CHAPTER XXXVIII
"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 notto, the Cow Temple.
For hours the endless streams had moved inch by inch through the narrowstreets lined with shops and gaily painted houses, towards the heart ofIndia's Holy City.
Young women and old, young men and old, children, fakirs and holy menpressed patiently forward, impelled and called by some mystic summonsthey could not explain.
There was no pushing nor striving, neither was there laughter nor anykind of merry-making, although a flower garland hung around every neck,although the multi-coloured raiment was of the best and cleanest andbrightest, and the different marks of the different religious sectsshone as though fresh painted between the eyes and upon the face andbody.
The holy cows walked slowly with the people, hung with garlands andpainted 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 humanstream into the Cow Temple as they passed the ever-open door.
There was certainly no pushing nor striving to get one before theother, but underneath the calm pulsated a certain restrainedexcitement, to be read in the light of the thousands of eyes, and theextraordinary spasmodic, almost uncontrolled, movements of the delicatedusky hands.
Mothers would suddenly jerk their children up into their arms and presstheir little faces against one of the thousands of tiny shrines, wherethe gods sit all day and all night behind the bars through which arethrust 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 calmlyupon their way. One out of a number of beautiful, fragile girls, withcast-down painted eyes and half-veiled face, for no apparent reasonwould sidle up against some man; rest for one moment against him, andcontinue with him upon the road, his arm about her, crushing her bodyto his; and the drums throbbed, and the horns screamed in and aroundthe temple of their goddess.
Yet one did strive, and, heedless of rebuke, did push her wayruthlessly through the throngs, slipping on the greasy pavement coveredwith refuse and cow-dung; sliding, ducking, squirming her way in andout, breathless and dishevelled, with a simple brown _sari_ slippingfrom about her sleek head and pock-marked face.
Her monkey eyes flashed this way and that in search of something orsomeone she could not find; her withered hands beat her witheredbreast; the sweat streamed down her face until at last the crowd gaveway, and looking upon her as one mentally afflicted, helped herstumbling passage up to and through the temple gateway.
Priests stood at the entrance to the outer court of the temple. Theydid not stand there, as do the ushers in the West, in order to keep theriff-raff, those humble, poverty-stricken children of God, fromoccupying the plush-covered seats in His House; but knowing theintimate connection between religion and the senses, and the limitedspace of the court of sacrifice and the temple itself, they stood therein order to keep a finger upon the pulse of that mass of humanity'spassions.
The full moon flung her silver on to the stained worn flags of theroofless court; hundreds, thousands even of tiny wicks in tinyearthenware saucers flickered in the niches and on the outer edge ofthe walls; hundreds of torches flung a smoky veil around the restlessfigures passing in and out of the narrow entrance, and over dark heapswhich lay at the foot of the walls and in the corners.
Black heaps which, lay upon dark carpets, heaps big and small whichseemed to move, around which hung an overpowering, sickening stench ofblood.
Heaps revealed when touched by the fluttering drapery of someworshipper to be the decapitated bodies of goats and bullocks lying intheir blood, and from which would rise the millions of ever-movingflies which had given them a semblance of life in the torch-light.
Millions of flies, bloated offences, which settle for a second heavilyon 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 silverbell, as in one continuous stream the worshippers climbed slowly up theflight of steps, passed in, struck one note by swinging the tongue ofthe bell to announce their arrival to their goddess, and passed out;while babies of both sexes, naked save for a silver bead upon theirrotund little bellies in the male, or a profusion of tiny bracelets anda nose-ring in the female, heaped the flower offerings in masses atKali's feet.
Kali! Ah! formidable, terrible image graven in stone!
Pictures, highly coloured and blatant reproductions which will shockyour artistic sense, can be bought for a few annas at the native shopswhich swarm outside the temple walls; but it is probable, nay, it iscertain that not a single one of the Europeans who may read this bookwill ever see the original goddess in all her terror, and all thatinexplicable power with which she holds the Hindu multitudes in thepalms of her black hands.
Black, and crowned and heaped with jewels, she looks down at, orthrough, or over you with her slanting fish-shaped eyes. Her smallears, her flat nose, her arms, her pendant breasts are smothered inpriceless gems; a huge red tongue protruding through the stretchedmouth hangs far down upon the chest, ready to lick up the flames ofsacrificial fires; a magnificent tiara binds the black hair whichstreams in masses behind her small distorted body; rows of pearls,flower garlands, and a string of skulls hang about her short neck; onehand holds a knife, the other a bleeding head, two are raised inblessing, while behind her shines a sun of flaming tongues of fire, andover all is spread an umbrella.
Yet it is not the horror of the repulsive physique hewn in stone whichholds you breathless before her; you know it is stone you are lookingat, just as you know that the Sphinx is stone; but as with the Sphinxyou feel the life of centuries throbbing through the carved monster;you feel that its breath, which is about you, is the wind which hasswept across the desert places and teeming cities of the East; you feelthat the eyes which are upon you have seen all things; in fact you arealmost mesmerised by the force of ages into falling upon your knees inworship, before you suddenly wrench yourself violently round to facethe sun outside the open door; and even as you do it involuntarily putyour hands to your neck, upon the nape of which, by the suggestion ofunconfessed fear, you have felt the stealthy, longing, jewelled fingers.
On this night the slanting fish eyes of the goddess seemed to lookthrough the doorway, and to linger upon the exquisite figure of a childdancing upon the extreme edge of the terrace between the two flights ofsteps.
Dancing!--hardly that, as she stood, her body swaying slightly in thewhirl of her mixed emotions, and totally unconscious of four young menwho, arms entwined, stood below, watching the beauty of her body andher movements with half-shut eyes.
Her ankle-length, full muslin skirt swung this way and that, as shemoved slightly from her bare, over-slender waist, which accentuated thewonder of the young bosom out of all proportion in any but an easternmaid of ten years.
Jewels flashed in her delicate nose and ears, and on her slenderfingers and parted toes, for was she not on the eve of her marriage,this little maid? Who, finding herself upon this unwonted night, alonefor the first time in her life, had broken purdah, with her sensesstrung by days and nights of never-ceasing preparation for hermarriage; during which she had been massaged by skilful, cunning hands;bathed and perfumed, forced to dance, forced to over-feed; until rousedto a pitch of terrible excitement by drugs and curiosity, and thereligious ecstasy of all around her, she had crept out alone, and intothe temple with the teeming multitude to dance for the glory of hergoddess.
Her little feet made patterns in the dust as she turned slightly, thischild of ten, until her snake-like arms seemed stretched in invitationto the four pairs of burning eyes fixed upon the virgin
beauty of thelittle body.
Who noticed in all that crowd when four pairs of hands shot up andseized her about the knees, lifting her gently down, or who, in thetumult, heard the cry smothered in the muffling cloth of a white coatin a distant shadowed corner.
And one dead body more or less in the morning, what does it signify ormatter in a place which reeks of blood?
And just as this happened, and just as a dishevelled pock-marked womanstole 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; onlythe high priest, tall and terrible, with the face of a Roman emperor ora 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 towardsthe east, and was slowly climbing the heavens.
Leonie of the Jungle Page 39
