
regains the upper hand, and, with consciences set
at rest, the crowds plunge with greater eagerness
than before into the din and bewilderment
of traffic.

The Ganges now flows onward through a plain
on which it sheds countless fruits and flowers.
For twelve hundred miles it winds down the slow
descent, until, at a distance from Hurdwar, equal
to little more than half its navigable length, it
discharges its swollen waters through a
hundred mouths into the Bay of Bengal. Except
where its progress, half way to the sea, is
arrested by the concluding links of the chain of
the Vindhya Mountains, it flows through an
unbroken champagne country, gentle undulations
here and there alone breaking the
monotony of the dull and boundless flat. Any
one travelling from Calcutta to Lahore cannot
fail to be impressed with the conviction that
the land has once reposed beneath some mighty
ocean, whose waters have retired, and left
behind a rich alluvial deposit to fertilise the
new-sprung waste. But in truth the Ganges
is the unknown sea, and the alluvial deposit
the product of her agency; for when the
snows have begun to melt, and the rains to
fall, the river for three months pours itself out
over the land. In Bengal proper, or rather in
Lower Bengal, when the Brahmapootra, flowing
in a nearly parallel course, and swollen in a
similar manner by the rain and snow, sends out
its floods to meet those of the sacred Ganges,
the water extends across the country for more
than a hundred miles. Along its whole course
the river is lined for miles around with the
richest and most luxuriant vegetation. In
the more northern districts, at the foot of
the Himalayas, are forests of beautiful and
valuable woods; and along the northern banks
fields of wheat wave incessantly, and
wildernesses of tall sugar-cane are met with
everywhere. Further south, wheat and barley give
way to cotton, to the red and white poppy, to
indigo, and, above all, to the much-prized
paddy. Harvests fall before the sickle of the
reaper twice a year, in some parts three times.
Plantains or bananas, dates, cocoanuts, and
mangoes, grow all along the stream; and
animals of every kind, from the royal tiger to
the timid hare, drink of its wave. The deer and
the wild boar are found in certain parts, and the
lion has recently been hunted near its stream.
Bears, jackals, panthers, leopards, wild cats,
hyenas, monkeys, and baboons, are common.