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   You are looking from a slender minaret belonging to a Mohammedan mosque, built here two hundred years ago. It is 147 feet from here down to the ground and perhaps 40 feet more to the level of the river that you see sweeping on towards the N. E. That steel bridge has foundations 200 feet deep to withstand the current in flood-times. It carries across the Ganges trains that connect with the main line for Calcutta.
   The city lies along the river bank here for about four miles - a large part of it lies behind you. The buildings you see now are chiefly dwelling-houses, native hotels and shops. The place has a permanent population of almost a quarter of a million and thousands and thousands of pilgrims come here every year from all parts of India and other Oriental countries. From the very earliest times of which any record is known, this region about the Ganges was regarded by the Brahman Hindus as sacred; pilgrims used to come to this vicinity even twenty-five hundred years ago, when Sakya Muni, the Hindu prince, since known as the Buddha, here began his teachings of a serener faith. The region is consequently sacred both to Brahmans and Buddhists. The mosque on which you are now perched was built by one of the haughty Moslem monarchs of India after the conquest. (For accounts of these three systems of belief see volumes like Clarke's "Ten Great Religions," or briefer encyclopedia articles on Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism.)
   It is the greatest ambition of millions people to see this sacred river here at Benares, to bathe in it, to drink of its water and to have their ashes after death thrown into the stream.
   These umbrellas you see down on the bank shelter priests, or groups of devout visitors who have been bathing and are now dressing, anointing themselves with old and reciting prayers to the Hindu gods.
   (Read Arnold's "India Revisited." Carpenter's "From Adam's Peak to Elephanta." etc. Kipling's "Kim" makes interesting mention of the place and its temples.)
   From Notes of Travel, No. 11, copyright, 1904, by Underwood & Underwood.